Gorgon Supper

By Jack Barker-Clark.

Not long after the dinner, I am hospitalised, appendicitis, the doctors doing their magic while I lie in cardigans, a bed of white linens, grape-eating and offensively incited. That’s all. I am not well liked. In truth I am abhorred. For my dusty neighbours I writhe too poetically, catch their ire. Their big-band coughs and rose-gold colostomy bags. All afternoon I move like a snake. But at night I perch in my skin.

It is my destiny to dream of courtyards. Fate or fever. For days I peer down at dusky cobbles, sombre undying blue. I have the best aerial views from my rental turret, all night taking in the lavender mountains that spangle the bedheads, the drips. One evening I struggle with my medicines. A nurse says, Swallow it. It might have been my father, that tone. At home in the valley. If it was born in your mouth it can go down your throat. Except we never call him father. And never once has he raised his voice.

Every hour I hear footsteps in the leaves, the buffed and strip-lit corridors. A nurse, my parents, my sister, myself. They will arrive after work, after they’ve pressed all their grapes. For they live on a farm, in the valley where I was born. A farm not a vineyard. A little kingdom with no cattle. Our soils are rich but our trees are diseased. There is an incredible continuous wind, thick ropes of turbulence. We boat our sentences over it. In spring we spot spoonbills, lone ramblers flattening fescue grass on their way to the woods. Nothing happens. Nobody harms us. We have our jigsaws and our spaghetti and our Ancient Greek.

At one-fifteen I see doctors, preening other patients’ diagrams, bar graphs showing periodicity, long lines with unsettling end behaviours. Please stand and jump, they say, but I cannot, then you have appendicitis. And I am wheeled away, horizontally: theatre, spotlights, a little planetarium, nightfall. Then nothing. Then blood, so slick. Around the wound a decorative gore, bright garnish, so much of it, which strikes me as anachronistic, when I am revived, as if from smelling salts in some long-ago century.

For a little while I cease to exist. Do my time in the special void. As soon as I am conscious again, I count the red grapes that accumulate at my bedside. Grapes or raisins. Dried fruits that look as though they’ve been plucked from a riverside in Hades. For days I press the buzzer, a religious zeal. Tell my tales. On the surface I am regal, pompous, unbreakable. And beneath I choke with fear. Dutifully, I suppress. I do my whimpering where it belongs, where it matters. I do my whimpering in the blood.

Please recall your evening, your terrible sensations. I had been gulping with abandon at a restaurant in the valley. Rice fusion, a long stained teak floor. I swam to the table, my prehistoric fingers, my adoring parents. Whisked beetroot risotto to paste. I was so tranquil then. A man on the table opposite beckoned the waiter but it is not our family’s style to get involved. He said, The spoons are too bevelled. He said, The spoons are bevelled in a way that offends. I carried on torquing my dinner until the room staggered, tipped. I saw scales or armour. Dragnets or ceiling tiles.

I am a person cursed to remember tears. Alive to every drop. I have the feeling my parents were in agony, at war with the council. There is planning permission for a telecommunications mast outside their home and it wounds them. But I didn’t want to talk about application 17/2335212482v3 for a phase 8 monopole, wraparound cabinets and associated ancillary works – or about discounted Georgian-style doors with sunburst lead inlays and crenelated glass. I wanted only to talk about me. I brought up my recent achievement, the medal I’d invented, before the lights went out and I awoke here, hungry and prawn-shaped, and wobbling in the darkness.

For days I await my dishonourable discharge, as if from Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, rather than the local infirmary. My chest is swampy, half-full, clattering, in recovery from life rather than from appendicitis, something I explain to the tired nurses in the evening-time, over and over, chronicling myself half-sincerely as the sun sets like blood on the endless carpark. Had I noticed my appendix was inflamed in the restaurant? No, though I was unusually stirred. Dining will do that to you. To dine is to invite nostalgia. To dine is to welcome catastrophe.

