a twenty sixth new story...'aqueduct'

The place smelled of sick.  Baby’s sick, kiddies’ mucus intermingling with the waft of gravy-drowned roast dinners from the open kitchen. And the floorboards were creaking under the weight of dozens of chariot-sized push buggies as well as anxious, obese, semi-obese Mums and Dads – had the chicken come with bread sauce? Or was this more of little Nicky’s vomit? Erin took a deep breath and entered.

She eventually located John and Jerusha in the annex where the atmosphere was a shrill melange of monkey sanctuary and junior aviary. John, in his now perpetual state of shell-shock, was wordlessly picking through the remains of his (?) lunch; Jerusha was handling the kids’ leftovers; the kids were clambering in and out of a plastic red and yellow bubble car, belching and bellyaching: their miniature bodies, factories producing all kinds of noises, smells and substances. ‘Heyhey!’ said Jerusha on spotting Erin, ‘you’re just in time for dessert!’

In between wiping ice-cream from her eye, Jerusha talked kids kids kids and John listened, nodded and frowned where he thought appropriate: Paulie got a gold star for handwriting – Nod. Eleanor was nipped by the school donkey – Frown. Micky swallowed a tooth-pick … And Erin tried to suppress her envy, to listen politely while one from Paulie or Micky intermittently tapped her left knee with the edge of a spoon from somewhere underneath the tablecloth. Was this Sunday lunch or a visit to an orthopaedic clinic cum asylum for under-10s?

It was strange. Without Bud, touched starved, sex deprived and sexless, Erin’s senses had retreated to the extent she felt sealed off from the world as if she was living inside of an old deep sea diver suit; other times she would feel strangely hollow, like an empty and unfurnished house forever up for sale, everything going on outside – in her state of hibernation she secretly longed for someone to throw open the windows, to help her come back to the air. ‘I want to be slapped about’, she confided to Jerusha when slightly drunk one evening only to be admonished – ‘no DV, not even wet fishes!!’. ‘Ok, I want a man to tear off my clothes’, Erin had compromised.  

Meanwhile, recent hospital visits hadn’t helped her state of dislocation either. In the wake of the various tests, tubes in forearms, Erin felt like a rubber mannikin – the kind she had used at school when many moons ago she was taught CPR by a grouchy district nurse. And further still, after all the waiting around in the pristine surrounds of the hospital lobby, it was as if she had become part of the decor, a seated, life-size humanoid exhibit donated courtesy of the Wellcome Collection that kids might scribble felt-tip all over and about whom grey, lonely men with sweaty temples could conjure bizarre psycho-sexual fantasies dans le noir.

Erin felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned and looked into the sunken eyes of the waiter: a stooped fifty something, sallow skin, tufts of hair sprouting from his ears, chewing silently on the remains of his gums.  He pulled a biro from the pocket of his black V neck and asked whether she would like pork and beans, then a string of other options Erin was too confused and far fled in her mind to hear or understand.

Where was she!?

Rub a lamp? 

Strike a match? 

‘Psst Erin’, Jerusha said earnestly as the waiter melted away into the heaving throng of Sunday diners, ‘you’ve got jelly in your lap’.

It was like being sluiced into the past, back-washed along the aqueduct of twenty five years to the embarrassment of Erin's eighth birthday party.