Profane Exegesis/Trivial Tales of Everyday Madness: 9

Robert K Hogg

I’d many explorations of that same tenement. The pigeons nested in and on the
gap between the top of cupboards and the ceiling. It was easy to climb up and
see if there were any eggs. Often the adult would fly out as I approached it.
One time there was an older fledging in one nest so I watched it for a bit as it
watched me back, then predictably I had to try and stroke it, but it was hostile
of course and defended itself by flicking its wing at me and pecking at me. It’s
helplessness only made it seem all the more poignant and touching. I could say
‘cute’ but that would be too superficial.
I found this so engrossingly entertaining and interesting that I told myself I
was playing with it when in reality I was only tormenting it as it was a deadly
series business to the poor creature. I went on so long, letting it ‘attack’ me,
that’s the parent bird – its mother came back twice or thrice before scooting off
mid-landing when it saw I was still there. Some days later I went to check on it
again to see if it had flown the nest, but when I climbed up I was hit by a
stench; the bird was dead in the nest, its mother having deserted it in fright. I
always had to overdo things.

One afternoon, Alex and me walked the road bridge to Tayport across the
water in Fife. The countryside was on the left of the end of the bridge. We
could see it n the distance from Dundee. The walk along the footpath across the
bridge had seemed interminable, Tayport getting closer far too slowly. The
walk across was all of a mile and a half. We walked along on the right side of
the road by the tufts of grass until we saw a wooden house in the distance. I
couldn’t imagine why anyone would build and live in a house standing by itself.
We walked cautiously up the path that led to it, noticing the corners of the
eaves of the wooden patio that surrounded the entrance and that promised there
might be small birds nesting there. We farted around for a while, looking for a
way to get up and looking around a large grassy area to the side that passed for
a garden. After a while we assumed there was no-one home and peered through
the windows at the front. There were no curtains, front and back. It looked
sparsely decorated but it was obvious someone lived there; a large chair and
settee, and a carpet covering most of the wooden floor. Maybe The
Woodentops lived here – a popular kids programme from some years before.
We weren’t interested in trying to get in or anything like that, but were
happy we could explore the place at leisure. The thought of finding some rare
eggs in those eaves was tantalising. Swifts or Swallows. I could still recall a
kid shouting out that a bird he had spotted was a Yellowhammer when we were
surveying the big old wall by the tenements, looking for the tell-tale holes
where the House Martins nested. The thought of finding a nest with the eggs of
a Yellowhammer was equivalent to stumbling upon the Holy Grail – extremely
unlikely. There was an indescribable thrill in catching a glimpse of what I took
to be a relatively rare bird. A moment captured in time; just you and the bird, in
that instance. I had much the same feeling when I saw a Goldfinch or even a
Blue-tit. There was also the Chaffinch, a bird with a distinctive plumage. And
Robin’s made me think of postcards and Xmas.
There was no way I was going to get up those round wooden pillars to get
to the eaves, and Alex was less interested, so I gave up with the conviction we
were letting a valuable prize slip out of our grasp – or mine – and walked
further on along the main road until we reached a low concrete wall after which
was an open muddy driveway. As we had lived in town all our lives it was all
dashedly interesting and all the more so as there was never anyone around
except passing cars. On the other side was the long fence that blocked off the
shore. But it was to pastures new and unexplored by us that drew us on. The
wide drive went around in an arc, which we followed. Beyond it another fence,
then the fields we had seen in the distance from the bridge and all our lives,
when in the centre of town. Exploring it with parents or school would never
have been the same, even if they had the time or inclination. One didn’t have
adventures under supervision. We wandered into an area where there was a
large shed or outhouse – one of those, but we were more interested in getting
across those fields and into that entire bushy and hilly wilderness we could see
beyond them. That would really be something.
We found a good spot to clamber over the wires of the fence, while I
marvelled that we were now wading through the fields and Hollyhocks and God
knew what else those plants were we came to and passed by after a man
shouted after us shortly after we had climbed over the fence. Perhaps he had
been in the outhouse. We ran off of course, as that’s what kids did as we were
more worried about what he might do if he got his hands on us. We kept up a
good humour all the way as we always did, while remarking on whatever
caught our interest. I would give my eye-teeth now to be able to see that, if I
knew what eye-teeth were and had any, in all its colour and freshness and to see
and hear exactly what we said. But that would still never be the same as feeling
exactly as I felt at the time and knowing what I was thinking. Did I ever once
think of L and what she might be doing right then, or even think of what it
might be like to have her there too, meaning be there with her alone? I can’t
recall. I was certainly capable of forgetting her very existence for long periods
of time in the experience of the new. I was still very young I knew, and the
future stretched ahead in the distance. There was never a question of urgency.