But here’s the truth: there is a problem with my accent. Too thin, too ratified. Once, long ago, my emphasis was in decline. I’d been swallowing flat vowels in the North of England but I regurgitate them now. A fraud, I’ve clawed my way up disgracefully into new cadences, pretending never to have kicked a ball or owned a season ticket or loved a grandad who signed his name with an X. I bore strangers with tales of my imaginary mother, her triumphs. On Mondays she is a fortune teller, a priest, and later in the week an addict, virtuoso, a lumberjack, a ghost, has died of consumption. She walks hauntingly, both as though she has already passed over and as though she is still lithe and sprightly, an acrobat of unprecedented agility, a star. I am struggling to remember whom I’ve lied to, whose affection I’ve concocted myself out of. Each scenario, the same basic hue. What a comfort to me, this thrilling consistency.

After the surgery, I await cured meats, prime top and silverside ham. Instead, strangers bring grey sandwiches from the canteen, wholesomely, with a lack of pretension, the stuff I have been struggling against my whole life, no grants or fieldwork to excuse it, a sinking and pendulous pretension, a pendant I feel duty-bound to wear. I swallow. The sandwiches and these strangers. Ingest their modesty as though it is an elixir that will save me. Protect me from harm, in the minutes before the arrival of my mother and father.

Another genteelism. For I call them Mum and Dad. Now bounding through light countryside, now piercing that bloodstained sunset. They will stop on their way to me to take photographs. Climb down from their carriage and wind up the camera, the horses silhouetted against cindered clouds. Except it is the turn of the millennium and they will in fact be on the bus, the 33a from down in the valley, the one whose driver I grew up with and calls everyone son, though he is in most cases their junior, and who takes puffs of his e-cig in autumnal laybys while passengers gawp longingly at the vaulted wall of the moors.

Now the plasterboard sheds its pastel colours, its lavenders, lilacs, peaches, and I am free to sob. This I do into a pillow, to save my neighbours’ embarrassment, the embarrassment, over and over, of rooming next to me. And I explain to the nurses, as they wipe my brow and refuse to sketch me, that I am famous, in a way, the recipient of a grant, unmerited, for my work in genome mapping, untrue, every fragment. Describe to us your kingdom, they say. I say, Some kingdoms need moats.

I speak like that sometimes, cryptically, as though it betters me, this slipperiness. I’ve been slippery for years. Since at least the time I painted. I worked mainly in oils and gouache and could be found in my studio, adding life and texture to dried grapes. The wholesome ninety-nine-percent raisins with traces of cotton seed oil you see in the supermarkets. I had an aptitude for turbulence, raged capaciously on the canvas against the soul I was at the time embarrassed to conceive of. But broadsides in oil-based paints and gouache are not always successful. And even I could not save a raisin born primarily of rage. Had my father banned me from painting, its study? No, he’d paid my tuition fees.

Tell us of your father. My father is rich, reflective, dazzling, or not. His lifeless hair is stiffly oiled, his hyper-intelligent mouth sits preserved for all eternity on his face. The funds are forthcoming, always wired from Madrid, or Helsinki, his office. Clothes allowance, expenditures, too. For he is a count, a viceroy. Keeps a dahlia garden in a courtyard. Not that any of that is true. He is bouncer, a heavyweight. He manufactures gloves. Or engines. Or crayons. I go to the past to see him. At night now the nurses wrestle jackals, the ungrateful wounded, while I creak musically in my bed.

Please recall your evening, your terrible sensations. I had been assailing my family, my sister, her husband, okay? With long unsightly prehistoric fingers I assaulted their faces and shoulders, their joyfulness, élan. There were mirrors lining every wall. The restaurant a desert and I its pale mirage. My brother-in-law, handsome, precise, pre-Raphaelite, took my hand. Are you doing okay, Jim? I whisked my risotto, purple lagoon. What can I say? Times are tough, more sad than uproarious. About my being perceived as aloof I am in a way appreciative. I’ll never have to wonder whether intense friendships are enough to hold against loneliness, against incongruity, against the self. Oh consider my training. My family, their reticence. I am an expert. The son of two humans only truly alive when boiling their denim.

