Through the Keyhole: May 2016

14

11:00:00

One night he was woken up by moans coming from the toilet. It was 1 a.m. and she was making strange noises like a wounded animal. She was in pain.

‘It started.’

He called for a taxi. She took her labor bag and went down the stars. Through the window, he saw her entering the car.

She was away for a week. It was a silent week when he read a lot about labor. He learned about the cramps, the placenta and the order in which it usually took place. He watched dozens of childbirths on YouTube, startled at the fact that sexual organs could be so practical and productive. The head coming from woman’s vagina looked more alien-like, but it all made sense. Even the sex made sense. He ignored the fact that women on films were screaming from pain. He was appreciative and respectful that they could actually produce a human being. It looked like a miracle. Their bodies disfigured, their vaginas spread x number of times, their breast swelled but they could create a walking-talking-eating-and-living human, which he had never had and would never be capable of doing. It made him both fascinated and jealous.

She came after a week. She came with the grapefruit. She showed him the grapefruit through the keyhole.

Grapefruit was funny. It was plump and had blue eyes. Grapefruit was a boy, as he was kindly informed, and when it appeared it weighed 3, 65 kilos. He looked quite normal and he was healthy. She looked exhausted and said that it had been the worst day of her life. He reminded himself of the pain he saw on the faces of YouTube women giving birth. He felt sorry for her, but now when the grapefruit was outside, she should be relieved and happy.

She looked less happy, though. She looked sad and exhausted.

She asked him from time to time to look after the grapefruit as she had to go for a walk or visit the doctor. She asked him to feed him and change his nappies. He did this first with awkwardness but then he learned how to operate the grapefruit. It gave him this strange feeling of satisfaction to make grapefruit clean, fed and comforted. He knew how to take care of himself and he intuitively knew how to comfort a little one.

There were days when she disappeared for a couple of hours. There were nights when she ignored the grapefruit’s cries. There was one night when she packed all her things and left the flat.

She didn’t come back. She just left the grapefruit in its bed. She stuck a note to the bed.

‘Have a nice life. Both of you.’

That was the last thing she had ever communicated to him.

She was the last flatmate he had in his life. Except for the grapefruit. The grapefruit took her room and, even though he was little, he got a lot of space. Generally, the grapefruit behaved well. It was nourished and clean. But these were only the first months and there were many more months to approach.

He wanted to be prepared. He ordered more books on the subject of raising a human. He ordered some toys. And when the grapefruit was crying, he played to him a lullaby he found online, as he wasn’t good at singing.

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13

23:51:00

And then he caught some food poisoning. He blamed it on the quality of food he ordered from the supermarket. It was a severe case and he ran to and from the toilet, appreciating the fact that toilet paper was in abundance. She suggested calling for a doctor. He refused. When he was sitting on the toilet during the night, dehydrated, she advised him to call for an ambulance. That was the last thing he wanted. He drank a lot of water and went on a starvation diet for a few days.

‘And what if you were really sick?’, she asked.

‘Then I wouldn’t have a choice.’

‘What if I got sick? Or unconscious?’

‘Then I would call for an ambulance. You’re not tied to this place. It’s my choice.’

‘Then, if you lived with someone else, let’s say, another human, would you allow him to have a normal life?’

He felt silent for a while.

‘What do you mean, another human? If I had another flatmate, I wouldn’t imprison him, that’s rather obvious. I think you are the last roommate I’ve had. Mother had a silly idea.’

‘She’s dead. She won’t have another one.’

He felt silent again this time at the realization of being an orphan himself. Father didn’t call him for a long time. The void created by the lack of mother’s calls was getting bigger. He missed her. He missed her when she was in Norway, but the pros outweighed the cons of her departure. He couldn’t stand living with her. He was too much of an adult to deal with her constant comments on his lifestyle and moans of disappointment. They were better when separate. Now he missed her in a different way. In a panicky way when he realized that he will never look at her again and that her support, however fragile it was, would never comfort him.

The food poisoning was the last disturbing thing that happened. From then on the online shopping was flawless, electricity worked like magic and water allowed him to take constant showers.