Life could be good when people weren’t being stupid and with people like her
in the world, I felt however obscurely that life must mean well by me and her
too, as well as Alex. She liked me. If I was unhappy, she would be unhappy
too, I was sure, and if life meant well by her, and it seemed to, then it surely
meant well by me too, whatever appearances to the contrary. The farmer or
cowherd or whatever he was had been only a temporary blip in our reverie – or
mine. I was free; there was us and the world, however partial, but it was an
aspect of the whole and I knew that in some real way, Lynne was with us if only
through the act of my thinking of her, and she was always there in my mind
whether I was consciously thinking of her or not. The sadness lay in knowing
that she wasn’t literally there if I ever specifically thought of her at all, but on
an unconscious level I shared everything with her as she was a part of my world
now, and there, among the wheat or hay and midges I felt I was exactly where I
wanted to be. The rest of the world I knew was on hold.
It seemed natural to head towards a large promontory in the distance as it
was the most dominant feature of the landscape, so that made it the most
interesting to us. The occasional insects buzzed and flit by us. The air was
balmy and pleasant with the warmth of the sun. There was no urgency, only the
vaguest sense of time, though there was an unspoken awareness between us that
we kept track of the distance we had come and the difficulty of the terrain or
otherwise, always keeping in mind that we had to make a journey of the same
length back. Neither of us would want to find ourselves out here in the dark.
Even together it would still be an unthinkable prospect. And we’d be hungry
long before then. But right now we barely had a care in the world.

There was a sudden fluttering ahead of us and a largish dull plumaged bird
or two flew out from ahead of us. I took them to be Corncrakes. Stupidly, if
innocently, we kept walking in the same direction, or perhaps we forgot about it
and it didn’t matter where we walked and what happened shortly after was pure
chance, if there is such a thing, but to my amazement, there was a sudden and
frantic rusting under my foot. A moment of mute surprise and I remembered to
lift my foot. There was a small bird squirming in on the ground, clearly a
nestling. I bent down and picked it up. It filled my whole hand. It was gasping
for breath, choking. It was obvious my weight had broken its neck. We stood
and looked at it for some seconds as I wondered what to do. It was obviously
suffering but I was too squeamish to put it out of its misery. Alex, having
grasped the situation immediately said ‘Give me it. I’ll kill it quickly,’ but I was
too wimpy for that too, and so stood there feeling foolish and terribly guilty, my
ineffectualness and inability to make a decision only compounding the guilt I
felt, as if I’d murdered something precious. And I felt I had. That was how I
felt about birds. Fortunately it choked away its last breath quite quickly, and
my dilemma, the crisis of bad conscience was over. There was nothing else to
be done, or done with it. I’d never felt sentimental over bodies. It was the life
they seemed to contain that was important, though I was sure in some obscure
way that it wasn’t the body or even the parent that generated the life, but the
Creator, the thought of which succeeded in making me only feel more guilty. I
tossed it into the reeds in dejection that such an event had occurred. Boys
didn’t bury birds. That would have been twee and silly. Girlstuff. I was Just
William having my little Boys Own Adventure.
But once again reality had stepped in, no pun intended, and turned my
bookish lifeworld on its head. As someone had said, life was nasty, brutish, and
short. Or could be if you stand on a creatures head and I was the brute, the
clumsy Klutz that did it. Even out here it was as if my mother was right all
along. I couldn’t escape myself, as that bird couldn’t escape me. I was the
bringer of death and pestilence to that small nest. The parent bird would be
back only to discover its chick, its offspring either gone or dead, and I was the
cause of its grief – and I had no doubt it had feelings. If birds were capable of
feeling protective then they were capable of feeling loss. It was silly to dismiss
it as a blind evolutionary urge, typical of the arrogance of conceited, over
intellectual adults, scientists. One may as well say the same of any mother. I
knew they were intelligent, sentient creatures. I didn’t believe the sense of
regret I felt was only all about me. We were both involved. I could feel I had
betrayed them, if accidentally. But I felt guilty in any case, whether
conditioned to feel that way or not. If I saw them as robotic as insects, then no
doubt I’d have felt next to nothing.