For their part my parents are stately, naïve. I test their love of me continuously. I give them the tools to end me and smirk when they cannot hold them at the handles. Come off it, son, we love you, they say. Or Tally-ho. Or Bugger off. Or My darling, my sweetheart, my soldier. For generations my entire family has manufactured something – but what is it? Bombs? Raisins? No added sugar, fibre-rich, ready to eat raisins. For generations we have dined on little else. We do not bake them, we do not chop them, we do not sauté them with spinach. We swallow fourteen grams before bedtime and say our prayers.

Again and again I am not quite exposed. I am nodded at, humoured, this time over the fruit that rots at my bedside table, a hairy still life. Will my parents wish to see my medal? I can sketch it happily – but I no longer remember what it is for. Am I King of Saturn or Employee of the Month? I have brokered a treaty, somewhere remote, the distant past, birches, alder, spruce, a little fortress, a ring of stones. Am I suitably well hidden in these sheets? My pyjamas are long. And I so dread my parents’ arrival, my spectacular excoriation.

As it happens my writhing soothes me. One night I writhe up to the roof, hover above the room, another courtyard. There are boxes, splinters, thick gluey cliché mist. Am I Dracula? I move his earth, his pillows. I have to invent the countryside, the terrain, for I have never been anywhere beyond West Yorkshire, these valleys. Have you ordered the maps and euros, printed the itineraries? my parents continuously say. For I have spent decades describing little villas outside Marsaskala and never taking myself there. Once, eventually, I climb a hill. At the summit I say The frame rate is too low. I am appalling.

And wounded. And delicate, too. A cake of ice. Once I’d abandoned my painting, I moved my attention to the project of myself. Refining my intonation, smoothing out wrinkles. Because all artists are outsiders, I thought my evaporation must have stung – must have stung someone. But there was silence. Lake water. In December I bought a tiger snake and housed it in its own expensive kingdom. By January it had jumped out of its tank and strangled me in my sleep. Have I survived that? I ask the nurses. But half-heartedly. They are so busy. The ward is always full. Of sycophants and plastic bottles. A patient has started feeding sparkling water to the plants. It is me.

Six-forty. Soon my parents will be here, my sister, oh Christ. Treading water around my bed. My pleasant family, who attend the theatre but always watch the wrong plays, who’ve never once enquired why a term or two at art college has transformed their working class son’s every chirp, every twang, and chipped away forever at his embarrassing love of darts – has renovated their boy into a kind of baffling duke, who reads Keats and Dante but whose grandad, a coal miner, drinks watter and digs oils and has worn the same flat cap since 1976. They are here.

They are here. Here they come. Bringing in the golden leaves, while I recover, reluctantly, from my life and from appendicitis, and I wonder whether they have been saving up all their guile these decades, have brought the tools finally to puncture me. But they are only overflowing with empathy, my family who never warped or suffocated or pummelled me, and who played dominos in the front room of our terrace and loved me, unreservedly, their inexplicable son.

They are here. Here they are, crossing the tiles. Lying flat, I have still managed to put my armour on, my shield, am drawing my sword as they approach. I pull at my muscles. Lift myself out of the centuries. That gathered dread. A shape, a shadow, icy, athletic, unruffled, a pair of trainers glowing in UV light. Still I wonder now, over the wheezing of nobler patients on the ward, while the sun comes down on each of my affectations and the nurses explain to me that, no, life is not on trial for immorality, that it is only me, I wonder, just then, as my mother puts her lips to my forehead, in what new foul uncertified way I will go about repaying them next.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Barker-Clark is a writer from a valley in West Yorkshire. His fiction has or will shortly appear in The Babel Tower Notice Board, Diagram, Hobart, Litro, Short Fiction, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2021 Fish Publishing Flash Fiction Prize. Twitter: @jackbarkerclark