With
two short bursts from the cold tap, Brother Skunk fills as much of the kettle
as is requisite to his morning coffee. Pulled up, the blind reveals just how
early the hour, the actual sun itself too low yet to be visible but heralded by
a distant and increasing brightness to the sky.
Having
switched on the kettle to boil, he collects the cafetiere and its plunger from
the drying rack, and from the fridge the coffee caddy, from out which he scoops two
heaped spoonfuls as the water warming inside the kettle begins to come audible, its
initial whispering hiss quickly rising to a hoarse exhalation; Skunk imagines
the depth to which an actual breath might be inhaled and held to effect such
sustained release.
It
is an unbidden anxiety; the sudden thought of his own breath as an exhaustible
resource, as being defined by a limited physical and finite volume of which he
might be relieved at any moment in just such a single and prolonged vent. He
thinks of other things, consciously so, wondering whether this close to
Christmas there will even be any wreaths left available, never before having
bought such an item.
Increasingly
loud, the impression now is of the exhaled breath rising tight around him in
claustrophobic convergence.
It
is in reaching for his mug that he accidentally knocks the still-lifted plunger
of the cafetiere, his subsequent grab to keep it vertical triggering some
memory of the exact same gesture, recently enacted, his perception of which
places it within the immediate past.
Skunk:
Ah, how weird.
Even
as the noise of the boiling water increases, the room for Brother Skunk falls
suddenly silent as he pursues the memory to its retrieval.
Skunk:
Last night I dreamt eh... that before Mum died, she gave me... a woollen toy...
of the mouse and his child.
The
kettle’s volume reaches its plateau, the noise attaining a sort of audible
thickness, somehow forcing him to project upon it the notion of its own mass or
density.
Skunk:
I dreamt, before she died... Had it- she had given me a woollen mouse and his
child, and I was in the old house, down south still, and ehm, I put it on my
bookshelf
sighs
Skunk:
and I must have been doing something but it sat on the bookshelf, and it was
there, whatever else was going on in the dream it was always there, and this
was like time, a sense of time... passing, with this always there, the
the woollen, a little kind of woollen toy um, of the mouse and his child...
holding...
He
fills the little cafetiere with boiled water and then, remembering, opens one
of the cupboards to retrieve from far back on an upper shelf a small bright
green thermos flask into which he tips the kettle’s remnant, sealing it with
its little white plastic top.
Skunk
(returning to his train of thought): They were kind of like balls of, the head
was a kind of ball of wool, and the body was a ball of wool, and the arms were
these little spindly things that, that were stitched together. And they had
tails...
Still
waiting for the coffee to brew, he returns to the same cupboard for a
translucent plastic funnel to facilitate the filling with whiskey his battered
pewter hipflask, the cap of which emits an awful dry shriek with each turn of
its unscrewing.
Skunk:
And you could set, you could prop the mouse child uh, on top of the eh
father’s... body, so it looked like he was holding him up a bit, like the
actual toy itself.
emptying
in the last of the 70 cl. bottle
Skunk
(shaking his head): Heeltaps.
before
screwing the cap back tight, wincing at each repeated shrill skreek this again
elicits.
Skunk:
But I just had them sitting, they were level on the bookshelf. And then eh, I
was cleaning that’s what it was, I was cleaning away in the dream, and I
accidentally knocked, I knocked them over
clearing
his throat
Skunk:
and they fell off, and there was that um s- a split-second panic where I
thought something would happen to them because, obviously they were so precious
to me, and in that split second... uh... The, just, I, I reached to grab
them... but they were already suspended in mid-air, they were already
suspended... from the bookshelf. What had happened was the mouse child’s tail
had got trapped
underneath a book... and so he was hanging partly off the edge, but his hands
were reaching out and holding the mouse father up, over this, you know, from
this drop. It... It was weird, I remember eh eh in the dream looking at it
thinking, there was something there but I... I wasn’t entirely sure that it
was... I didn’t know that it was the right way round.
Standing
in such utter immobility, by the time he is done with the thinking on this the
cafetiere will be quite cold to the touch, the coffee he has made will have to
be discarded, and the whole process require its repeating.
Two
things he cannot at this point know: all her wasps lie dead within the walls,
and there is not a single grain of sugar remaining anywhere in the house.
He
will buy flowers on the way to her grave.
He
will buy her flowers on his way to the grave.