She unpacked the Ikea furniture and from the neighbors borrowed the tools to set the bed. When she went for a walk, he came to her room and adjusted screws, as she didn’t have enough experience and the bed was wobbly. Grapefruit's furniture took a big part of the room. There was a fluffy teddy bear imprisoned behind the white bars of bed. There was a selection of towels and tiny clothes folded on the chest of drawers. There were some children books stacked on the shelf. The sheets were spread and over the bed hung a tiny moon lamp which apparently she bought on her own. You could sense that the grapefruit was going to appear soon.

For someone looking from the outside, there might have been some pathology behind him leaving his room only when she left the flat. He didn’t want to have an eye contact with her. He didn’t really want to get to know her. Feeling her things, listening to her steps and talking with her from time to time was enough to create a picture of her in his mind. They didn’t have to socialize. She was there for some reason and he learned to appreciate this reason once the mother was dead. The flat was noisy like in his childhood years, the doors were moving, the kitchen was full of smells and he had to adjust to the selection of music: whether it was his or hers. She bought him a couple of things, which he appreciated. They were mainly comics and sweets and they were light but, as she said, she couldn’t carry anything heavy. That was her act of kindness. She also bought him a nice-smelling shower gel from some fancy beauty shop. It was wrapped with a ribbon and smelled of citrus fruit. They didn’t talk. They didn’t have to. They already knew each other and that was enough.

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12

07:09:00

The history of the world made sense. The primal instinct of taking care of the young ones by the older ones. Being a tutor in a student-master relationship. Passing on the craftsmanship, the recipes of good formulas of life. His life was obvious. He covered all the stages of education to guide someone else and be the help in covering those stages. He was once taught how to eat, walk, read, write and speak to later on pass the knowledge to the little ones. He earned money not for himself but for others to share as they were incapable of working at a very young age. They couldn’t hunt their own food. The instinct of maintaining the tribe was important. The grapefruit was important in the long history of civilization. He felt important. He actually found sense in being a father.

As the weather improved and stabilized in its query unpredictable ways, strange things started happening. First, there was no electricity. His computer ran on the battery for a while but then work and entertainment was off completely. He phoned the power plant and the caretaker of the building but no one had answers to his queries. It might have been a temporary power cut. It might have been the weather (which, taking into account the circumstances, was the worst possible excuse). Even the neighbor didn’t seem to notice the problem. She was indifferent. She just sat on the balcony and read a book. Then she went for a long walk, possibly to a café with WiFi (or he imagined her doing it out of jealousy). She came back in the evening and instantly fell asleep.

He took his books and comics and spent time motionless in bed, wondering whether they will make him again unemployed for a long absence at work. He managed to use his mobile phone to write to the boss but in the middle of sending the message his battery ran down, either cutting the text or deleting it altogether. There was no contact with the outside world. He even couldn’t call for an ambulance.

When the electricity came back, there was the cut-off of water. First, it was for a day. The second day didn’t bring any changes. On the third day, he was dirty, stinky and irritated beyond measure. She wasn’t in the least affected by the event. She went to the swimming pool to wash and was cheerfully happy and perfumed. She offered him mineral water, waving her still moist hair and cherishing the fact that the public swimming pool was just around the corner. On the fourth day, the water came back, which was a miracle, considering his mental state, as he started scratching himself from staying in the abundance of his own bacteria. When water started running through the pipes again, he was blessed by the possibility of washing himself. He treated it like a gold powder, massaging every inch of his preserved body. He did a double laundry to store clean things in advance. She stopped taking her pregnant swimming classes.

Then half of the order of his shopping was missing. There was no reason behind it. The delivery man said that they must have mixed something while preparing the orders but he didn’t have to pay for all of it, just cover the bill for the things that were actually brought to his place. But how could he survive without toilet paper, bread, milk, butter, eggs, binging only on lettuce and tomatoes? And drinking a liquid soap instead of six bottles of fizzy drinks that he ordered? Drinking tap water might have been recommended by the doctors, but drinking tap water in the civilized world must have been a disaster. Why did we create all these cancer-causing, diabetes-enhancing, sparkling bottled drinks, if we didn’t want to have a choice? And such a choice did involve a conscious decision of dying from unhealthy eating habits.

‘You should go shopping,’ she suggested ‘I would buy something for you, but I cannot carry heavy things.’

