Dance Me To The End

We are dancing in the kitchen on Friday evening. I've left it too late to start cooking dinner and the children are grumpy. So I am trying to distract them from their growling stomachs and my own time mismanagement.

The music is Rimsky Korsakov's 'Flight of the Bumblebee' and our dance features Reuben as the eponymous bumble bee, chubby in bright blue stripes. Hovering, held up by my arms. He flies at Jessica, diving. Bzzzzzzzzzz. No sting though. Just a smile.

"No, no, Bay Reub" she shrieks. Delightedly.

The music changes. Something calmer. We are exhausted with our buzzing and swooping. I pick them both up, a feat that I will not be able to manage for very much longer.

We rest for a minute, three. I feel muscular and towering, one arm wrapped around each. So full, it feels as though there could not possibly be room for a third. And, for a moment, she is forgotten. My dear ashen baby daughter. She pales away to nothing. Nothing at all. And I don't know if I should feel guilty or if, for once, I am doing the right thing.

Then Jessica leans in, up close to my face. "Wake up Mummy," she says.

I wonder if she knows more than she lets on. That girl of mine. I wonder if that is what she has been trying to tell me all along.

"Wake up."

******

Increasingly I feel as though I am developing a very thin, tough surface. It has a high gloss finish. It is painted with enquiring, concerned eyes and a cheery grin. Sometimes that smile is genuine, at others, a rictus. I feel as though I am some sort of bizarre human shaped pinata. A small person trapped inside a large construction of papier mache, which I am furiously plastering away at from the inside.

Whack! Cue furiously internal plastering.
Whack! More furious internal plastering.
Fix. Fix.
Because I will not allow myself to be shattered.
That glossy surface has been hard won.
That cheery grin and concerned expression didn't come for free.
I will go to great lengths to maintain them.

Sometimes I catch the eye of a stranger on the street and think I see their own internal maintenance person flurrying about. Perhaps we should just knock heads with one another and see what falls out?

I am awake my love. My dear bird girl. Can you not see how hard I am working?
Of course you can't. I do hope you can't.
That's why I'm trying so hard, faster and faster, so that cracks will not develop on my shiny, smiling surface.

I don't contain sweets and toys. Sadly. I only wish I did. Then people could whack me and cool, fun things would fall out. Then I wouldn't mind being hit. Slings and arrows, step on down. You will only result in sweet and toys around these parts.

But rather, I only contain strange things. Not necessarily sad things. Or not only sad things, not any more. Just things that don't seem to want to shift. The jumper that I wore on the day that the twins were born lies on my floor. I still own it. I still wear it. Currently it is discarded, waiting to be added to the laundry basket.
I can't wear the T shirt I wore when I held Georgina as she was dying, that is in her box.
But the jumper?
It's there, being bright blue and attention seeking, on the floor, being just ever so slightly disconcerting.
Tempting me back there. Come on, dwell a little, try to remember. You know you want to.

And curious things. Things with long, thin fingers and large knuckles. Things that peer and poke and wonder. That is what you would get tumbling out if you managed to split my surface.

Curiouser and curiouser.
Muddled up with ironed clean sheets and numbers and poems written by only one poet.
A vast collection of unread books, a bewildered glance and an exasperated sigh.
But mainly, for the most part, the curious.

So I stumble down passageways, chasing these curious things, where they lead I don't know.
To the afterlife?
To meaning?
To nothing?
I don't know.
It's a recurrent theme, ignorance.
I'm sure that would come tumbling out, en masse, out of the Catherine W shaped pinata.
Should you choose to whack it a bit?
Enquiry and a blank answer. A useless combination.

But I hear the soft footfalls of my lost daughter.
She is racing ahead of me. She treads quickly and surefooted-ly through this murky place.
She is not human. Never was. Not really. And certainly not now.
Full of light and knowledge. So quick. She is laughing. She is delighted.

Her mother stumbles behind. Heavy. I trip. I say, "Wait. Please wait."
But she's gone.

I hear an echo.
"I know mama. I know. Wake up."

I am trying. My dear girls, I am trying.