True Minds

"Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out, e'en to the edge of doom".

Shakespeare 










Content Warning:
Strong sex references, paedophilia references, infrequent gory detail, depictions of transphobia

Transcript

      True Minds

      Hot ears. That was the remark with which Harry Wisthom broke the silence in the car. The right was the worst of the two. He sat in the front passenger seat. His wife, Summer, did all the driving. Harry would have driven if he could, but he lacked the capability. The third, teenaged component of his family idled in his own world in the back of the car, lost to his own introversion.

      “But I’ve got hot ears,” Harry protested, when his son Lars shushed the first utterance, sharply. Lars was reading a book.

      Lars, the Wisthoms’ son, used to be Lara, a daughter. He had begun medical transition quite recently, away from the sex of his birth, towards a long longed-for, perhaps idealised maleness. Harry had taken what he felt to be the erasure of his daughter quite hard, the ashamed and censored character so suddenly assigned, to the sex that she had been, to any mention of it. All lingering trace of that which was femalely sexed about Lars was now a taboo part of himself, carefully guarded, concealed, wherever possible. It would not do anymore, to be that thing, to be one over whom menstruation broke monthly, through whom oestrogen voyaged. Her female puberty had been paused unmendably, and the infusions of testosterone he had been granted after a lengthy and tortured process, were already beginning to harden and carve and generally masculinise the features with which Harry’s daughter had been born.       

      Just as Lars’ ship was sailing off, leaving the pier of home behind, Harry was also making a journey of his own. He kept his journey secret from his wife and so he was able only to visit it in his mind, that nocturnal embarking, the fragrant outset of that moonlit voyage. It was a point of no return, to have kissed her, to have been unable to refrain from doing so. He could never look upon his student April the same way again, be beside her the same way again, face her youth from across his office desk, walk around her scented sacredness in a manner curiously chaste, as he had been able to do while his desire for her was not declared, and the love lay in the realm of desire, not touch. She smelled like an April, and everything that she was was declared upon her, given visage in her poignantly perfect features. She was in the April of her life. When she and her doting professor went their separate ways, when he would finally betray her and she was leant an indubitable air of September, her name would become satiric, sardonic. She would become a gross ironisation of her name, being betrayed, realising her betrayal.

      Harry’s wife Summer drove the car with cold competence to the wedding they were all bound to attend. In the wiser part of himself, it caused him great pain to despise Summer. When he thought of April he grew breathless: he was able to enjoy his seduction of her, in his true mind, only if he despised his wife. If Summer was responsible for it, if her reproaches caused it, he was guiltless, and how solving and inevitable that bi-genarian, sophomorically sullen approach across the panels of the Albert Study (or the carpet of the teaching lab). She somehow rose to a place where scruple did not exist and took her professor there with her. Harry and April had each been animated by a loneliness, two lonelinesses each quite different from the other: April’s the normal, lonely, colleigate disconsolation of early adulthood, Harry’s a more mature but less easily navigable discontent.

      It was spring. A cold light touched the leagues of blossomed hawthorn hedge and Alexander plant. There was cuckoo-spit in the lavender by the Albert Study window, Harry had noticed. The threading traffic drove most animal wildlife far away from it, to rivers and tracts and meadow and woods worlds away. The din of the cars shouted over the cuckoo and drowned him out, but the two ancient, recited notes were there, in the distance, piping unheard. A hot air balloon was rising in slow, secluded silence, the rose red of the tear-shaped globe vivified against so many stark white cumuli, the clouds allowing their sky its hardly believed blue only in a few seldom, scattered places. The people in the airborne basket had won a hot air balloon trip, in a cereal box; Harry and Summer and Lars couldn’t know that of course. A field of wind turbines turned in the wind. That at least seemed right, in a world of wrong things: the wind turbines, turning in the wind, generating what little energy they could in a starved world. 

