Fundamental Matter

CW: contains allusions to child abuse and death.

Maris is a beautiful woman if you like them ice cold. Her blonde hair is styled in an immaculate chignon and she has such a little waist. Waspish, one might say. Tonight she is at a party hosted by a neighbour, tinkling and twinkling with her dry martini in one hand and a Sobranie cigarette in the other. But, despite her supremacy amongst the shackled wives, she is bored. There are no conquests to be made in this vanilla landscape. Who knew that plain women could be so Valkyrie-like in the protection of their household gods? It occurs to her, as she sways her hips to the music, that to be single and glorious is a lonely aspect. She looks under false lashes, curls her lips into seductive motifs and brushes her hips against other hips without acknowledgment or apology.

But for all this subtle trouble, what has never occurred to Maris, so cocooned in her comfortable ego, is that she is a woman a man might like to fuck, and that is all.

She makes her excuses at 11.30. There is nothing here for her. She lives two doors down, but no gallant offers to walk her home. Even she must concede that those days are gone. She had not noticed the falling snow when she was indoors, but now she pauses and lifts her face to it, trying to capture something that others feel. To her, it smells of wet concrete and is ruinous to her shoes. She slips them off and walks home in stockinged feet, swinging them like a Champagne Charlotte in some great, Gatsby-esque world of her own device.

Christmas Eve, don’t you know, and not a soul to share it with.

At home she lies on the settee and flicks on the TV. She has taken the kirby grips from her chignon and lets her hair fall loose. She drinks cider straight from the can because there is no one watching now - lets rip a loud belch because that little tiny waist does not accommodate food beyond a canapé, and the void gets filled by gas. She likes the vulgarity of it, but less so when the doorbell rings at one minute to midnight. She plumps her hair, applies a fresh slick of lipstick to her recently enhanced lips and opens the door, sashaying like a pro.

An errant husband, no doubt.

The man at the door was very young, no more than twenty-one or two.

‘Hello mother,’ he says.

He escorts himself inside and then ushers her to her own front room. The place is a dump, smells like bad flesh, just as he recalls. There are cans and cigarette buts littering every surface. Cobwebs, brown in the dust, festoon the high walls, but the spiders know better. They might play when Maris is away but now they hide. There is an atom in every creature that knows just the sort of creature Maris is.

‘I don’t have a son,’ she says, sitting like Lady Di now, knees together, legs 40 degrees to the right. ‘Or a daughter, for that matter.’

One word from him and she’d open those legs wide, that much he knows.

She fishes in her bag and finds the black Russian cigarettes she uses to impress. Forget the countless roll-ups in the ashtrays and on the floor with their white Rizla wrapping and their tobacco leaves swept from a Chinese factory floor. She looks at him intently through the smoke.

‘You do look familiar,’ she concedes. It was his mouth, she thought, much like hers before she got them plumped like a lanternfish. He had a cupid’s bow and a resting, sardonic downturn at the edges. Too thin for a woman, but quite right on him. There is something lascivious about her middle-aged gaze.

He leans forward in the chair opposite hers. ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘that the human soul has a weight?’

‘Oh, God,’ she drawls. ‘A philosopher.’ She tries to get up, but her feet are pinned to the sticky shag pile. He is undeterred.

‘It was posited, back in 1907, that a human soul weighs 21 grams, or 5 level teaspoons of sugar. Of course, that’s been discredited now.’

He leaves a silence which, after a fraction longer than the usual four seconds, Maris feels compelled to fill.

‘Who are you and why are you here?’

‘I am your son. You called me Johnny.’

A contemptuous sound comes from her closed mouth.

‘Have you ever heard of the fundamental field?’ he asks.

Again, that noise from her mouth, from her throat.

‘Oh, I forgot,’ he says. ‘You are not the curious type, are your Maris.’

‘I am curious about how to get you out of my fucking house,’ she says.

‘You invited me,’ he says, sitting with his legs splayed and his hands clasped between them, David Frost interviewing Nixon.

‘I did not,’ she asserts. ‘I’ve never seen you before.’

‘Oh, that’s funny, Maris. That’s really funny.’

‘Leave,’ she says, still unable to rise.

‘Oh, Maris, Maris. I’m not leaving until you die.’

‘The fuck?’

‘Tut tut, Maris. Such a potty-mouth.’

He stands up and looks out the window, at the snow. ‘Christmas Eve,’ he says quietly. And then he quickly returns to the recently vacated chair and says, ‘You have more chance of Father Christmas coming down that chimney than me leaving before you die.’

She is finding her level now. The boy doesn’t seem to be the killing type. She even risks a laugh and leans back on the settee. ‘I am only in my mid-thirties,’ she says, ‘and as you can see ….’ She flourishes a hand from top to bottom. Voila!

He ignores the lie. In her conjuring, Maris has got confused. She was thirty-five when her life came crashing down, but here she is forty-five at least.

‘Fundamental matter,’ he resumed, ‘is the theory that no part of our body dies. That if we go up in smoke we are particles in the air, and if we go down in the ground, we bleed into the soil. Our ashes are scattered to the wind, our bones atomised and we are absorbed into a greater whole: that these composite particles eventually come to make up other people, or animals, plants, desert sand, whatever you like. In the waiting time, all these little tiny pieces of us linger in the fundamental field until they are called again.'

‘And what is your point?’ She asks, rolling a cigarette now. He is not worth a Sobranie now.

‘It means that in every saint there is a sinner and in every sinner there is a saint.’

‘Dear God,’ she murmurs. ‘An idiot is in my house.’

He leans back and crosses his arms, staring at her.

‘But I don’t want a single atom of you to join that parade, Maris.’

‘I’ll call the police,’ she says, searching for a phone she doesn’t possess.

