Bitter Battle Over Sweetness

The Bitter Battle Over Sweetness

There is a pot on the gas stove heating up tea to strong brew. A
process called stewing. A mug awaits. No, two mugs await. One, with
aged finger curled and ready to insert. The other, with a little drop
of milk in the bottom, prepared for its treacly fill. A piece of
crockery that was a shrine around which hands clung and lips reverently
approached. A cheap relic, caressed as if its dynasty were Ming. But it
waits and waits. As does the other mug, Old Hughie, empty inside and on
a quest. In the kitchen seizing the opportunity offered by a certain
feminine absence, to locate the crystal substance, to liberally pilfer
its sweet, destructive properties, the evidence of that all too obvious
in the old mug's empty grate. And his God knew he needed the sweetness,
for a sour creature he always was and was always. But there was never
so much bitterness as over the white granule. A war. A battle of wits.
A scary cat and mouse encounter, which had the nerves of the warring
parties strung as tightly as acute angina chests. Ailments, and there
were many; back, feet, head, were all traced to the state of the
nerves, the upset balance of the mind in and through this continuous
psychological conflict
"That skitter'll be the death of me I'm tellin' ye." she would say
bitterly, holding her breath and placing the palms of her hands on her
meaty chest.
Whilst he, with self pitying, heaven bound, knitted eyebrows, would say
fearfully and just out of audible range, " You're drivin' me to an
early grave missis."
White stained enamel stained with the bubbling brew's excess, shoved up
through the spout, spitting and sizzling on contact with the blue
flame, staining the stainless. Stains on stains. And stained on the
mind of the old fool, an unmoveable unsightly blemish, part and parcel
now of his whole mental weave. A blemish of fierce malignancy, a
threatening incendiary of feminine force. A frightening blot, small and
squat, heaving in perpetual temper, with a mind equally infiltrated by
ugly stains.
Standing stooped. The stoop of age. The stoop of stupidity. The stoop
of fear. This animal shrinkage to avoid detection. A vestige in vest of
the primitive cower. Sinking down near the sink with sunken hopes of
greeting the firm rounded sack and spooning the contents in heaps, into
the waiting brown liquid, until there rises a moistened peak, ready for
substantial mixing. Total immersion from above, fluidising the solid
grain. Matrimonial combinations in unsavoury combinations. The coming
together in sweet union. Drink ye all of it. Sup and slurp the last
reluctant drops. Employ all the power of lips and tongue to satisfy the
expectant senses. Erect a new and stronger memorial which will demand
more and more of the same and drive him on to continually uncover newer
hidden pleasures.
But other monuments of greater, or at least as great a power, stand
sentry at the frontiers of his thought and warn of the consequences of
trespass. And the lodger that he is knows to obey the mistress of the
house. This lodger must for his options are strictly limited and that
lodged firmly in the lodger's mind is the idea of subservience.
Permanently hunched shoulders are an open testimony to the humbling
process. Unaware he is of the names of ridicule that are attached to
him; King Tut and Slippy Tit, the one signifying the fact that he
thinks himself as a man of the highest calibre and the other, that he
slips about slug-like in slinking slippers, a contemptible crater in a
hostile house.
The object of hate he is, the object of disgust he is but also the
object of fun. The cruel fun as in the administration of strong
laxative in chocolate bar form which, in the absence of sugar, he takes
without hesitation to relieve the desire for sweetness. And so the
story is passed through the family as rapidly as the old mug's motions
through his system and uncontrollable hilarity prevails over and above
uncontrollable bowels. Almost any humiliation is acceptable to him to
avoid ejection with bag and baggage on to the cold streets of the city.
This was a sobering notion, even in a condition of acute inebriation.
It was a regular occurrence when the feminine patience snapped. Her
uncontrolled annoyance at his sheer presence was an inevitability. But
the ejection was particularly unwelcome when middle of the night bed
warmth, sheathed in body-hugging longjohn snugness, positioned foetally
with hands nestling in the nest of testicles, was unscrupulously
withdrawn.
With no warning a barrage of the unpleasant, an invasion of unsettling
and disturbing opposite sex sense data. Simultaneously, the brightness
of an unshaded light bulb, the all encompassing draught of wintry cold,
the harsh verbal scringings filtering the well waxed ear, added to the
overall sense of vulnerability. Gone, the anonymity offered by darkness
and the protection of the covers. Exposed!
The swinging light bulb and the swinging fist. The contorted face of
feminine anger. The mouth of flexibility mouthing the inflexible
message. A kaleidoscope of images all generated by the one meaning.
OUT!! Out of bed. Out of room. Out of house. Out of her life. The
little fat finger, pointing the way out was unwavering. No words, no
appeal to old man frailty of the sort, or family loyalty. No old self
pitying look or begging posture, no bended knee or praying plea could
shake her resolve. Not even one of the massed ranks of holy relics on
the bedside table constituted a power of assistance. They would all be
swept into a plastic supermarket bag and, like him, with him, be
homeless.
Humiliation after humiliation. What was sugar? A symbol. " Do not think
for one minute that this is your sweet home?" Her sweet home without
question and she was proud of it. But she hated it as much as she was
