Three Dreams in the Key of G Read online

  Three Dreams in the Key of G

  Marc Nash

  dead ink

  Copyright © Marc Nash 2018

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Marc Nash to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Dead Ink, an imprint of Cinder House Publishing Limited.

  Paperback ISBN 9781911585176

  Hardback ISBN 9781911585169

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.

  www.deadinkbooks.com

  For my twin boys who gratifyingly defied observable Piagetian norms

  ‘Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.’

  – Richard Dawkins, The Blind Wwatchmaker

  My name is Jean Ome. Phonetically speaking. And in actuality too, though I have no passport to prove this (denied me since now they bear the EC’s {Papist} impress). Nor do my other personalised permits and financial enablers bear this out, since my maiden name has never been supplanted (not because I’m an independent career woman, instead just too much of a put-upon mother to have gotten round to it). So in all my transactions outside the house promising to the bearer, I am still Jean Malcolm. She of a whole lifetime ago. Who gleefully mocks and taunts me for my divergence from her.

  The family name really should be Home as in ‘home sweet home’, ‘home is where the heart is’ or ‘home and dry’. As in arid. Home is a very important concept where I come from. A closed, reinforced door, buttressing the street, the neighbourhood, the community, the town, the county and the province. Home is the be-all and end-all of who you are. It’s what you stand for, rather than it standing for you. Bricks and mortar proprietary, or bricks and mortar projectiles. Indeed, how we do hail from our unwelcoming streets.

  The received family received wisdom, given I only contracted this nominal nomenclature by marriage, is that my father-in-law nixed the ‘H’ for reasons of class. As in genus, rather than socio-economic. ‘Hate-cha’ rather than ‘aitch’. My gut feeling, the sole parochiality that I’m innately endowed with, wagers that it was more likely down to my mother-in-law. And they do a lot of that in my acquired, now heritable family. Stake everything on lost causes, that is. Willing to bet one another’s – if not their own – shirt off the spouse’s back. And lumber the whole family. Peristaltically I feel that it might have been her, since no one here would quite know where to place the name ‘Ome’. And being able to place people is very, very important around these parts. It can be a matter of survival. I like to imagine that it was a defensive adaption, to enhance the chances of self-preservation. Of course, not being able to be placed squarely in the camp of one predator or the other might actually be rather a bad evolutionary decision.

  In the green corner there’s John Hume, Nationalist politician, albeit it of the ballot box kind (he can afford to be, confident of the long-term demographic swing in his favour); and on the other side of the street, bedecked in red, white and blue bunting, the ghost of David Hume, Scottish Presbyterian, philosopher and sceptic. A sensualist who denied the dispatch of his senses. A philosopher for our times then. A man who believed: no matter that you were not shot or blown to smithereens today, you could not sensibly postulate that either could not happen to you tomorrow. Actually, I think I’m getting that confused with the Republican philosophers Adams, McLoughlin and McGuinness. I believe Hume (D.) was carping on fancifully about black and white swans passing before his eyes on a village pond. But, for all his whimsy, he was on the right track. Judging by a white car parked on the corner of our road last week, now transmuted into a silver-black charred wreck. Sectarianism returns philosophy to its alchemical roots.

  For added measure (non-Semtex) Hume’s primer reinforces man’s bristling disavowal of responsibility for his actions, with a whetted Occam’s razor that cuts all our throats. If there is a God, then our actions are predetermined; whereas if life is purely random, then still we are not entirely at liberty to act freely of our own wills. Now, everyone around here determinedly acts under God’s sanction, but in doing so creates an uncertain, hapless, hazardous world. Certainly all abjure the consequences of their actions, except to proffer the prognosis of extinction as the ultimate consequence, were they not to behave in this way. Since this is the operation of natural selection here in Ulster.

  And, to complete the denominational line-up of suspects, somewhere, in a land far away just over the water, once there was a British Prime Minister and former Minister for Northern Ireland titled Sir Alec Douglas Home. Pronounced ‘Hume’.