It was an unfortunate little incident. but there was nothing to be done; it
was a an aspect of nature and of our unfamiliarity with the terrain. A couple of
clueless city kids, stumbling ahead, feet first, disturbing the delicate balance of
nature and all of that. Or not affecting it in the least in the grand scheme of
things, and if so, then guilt was meaningless. Accidents will happen. But at the
back of my mind was the lurking thought that on some level, it’s a life for a life,
or there would at least have to be some kind of payback for bringing murder
and mayhem to the land. I hadn’t seen much of nature, red in tooth and claw.
There was Billy’s dad next door to us who caught and killed rabbits by sending
his ferrets down rabbit holes. This seemed needlessly and unutterably cruel to
me. He would skin them by his shed in the back green, an almost equally
repulsive process.
Having been brought up on Disney and Snow White and talking animals I
was used to everything pre-packaged. I preferred to avoid the butchers, though
I liked the smell of fish shops, but even then I couldn’t understand why anyone
bought anything in the summer as I watched flies hopping from fish to fish.
Even cats won’t touch their food when flies have been on it. A memory of my
granddad when he lived off the Perth Road and before he came to stay with us
before he got married again. Our one and only visit that I can recall. My
mother, too myopically provincial minded preferred to be on home ground as
then she was in control of her little domain and us – me. His room was bright
and summery and I could see his bed in the small room off the sitting-room.
My granddads little world. I wish I lived there too or had a little flat like it to
myself and we could invite each other to dinner whenever we felt like it.
My mothers triviality and small-mindedness had a knack of colouring
every ‘occasion’, bringing it down. And this was to be something different. He
was cooking a rabbit in a largish pot. There it was on his stove. He had a
cooker, just like we did. My mother didn’t rule the world after all. There was
life beyond the tyranny. I always felt comfortable, almost happy when my
granddad was around. And here, she was obliged to keep her emotional
indulgence in check. We sat around the table expectantly, my brother and me,
and then my granddad served the rabbit. It tasted pretty much like chicken I
thought. If I felt remotely squeamish I would never give my mother the
satisfaction. I was on Granddad’s side on home ground. Far be it from me to
add my puny weight to boorish lack of appreciation. I loved the man. An hour
or two there was like a glimpse of another way of being. One day… One day. I
wouldn’t be a kid forever. Maybe my mother said it was ‘okay’, but she
preferred chicken. Maybe she said she didn’t think she was going to enjoy it
but it was better than she thought it would be. Perhaps she even said it wasn’t
bad, but she couldn’t eat it very often, implying that would be the first and last
time. Maybe she never said anything of the kind. What I do know is that it
wasn’t customary to sit there and say nothing. And no doubt I was sorry when
we had to leave. Maybe next day was a Sunday I would have to myself. I can
as likely picture my mother emphasising she had to get us back as it was ‘a
skale’ day – as if she could care less about my education, or even being on time.
But there was my brother to think about. And now, here in Tayport, barely
more than a mile from the roadway, we were as good as in the middle of
nowhere. For the time being, the world was ours. We were beholden to no one.
The past was gone, the future an open book. There would surely be no
repercussion for my accidental taking of the life of one of the Creator’s
creations. The unspoken thought in dread somewhere in the back of my mind.
An eye for an eye. A philosophy I myself subscribed to if I could. If I didn’t
forget what I thought I was supposed to be enraged over. The hill, the mound,
whatever it was was larger than I had pictured it would be. It was covered in
bushes and plants and trees, all the way to the top. This was going to be
interesting.

