It Was Never My Idea To Go To That Party

It was never my idea to go that party, let me make that clear from the start. It was never my idea to attend the National Society of of Turkey Basting Swingers Competition Party, but Donna was a strong woman and she could always make me think of things as ‘a good idea’ and somehow she did it with this. Even with a party of that title I can honestly say that it seemed like a good idea, at the time.

It was after six glorious years together that we had decided to have a baby. We were certain that we didn’t want to adopt, Donna spoke with a desperate clinging of her longing to be pregnant, and I, with my fear of all things sickly and my recurring back problem was more than happy to go without the whole ‘miracle’. We lived in my house in the surburbs of a small city and had a decent income, many good friends and it just seemed like the logical next step.

Donna. Oh, Donna! That beautiful, sexy witch! Why did I let her rule me so? I had always been at her absolute mercy without either of us really knowing it. I wonder now, if I had ever even been myself the whole time we were together, but more just the person I wanted to be for Donna without a single regard for myself. I had no soul to feed or life to lead, I had only Donna.

Donna was freelance journalist and a very good one at that, she was always being invited to press launch parties and this is how I would meet most of our friends too. I was just serious old scientist Maggie; but she would dress me up, show me off, introduce me to the people who were actually interested in the kind of science I was working in, and I would watch her dazzle them with her headlines.

One morning I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking my tea, eating my toast, listening to the breakfast show radio as I always did before leaving for the lab. It must have been the heart of winter for I had the gas fire on all bars and it was still dark outside. I remember this morning clearly, for this was the morning that Donna put to me the idea. She appeared at the foot of the stairs; bed-hair, silk robe barely covering her perfect, naked skin and she had that look on her face. The one that made her special and that also made her dangerous.
“Maggie. Darling Maggie!” she was excited and she came pawing at me, kneeling by my side. “After the opening party at Trams last night, I went on to Hippos” she was now stroking my hair, curling it around her fingers, “and sweetie. I got talking to these people who told me about this sort of party that, well...”

And so there it was. There was the moment when Donna told me about the party and talked me into thinking it was good idea. The party I’m talking about is of course the National Society of of Turkey Basting Swingers Competition Party. It works basically like this:

There are twenty parties that happen on the same night nationwide. In each party there are five lesbian couples who are all wanting to have a baby through artificial insemination and there are five men who are willing to donate their sperm. There are five turkey basters that the men fill up while watching the couples have sex and then all the turkey basters are put into a large dish, much like car keys at a swingers’ party, and they are shaken around, mixed up by an officiator of the NSTBSCP.
Each couple takes away one of the basters and inserts it into the woman who is going to get pregnant. Nobody knows who the father is, and then when the babies are born each party has to come to a decision by committee as to who they think each father of each baby is, fill it in like an orienteering card, and send the completed card back to the HQ of NSTBSCP. The NSTBSCP run DNA tests and then the first party who has sent back their card and correctly identified each baby with each father wins the money.
Did I forget to mention it costs each couple and each man £2000 to enter so with five couples, five men in each party and twenty parties the prize money is a delicious £400,000 which means a nice £40,000 for each couple and man of the winning party.


Were we poor? I didn’t think so, but then I didn’t know about the debts. From what I saw, we didn’t even particularly need £40,000 but I allowed that seed of greed to settle within me, planted by the evil goddess, Donna and nurtured by me and my fancy.
“At the end of the day, Donna” I said “I suppose we can just look at it as a fun way of getting pregnant. I mean, we get to go to a sex party AND get pregnant. The chance of winning £40,000 is slim, but a possibility. But, darling, we have to just see that as a bonus in the unlikely event that it happens.”
She smiled a wicked smile.
“Oh dear, sweet Maggie. Why don’t you ever realise who you are?” she kissed me all over as she told me of the dangerous part of the plan.

The science I worked in, was with DNA. I was working on a project at that time that examined the DNA of living things that had now died. But that’s not to say that the specifics of my work were not mutually exclusive to all other parts of DNA, or that I did not have access to the sorts of things you would need to perform a DNA paternity test, for instance.

