HUNGER FOR THE WORD
In the beginning was the Word.
The woman wondered whether this was true. In the beginning was Nothing – logically. And at the end, likewise. She turned her shoulders – leather cracking around the blades – to find her husband had come into the room. He stood at the door, suds up to his elbows and a dinner plate thrust towards her like a second face.
“See! I’ve got it clean. OK?”
She laughed, having complained most of their life together about the quality of his doing the dishes – claiming that there were supplementary meals to be had if one simply dashed to the draining-board before it was cleared of the crockery he’d just done.
She put down her book. Religious Studies for an Open University course was using up a lot of time. More than life itself. No time for real things. Her children were permanently at some school in the sky … from where her husband had always wanted to fish them down with some hook line and sinker. Thankfully, the children themselves hadn’t assigned blame to the barrenness that created their non-existence. Or so she believed. Nobody could be sure. Especially nobody.
She yearned for a fulfilment that would retrospectively cast some meaning to the previous years of her life. She scribbled out a few notes from the text book she was studying and she wondered whether her handwriting could subsist beyond the paper’s surface whereon the joined-up letters seemed to reside. Tangible fashionings that would taste and feel their own meanings as words if they could only be lifted like children’s transfers and popped in the mouth.
Her husband had returned to the kitchen, following his joke with the plate. But was it a joke? She sensed that every joke was seriousness disguised. And vice versa. Especially religion, which, in its way, gave the words birth and death an extended meaning they otherwise lacked. Lifted their existentialist absurdity into realms where it could be unfathomed, unspooled, unspun, like whipping a top until it paradoxically bore the static colours of mysticism.
She licked her lips. The sight of a famine on the television faced her from some news event. She often had the picture on with no sound. The reception tonight was leathery – with the same matt consistency as her jacket … as she tried to penetrate the dull brown pixels to follow the paths of ghostly skeletons lined up towards the flat screen’s variously moving horizons.
She heard a plane crash. Sorry, cross that out. She heard a plate crash on to the kitchen lino. Or was it a wine-glass. She’d later be ages picking over every splinter. Her husband never had the knack for such minutiae, nor the gumption. Then the sound of skidding feet as he evidently walked through the suds he’d scattered in all directions. She visualised chaos with body-sized meat at its centre – orbitting seeds, then lumbering life itself. A spinning plate. Or a series of many spinning plates that used to be an act on variety shows where the artist had to keep them all up in the air by twirling in turn each spindle upon which they spun. Humming like giant bees.
As a child, she was once severely scolded at a school-dinner for licking the remains of gravy from her plate with her tongue.. French-kissing food was not what a well-behaved girl was meant to do. Indeed, after lifting the plate to her face, she cold see the teacher’s shocked expression – even now. A bit like a cross God. Or so she thought. One of those ancient memories that stayed with you all your life, trivial in themselves, but fundamental in retrospect. She could hardly believe she was herself a child once. And, before that, a baby dropped down the chimney by a stork.
A plate was spinning on the TV screen like a visitant from space. World Hunger had been replaced by a black and white Dr. Who episode from the Sixties. There was a strange mixture of moods as she channel-hopped herself through the eons with the remote.
Time for supper. She felt hungry. Strangely tired. Her husband had only just finished the washing-up for lunch. They really must get a proper dish-washer, before it was too late. In the beginning was the Whirled. She slumped to the floor and cracked like a leather egg. No joke.