proud of it, for she realized that this was the sum total of her
significance. Queen of 40 Wolsey Street but what was that when it came
down to it? It was bitterness at all of its real insignificance. To
control it all in every aspect, to have each inhabitant know their
limits; "Don't walk on that just polished floor! Don't touch that just
dusted furniture!"
Her heavy sighs and tut tuts, establishing an atmosphere of
disapproval, seemed necessary for sanity but drove every one else mad
and eventually her as well.
But old Hughie was a mug. The mug of mugs. He continued to search
knowing that if he found, he would be found out. And he would find
himself out, out of a place to stay. But what was tea without
sugar?
Why does the little fat niece take him in at all? Time and time again
she throws him out and takes him back in. Why does she permit at all
his piss, beer smell over her glassy, red tiled threshold?
"Poor old man. I can't see him alone and suffering." she utters to a
silent hubby. " He promises he will be a good boy." It feels good to do
a good turn, to help a distressed relative.
But in that old Victorian house with four long flights of stairs, where
does she put the aching elderly gent? He knows where to go, and he goes
hunched and resigned like a fearing dog to his kennel. Right to the top
to the small attic, whose rusty skylight overlooks the alley and the
backs of another row of tall Victorian terraces. As far out of view as
possible without putting him on the roof. And he won't often venture
far for he knows the gasping ordeal of the return journey.
One flight, turn. Rest on the landing. Up the second flight, turn.
Grasp the banister. Stop. Take a deep breath. Look up. Onward. The
third landing. Blood rushing, light headed, swaying, surroundings
spinning. Stop. Lean over the banister, look down through the narrow
ballustradial gap to distant step one.
He was once found there by the niece's youngest son (me) who was
terribly affected by the all too real surreal incident. On the third
floor landing Hughie lay unconscious on his back clutching in his hand
a raw egg, the yellow oozing through his outstretched fingers. Late at
night with his little mistress not at home, drunken to virtual
unconsciousness and slightly peckish, he shuffled his remaining
conscious frame into the kitchen. An egg was plucked from a carton in
the larder and held in one quivering old hand, while with the other he
filled a pot with water and placed it on the stove. Swaying back and
forth he deposited the egg in the water on one of his forward swoons.
It lay there in undisturbed water while the drink enfeebled mind, stout
clouded with a swirling cocktail of unconnected, discrete notions,
searched for the implements of egg eating. Barely thirty seconds had
elapsed in real time - the full 3 minutes according to stupor time-
when he swung around and spooned out the uncooked ovum. And with a
defiant republican song hummed with unpleasant monotony - a mere
reverberation from the more comprehensible original sung in Mosey
Hunter's Bar - he headed for the stairs.
On the third landing, having already lost the spoon, egg cup and
saucer, a moment of massive light-headedness, combined with a loss of
visual clarity and a pounding from within his concave chest, sent him
hurtling forward, mouth agape, on to knobbly knees. Hummed republican
defiance subsided and was replaced by throaty growls of agony.
Partially controlled dentures clicked as they were forced outside the
moist, livery lips by the sudden thumping collision. With watering eyes
staring closer and closer at the vortical carpet patterns, the
painfully precarious knee pose converted into a slow, agonising
sidewards roll. But floating on the surface of the drink flooded mind
was the egg and its well being. Instructions to hold it aloft, safe
from earthly impact, (the desire for food taking precedence over all
other self-preserving instincts) were being passed from mind along the
numbed nervous system to those distant digital outposts, resulting in
an excruciatingly uncushioned collapse onto the small of the back. With
a rush of bad air sent up from his deepest innards, teeth were
jettisoned heavenward, and then, due to the mysterious force of
gravity, returned and deposited themselves forcefully and painfully
with a couple of clicks on the bridge of the old mug's nose. And with
pain the controlling mode of being, pain from all sources, and with
hand clutching the squashed egg with rigor mortis tightness, he
temporarily absented the immediate realm. However, to the young boy
looking down from the landing above, he looked as dead as a dodo.
And this flattened being was the man who proudly boasted of his manly
history in the IRA. "The original ones" he would announce in proud
tones, "not the cowardly shite they have these days." A bitter man he
was, for every cause he backed, every opinion he assented to, was the
wrong one. In one way or another he desired sweetness but he was denied
and broken by the puffing little pigeon that was his niece who, that
night, caught him shovelling the sugar, a circumstance of monumental
tension, of discrete comic moments and ultimate tragedy.
The treacly brew in the precious mug with all its invisible sweetness
was snatched from his grasp and held tantalisingly with feminine fat
finger firmness. Vacant old hands moved to pleading but the cause was
yet again ineffectual. No mercy here, no last minute reprieve. The
punishment would come. The tea, the woman, the turning wrist and the
forward thrust with the precursory " If you bloody well want sugared
tea I'll give you bloody sugared tea," before the action.
And so it was. The aftermath. Standing, stupid, spluttering, licking
leaves, liquidic leer under flattened, shiny thatch, Slippy Tit resumed
his station, beaten and more bitter.

The End