There was no sign of any birds or nests in the bushes as we made our way
up. Still wincing from a kind of sickly resentment of myself I don’t think I’d
have given any more than a perfunctory examination, if that. As fit as two
fiddles and about as loud, we soon reached the ‘summit’. The ground consisted
of flat earth. As curious to see what was on the other side, I walked and slid
down first while grasping the branched of the trees growing at an angle on the
steep side. It was looking quite precarious, with the tops of firs showing up
through the haze of leaves and limbs. ‘There’s a wasps nest here!’ Alex said as
he began scrambling back up the bank. I hadn’t noticed a single wasp. Now
that he had pointed it out I saw they were flying slowly and silently around and
in front of me. It was an unnerving sight. And just as I noticed this I heard a
buzzing and lowering my head in stifled alarm, saw there was a wasp hovering
as it flew slowly out of the top of the collar of my t-shirt. I felt a twinge of
relief at the simultaneous realisation that it hadn’t stung me. A miracle. Just at
that moment I felt a stinging pain in my neck, similar to the sharp jab of the
dentist in my gum when he or she gave me ‘the freeze’ as we imaginatively
called it. Only, this pain wasn’t going away. In a matter of seconds it came to
an unbearable crescendo. ‘Eck, I’m in agony,’ I shouted. I was in my own
separate little world of private pain, like some surreal dream. It was as if
someone had taken a long needle of indefinite length and was slowly pushing it
into my neck. If someone stuck a pin in you or a tack or you sat or stepped on
one the pain was sharp, but temporary. It would stop. This was something akin
to Dante’s 7th circle of Hell. I considered the possibility I could die, or if I was
lucky, lose consciousness and tumble to a prickly death or even more
unpleasant injury in the unexplored depths at the end of the slope I was
precariously keeping my balance on, looking up at the branches and sky above
me, as indifferent or as malevolently inclined as I might imagine them to be and
as they would be as if I had collapsed and rolled to my uncertain fate, careening
off trunks and stumps and clods of earth, attracting and perhaps flattening a
wasp or two in the process, or if my luck was really in, I’d die in agony from
more stings before I reached the top of those furs or hit any nettles below. The
pain began to ease off. Alex seemed curiously indifferent I felt.
But it was only due to the difficulty of conveying the extent of the
nightmare I had been through in the space of some seconds. I was convinced it
wasn’t any exaggeration to say we had, for that period of time, been in two
different worlds. And why would I want him to share it? was my unspoken
realisation. And why me rather than he? I cursed at the arbitrariness of it,
knowing on some obscure level that it was as if it separated us that if I had been
given the choice as to whether I should experience it or he should, it could be
an impossible decision to make. The anticipation alone might send me haywire.
Thankfully it was now over. We walked back down a path of sorts from the
side, unconsciously avoiding any clumps of foliage. Alex had me stop for a
moment. ‘Half its arse is still sticking out of your neck’. No wonder it had
hurt. I’d thought only bees were supposed to leave the sting. Maybe this one
had been a bit overzealous. Or had panicked and this was the wasp’s death-
sting. Yes, maybe it really had tried to kill me – through leaving it’s arse and
sting in me. I could picture it still pumping away as the wasp fell dead to the
earth, the nasty little bastard. I could only be thankful they weren’t two feet
long say, as in Land Of The Giants. One of the scariest scenarios of all, the
most terminally unsettling, had been the predicament of The Incredible
Shrinking Man. Not only was his unfathomable future to shrink into oblivion
but he had to flee from the family cat in the process as well as kill a ‘giant’
spider with a pin. I think he escaped for the cat by hiding in a child’s doll
house. Maybe he stabbed its paw with a pin too. I would. And what weird and
futuristic monsters would he have to deal with on the atomic level? That much
I knew. And how would he feed himself and sleep and…And what about the
subatomic level? What happened then? In theory, he could go on shrinking
forever. Atoms cold be the size of planets, or a universe. The mind boggled. It
was about as unpleasant a prospect as an infinity of pain the religionists, the
Christians were so keen to remind us kids of it we stepped out of line or at least
that’s how it seemed to me.
I just couldn’t get my head around the ‘Jesus thing’ at all. A vivid image of
myself, walking along the High Street, contemplating this, in a hazy, pea soup
of thought kind of way, groping for a realization, an insight if I could, aware
that there was a centuries, millennia length of tradition and conviction revolving
around this, nay – that it hinged on it. But the more I thought about it the more
illogical and cruel it seemed; that a benevolent God would send his ‘Son’ – his
only Son, whatever that meant – to die ‘on our behalf’. As I understood it, that
meant he died in place of us. This meant that for some reason, God wanted to
kill me – me with all my pleasure from reading and love for L when I ever
thought about it and my friends too along with the bullies and other boors and
ignoramuses. That seemed a little harsh even for them. Even for my mother.
