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13 May 2008
61. Lizzie Says Oestrogen Is Airborne
Lizzie says oestrogen is airborne. Then she follows up this statement with an explanation of the distaste this fills her with by writing an onomatopoeic word that contains around 25 consonants, about three vowels and a platoon of belligerent exclamation marks so long and angry-looking that they could probably successfully invade Russia, armed with nothing but one explosive-looking dot each. Yes, Lizzie would be pleased to know that her expression of emphasis has not been lost on me.
She announces this information to me in a letter. The first in a while actually.
But once again the postman turned-up, delivered his letters and disappeared again without me hearing a car engine or a hint on gravel! How does he do that? Pigeon post? If I’d heard him arrive I’d have asked him to take me to the neighbouring town so I could get my car. I’ve been here five days now and I’m getting a bit low on food. Well, wine! Well, wine and cheese biscuits actually! Well, okay, wine, cheese biscuits and toffee swirls! Things are really getting desperate here!
Anyway, Lizzie says that five of our friends have announced that they’re pregnant in just the last month. Whenever she writes the word ‘pregnant’ she puts it in italics – pregnant – it makes prenatal motherhood appear like some bug that’s doing the rounds, or some highly unsalubrious job somewhere beneath prostituting, toilet-cleaning and voluntary charity work. A couple of these pregnant friends - she says - were doing that naff waiting nonsense and mumbling about getting through the initial stages to the ‘safe period’ – Lizzie speculates that this makes no sense, that surely having your period is when you actually know it’s safe! Then – she says – these pregnant women would whitter on about how difficult it was ‘to keep it all quiet and only tell a handful of around 50-odd close family, friends and work colleagues’, while others – she said - just blurted it out ‘before the semen was even dry’, as she put it, and then they said that they shouldn’t really be saying anything, yet with no hint of regret just relish, and that they should really be waiting until the ‘safe period’ - even though they’d just copulated the night before, they said they just ‘felt different’, that they ‘just knew they were, well, you know …’. Lizzie says that she would complete the sentence for them. ‘Pregnant?’ Lizzie would ask, with a mixture of disgust and abhorrence. So, Lizzie says she needs to get away from the city just in order to avoid the high levels of oestrogen in the air – she says there’s a hormone monitor on Hope Street and it’s been in the red for weeks! Soon she’ll be in the sun again, I muse. The south of France, the south of Spain. Lizzie loves going south. Ask any man. In all this rambling, she fails to tell me which of our friends has fallen pregnant. Not that I’m bothered, but I would really, really, really like to have known, all the same. Dammit, I wish she’d told me who!
But that’s Lizzie for you. She does have a strange outlook on life and her place within it. She does have some strange ideas too. For example, her idea to save the rain forests consists of arguing for the creation of fake semen stains made of plastic for positioning on a woman’s tummy or across her breasts - she argues that this would save so much tissue paper that you’d barely be able to walk a few yards without bumping into a tree! When she first laid out this idea, I asked her what men were to do with their actual semen and she fell into such a trance that it was a full half-hour before she came round. And when she did all that came from her was a delicious smile and a long sigh. I shivered at the thought of the amount of tissue paper that would be required to clean-up her brain at that moment!
Lizzie, you’ll not be surprised to learn, has had her fair share of nights where passion eclipsed prudence and pregnancy was a strong possibility. Another of her ideas was to take the fluoride out of the water supply and replace it with whatever chemical was the key one contained in the ‘morning after’ pill. I pointed out that this would mean that nobody at all would fall pregnant, but this just made her fall into another reverie and it was at least another half-hour before she rejoined the land of tables, chairs and all that physical, actual stuff. I didn’t ask where she’d been. She hates kids. She says they smell.
With all this focus on pregnancy it really is the worst letter I could have received from Lizzie. Her writing about pregnancy and her fears of it makes me think of pregnancy and my associations with it and my own thoughts of it. This is not a good thing - especially in my emotional state after spending the night with James. I’ve looked in the bins for condoms but I can’t see any. So did he use a condom? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that we were ‘at it’ pretty vigorously but there’s no smell of burnt rubber in the room. Isn’t that a tell-tale sign? Actually, now I come to think of it, I seem to remember the smoke alarm going off at one point! Luckily I was on top when the alarm went off and my jiggling breasts created enough of a draft to make it stop beeping. Why am I making light of this? This is not funny at all! Perhaps it’s because my body doesn’t ‘feel different’ in a way that feels like pregnancy. Without Kidman I feel emptier, not fuller. This sense of difference is more of self-loathing and loss than being pregnanto.
Pregnanto! Lord, I see what Lizzie means! The thought if it is quite repulsive! But it’s only repulsive at the thought of such a thing coming from that one night with James. Yes, that’s what disgusts me. The thought of a baby in itself is extraordinary. It’s a clean thought. Something untouched and portentous. A little spark of hope. A spark that can renew everything it comes into contact with. And isn’t that the reality of hope? Doesn’t all hope have to grow out of horror or hardship? Isn’t horror always the context of hope? If so, then I hope Lizzie’s right and oestrogen is airborne, then we all have a chance to ingest what can lead to new life, and every hopeless horror can be contaminated and spoiled by purity. Yes, even this hopeless horror of a life that I inhabit and sully with every day that I live it! Even the life of a recovering stalker like me can be made pristine again!
But maybe it doesn’t have to be a baby growing inside that can give this sense of rejuvenation, of reincarnation within the same life. Maybe you can find another seed to grow. But when you don’t have a seed, where do you find one? If oestrogen is airborne, what else might be there, carried in the wind?
After thinking this, I went outside and started walking, breathing in deeply with every forthright step. It was a lovely day and the air was like honey. Before I knew it, I was half-way to the neighbouring town, so I decided to just keep on going. Eventually I got to my car, with a sense of real achievement. So that was what else was in the air! The seed of perseverance. Crisp and invigorating. As I stood beside my car, something similar to hope was there inside me. Well, that was perhaps one way that a seed of hope could come to be planted: by complete bloody accident! So all I needed was to have a life that was just one accident after another and everything would be alright! How reassuring!
Being starved of human company – even the proximity to human beings – for so many days left me thinking that I would visit one of the town’s cafes, just to watch the world go by and feel normal and social and worldly again. Maybe it was my new-found sense of something like hope that gave me the courage and inclination. Anyway, whatever it was, what happened next was, I suppose with hindsight, an accident waiting to happen.
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10:49 Posted in Part Two: Getting Some Answers | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: haunted house, ghost story, horror story, astronaut, space, nicole kidman, journal