      The professor was visited by a swift, sometime memory of April: the urgent, half-afraid, half-invigorated swiftness with which she unbuttoned him. Her resolve had been quickened by something. Holding her small, gaunt shoulders, and nuzzling in her young, not-quite-a-decade-old breasts with a passion carefully mastered so she would not be alarmed, he was comforted by the assurance in his ear that she wasn’t a virgin. He heeded graciously the soft, close voice in which nothings are mumbled. She didn’t have to say it, any version of that phrase once so appealing to him, I’m not a virgin… she hadn’t even used the word virgin. But he understood her consolation. Most of the consolations offered during the act are non-verbal, like when she availed herself, with strange, hushed gratitude, of her professor’s buttocks, holding them happily, assisting his only half-tender thrusts with her spirited hold. Harry’s ears were feeling hot again.

      “My ears are hot again,” he said. “Really quite shockingly hot.”

      No-one said anything in reply.

      “Could we stop at a services? I think I need to press a can of coke to my ears.” A nice cold can of coke, he thought, iteratively, a tacit afterthought.

      Summer obliged at the next services. In a newsagents full of newspapers and magazines and wine and lager and crisps, Harry found himself craving a packet of cigarettes. He’d promised Summer he’d given up. He imagined lighting up and inhaling the miracle of that lit tube with great glee. But Summer’s disappointed surveillance of the act would serve to perfectly ruin it. He’d have to do it in secret. The thought of such a betrayal was wounding to him, until he remembered that it would not be the only one, would in fact be the most colossally trivial of the two. He couldn’t allow himself to feel such revulsion at so small a betrayal of trust, while the other went on in tandem. So he bought a lighter, and a packet and smoked one as soon as he left the shop, forgetting to purchase a cold can of coke for his hot ears. The right was still worse. If he relieved the heat in the right, surely the left would follow suit. 

      The Wisthoms drove onwards. The distant county showed its singular features and its eccentricities of landscape. They found themselves in the centre of the main town soon enough, and proceeded on to the main Catholic church where the nuptials were scheduled shortly to commence. 

      Harry and Summer and Lars (Harry still didn’t find it an appealing name) had pilgrimaged a long way for the marriage of Harry’s brother Winston and his fiancé Ruth. Winston’s first wife Oona had passed from late-diagnosed breast cancer several years before. Matrimony’s serendipitous advent is one for which people pilgrimage, many, invariably, from some distance away. People will travel a long way for a death also. Rarely will they travel so far for a birth. The car parked, and Harry suited and trousered in the regulation pinstripe (he was the only one who had come unapparelled) the pilgrims ambled in manner as casual as they could muster, bringing their silent troubles with them into the churchyard, where stood assembled a colourful and loquacious rabblement of family, Harry’s own and the bride’s, and acquaintances, Winston’s and the bride’s. Ruth Liotti was her maiden name, soon to be lost. All about them smiled big, vivid Italianate faces, and often, audible, unsurprising mutters of Italian. Harry said his Hellos and laughed where appropriate. He kissed his mother on the cheek, and shook hands with Murray. Then he noticed Lars standing alone, on the darkened ecclesiastical grass. People who knew Lara well, seemed to be avoiding Lars. Hello Lara! they’d say, It’s Lars actually, he’d be bound to reply. Harry observed that they all seemed to evade his daughter, preferring to avoid rather than err. Lars didn’t know which was worse, to go through the wearying dialogue repeatedly, or to be forsaken entirely. Harry didn’t know which was worse, either. 

      The bride arrived. In the church, the organist rummaged through a soft, peaceful prelude. The priest knit the two candidates into one. Or rather he stood in officiation, somehow both solemn and cheerful, as Winston and Ruth knit each other together in the connective tissue of marriage. The vested clergyman and the fusty choreography and aged liturgy over which he presided with warm firmness leant to the largely universal rubric of marriage a solemnity even the atheist Wisthoms couldn’t deny. The father of the bride, a red, wrinkled, sunkissed man, walked his white daughter to the stone of separation, the clothed severing block.