And again for me, however much fun Alex and me had had through our stealing
sprees at the Woolworth’s in this same High Street, pulling out and examining
and chortling and drooling over our spoils at the back of the building. Paints
and glue and paperbacks and sweets in my case along with the
incomprehensibly odd choices on his part – pen-knifes and wallets and cigarette
lighters, but all the predictable paraphernalia of the kind of thing one would
expect boys to want and accumulate, only we couldn’t afford it and neither
could our parents and neither would they have seen the point of it all, but to me
it was like manna from heaven. I was sure God would understand, if I ever let
Him float into mind.
And anyway I could as quickly shove Him out, or if not, then distract
myself, often with more goodies. It was a bit of a comedown, a bit of a drag to
think that Jesus may have died for this; that he had went through the agony of
the cross and humiliation in order for us – me – to carry on willy-nilly, and hang
the consequences and to hell with my conscience. The fact was I didn’t believe
it. I knew it had taken place as a historical event but I was sure God had better
things to concern himself with than an excitable and harmlessly avaricious kid
helping himself to whatever interested him. It was as clear as day they were
available, there to make money. That much of it was what intensely attracted
and interested me was either serendipity or brilliant insight in the manufacturers
part and as for books, such as the volumes of Tarzan I helped myself to, I knew
this was quality goods however cheaply made and packaged. It was literature
and the fact was my mother didn’t give a toss about my interest in that.
Moreover it was more accurate to say she resented it. I didn’t share my
thoughts on ‘religion’ and God with anyone either. Those on charge believed
what they believed and I already knew they could be inconsistent and childish
and hypocritical. It seemed natural to mull things over myself and come to my
own conclusions. And it seemed equally ridiculous or at least very unlikely that
anyone could be condemned for eternity to the flames – the, er, fiery pits of
hell. That this was as real a prospect as was the possibility of going to heaven,
itself as much of a myth to me. Yet there had been moments…
It didn’t seem natural to think of God on that way. And if he could kill the
good, the best of us as I knew Jesus represented, then how come the bad and the
indifferent escaped that fate? How come none of them were chosen to take on
the sins of the rest of us and might even escape such a painful death (though
hell might or would get them in the end)? What was the point of being ‘good’ if
it made you a marked man even in God’s eyes? the very Being one might
expect to be pleased about it and give one ones just reward for it. In short, who
the hell would want to be Jesus? And hadn’t he even asked ‘for this cup to be
taken away from me during the ‘agony in the Garden? But apparently he didn’t
really mean it or it was only a moment of terminal discouragement and he soon
came back to his senses and awareness of his mission. A moment of temporary
insanity in a sane scenario, apparently. I would call it a moment of sanity in a
surely insane scenario. Faced with the choice of that wasp-sting I would let the
world go to hell in a hand basket and Jesus along with it. I would consider the
same over a sufficiently excruciating toothache. At least the nails through my
hands and feet might prove a distraction.

Nope, the whole thing was circular. You could go around and around with
this until the cows came home or forever. For anyone to die to save me made
no logical sense. It would mean the world was based on a crazy premise and
God was just as mad. Maybe the religionists, the men in frocks, the Churches,
my teachers at school had it all wrong. They were perfectly, even absurdly
capable of getting the wrong end of the stick at the best of times and if good
created the world and saw that it was good, why would he want to kill us? Oh
he didn’t, he only killed the best guy to save us? and anyway, he was
resurrected. Right, so having now taken on board all our sins for himself, he
and we are now magically purified and will live forever like him in immortal
bodies forever? as long as we’re good, otherwise we’ll go to the fiery scaly
place where all is great gnashing of teeth and where we were all destined to go
anyway before Christ came along, so really, little has changed. In fact one
might assume that as Jesus has taken on all our sins it might not even matter
what we do if we are now innocent and sinless forever, but hey, I can
understand that that would only make me feel guilty in the long run, but what I
don’t understand – along with the rest of the above – is how a good guy has to
go through real pain and real death to come out the other side in a now
immortal body while others as yet whether mad or bad or indifferent/lukewarm
will still screw up for all eternity.
Surely a more reasonable and sane and manageable scenario would be if it
was a learning process? If Jesus has already demonstrated sins are not eternal
as he now lives forever then why would that apply only to him and not for the
rest of us, because, let’s face it, he can make mistakes too if the agony in the
garden is anything to go by and where would we be then? But Good always
prevails? Presumably that’s why he was Chosen to begin with. It’s all very
convenient and circular. I still think it’s a case of either/or. Either we are saved
or we’re not. It’s more likely we do as much harm to ourselves as to others.