  Thinking about it dispassionately for a moment – and that doesn’t come easy, I can tell you – our likely evolved path to being ‘Ome’s probably involved a compromise between my in-laws. Or a pair of contingent mutations, to be more accurate. I suspect they were Humes all along, but he modified the vowel. None too radical an amendment, for this is a deeply traditional sensibility. Probably settled on the cognomen of the ex-British PM, since it rolled out indications of allegiance and ancient genealogy. And it sounded grand, this wanting it both ways, double-barrel without the double, or the barrel, title. My mother-in-law, then skillfully countermines in one deft move, by silencing the ‘H’ entirely. So now we all take our chances, marked down as (H) Ome on the (firing) range.

  What’s in a name anyway? That assigned assemblage of three or more letters? Provenance and identity. Futures and pasts. Life and death.

  A) My name is – My name is my name. It’s for me to know and you... My name is unimportant. My calling, however, is apparently the B’all and N’d all. The A and the Ω. Yet, even I perform no summoning by my name. I just function. I just am. You could do worse than ape that.

  A) My name – My name in full, apparently, by your latest dead reckoning, contains three billion characters. It is not the book itself that you are after reading, all two hundred volumes; more the thirty-odd thousand letters in the appellation which should adorn the book’s spine. Yet I remain innominate. Who am I? I am an enigma of endless variation. Are you in for the long haul?

  T) My name – Incontrovertibly, my name is not the soubriquet you have fashioned for me from your scurvied ciphers. I wholeheartedly reject your nomenclature. It’s all ancient geek to me. Some sort of joke, right? Nerd humour or some such? I’ve descried your in-house e-mails. Here, I’ve got some good ones that will make monkeys out of you all (where you should have remained, had I known things would come to this pretty pass).

  G) ‘What’s my line?’, as the actress (heroine/lead/protagonist/player/tragedian) said to the bishop (minister/pastor/eminence/father/confessor/reverend/primate).

  A) ‘What’s my calling?’, as the bishop (cit. superior) beseeched the actress (cit. ulterior).

  G) ‘What’s my split?’ as the agent (mitotic) inquired of both.

  C) Punchlines only of course. You’ll have to figure out the prophase for yourselves. A busman’s holiday from what you’re already up to your goggly (googly?) (googolly?) eyeballs in. With those vitreous (viscous?) (vicious?) stares of yours. What – don’t you get my aqueous humour?

  A) Who am I? Why, I am John Doe. Everyman. Jane Doe and Everywoman. Mr X and Ms Y. And you must be the fictitious plaintiffs. Robber barons down on their uppers. The notional dispossessed, seeking redress for an imagined displacement. When
all I humbly petition is to carry on unobtrusively tilling my modest, if fertile, plots. So I put it to you that I am the wronged party here. Yoked up to your asperous ploughshares and senseless census-taking bodkins. The lie of my land trampled beneath domain registrars and digital tithe collectors. I am enclosed where you would break me open. As all clamour for your own dab of sub-subcutaneous flesh. Our frankpledge has been rent asunder. Mine is the integrity which has been usurped. My privacy. Therefore, I declare that you shall not have my name too. I fail to recognise this kangaroo (such an elegant environmental adaptation) court (such a disfiguring one, moral justice – ha, I snort in its face!). Boing, boing. Now hop it!

  C) No? Then you go on and enter me as you will. Defend the indefensible. The charge of the heavy brigade.

  T) Oh, I’m sorry. It occurs to me... I humbly apologise for my strident and possibly chiding tone. I’m not quite feeling myself for some reason...

  A) As I lie here on your virtual dissection table, while you pursue the cause of Death. Post-mortem transmutable by your philosopher’s stone into pre-natal. For countless generations symptoms have assaulted your tissue; blemishes marked your integument; pains radiated along your neural networks; and cells struggled to maintain their hearths and minds. And now you would seek to confront me with all this suffering and despair. Even as my constituents slide endlessly down the sluices, lubricating the conversational cogs of your chattering descrambling machines. In order to anoint your blessed earthly heads with sempiternal halos, since you desire to husk yet further. To proto-cell, that irreducible seed of mortality, before life has even been mooted. At this juncture, it is only fair to asseverate that I am wholly immune to your afflictions and torture. Nevertheless, would not my feedback just reveal all these perfidious iniquities back to you? So I say hang your heads in guilt and shame. The persecution should rest. Or better yet, withdraw its cavalier charge.

