I was just looking back through some old files, and found this, which is a little thing I wrote about a year ago, when I was trying to transform
a W.H. Auden poem into the style of J.D. Salinger. So, yeah, I'm not that sex-obsessed, Caulfield is, honest. It's a bit weird, and I haven't made any changes, just thought some of you might be interested really!
Gosh, this is my fourth day of consecutive blogs; I do treat you sometimes. Enjoy x
One time, I knew this bird – Miss Edith Gee – when I was in Minnesota. Everyday for a month, I went round to see her. Number 83 Clevedon Terrace, if you really wanna know. Anyway, I moved to Maine and met Jane soon enough, but I never forgot quite how Eeds’ quirky charm somehow wormed its way into the fathoms of my emotion – not my heart, I like that – but anyway, she was like an ironing board with a face, that girl, no bust. None at all. Real narrow shoulders, you know? Like, really; from wherever you chose to stand.They were sloped enough to give the impression of a nice little green hillock – angled towards the sky, into the sky, with slight bumpy molehills of breasts giving the most slight rise you ever saw, creating this tiny dip, dyke-like, a beautiful ditch, and then you’d move upwards, past her tiny thin lips. Particularly her bottom lip – a friend of mine, ol’ Jimmie Hunt, had once told me this crazy theory of his, whereby you can judge the manner of a girl in bed from the size of her bottom lip. Now, I haven’t quite got a grasp of some of the very finer points of sex quite just yet. I make rules for myself most nights, and end up breaking them necking some girl the next week. You’ve never seen such a crumby fiend as me; I really believe that, no phony is quite as manic as me. Whilst I do tend to overanalyse tricky business, I find it a great turn on if I don’t, so try to keep it out of my mind. I just don’t understand it. I swear to God, I really don’t. So old Jimmie, he had told me this great trick for seeing just how vicious a girl was in bed. The smaller the bottom lip, the more fiendish they are. It was a load of bull, obviously, but has served me damn well on a few occasions. Top lips, whilst not irrelevant, have little effect on proceedings, If y’know what I’m saying. Technical matters only; solely the finer points of technique.Anyhow, if we can be viewing Eedie as a little hill, we can rise above the sharp red rose of her tight, angular little lips and then we can see two glinting suns, her eyes, blue enough to perfectly bridge the colour gaps between her green umbrella, purple mac and violvet hat (which she wore all the damned time, I’d have gotten through several hunting hats by then (Phoebs likes ‘em, keeps taking ‘em)) but also grey enough to absolutely convey the ambiguity of her emotion to the world. A puzzle, that girl was. It is the imperfections that truly make a person or thing perfect, and Eeds had a little squint to her left eye. When I mentioned this thought to her one time, she just cried. I don’t know why, I don’t really get girls. All over the place – it was a nice enough compliment though, right?
When I remembered the oversized, lolloping tears dripping, rollin’, down her pretty bone cheeks, it makes me smile. I did that. It reminds me of Jane’s chessboard, how her own particular saline blend smudged into the dyed wooden squares. Red, swirling; tainting the ‘blank’ segments of the grain.
Eeds resided, as I said, in Clevedon Terrace, but what I didn’t mention was her actual living quarters, a small room of a bed-sit. Clevedon is fairly downtown, but was far from desirable. In her sole room, she kept her few outfits, all high-necked – no-one could damage her integrity, except me, they were all buttoned and I have nimble fingers; she also kept her knitting kit and titbits around the place, and a silvered crucifix she held dear.I took that when I left, just on a whim. I replaced it some wooden beads, all glued up. I left my mark on that room, just like Jane’s chessboard. Something so I’d be remembered, comforting to me for some reason; it was fair enough. She had a thing for stuff, E’, aside from that crucifix and various jewellery, and those knitting titbits – cotton and the like – she had this hat, I’ve already mentioned it, I’m sure. My point is this – she couldn’t just have a normal hat, oh, no, it was not only velvet but covered, draped, in all this sentimental garbage. It ruined an already poor hat. And have I mentioned her bicycle? You could always tell when Edith was about by the screech of brakes, a real edgy crescendo.The dreadful noise was made even more so with the rattle of this pristine little basket she’d kept on the front all that bike’s life. It’d gotten to be grotty, until I’d cleaned it for her.She undid a button that day. And, the second time, I another. I won’t deny it, nor shall I go into detail, but we horsed around a bit. I was a real phony back then, making bad rules.She cried when I stopped, though, and even more when I started again. It was all very confusing, and in the end I just gave up. But not before taking a wicker strip from her basket, something I did each time I cleaned it. Leaving my mark.
One time, I walked past her parking her bike outside St. Aloysius’ Church, a load of knitwear and children’s toys piled high in the basket. I helped her carry them in, naturally; the hot summer’s day gave me an opportunity to work her down to a possible third button.The chance never came – maybe something to do with being in a church yard and all, right? You know I’m right. I caught her praying later on; praying for love, piety, and money.Bit selfish to ask God for material matters, I’d thought. Maybe the prayer had something to do with this experience she told me she’d had in this dream once. I don’ kno’, could have been the heat. I am one sexy guy. It was mighty odd, this ‘dream’, starting off with Eeds somehow having become French royalty in the course of one night and being asked by the vicar to undo a button and dance. Then, some crackpot psychiatric student would love this, she began to bike through fields, fields of corn; the vicar’s face was transposed to a bull, and Eeds got charged by this gargantuan quasi-holy beast. All after a storm had blown down the palace, Josh style. The vicar was about to overtake, and Queenie Eedie was slowing, due to her old back-pedal brake. I’m a sceptic, yeah – so imagine my face when I first learned exactly what had happened new. Being at church, alone, everyday, Eed had developed a sort of complex. Because I had left by then, obviously. It burned her gut each and every day, and she prayed to God, more an’ more goddamned more. She felt so lonely; the choir’s inept harmonies drew out a loneliness issue in her, and she hurt still more. One day, of boredom most likely, she got on her pretty dainty bicycle, with the clean but bare basket and paid the doctor’s a visit. Now, I’d always lived by the ‘apple a day’ method of things – if you keep them all in a box, you can throw them and repel any encroaching medics – but she had this thing for health, hygiene, and fitness. Without me, of course, she never undid a button any more. Well, when she got there, it turned out that the pain she’d been feeling was further developed than she had thought to herself, even by her standards, and the doctor didn’t really feel like telling her, or anyone what really was damned wrong with the bitch. Two days later, Eeds was in hospital, can you believe it? A rabid, quivering wreck, that girl; all over the place. Like, really. Ironic, really – her corpse was too long for the child’s shroud they gave her; it only reached up to her neck.
They examined her good and proper after that, strung her up, blood tainting the checked hospital floor. Used her for training purposes; looking at her advanced sarcoma, apparently. I had to look that word up. A malignant tumour, it turns out, ironic what with her personality and all. Right on the knee. Unusual, I suppose, but she’d never have had one above the neck.