And that mistakes are not irredeemable sins but a learning process on the
journey to immortality, but Jesus has demonstrated already that immortality is
ours as it always was for him, as was ultimate sinlessness. You’d think. And
now he lives in some new or ethereal superbody. Wherever he lives, on
whatever plane he exists, he’s now the literal equivalent of Superman. God’s
goal is, apparently, to create a race of Superman, Super beingsssss on the way to
eternity to live as Superdupermen and Superduperwoalongggmg with our
favourite Superduperdogs and parrots and the rest while the
Supersinnsquirmuirm in hell for all eternity too – meaning there’s also two
eternity’s -which again makes no sense to me as eternity is surely one – a
whole, indivisible, unending, forever; that’s what it means. It it isn’t eternity
then it’s something else. Hell perhaps. And so it goes. Eventually one comes
to suspect all it is is a pile of Superhorseshit. A pile of superpish.
That people don’t really know what they’re talking about, least of all the
people who’ve set themselves up to be and be seen as the authorities on the
subject. That it’s all a crock to keep the sense of sin, of believing oneself to be
a bad person, alive . That it isn’t what God has decreed at all. They’ve made it
all up themselves. It’s myth, a fairy story to keep eternity from us and so we
see God as the epitome of fear and victimisation and Jesus as a hateful figure
for what he seems to demand of us – sacrifice and pain. Thanks but no thanks.
I’ve pain enough as it is. It seems to me the traditional Christian view of
salvation has much in common with the Nazis. It’s all about elites and
indestructible bodies or as near as. And finding scapegoats in order to justify it.
The damned and the saved, the guilty and the innocent, the good and the bad.
And the bad is whomever and whatever doesn’t fit their definition of salvation
and reality. It’s all about being a ‘good’ body. And just like God, that means
killing other bodies on God’s behalf for their own good; to save them from and
for themselves. Whatever that means. I

t’s ironic; now I can think of Mrs McDonald at school, grabbing the Pow!
comic from my hand. I wasn’t reading it but giving it a loving once over before
I put it back in my bag, relishing the prospect of Spidey’s epic battle with the
dreaded Dr Doom. It was issue number 10. She had raced up the isle between
our desks and now she glared at it in undisguised disgust and contempt. ‘What
is this garbage?’ She went back to her place in front of the blackboard, but first
tossing the priceless artefact into the waste-paper basket. I was outraged:
dumbfounded; speechless. I was nine or ten -and sorely tempted to defy her by
taking it out of the basket on the sly when the class finished. I liked her – or
thought I did. I generally assumed most people were sane and meant well by
me, until proven otherwise. What wasn’t to like? She had once said God is
everywhere. In the company of my classmates I was inclined to be flippant. I
wanted to ask if God is sitting on my earlobe but I knew she wouldn’t see the
genuinely puzzled enquiry behind the humour and she was a bit too zealous
with the old two leather fingers she kept in her desk. I seemed to be her
favourite on that account.
But it was a genuinely thought-provoking observation on her part I’d
thought. I wished we could have discussed it further. If I was less bashful and
felt less ambivalent towards her I might have broached the subject if I could get
a moment alone with her. Now I was feeling even less ambiguous about her.
The woman was clearly a cretin. One didn’t open oneself up to people – to
creatures - such as these. I chickened out of challenging her authority head on
by consoling myself with the thought I would find buy another copy as soon as
possible before it sold out. I think I forgot. Out of side out of mind. The sense
of loss and anger came back to mind for years. I had been a hairs breadth to
saying the ten year old equivalent of ‘fuck it’ (‘Fuck it’, perhaps) and taking the
comic back anyway. I felt she was unjustifiably interfering with my life. It had
cost money. It was separate from school. I had been only glancing at it in
passing.