Oh, Donna! Ghastly, dazzling Donna! With her ways and her wiles! Her soft lips that I so lusted for and licked up the very poison which oozed from them. I agreed to it; to the party, to the plan, to the whole wretched affair. She signed us up, we had to be interviewed and approved and we were charming and sparkling, and naturally, we passed. We maintained this delightful atmosphere about us as we pulled up into the driveway of the private country estate house that the party was being held in. Donna held my hand as we walked through the rose garden around to the front of the house. From inside, I could faintly hear the sound of a violin. I remember looking at Donna in the moonlight and being quite unable to speak for her beauty had me so spellbound. Stars flickered in the clear, country sky. It had been so long since I had seen these stars. I was back at college all over again; breaking into the observatory at night with my friends, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes under the willow tree and Faye Coulson asking me to come and look at the moon with her.

I can barely think about those times now, it makes me so sad because I can truly say that that was me back then, that was who I was. And yet the years that followed after college, when I met Donna, I simply lost that. Donna was the interesting one, she was the one who did the things worth future reverie, I just watched her. I complemented her but she was magic on her own. She was a willow tree in the good times all the time. She was remarkable and thoroughly overwhelming and there just wasn’t room for the both of us.
“Look a shooting star!” Donna, smiling, pointing upwards, "Make a wish!" But I just carried on looking at her thinking how I had nothing I would wish for.
Oh, shooting star! If only I could see you now. I would take that wish. I would take it now and wish myself never to have met Donna Craven!

Everyone in our party got pregnant, everyone in our party took very little pursuading to agree to the plan to win the money. All the babies were born, I performed the swabs on the men and the babies. Our baby, a beautiful girl we called Sadie, was the daughter of Benny, a man who left watching us to go and watch a foursome down the corridor. Rubia and Liz had a baby boy they called Zeek, he was the son of Marlon, a maths lecturer who had watched us and who had been my favourite of all the potential fathers. We filled in our card and sent it off to HQ and won the money. It was about eight months after that that it all started to unravel.

Liz came home from work early one day after her office was closed due to a fire in the neighbouring cafe at lunchtime and she found Rubia and Donna naked on the living room floor. I got the phonecall from Liz while I was in the park with Sadie, feeding the ducks. I sat there with my mobile against my ear, looking at Sadie and listening to the ducks mocking me. Rubia and Donna had been having an affair ever since the night they met in Hippos. Donna was in debt of more than £50,000 and Rubia was more than willing to pool her money with Donna to pay of the debts and then she and Donna and the two babies could run away together to Brazil where Rubia was from and desperately homesick for but Liz had always thrown out the idea of moving to San Paulo where as Donna was up for getting as far away from her past life ie. before me, as possible. What she did to gain those debts and to need to run away from her former life I do not even want to know, but I bet it is even worse than my darkest imaginings.

When I heard all the sorry details of their plan, I came back to myself. I found the person I truly was before I turned into the pleasure of Donna and I made plans for custody of Sadie.
“What are you going to do?” Donna snarled “how can you tell them we had a plan involving the money when the only sure way to get that money was to use you? You’d get years for that sort of fraud, and you’d lose your whole career!”

I took no notice of her and filed ahead. Sadie was the most important thing to me now, much more important than Donna or the lab. But oh! Donna! That evil wench! She had been right! Rubia had a cousin who was an excellent barrister who specialised in fraud cases. In the custody battle that I waged, Donna of course, hired Luis and I lost my baby. Donna was the biological mother of Sadie, she had carried her for nine months, and though we had lived together, we were not married and there was nothing the court could do to give me- a fraudster, the custody of a baby who technically I had nothing to do with. Donna was her mother, and Donna denied all knowledge of the paternity testing I had performed on all the babies. Everybody else in our party denied that they knew anything about the paternity tests too, as they wanted to keep the money they had mostly already spent.

“She must have pulled hair out of our babies when we weren’t looking!” Candice shrieked in the witness box. How she had the brass to look me in the eye as she said these things I can never comprehend.

“Is it possible she took DNA from our babies through collecting old soiled nappies from the bin outside our houses? The woman is SICK!” was the contribution from Jade.