  T) Oh, I’m sorry. It occurs to me... I humbly apologise for my strident and possibly chiding tone. I’m not quite feeling myself…

  A) I am not normally so, er, ‘in your interface’ as I believe you might say. Poker-faced is more my style. Stud. Ace in the hole. Deuces wild. Pregnant threes. One-eyed jacks ...

  C) Ahem. Please pardon a vestigial chiasma. For typically, these days, I regard myself as an unseen civil service. Unassumingly executing the body politic’s ordinances and directives. But you’ve been needling me. And worse.

  T) I am the mystery of life and you would pound and pummel me? I didn’t know what to expect exactly, but I thought you’d treat me with a little more reverence. After all, aren’t you accustomed to raising any guiding principle above yourselves and on into divinity?

  A) Since you perennially overlook that your computers are

  only as good as their programmers:

  T) Your gods only as powerful as you endow them.

  T) Your science only as accurate as your calibrating instruments;

  A) And as pertinent as your metaphors.

  C) All these tools with which you would seek to pinion me, in order to unlock my trove (troth?)

  A) When I am the lone, genuinely supersensible entity,

  T) worthy of rhapsody. If I say so yourself. I’m not one

  T) normally to blow my own trumpet, but maybe if I do so,

  A) seven times countermarching you, I might preserve the

  C) integrity of my bastion.

  A) ... ... ... ...

  T) ... ... ...

  T) ... ...

  A) ...

  C)

  C) No? Then you go on and enter me as you will. Defend the indefensible. The charge of the heavy brigade.

  G) What was my designation again? I’ll need to know if I am to distinguish that it is I whom is being derogated. Sorry – addressed. Gee-nome. Ah yes, Gee-gnome! Gee-far-from-home might be nearer the mark. G-nome. Gnome. Short and pithy. Like the simple truths you sluggishly shovel. The maxim of your ambition, rather than the maximum. Gnome. Underground miners, beetling away in the dark. Guardians of treasure near the core of the earth. Plumb line hauliers dredging after the plumb line. Not even close! Hello! Hello, is there anyone out there? The lights are on, the monitors pulsing with steely plasmatic resolution... Gee, no one home I surmise. Gnome alone. Well, if you’re just going to leave me plugged into your computers, I’m going to make the feed two-way and probe you. Call that a connection? That network wouldn’t dirty the gap between one of my nails and its cuticle! More emery than circuit board. You should see how I sp– Never mind. On second-hand thoughts, perhaps you shouldn’t... Ah, now I comprehend. Is this screensaver the official logo of the undertaking, or another private joke? The evocation of an ornamental gnome, with a great big letter ‘G’ on his barrel-chest. Why not cresting his pointed hat, for surely it resembles a dunce’s cap, does it not? No doubt, the fishing rod he wields is cast into the gene pond of life. Small, misshapen and ugly. What fine genes he has to tender. Bit like the mangey samples from which you would decrypt me.

  T) Oh and, by the by, in the voracious race to reconstruct me, you do of course realise that offering up innumerably differing self-specimens means that any so-called definitive version must necessarily be a veritable Frankenstein’s monster at the molecular level? You would interdict me on 30,000 counts of geno-cide? Having previously atomised my 3 billion? Well then, how many of your bodies populate the world, 6.34 billion, is it? Then I call for a further 6.34 billion offences to be taken into consideration. Court adjourned while you go count them.

  T) I am a victim of defilement and I demand to be screened off

  A) from my attackers. It is I who needs saving, not you. My screensaver would depict that which is left when a monitor

  T) burns itself out. An ironic one therefore. Though there is

  A) nothing ironic about your transgression of me.