      Faced with that processional ritual, the giving away of the bride, the dispatch of a woman virginally white between two different sorts of phallic master, Harry considered its validity. Certain rituals, though aged and imperfect, keep a fittingness, a congruity across time, a sense of meaning that pervades. Summer’s father, Graham, had given her away. Summer would never admit to being comfortable with that notion, that sense of male ownership that lingers in the marital ceremony. She hadn’t accepted Harry’s last name, though she welcomed any public conception of her, Harry, and Lars as The Wisthoms, as one unit joined under her husband’s name. Much in life is decided for us, Summer thought, as Ruth and her father reached the culmination of the altar, the sanctuary around. She had been happy to make that walk with her father, before he’d left this world in favour of another. The photograph continued to exist while daddy did not. She couldn’t help smiling, she couldn’t help but be moved by something immemorial, something deep and rooted that continued to reside in the heart of such a ritual act: being given away, by her father, to her husband. It expressed something, she reasoned, not quite what she wanted the ceremony of her wedding to express. But it expressed something. Harry thought much the same as his wife. As he watched the sweet look in his older brother’s eye, that sweet blue gaze that only the bereft seem to exude, receiving Ruth’s approach up the aisle, Harry felt a deep pang of pensive shame inside him. Harry knew how Winston had devoted himself to Oona tirelessly, shown great strength and performed great acts of love by her ailed bedside. Even in the simplicity of a cool cloth on her hot bald head, the strength of love was made manifest. 

      In the eye of Harry’s mind, April took the place of Ruth. She was garbed in white, she was veiled, and a bouquet filled her arms. The ageing, plain, irrelevant father from whose loins she sprang, allowed one last glory, one last show of relevance, performed the ceremonial act. Harry winced to envisage how old he would be when April married. Maybe she’d get married young and their fling would still be only freshly put to bed- whenever he did finally put it to bed. He would do it, he would do it, he told himself: he was too old and sad to be being dumped. Maybe ten years away- when she’d be the same age at which Harry and Summer got married- she’d remember her professor. Remember the essence of the paternal that she had sought and seen and conquered in her professor. Lars looked malcontently on the patriarchs at the front, ordained and lay, performing the ceremony of marriage, in the frowsty old church, with its antique wisdom and quaint trinkets and impotent morality. Harry looked at the bride; and the three male figures: father, brother, priest, surrounding her. Then he looked at Lara- Lars! he meant. He was trying, he really was. He tried to make that petition with his eyes. But whenever Harry looked at “Lars” his mind uttered “Lara”. Lars remained Lara, and Lara was his daughter. 

      It was strange. Harry wasn’t prepared for this. He hadn’t been prepared for university once, and then not for his first job, and then he hadn’t been prepared to get married, nor to have a child, nor to change that child’s nappy for the first time. It was strange, Harry felt…to feel himself looking at the daughter he had, once had, still had, the daughter that he might have given away, parted with, in the safe, brief, imperfect ritual of marriage but now had parted with under far stranger, far less usual, far more arcane circumstances. But as she looked back at him, she resisted being that daughter: He resisted being that daughter.

      Harry remembered stumbling into a cinema, drunk, after Covid, when the cinemas reopened. He had allowed himself a small, controlled relapse under such emotive circumstances. Teetotal once again. It had been a film called “A Wedding”. Robert Altman. He remembered with great pleasure, through his inebriation, a sequence in which a procession of limousines circled a circular lawn with fountain in the middle, to that famous Brahms Hungarian dance. The silly grandeur of it. Round and round and round the limousines went on the big screen. In the auditorium, in reply: a titter and then a crescendo of laughter at their dance. Then:

      To have and to hold: to have and to hold. In sickness and in health: in sickness and in health. With my body I honour you: with my body I honour you. Harry’s right ear was on fire. He stood up with a shudder and walked quickly out into the churchyard, taking up a handful of holy water from the stoop and cooling his ear with it. Having fled the cumulative kiss in the ceremony before him, and his wet ear still infernal, he lit a cigarette. Just as soon as the igniting flick of the lighter had sounded, he noticed the dark figure on the bench, on the other side of an expanse of graves, and potted roses, and willowherb. Harry moved a few paces towards the figure, in curiosity. Some force of recognition of realisation was acting faster than his cognition. He felt that he recognised this man and studied the form, frame, bodily features, facial features, zealously, yet attempting not to fixedly stare as he did so. Finally, the pinging light of recognition came, widening Harry’s eyes, and flinging like a cricket ball released from the scooped bowling hand towards the standing wickets of his brain, that one haunted, decades unacknowledged monosyllable: Dad.   