He said that he would manage. Actually, he managed for a week and then ordered another shopping from a different online store. This time it came the way he ordered it and nothing was missing. Then he bought some things in advance and stored them in boxes in one part of the room, just behind the wardrobe. Finally, he looked for alternative sources of energy, such as solar powers and windmills and wondered how on earth he could make his life independent from unreliable sources such as his electric sockets.

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11

00:56:00

She actually didn’t talk to him that much. He sensed that spending time at home and not contacting her friends was having an impact on her mood. She was sleeping longer than usual. She ate more than necessary. She bought a lot of sweets and fizzy drinks and now she was getting really fat. On his comment that she should look out for what she was eating, she showed him the biggest middle finger he saw in years. It wasn’t about the size. It was about the impact. She was silent, overfed and she constantly watched the same American TV shows which from YouTube she was able to display on the TV screen. Now Stephen Colbert, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and James Corden welcomed their everyday routine and stayed as fixed flat-mates, breaking the silence with scripted rounds of applause from the audience. She watched hours of film stars interviews, singers performances, and celebrity gossip vlogs. She was glued to make-up tutorials, recipes for dieting and coming back to the pre-child weight. She could concentrate on footage of reviewed shopping hauls, discussions about bags, cosmetics, T-shirts, skirts, dresses, and shoes. She started ordering the shopping online and he was now confused whose package the courier was bringing at the door: his or hers. She dove into his lifestyle completely. As her biological clock downregulated, she walked into the kitchen at night and ate until she felt sleepy again. She developed terrible stretchmarks on her stomach, hips, and tights. Her breasts grew and in the rubbish box, he saw packages from the underwear shops.

He remembered his mother’s bras. He would look at them secretly and they were decent enough to make him think about his mother as a sexual being. Once she got divorced, she tried various relationships, but she had difficulty in finding the right partner. She always took his opinion into account and he was sure he put a damper on a few of her romances. He sometimes didn’t like the guys she was dating. Sometimes they didn’t like him, as if he was a leftover from the past life, over which they had no control. But mother did make an effort. She bought new lingerie, she put on make-up, created a cloud of mystery and sex appeal with her expensive perfumes and sometimes didn’t come until the next day. She stayed at their place. Having sex. That was beyond him. The girl must have been having sex just the same as she carried now the burden of her pleasures. But the bras that she bought were not as attractive as his mother’s used to be. They were big comfortable bras. Looking at her now, the last thing she cared about at the time was to look sexy. He never took care of his outward appearance. Maybe also, for this reason, he didn’t miss the outside, where he just had to pretend that behind clean and ironed clothes everything was just well.

The idea that there were three of them was intriguing. It was like a family of three. The father, the mother and a child. He wasn’t in love with her, she wasn’t in love with him. The grapefruit was simply in his last stages of development.

He read about a child a lot. She was watching TV series so he caught up on the knowledge of first months care, breastfeeding, and nourishment. He actually enjoyed the prospect of taking care of a human being. He never had a pet, neither he had a cousin, a distant nephew or a neighbor with whom he could spend his babysitting hours, getting any form of experience. The prospect of spending time with a little human, in theory, was simple and learnable. In practice, it might have appeared more complex. But he always liked children. He didn’t mind waiting in a queue in a department store behind a woman with a stroller. Sometimes the baby was screaming, occasionally it took all the things from the shelves and put them into the stroller at the alarm of the mother. He didn’t mind looking at children playing in the playground. Their noises didn’t irritate him at all. He felt a weird sort of satisfaction when a child ate the snack given to him by the mother or when he stopped crying, soothed after falling down. He sensed this mission accomplished. He wanted to school some mothers who didn’t pay enough attention to the child and left them to their own devices, ignorant to the risks awaiting them. The park was close to the street, the park was full of hostile people, violent children, pedophiles, crazy kidnapping mothers who couldn’t have children on their own. He didn’t mind expenses: toys, gadgets and pocket money. It all made sense. It prepared a young one to be an adult. In a vicious world where you still fought for survival, when you could still die an unexpected death at the hands of freedom fighters, or fail terribly at school and later on at work, you couldn’t expect the child to be all nice and clean. It could instinctively be born vicious, aggressive, abusive or angry. It could play on its instincts then to be a stronger human, to win a better female, to outwit the competition, to create a stronger family. It had to know how to survive.

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