“She tried to kiss me once, but I realise now that she was actually taking a mouth swab from me!” -Marlon, who I had always liked the best from our party.

And Donna, in that witness box, Donna put on quite a show. She sobbed quietly, saying through the gulps and the tears how she was unable to understand how she thought she had known me so well when really I was just a liar and had she ever really known me at all?

Devil take that woman! For here I am, in prison! Nine years before I will even be able to begin my search for Donna and more importantly for my Sadie. Every hour of every day I weep. I weep more than that willow tree which, if I stretch on the very tips of my toes, I can see through the bars of my window. In a final sick twist of fate it is such that my prison cell happens to ever so cruelly overlook my old college and, in the far distance, the observatory holding within it the brutal memories of when I was last truly myself . I sit here and watch it like a distant star; the light from which it burns is from so very long ago and has taken so long to reach me. The star; from which the light has traveled all these years to me is, quite possibly, already dead.



Diane

I stumbled across this translation of a Rilke poem and couldn't believe how much it reads like Special Agent Dale Cooper of Twin Peaks doing a dictaphone entry to Diane. I think it's a pretty unaccredited translation and more like some bloke just doing it in his room as opposed to a widely published one but I much prefer it.

Remember that scene where Coop's been shot and he's on the floor talking to the voice-activated dicta about all the things he would like to do with his life and how he feels about being shot? Keep that scene in mind then read this poem!

LAMENT by Rainer Maria Rilke translated from German by Cliff Crego

O How everything is so far away
and so long ago departed.
I believe that the star from which
I receive such glittering light
has been dead for thousands of years.
I believe that something
frightening was said
in the boat which just passed by.In a house, a clock
has marked the hour . . .
In which house? . . .
I would like to leave my heart behind
and step out under the immense sky.
I would like to pray.
That one of all these stars
must certainly still exist.I think I know
which one
has endured,—
which one, at the end of its heavenly ray,
stands like a city of white light . . .

Long time working, mapping and looking

It started on day one, because I guess how could it start on any other day? On day one, though, he didn’t realise it was day one, (How do you know you’re counting until you start counting?) he merely decided that he’d simply had enough, and that he had to do something about it. He started moving around the house. He tidied up everything; cups, plates, teaspoons, food wrappers, clothes that he had left to pile up over the week. He brought out the hoover, he straightened all the throws on the chairs and sofas. And after he had cleaned the windows, bleached the bathroom and even de-greased the oven he sat back down with a cup of tea and started to make his plan.
“Wow, you cleaned!” his housemate exclaimed when she got home from shopping.

On day two he went down to the timber yard.
“Well what sort of boat are you building?” asked the short, serious looking one.
“One that floats” he replied and watched the man go off to the store room, shaking his head.

On day three it rained so he covered up his pieces of wood that were lying all over the garden with a tarpaulin they used as a smoker’s shelter for when they threw house parties. He went into town to the library. He pulled out the almanac of tide tables for that year and for every port and secondary port in the country and its neighbouring islands. He took out a note book and started to jot things down, scribble some things, turn pages, go back pages. He stood up after an hour and went over to the maps section and took out some admirality charts of certain coastal zones and took them back to his table. Every few hours he would go and get more tea or water and he bought a sandwich and some flapjacks from the library cafe.

Outside, smoking under the shelter, an attractive girl with huge, swooping brown eyes said to him
“I love these rainy library kind of days”
“Maybe” he said, and threw his cigarette end in the ash bin and went back inside to his charts, notes and almanac. He worked until the library closed at 9pm.

On day four it was still raining so he went back to the library and did the same as the day before. The attractive girl with the huge swooping brown eyes turned up at midday and smiled at him. Outside, smoking, she asked him
“What are you doing with all those maps?”
He looked at her from a thousand miles away
“Planning.”

They finished their cigarettes with no more words; just the sound of the relentless rain, stinging the pavement over and over.