      “Dad?” Harry called out, hardly meaning to. The questioning intonation was evident. The figure rose. Harry had his answer. A blackbird jumped. This way, that way. He flew off. Birdsong fell softly over the meeting of Harry and the man who was his father.

      Harry had not seen his father for twenty-two years. It took him almost a minute to arrive at the accurate number of years since he and the figure across from him had last encountered one another. They approached one another, warily.

      “Hello, dad,” Harry said.

      “Hello, son,” Harry’s father said, also Winston’s father: Michael.

      “What are you doing here?” Harry said.

      “I’ve been waiting outside,” Harry’s father said. “I wasn’t invited”.

      Harry didn’t know what to say. He knew that not all can receive invite to a wedding. One does one’s best to keep away the bad and the mad and the sad. Maybe not the sad: Harry was present, after all, feeling pretty sad. There was a cousin he was very fond of, once upon a time. He would have loved to invite her to his and Summer’s wedding, all those years ago. But he had allowed himself to be advised against it.

       “I won’t cause any trouble,” Michael said, speaking with slow stern knowing. “I just wanted to see the wedding day, see a son of mine on his wedding day. Might be the last chance I get”.

      Harry gazed into his father’s face. The facial flesh was squeezed and lined, and the mouth a little collapsed with years of heavy drinking, and, finding derivation from the same pursuits, two spots of sunken darkness beneath his two eyes sat, each like a dark shadow cast by the soul lurking within the iris. Harry recognised himself, and his daughter too, with alienated familiarity, in his father’s features, and in occasional habits too: he and his father had shared the same twitch once, in the right-hand corner of the face. His father twitched, then and there, as though Harry had been able to cause it by telepathy. Michael Wisthom moved with infirm majesty closer to his son. Harry felt himself step backwards with his father’s approach.

      When the wedding party, led by the bride and groom and succeeded by the clergyman, streamed out into the churchyard, rice and confetti showered them from all sides. Chatter and laughter and a crying baby and a small group of frothing and jumping bridesmaids all drew Harry away from his father and trapped him in their dizzy spell. There were two flower girls in bridal white, and a little boy. Michael continued to stand, stern and spectatorial, at the periphery of the busy vision: all the while, a photographer took photographs of it. Winston withdrew from the embrace of his new wife, from the lips that rounded her astonishingly charming smile, and noticed his father standing there. Winston continued to smile, but his face grew tense and his eyes fluttered with concern. Eyes have a habit of opening and closing a lot when the mind is thinking, imagining, remembering, stormed with activity. Winston blinked a lot whenever he had to lie. Harry continued to suffer hot ears. The last that Harry saw of his father, he was talking to he and Winston’s mother, and Murray. Harry had never seen anyone look so unhappy to see someone as his mother and step-dad Murray looked to see Michael, and Michael right back at them.  

      The wedding party went in their cars to Frownly Manor where the reception was to take place. The quantities of food and drink awaiting consumption by all in attendance were substantial.

      The Wisthom’s father trudged morosely behind them and seated himself with Winston and Harry at the head table, having made his own way to Frownly by taxi, acquiring the address from an unsuspecting wedding guest. Crossing the threshold and following behind into the foyer, he moved with a kind of invasive slowness, a rootedness that planted in Winston and Harry’s minds a feeling of the immovable. Unphased he ambled, uninvited. Their father moved behind them and went where they went, in his ragged hat and creased, unmeasured suit, like a great weight. Having self-nominated his presence at the wedding, he gave no sign that he would take ejection lightly, and Winston felt powerless to eject him.

      News of the unannounced and unexpected materialisation of the estranged father at the wedding went around the room in hushed voices, turning heads.

      Between all members of the Wisthom family’s attendant generations, the utterances were laconic and sparse. The gnaw of the past worried at them wordlessly, the past nested between them, unable to find the release of confrontation, or even the relief of acknowledgement.

