The garden was crowded with love-me, love-me-not floss-top weeds, some already half-headed by the fitful breeze.
Digory had ventured out to be alone, but the sound of distant children playing was a reminder of other people’s livestock. Such voices of pain or joy were neither to Digory. Thankfully, today, there were no garden gnats on the tiny thermals of his body’s warmth. The sun was hot but the air strangely cool. Digory’s thoughts shorted...
He had just murdered his only child.
Not because it was bawling endlessly in its makeshift cot, rough-handling its masochistic ambition amid the other crude pre-human passions of a baby. But because it had always slept and woke meekly; too peaceful for its own good, the old ladies had said - choosing ‘it’instead of ‘she’ or ‘he’ one of which would have better suited it - with the unselfconsciousness of people too long-in-the-tooth to care about sex.
Despite loving it in the only way he knew how, Digory had imagined all kinds of goings-on in its head. He dreaded its alien ability to see without looking, to hear without listening, to feel without touching. The baby was a horror, its mother herself an abandoned child who had been taken in and out of care like a dose of salts on incalculable tides: a foundling that death had eventually made a changeling.
The old ladies had come in like district witches - ever ready with the ancient remedy of herb and untried gossip. The Authorities (if there were such bodies who could control the motiveless movements of human beings) had agreed that Digory could be given a trial run with it. Fathers were not particularly famous for making good mothers but nobody would accuse Authorities of being sexist.
Digory had accepted all the suspicions attached to his demeanour. Worklessness tantamount to worthlessness showed in every movement he made: unmechanical ditherings with olden hippie locks; never owning the right screwdriver for the screws that held the real world together; staring at blanks of paper with the nonsensical aim of retrieving poems he’d never written but somehow remembered without words; misfiling important documents upon the roller-file of existence; cleaning the bath more often than he got in it himself as if this would impress the Authorities who visited him to inspect the cleanliness of the sink but not the cleanliness (or otherwise) of his private parts; and, finally, the purchase of disposable nappies which he never used on the baby for fear of spoiling such expensive throwaways (there was logic there somewhere) and used instead his own underwear in ill-folded, ill-pinned wadges.
Digory had tried to live up to the images that others wanted him to assume. Yet now it was dead. He could relax. The Authorities could no longer accuse him of not taking care of it. The act of murder, to him, was a pure moment of love, the only love, as opposed to lust, he’d ever felt for any human being. The baby now had a reason to cry without feeling it.
The old ladies mustered in the garden around him, blowing upon the floss-heads, each intoning: he loved it, he loved it not, he loved it, he loved it not, he loved it...
One of the old ladies went into the house and fetched out a crimson bundle of Digory’s smalls - followed by a swarm of gnats.
(published ‘Gathering Darkness’ 1994)