On day five the rain continued and so he did the same as the previous two days and worked down at the library until the latest time he was allowed to. The attractive girl with the huge swooping brown eyes was there again but she did not take her cigarette breaks at the same time as him and only acknowledged him with a smile as she passed him on the spiral staircase on his way down to the cafe. At 9pm the librarian had to tell him to leave.
“We’re closing now. But I’m sure we’ll be seeing you tomorrow again.” And then she laughed.
He gathered up his things and put the charts and the almanac back.
“Maybe. There’s a lot of work to do yet.”

He walked home under the street lights which were struggling against a fog that had begun to lie about the town. The smoke from his cigarette blended in perfectly to his background.

On day six his housemate was off work as it was the weekend.
“I wondered if you fancied coming to that exhibition we were talking about?” she asked him.
“I haven’t got time for these things right now, Cath. I’m sorry. You go and tell me how it is though.”
“What is it you’re actually... errm, doing?” she ventured.
“I’m planning.” He said with a full-stop and end-of-paragraph sort of tone.

He worked in the garden all day on his boat; sawing, nailing, edging.

Catherine returned from the gallery and stood at the back door looking out into the garden. She could barely see him for the fog, she could just make out the outline and shapes of him and a vaguely skeletal boat and she could hear the sound of banging and sawing and hammering which seemed to ricochet and bounce off the fog to its magnification.

“Do you want a cup of tea?” she called out into the white.

On day seven, Catherine was at home again and fog had cleared. They sat together at breakfast while he was reading a book about stars.
“Evan’s coming round for lunch today and he’s bringing Rav and Jenny. Do you want to eat with us too?”
“I’m busy” he said, not looking up from his book.
“You like Rav. I know Jenny can be a bit much sometimes but...”
“It’s not that, Cath. I’m just really busy.” He said, not moving his eyes from the page.

He was back out in the garden working on the boat while they all ate lunch. He could hear them laughing in the moments that he wasn’t sawing or hammering. He paused for just a second, saw poised for cutting, and looked back at the house. He could see through the window the table and the food and he saw Evan doing some big hand gestures while presumably telling some sort of amusing anecdote.

When it started to get dark he heard the door ppen and Rav came out with a tray of food and a beer.
“You’re not going to come in and join us are you?”
“No. Sorry.” He said. “I’m just really busy.”
“Oh well” she sighed “where shall I put this tray?”
“Just set it on the ground there. I just need to finish this beam.” And then he added “thanks, Rav.”

Rav was walking around the pieces of wood that were beginning to resemble at boat.
“It’s pretty good this, you know. Did you honestly make it from scratch?”
He nodded.
“It’s impressive. But, why are you building it?”
“I’m planning” he said and ended the conversation there.

Many days passed.

On day forty three his arms were sore, so he left the boat which now had rigging but no sails and went to the library. On the way there, he saw a pocket compass in the window display of a pawn shop. It was ornate looking but surprisingly cheap, and most importantly, working. He went inside and bought it. It was made of some sort of hard metal and had a strong clasp which allowed it to spring shut to keep the compass safe and shelled. On the inside of the shell, there was an engraving. It read

Impossible to lose yourself

He sprung it shut, put it in his safe zipped pocket and started to run to the library. When he finished that night, he ran home too.

On day fifty the canvass he had ordered arrived. He laid it all out in the garden and measured it and marked it with a pencil. Catherine came outside with a cup of tea for him.
“What’s this?” she asked, and for the first time since this plan began, he smiled.
“Sails!”

On day seventy four it blew a storm. He sat in his boat in the garden, wrapped in jumpers and a raincoat and gloves and a hat. He smoked a cigarette and laying in the cockpit looking up at his finished rigging he closed his eyes. He was exhausted and slept there, in the garden of that residential street; the driving rain, the vicious cold wind and the violent cracks of thunder from far away behind thick, sodden grey clouds.

On day seventy nine he finished his books. He and Catherine were sat there in the front room; he reading and she doing her internet banking. He slammed shut the heavy 700 page hardback and looked at her.
“Huh?” she asked.