      “I saw you on that website,” Harry said to his father, who was intently nursing a big glass of lager.

      “What?” Michael said.

      “I saw your website,” Harry said. Harry had recently searched online for a trace of his father and found him on a strange, lilac-toned website. VIRTUE.ORG.

      “What of it?” Michael said. The folds of his red forehead bobbed in the strangest manner. Memories in his old, complicated mind furrowed and unfurrowed his brow.

      “I’m not sure what I thought about it,” Harry said.

      “I don’t have much to do with them anymore,” Michael said.

      “Virtuous abstinence?” Harry said. “Paedophile rights advocacy?”

      There was a weighty, knowledgeable silence between them. A young waitress entered with a salver of duck and swiftly made for the foremost table with it.

      “I got mixed up in heavy and uncomfortable business, Harry. But I always acted morally, you do know that, don’t you? My conscience is clear.”

      Their father was fatherly in his reign. He commanded a brooding power over the table at which he sat. The waitress placed the duck in the centre of the white cloth. She was quite short, and the dish’s landing spot was just a little further than she could comfortably reach. Stretching out her arms and then withdrawing them effortfully, forgetting to keep an eye on the accoutred and thickly furnished surroundings, she narrowly avoided knocking over Michael’s glass of beer.

      “Whoa!” he exclaimed, stilling the glass.

      “Oh, whoops, sorry sir,” she said, reacting abashedly.

      Michael looked the young woman up and down, very deliberately.

      “What’s your name, love?” he said, with all the time in the world.

      Harry put his head in his hands, mustered a conscious effort towards invisibility. Right away flirtation was obvious, in the intonation, and the glint of sleaze that glittered in his father’s bagged eyes and on what teeth he had left. Dealing with this latest specimen of a generation of male who thought it quite appropriate to flirt with waitresses, the waitress was coldly cordial and wary.

       “Um…Niccola,” she said.

       “First day, is it, Niccola?” Michael said.

      She looked about uncomfortably.

      “First week,” she admitted.

      “Dad, leave her alone. Don’t bother the staff, they’re busy,” Harry said, his right ear screaming again with heat, and his tone a little contemptuous and exasperated.

      Niccola tacitly thanked Harry for the rescue he had provided.

      “Am I bothering you, love?” Michael enquired, disingenuously.

       Niccola half-apologised with a quick, efficient laugh, and escaped the table, walking quickly off. Michael gazed after her quick flight, eyeing the two-thirds of stockinged leg left visible by the small, regulation black skirt.

      “Her boyfriend’s a lucky lad,” Michael said.

      “Maybe she hasn’t got a boyfriend,” Harry sighed world-wearily.

      “Don’t be ridiculous. How could she not?”

      “Maybe she likes women, maybe she’s a virgin, maybe she has five boyfriends, I don’t know, dad. It’s none of our business.”

      Michael sipped, ominously. April filled Harry’s mind. He dipped his fingers in the glass of water closest to him, and went back and forth clasping the upper curve and the lower lobe of his right ear.

      “What the Christ is that you’re doing?”

      “Hot ear,” Harry said.

      Summer and Lars were a few seats away. The sound of Michael’s voice turned their heads occasionally. Lars seemed to be quite intent upon her duck, Harry thought. He shot her a small, honest smile and he suffered the occasional reluctant look of acknowledgment back.

      “What’s going on with your girl, Harold?” Michael said.

      “Son, dad. Lars is a guy.” Harry answered. “And please don’t call me Harold. No-one calls me that.”

      “I chose that name for you,” Michael said. “Winston my eldest, Harold my littlest. Good, English, proper, priministerial names.”

      “Lars used to be Lara but he’s transitioning to become a boy.”

      “Oh, is that so?” Michael replied, mockingly. He laughed, catching the attention of a waiter, and said, through the last of his soft, wheezy laugh: “You must be joking” and ordered another lager.

      “It’s not actually funny, dad, it’s a difficult road and there’s been quite a lot of pain and difficulty along the way so I’ll thank you not to be flippant about it.”