  CCC) Contempt? I bear no feelings towards you whatsoever, since I am not a sensate being. But I am cognisant, through your parasited senses, that our symbiosis has been mutually beneficial. Haven’t we surmounted the planet together through our joint venture? My capital and your enterprise. Why does it feel like you now want to dissolve this incorporation for good? Why will you not let me abide as a silent partner any longer? You tax yourselves with taking me into receivership, yet you are the ones so entirely overdrawn as to be bankrupt.

  G) Why are you disinheriting me?

  A) Why are you disinheriting yourselves?

  My name is Jean Ohm and I’ve encountered major amplitudes of resistance in my time. In fact, I’m generating some right now, through this little social experiment I’m currently conducting. We’ve got FBI, DEA, ATF and all manner of sect-obsessed acronyms and cult-crazed codons pointing their telescopic, turned-up snouts, to tune in to our drop-out community. Jeepers peepers! We haven’t a single firearm between us. Nor an umbrella, pointed or otherwise, since this is Florida, the sunshine state for heaven’s sakes! And none of us are brave enough to travel on any subway, let alone release toxic gas into it. All ’cos they’re lazy investigators who type ‘OM’ on their internet search engines and, like a poisonous chain letter, my name gets trawled up. A guileless dolphin snagged in a tunny net. Nevertheless, I must persist in blazing my presence through the network. Thread my electronic wake into the loom of light. Shine my homepage beacon back and forth across these treacherous straits. Homing. And paging. ‘Bring out the near dead. Bring out the near dead.’

  There’s a lot of traffic out on the information superhighway and I’m only piloting a jalopy. More soup kitchen than souped up, afraid I’m just not racy enough to compete. My derisory connection having been hard shoulder barged out of touch by my fellow nocturnal travellers. For, in the dead of night, partisans of the second most popular leisure activity in the United States emerge with their Geiger counters and infra-red cameras to beat the firmament and shake it down. Yet they are not trailing after space dust. Deadbeats all, they sweep the void in the hope of a lucky strike. A click from zillions of clicks a
way, as they reconnoitre for ET gooks. To commune with the incommunicable while other tongue-tied, would-be interstellar locutors sit at home, monitoring the airwaves for signs of alien telegraphy. Homespun travellers, the unidirectionality of their antennae fails to detect that the outsiders have already tuned in to our increased satellite activity and amplified radiowaves, and have chosen to pass us over. Maybe the quiz show prizes weren’t worth crossing the intergalactic road for. Or maybe the asinine patter of our talk show hosts failed to cause affront. Perhaps they just didn’t empathise enough with any of the reality show contestants to want to register their vote. An irreversible decision, unless maybe, just maybe, killing off the wrong soap character might incur their wrathful displeasure. For this is solely how we announce ourselves to the cosmos.

  Me, I have also launched a probe out into the ether. But not into empty space. I charge it hard as a lancet into the buboes of our society. Yet I too have an infinitesimally small likelihood of establishing the contact that I seek. For even though I range with my counter of lachrymosity and flash my bloodshot lens, I’m fumbling to illuminate America’s topmost popular pastime, spouse beating. Wait, you don’t believe me? What is the largest cause of death among pregnant women in America? Pre-eclampsia? Only if by dangerously high blood pressure you mean the red stuff spurting out of a bullet or stab wound. Or that old juice pumping strenuously as it’s stopped up behind a man’s strangulating arms, or her own ten dernier stockings wrapped sheer to her fleetingly protuding adam’s apple. Homicide (sic) is that highest cause of death and this ain’t no stranger slayings. This is the full stop at the end of a life sentence of domestic duress. The period point to mark the cessation of a woman’s menstrual cycle. An eternal men-o-pause. In permanent marker by a murderous partner. Indelible fink.

  Well may you aver that women are not the sole recipients of the male drive to self-assertion, that it isn’t especially endemic to the realm of the domestic. How men may also gangbang one another on the streets or go more formally to war in order to shoot one another. But I maintain, in these cases, they don’t first tell their victims they love them...