31/05

On Bryan Gable’s dusty mantelshelf, a photo frame with three hinged compartments stood, fanned open like an altar triptych, blocking all but the Concordia logo on his dog-eared PHD in English Literature from view. One box for each of his baby daughters, all grown up now but immortalised there, fuzzy-headed and crying in the same bassinet Wendy and he had used to rear them all. It was blue and covered in car bumper stickers, literally covered by the time Sarah, the youngest, was born. Those crazy bumper stickers; how many disapproving looks in shopping centres had been cast on their account! As Bryan remembered it, the first one had been put there as a sort of joke to offset the monumental gravity of parenthood – after all, they were only kids themselves then. He supposed the rest had been jokes too. Where was that bassinet now?

The phone rang; he let it go. Sometimes the prospect of answering made Bryan too anxious to move. Only embers remained of the fire he had stoked alone, and sat by alone, most of the previous night. His lips were chapped. His long hair, needing continually to be brushed to either side of his thin, stubbled face, smelt of wood smoke.  Through the archway next to the hearth it was plain to see how empty, almost melancholically empty, the kitchen was; nothing but a few old cans of five bean mix and a box of All-Bran down to its dusty dregs still sat on shelves that had once struggled to cope with such abundance. A kitchen without food was like a bedroom without bedding. But Bryan wasn’t hungry. The malaise in his stomach made the very idea of eating revolting. Matter of fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten or drank for any other reason than to extend life another day. While the 11 o’clock news bleated in the background, Bryan looked at his girls. His little jewels, all their jumpsuits the exact same soft pink. Plaintively he imagined, and for a time nearly convinced himself, that it was a triplicate of the one picture. How alike they started out, how different they became. He hadn’t looked at those photos – or his degree – in ages.

Lately Bryan had been almost madly preoccupied with how manufactured everything around him was. Particularly since his resignation from the university it seemed that everything, from tiny rivets to colossal skyscrapers shining like supernovas in the sun, stair railings to the stitches on his bed sheets, footpaths and asphalt and disability ramps, burger wrappers and coffee cups and what-all else, whatever you cared to mention from these so-called urban environments, all of it was third or fourth or fifth hand, passed from the farm or the mine through who knew how many processes, across who knew how many oceans, only to be installed after dark and thought of by people the next day as something that had simply sprouted of its own accord from the ground. Walking through the synthetic streets nowadays was like an affront to one’s blood and bones. So conscious had Bryan become of this artificiality that he had purged his house of almost all electrical appliances, all whitegoods besides the refrigerator, all plastic rubbish bins, even clothes and Manchester containing the word polyester on their labels. In short, only materials which still bore some resemblance to the way the Earth had made them were acceptable for Bryan to have around him.