The woman was an unimaginative, interfering, tyrannical busybody. I
might not have the vocabulary to articulate it but I knew it was the case. One
didn’t reason with such people, one acted. Chalk up another inexplicable attack
on a teacher – meaning she manhandles me in the act of taking what I owned
and what was owed me. Only I didn’t as I say. I repressed it. And began
wearing a big Batman insignia badge I picked up somewhere, perhaps a free
gift in another comic. It didn’t distract me from lessons and it served to remind
her of my interests along with her grievous sin. As unintentional on my part as
it was unconscious. I even took to doing drawings in class of Batman, done at
breakneck speed for a penny or two to classmates. I was the small centre of the
cyclone. She didn’t seem to mind. Talent always perplexed and even awed the
plebs I think. They were obliged to think of the possibility there might really be
a higher authority than their own and its light flickered through me. I wonder
whatever happened to Spider-man and Doctor Doom and Batman and the rest…

Random memory: of wandering up the stairs of one of the old flats near us,
with the spiral stairs and the concrete platforms with railings on the other side –
‘pletties’. There were a couple of girls I liked and that were pretty that lived
there, a bit younger than me. Maybe they would be around. I could say I was
looking for Jackie, an older kid who lived there, though I didn’t know him. In
our territorial way, he was the enemy. As I came to their floor or plettie and
walked along to their flat or the one I thought might be their flat – I wasn’t quite
sure, I noticed their door was open – or what was perhaps their door. I peered
through the window.
There didn’t seem to be anyone around, so stupidly, I went in. Curiosity
overcame the natural fear of discovery if they anyone came back unexpectedly.
There wasn’t much to see. Maybe at the back of my mind was the thought of
finding something worth having but as I knew them, however loosely – and the
fact they were girls gave the situation a romantic aura that made the temptation
less likely. I never stole from friends. It wasn’t even a conscious decision. It
wasn’t done. One stole from adults, the establishment, the system -though I
never thought of it in those terms either. A small, shabby looking flat. They
had nothing. Just like us, only they had less. I noticed a wasp silently buzzing
the window from the inside. Now I was wary, though the sting episode was in
the future. It was time to go. Or distract myself with the wasp.
I found a newspaper and swatted it into the basin of water in the sink. In
the casually sadistic way of boys, I wanted to see how it might react, what it
would do. And the water would immobilise its wings, though when I lifted it
out with a spoon I still felt an irrational apprehension as if it might suddenly fly
at me. What was fascinating was to be able to examine it at leisure. Its head
looked as if it had an actual face, though I knew it was only the pattern it had,
yet it looked like some malevolent alien from another
planet.
Its sheer otherness was creepily alien. I could identity with animals and
birds easily enough but /I just couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be a
wasp. It seemed more akin to a robot of some kind. Gleefully amoral, without
conscience of any kind. And with a sting of unknown potentiality I had yet to
experience. Unpleasant and ugly, they really had nothing to recommend them.
But I was still reluctant to drown it or even kill it in any other way, so I let it go
and left before anyone came back. I seemed to live in a world in my head. It
was as if I was attracted to and curious about things no one paid the least
attention to, though it was obvious enough they did as I could attain books on
almost any subject that interested me. No doubt I had perused some large
colour drawing of a wasp and its attendant thorax and other body parts. The
stark reality was far more alien and unsettling for that reason. My unspoken
and unarticulated question was why would God, if he existed at all, create such
a pointlessly nasty creature?

Yet I could feel something for it as it existed. Like myself, I could safely
assume it couldn’t recall asking to be born or had any idea why it existed. It as
the victim of its own nature. Why should I compound that by victimising it
further. It seemed to be the predator but this line of thought offered a subtly
different way of perceiving it. Now, as with flies, I’ll kill them as soon as look
at them. Treat them like a murderous, psychopathic crazy person. Put them out
of commission with…dispassionate prejudice. That was weird. I just had the
sudden sensation of a slight pressure on my neck just above the collar of this
heavy black Nike pullover I’m wearing. A sudden if slight attack of the willies.
It genuinely felt as if there was an insect on me. Maybe there was. Talk about
the power of suggestion.

Oddly enough, the thought of wasps has become almost synonymous with
the memory of the same old flats with pletties that we lived up until when I was
six or seven. Left alone, I watched an episode of the old black and white Outer
Limits series. This one featured alien spiders that talked and ran amok in the
town, running all over the ceiling, as I recall. Needless to say I had never seen
anything like it. With their little talking faces, I watched in subdued horror and
much fascination.
At five or six I knew it was only a TV show but it was literally the stuff of
nightmares. The world was a far more interesting place with these sort of
scenarios in it. Anything was possible. Pigs might fly, but that would be far too
mundane. In retrospect I see now that that was what the wasps face reminded
me of. Some cold, alien intelligence. Only the wasp was as dull and robotic as
it could be quick and unpredictable, like any insect. For some reason I had
always assumed those talking spiders were from Mars.