On day eighty he went down to the harbour.
“Yeah that shouldn’t be a problem” said the older man with the weathered face. Smoking a cigarette he pointed to a younger, athletic looking man with sun bleached hair.
“Go talk to my son. It’s my crane but he’s the one who actually does it now. I just can’t be bothered any more. Know what I mean?”

On day eighty one he watched his boat be lowered into the harbour. Shaking the younger man’s hand after it all, he said
“Thanks. Perfect. Thanks.”
The younger man asked
“When do you leave?”
He considered the question while looking out to sea.
“When the time’s just right.”

On day eighty six Catherine came downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of water and found him in the garden. He was sitting under the apple tree on a chair with a duvet wrapped around him, looking up.
“What are you doing?” she whispered from the door.
“Waiting!” he hissed back.
“Waiting for what?”
“Lots of things. The right time, the right height, the right tide” and then he added “a sign.”
“I’m going to call your parents tomorrow” she said, sliding the patio door shut.

On day eighty seven he said “Cath, why don’t you join me under the apple tree tonight?”
She was squeezing lemons for her icing.
“Is this so I won’t call your parents?” she asked, putting the half-lemon down on the side and turning to face him.
“Just come out with me tonight. Then you’ll understand.”
“I can’t tonight. Evan’s coming over, he gets back from America this evening!”
“Aw, that’s great.” He said, looking out of the door up at the sky. “It’ll be cold tonight anyway, there are no clouds.”

On day eighty eight he was gone. Catherine and Evan came downstairs in the morning to find a note on the kitchen table.

Tonight, under the apple tree, through the gaps in the branches, I saw my sign. I have gone to get her. Xx

When She Took The Train Home

And it wasn't as though he didn't know that all he had to do was to pick up a telephone or to log onto the internet but somehow, in this state he had worked himself into, he just sort of forgot. He stood on the station platform, waving at the departing train until it dipped over the curvature of the earth and beyond his eye-line. Given how tall he was, this was a longer visual departure than for most men, but it wasn't as though it lasted that much longer so that he might feel better by the end of it, as if time would do it's healing by the time that train had gone; quite the opposite. He sighed into the empty platform, and along with his recent happiness, the sun departed, leaving him with clouds of gloom and uncertainty.

He scuffed his feet along the concrete as he made his way out of the station and, without any conscious thought, took the bus out into the countryside instead of to his house. His head was beginning to fill up with sounds, but not those of the diesel engine of the bus, or the screaming child at the ice-cream parlour where he alighted, but instead with his own voice saying things:

I can't believe she has gone. How will I go on? Can I really go on living here alone? Is this really what I want? Are these circumstances the best or should I change them? Do I just accept what is going on or do I change them? She is gone now. Shit. She is gone now. Oh fuck, I am lonely. She has gone home and I am still here.

The sounds stopped as, suddenly the real life sound of the running water, the singing birds crept in through his ears. For just a few moments he listened and smiled, looking at the river, and then the voice started up again and he began to frown.

This is where she made me paddle. This is where she made me take off my socks! I haven't taken my socks off outdoors for anyone ever. This is where she made me paddle. This is where I was happiest. This is where she was.

And he began to cry. Through sobbing, audible gulps and whines, he collapsed down on the bank of the river and began violently pulling off his shoes and socks.
"JESSIE!!" he cried out.
"JESSIE!!"
And he threw his shoes toward a rock and a mother sheltered her young son away from the crazy man as they watched him run into the water. His great frame; clumsy and awkward and pathetic. He was splashing the water around with his feet at first and as he moved into the deeper water he started to bend down and swoop at it with cupped hands. He was crying harder now, with real tears falling from his eyes.
"JESSIE" he screamed over and over again above the sound of the water.

Needless to say all of the birds had left in fright and the mother and her young son did the same. A few passers by were quoted as having seen "some sort of lunatic crying in the water" and "a giant man dressed in black throwing water at the sky" until well into the setting sun. The river, with the tears of this heartbroken madman, had begun to swell. The police sergeant in charge of the scene had said in the press conference the next day "It's really only his extraordinary height that kept him alive for so long. But even a man as tall as he, could not survive the kind of depths he was dealing with. His tears were more than he was tall, and in the end, that is what killed him."