‘Good luck with that, mother.’

‘Actually,’ she says, feeling hopeful now, ‘I think you’re just genuinely confused.’ She settles into the theme. ‘You see, I don’t have any children, and even if had casually misplaced one, he couldn’t possibly be as old as you. Well, perhaps at a stretch.’

‘The last time you saw me I was seven,’ he says. ‘I am a figment of your imagination. I am what you think I must look like, although in reality I am much older than this now. It is very typical of you to conjure a man in his prime.’ He mirrors her previous hand actions from top to bottom, with a flourish. ‘And you had a daughter, my sister. You called her Eliza and she was five.'

‘And why doesn’t she join you?’ Maris asks, feeling that familiar contempt bestowing power upon her.

‘Why indeed,’ he says, moving again to the window, cracking the flaked window open and smelling the blessed purity of it.

*****

There is a pokey waiting room adjacent to the hospital block of the prison. Robert Coles, (nee Johnny Warden) stands in silence before a window that doesn’t open. Between the window and a perimeter wall ten feet or so distant, a thick layer of snow is settling. It is Christmas Eve and he thinks of his grandchildren, who will be at home with Nell and the kids, preparing the feast for tomorrow. He takes a deep breath and enumerates all of those very countable blessings. He tries not to think of Eliza, but she comes unbidden. What he would give to bring her back again, and all the others.

In a single ward, just yards from his position, an elderly woman lies dying in a state of agony. She is late-seventies and she has the face of a boxer chewing a wasp. She has always had this face despite all of her delusions.

There are two nurses in the room. One is young and jejune and it remains to be seen whether these grim prison walls will suit her. She must make her friends here with care, and learn the gallows humour that is so necessary for her survival. The other is much older and although her face bears witness to the years, there is a melancholy sort of kindness about her. And so the young nurse, who goes by the curious name of Moth, asks why the older nurse, who goes by the name of Annie, is not administering the morphine.

‘God forgive me,' she says, 'but I cannot bring myself to ease this woman’s suffering. There are some who are so far beyond the pale, so far away from forgiveness, that to show her mercy now would make God weep and the Devil laugh.'

The dying woman is muttering again. Dear God, an idiot is in my house …

‘Who is she talking to, do you think?’ Moth asks.

‘My opinion? She’s talking to her son, the only survivor, who is sitting next door on Christmas Eve willing her to die. He told me his theory about fundamental matter earlier …’

The young nurse looks confused and Annie closes her eyes. ‘No matter,’ she says, ‘fundamental or not.’

‘Who is she really?’ Moth asks. ‘I have, you know, googled …’

Annie made to speak, perhaps rashly, and then brought herself to heel. ‘We are bound by the Official Secrets Act, Moth. But that dies with her. Even so, it is Christmas Eve and I believe it is snowing. You have a baby at home, Christmas with your parents, your brothers and sisters, to look forward to. If she died this minute, I would still not tell you until you return from your break.’

Moth is waiting for more and Annie gives an inch.

‘Her name was changed when she got here, and she was accommodated away from the others, for her own protection. She was always perfectly sane and yet completely deluded at the same time. She thought she was a blonde bombshell, although she was never that even in her youth. She was more like Myra Hindley in all respects.'

She straightens her uniform, looks down and looks up before looking at Moth.

'You will trust me when I tell you that you don’t want this woman polluting the season.’

‘Who’s Myra Hindley?’ Moth asks.

‘Never mind, dear. I forget how young you are, but hear me. I am not giving this bitch morphine and that’s that.’

The old woman begins talking again. You see, I don’t have any children …

She is trying to rise, but her feet cannot lift from the bed.

Ten minutes pass, and the woman has gone to whomever or whatever made her, screaming at the end. Annie involuntarily crosses herself, a muscle memory from her youth. She ushers Moth out and tells her to go home and have a happy Christmas. She knocks on the door of the waiting room, where Robert Coles is looking out the window at the snow. He had fallen asleep at some point, upright in the padded bench that rests against a greasy wall, thinking of fundamental matter and dreaming of a woman with blonde hair who was his mother, but looked nothing like his mother as his memory recalled her.

'Time of death, nine minutes past midnight,' she says. ‘It is Christmas Day, Robert,’ she says. ‘She’ll have to be taken to the city morgue over the holidays. Put in the deep freeze until they get around to her.’

He puts his head in his hands. ‘Just so long as she’s on the rocks, Annie.’

‘And then what?’

‘We have dug a twenty foot hole lined with heavy duty tarp. The coffin would give a brick shit house a run for its money. The ground is unconsecrated but perfectly legal.’ He is silent for a moment, until he says, ‘There is no part of that woman that will escape in the air we breathe.'

‘Will you tell your family she’s gone?’ Annie asks, and Robert looks at her and shakes his head.

‘I have never told them she existed,’ he says. ‘That’s how it must be, then as now.’

They walk out together. The prison smell is sharp in the virgin snow, much more so than in the prison itself. The car park is lit by dim lamps, some busted and others burning too bright. They had only met on this day, fleeting, passing souls whose lives had touched in one rare moment of accord.

‘God bless you, Robert,’ she says, ‘and your fundamental matter.’

‘I’m still not convinced by God,’ he says. ‘Father Christmas is a more bankable bet for new socks and a bottle of single malt, wouldn’t you say?’

He left her at her car, holding his hand in the air, a reverse wave, as he went towards his own.

*****

The body of Maris is roughly manhandled into a body bag. They know who she is, right enough, who she was, and they might not have been able to talk about her down the pub, not until now, but they can still treat her corpse with odium. In the tussle, her skin cells fly like unseen snow and the last of her gasping breaths still mingle in the stale, sickroom air.