Lion. In a cage, paces. Hormones thereby released dull its anxiety, keep it sane.
2. Pig. (More satisfyingly, more symbolically) in a factory farm, secured in its stall with chains, chews them. Day and night, obsessively. Survives, pain of captivity blunted, high on the heroin substitute its body manufactures in response to chain-chewing. Remove its chains, it cracks up: beats it brains out against the walls.
3. Marion. The case is less extreme. Drives. Brain pleasantly numbed from consideration of more serious matters.
Chemicals. Programmed to survive. All you are.
That’s enough.
Sat. 8
At times I can go down in an eddy – down, down, below the static-noise surface, into the quiet spaces (underwater?) where vision is peculiarly clear. One thought one image leading to the next like slippery underwater rope I’m on a trail, can’t let go in the dark clear depths for fear of total loss, but if it’s possible to pursue the thought to its end (cave diver in the liquid hollows of the earth) then I will win –
What? No more than a journey of that length. Always at the end, finally, a rock wall, a crevice too narrow for my shoulders.
Strange changes in my body as I travel through no-time. I seem to swell and bloat like a drowned woman. My hands and feet have puffed up so that the skin is tight. Reasonably, I argue that it’s due to hours of driving, sitting still, blood not circulating. My body remembers it as a sign of pregnancy. My aching eyes never recover from assaults of snow glare. And now my lips are dried and cracking like sun-baked mud. They too seem to have swollen; they are bursting through the old skin, which shrivels back, to be peeled absentmindedly by me as I drive. Today I peeled a section raw.
Reasonably, reasonably. The air outside is sharp and cold. Inside my car is hot and dry, the heater like a breath from the desert. My lips are simply dry. A sensible application of Vaseline or Lypsyl three times a day would sort them out. In the mirror I see a woman I’ve never met, with tiny squinting eyes and swollen bleeding lips.
My lips must be constantly touched. I find myself stroking the silken new skin; pressing them together and moistening the dry corners; brushing the back of my hand against them, peeling with my teeth the onion layers of old skin. I have picked foolishly at the scabs until they’ve bled again.
I am continuously aware of my lips. I feel them move and crack. I lick them to taste the blood. I can’t rest, I can’t leave them alone to heal. Last night I lay on my back with my hands clenched beneath me, to stop them stealing up to touch and peel my gigantic lips. I imagined I might unpick myself. Picking and picking, peeling back the skin, touching and brushing the moist new flesh, laying the backs of my fingernails against it, fretting at the edges of what is (already, for God’s sake) a hole; I might unpick enough to find an end to pull – that would make the whole lot unravel.
They’re a neat edge around a hole, lips. Like a button hole. We girls learnt button-hole stitch at junior school. Blanket stitch, the stitch for binding raw edges. Over and over goes the thread, passing the needle through each previous stitch’s loop, linking them together to make an edge.
I circle it. Over and over (sewing or unpicking?) I painstakingly circle the hole. The world resolves itself into images and theories of lips.
Consider Lips
Mouth edges. The rims of darker skin that frame the hole into which go air drink food thumbs lollipops cigarettes nipples and other parts of other people’s anatomies. Out from which come breath (used air) spit (lubricant and dissolver of those anatomies and lollipops) vomit (regurgitated food and drink) and words. Which have no counterpart in any of those things that go in. Except that words name them: identify them, ask for them, and so appear to own and control them all.
It’s not all to do with going in and coming out, though – don’t think of lips as just an entrance way. That would be to disregard their intrinsic beauty and agility. They are the face’s leading actor. Curving in smiles and grins, stretching in exasperation, pursing in annoyance, hollowing to a thin round O of desolate misery, downturning at the corners in set lines of anticipated and fulfilled mediocrity and boredom. And when you touch them with your fingers doesn’t your skin wonder at their smoothness and durability, their appearance and texture of inside-the-body skin, which yet survives in the dry outside? Their sex colour, the bruised pink-brown of all hole-edges. Their luscious, curving shape, which makes you want to lick them.
As for their movements, in speech alone their flexibility is extraordinary. When Billie Whitelaw played Beckett on TV, they filmed nothing but her speaking lips. Her lips filled the screen with a life, a tension, a manipulation and concatenation of muscle movements which was riveting; awe-inspiring. The words formed by these lips were lost – meaningless, insignificant – beside the movements which formed them. Medium made mincemeat of message.
On another surface – the surface, say, of your body – lips can mould, brush, skim, suck, infill any space or crevice. Against your lips they can breathe, tremble, press, grind, hold in open-mouthed suspension. Kiss.
Lips move; lips touch; lips signal. Lips are on the outside for show, and on the most secret inside of your mouth. Lips frame words that lie. Lips frame a hole that wants to be filled.
My children’s lips. My husband’s lips. Lips that have touched me.
Babies’ lips.
They come ready pursed, as big from top to bottom as they are from side to side. In age our mouths elongate – wider and wider in grin or grim, both of which are similar in that they are lines that know; alas, that know. A baby’s mouth knows and seeks to know nothing beyond nipple. Ejected from warm wet inside to cold dry outside, from darkness to light, from flesh-fluid suppleness to the disparate harsh angles of metal, plastic and starched white sheet, the baby wants home. Warmth. Wetness. Flesh. Insides. Its body is nothing but an aimless sack, with every nerve leading to its lips. Only its lips know how to make it survive. Its lips slot and damp like a vice over nipple. Nipple, source of warm wet nourishment, connection with mother’s insides, meeting of flesh.
At the first closing of new-born Ruth’s jaw on my breast I shouted in pain. If she could have sucked my nipple off and wormed her way back inside through the bloody hole it left, she’d have done it. A new-born baby’s suck is a desperate thing. The mother’s breast is the life-line, the life-hole. The greedy twins sucked me raw, till my nipples swelled and cracked. Little animals chewing at dugs; would tear the flesh and eat it if they could, if it would help them.
On the breast, a baby’s lips (contrary to popular belief) do not form the shape that we call suck. Sucking goes on inside, further down the baby’s maw. The lips are there for manipulation and control, making, in the course of feeding, a score of tiny adjustments of motion and position. The top lip closes over the flesh in a straight line, so that neither the pinky-brown of lip nor of areola is seen. The infant’s top lip is a flat surface; when they grow older children’s lips become fuller, but roundedness here would prevent that neat seam, one plane of flesh cleanly fitting another. The underlip is turned out, in a pout, around the underside of the nipple. When the first gush of milk stops and the baby requires more, it allows the nipple to slide very slightly out of its mouth. No longer sucking, it holds the nipple between jaws and applies with the lower lip an infinitesimal trembling motion. The upper lip remains still, a pressure point. The effect upon the nipple of being ever-so-slightly trembled from below is a tickling, turning to a tingling, turning in the mother’s body to a sense of yearning which is satisfied by the sudden release of a hidden reserve of milk shooting through the breast. The lower lip stops trembling, slides quickly
