-
1 of 10
-
2 of 10
-
3 of 10
-
4 of 10
-
5 of 10
-
6 of 10
-
7 of 10
-
8 of 10
-
9 of 10
-
10 of 10
‘Journey East,’ part five
Archive
Comments
Story
Kiely, Fulbright Scholar in Literature at Boise State, will be serializing the entire story “Journey East” here in The Arbiter
F I V E
Don Bishop’s nephew Todd Yorke was currently obsessed by two new houses on view from his back bedroom. These were occupied by young couples. Co-habitors co-owners newly weds? He didnt know nor care about their status. His anatomy studies entered another zone after the recent apprenticeship as a Peeping Tom or in his case Peeping Todd. One of the houses had only kitchen curtains and curtains on the French doors. The master bedroom of the same house was pure French on occasions. The couple had moved in in July and the diagonal view through the wide screen of his window was a source of eye squinting pleasure and frustration. There were nights when Mr and Mrs Curtainless put a light on and pranced around their bedroom nude.There were breathtaking moments when Mrs Curtainless prepared for going on the town. On showernight the silhouette of her through the bathroom window was followed by her talcum powder sessions and he reckoned the show would have commanded a fifty pound cover charge in one of those strip clubs. Such good luck thrilled him.
One night this couple left the landing light on and a bleary-eyed Todd was rewarded with a standing performance sporting themselves. Personally he would have awarded her a gold medal for the connecting gymnastics. During the free show a curtain moved against his nose and the sensation equalled the kisses of his friend Carmel.
To-night the couple were out presumably and yet his imagination could see them frothing and frolicking in the livingroom out of his sight. No sight of Miss Thighmaster though, their neighbour who worked out in silver leotard and white leggings. O how he watched her through a rigorous twenty minute programme inside her French doors on her back on her lovely tummy up and down rhythmically tensing and relaxing abdominal muscles with both cups full. Watching her was not as reliable as the couple’s periodic performances because she had horizontal blinds but she did perform in the garden weeding and hoeing after sensational sunbathing in a bikini while reading a paperback. What hoeing. A heigh hoe of a session as far as he was concerned. Was weeding ever so interesting to watch!
Comparison with Carmel was a disappointment. They slept together on their second night out. Carmel’s domineering apartment sharer was Ruby who had a sugar Daddy. However the apartment was booked again this weekend by Ruby and her tottering boyfriend. The predictability of recent night’s with Carmel irritated him as well. Lack of decision to break with her added to his disgruntlement. Still if he ended the affair he’d have no girl and confidence would suffer. The night ahead promised a ninety minute movie followed by something to eat. He was angry about the lack of a venue for sex. He couldnt bring Carmel here to Mrs Fuller’s house but her daughter Dee and Phil managed fine, coming in late when the old lady was tucked up snoring in bed.
When Todd was halfway through Pre-med his father died. His mother (Don Bishop’s sister) coped fairly well with bereavement while he found the summer at home heavier going than the day of the funeral. This summer Don had got him a job in a Garden Centre basically on the check out and ad-libbing gardening advice when customers asked. The boss Mr Verdure was usually offhand with gardening advice anyway but customers had very specific questions. Should I plant roses in the shade or out of the shade? How often should a herbaceous border be watered in hot weather? Is it too late to prune a Bramley? Is my soil too acidy for rhododendrons? Will a runner bean grow faster near a row of lettuce? Can you move a pear tree in June? How often should you clip a thriving alfalfa? Can you mishandle an artichoke? How do you encourage Bizzie Lizzy?
Mr Verdure’s advice had hourly variations. Todd was surprised that there werent more return complaints though exceptional customers had driven up with plant, stem roots and clay hanging from their hand and a stony silent expression. Todd considered with increasing doom the inconsistencies of planting instructions attached to dahlias petunias primulas cyclamen columbine geraniums and violas.
The sight of Miss Thighmaster at the Garden Centre one evening caused him to panic because of his persistent spying on her. Bagging a select weed killer and a small sack of lawn feed, he longed to be able to ask her to a movie or for a cup of coffee. As she stood in front of the tropical fish tank he visualised her on a South Sea island as he came ashore after a hurricane offering medical relief.
He hoped to study herbology but hadn’t got onto it as yet. The job would end in a few weeks and then it was back to College. Pre-med had been a leveller. He’d lost a good buddy who flunked due to an in-term part time job and an unhappy affair with Jill Cunlip, who was everyone’s fantasy. Todd was delighted with his exam results and the shelf of textbooks held no terror then. Highest marks in anatomy perhaps thanks to Uncle Don’s gift of a Balliere Atlas with lift up parts showing colour size and displacement of bodily organs bones muscles nerves and veins.
His wandering thoughts were stopped when from the room nextdoor to the pokey bedroom he heard Mrs Fuller’s daughter like a dolphin in the bath. The place would be steamed up in there after Dee who bathed with as much pomp and splash as a prima donna. His own bath was a dire necessity after the day’s slog. He stared at four fingers gashed with cuts from prickly plants. Rose thorns left infectious calluses on the wrists and hands.
After his bath, part cold because Dee had hogged the hot water, Mrs Fuller called him to the kitchen for a measly salad and her sing song chatter about the pills she had to take and the delays on Dee’s bus route. She further expounded concerning two soap operas a word quiz a documentary on holiday insurance because Phil and Dee proposed a package trip to the sun. She was fully intrigued about a Medicine Now programme on catscans and keyhole surgery and nerve implant using titanium wires and bone from the hip. Well Phil de Dee. Ill met by titanium she shoots from the hip does Mrs Fuller, he thought as she boomed on holding a pot of scalding tea not far from his forehead.
His fell into deep contemplation and she wandered on talking. How he had laughed during lectures when the Professor jeered Descartes, who located the anima in the pineal gland. And doom sounded from the sentences of Condorcet factualising the possibility that the human body was a machine albeit a very sophisticated one. Neural studies absorbed him and even on holiday when things were slack at the Garden Centre he read a bestseller about the bio-chip bio-plasma the body’s corona genetic engineering genetic finger printing cloning and the pursuit of medicine towards the edge of ethics searching for curative responses from the body’s biosphere and exploring the far fetched zone of a surgery for the psyche. Don loaned him Huxley’s Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited and Shaw’s Preface on Doctors. Neither writer had knocked out Todd, still he read them through.
Beyond the necessary marriage of science and medicine as a devout belief he was rutted in a metaphysical cul de sac enduring that period of youth largely explored only in literature, psychology and rites of passage movies. He was growing rather painfully towards maturity out of the dark acidy soil of adolescence. The body so far had sparked less flint of spirit to show its splendour beyond meat. He was an adolescent Hamlet or more accurately a global village under siege. Like Hamlet in despair, he handled a human skull but less suicidally. He could see no use for it other than as a prehistoric drinking vessel. The uncooked cocktail sausages of brain tissue were gone at that stage and what was left? He didnt discuss these musings with Mrs Fuller, who wiped an area of worktop which was already clean.
Phil arrived and immediately set to rewiring an electric carving knife while Mrs Fuller and Dee raptly adored the early news on the monitor high on a kitchen shelf. Later Phil Dee and Todd caught a bus and met Carmel, who was already nicely waiting in the queue outside the cinema.
KEVIN KIELY
Special to the Arbiter