      Michael paled and went silent. He was so effortlessly authoritative the majority of the time. But sometimes he was simply shocked into strange silence and looked about, lost. He received a pint silently from the waiter. Then he stood up and walked away. He said “Congratulations, mate” to Winston and then disappeared. 

      There were various lounges, drawing rooms, and suites dotted around the manor, most of them empty, waiting to receive people from the main dining hall upon their wish to retire. Harry remained at the table, his appetite little. The plate of food before him sat hardly touched, a grim superfluity. A bottle of champagne stood within grabbing distance, a faceless, spectral beacon. Harry’s gaze dimmed and dropped: he wanted to reach out and touch the soft face of the remembered vision he saw before him. April. He wished to leave everyone else and be with her. He wanted to hold her shoulders and sink down into the young, flower-smell of her flesh. 

       Michael, exploring the corridor, heard children’s laughter. The hallway was airy and full of light. Gelid spring sunlight pervaded the interior through big windows. Michael trudged with the beer in his hand, allowing himself to be drawn the way of the children’s laughter. He entered a spacious room, a deal table at one end laid with a bowl of fruit and wine bottles. There was a potted orange tree by a window seat cushioned in maroon, set before a capacious double window looking onto patio and gardens. The violet curtains were parted, and furled symmetrically on either side of the frame. There were two large hazel coloured sofas, an attractively aged rug laid upon the wooden floor, an old antique spinning globe in a holder, a quaint sundial, and framed pictures on the walls: eighteenth century ladies in electric blue dresses, fattened by frothing pantaloons, with huge curly hair wigged upon their heads. From behind fans, raised and motioned at mouth height, their seductive looks, bashful, deviant, stole from the paintings in which they courted imprisoned, and into Michael’s mind, which swam as he looked on them. And it seemed that they looked upon him too. 

      In the centre of the room, on the rug before an empty fireplace, three children were playing. Two girls and a little boy, each one adorable in their formal attire, rarely worn. The girls were both in juvenile, bridal white, the boy blue-shirted, beneath a dark waistcoat. The girls were distinguishable principally by their hair, one’s was curled and ginger, the other’s straight and fair as could be. The children were stacking Jenga blocks into tottering towers, and they took great pleasure in the towers’ frequent demise, howling with laughter at one’s demolition, assiduously rebuilding another as soon as it had collapsed. Michael seated himself on the nearest sofa and watched their play. The children were oblivious to him. They didn’t acknowledge the old man’s presence one iota as he watched them. Until it occurred to the girl with fair hair that perhaps it was really, quite extraordinarily rude to ignore a new visitor, no matter how old he was.

      “Hello,” she said, standing before Michael.

      “Hello, my darling,” Michael said. “And what’s your name, love?”

      “I’m Pearl,” Pearl said.

      Back in the main hall, Ruth’s Italian relatives were chatting and laughing away happily, drunkenly. Winston’s side were a little more reserved, but jaunty discourses began gradually to pass from relative to relative, acquaintance to acquaintance, new and old, across the massed tables to which desert, coffee, liqueurs, digestifs were being brought.

      Harry looked around him. Summer seemed unbearably distant from him. She was in fluid conversation with an uncle that Harry hadn’t seen for about seven Christmases. Harry felt forsaken and lonely. In his solitude, as he looked about the busy room, he saw things, things which beckoned his gaze, filling him with thoughts and frowns…he saw backs of necks and shadows and people in silhouette and expensive shoes and contraband measures of booze and his daughter in her recent, clung to, incongruous maleness. Her true self? Her true mind? and he saw a man and a woman, older than April, but younger than he and Summer. He saw the bemused wonder in the man’s eyes he was sure he had disguised but hadn’t quite, and the woman’s cordial, careful conviviality. Who was his father? Who was her father? What kind of a father would he be? What kind of a father would she be? Well, not a father is the answer, but a mother, Harry thought, and then he thought Fuck me, my ear is hot. It was. Maybe they’d sneak off to somewhere quiet, Harry thought. Later, during the party, after they’d had a few glasses, and a joint round the back, and a dance. Maybe we should all be fixed, Harry thought, mercilessly. We should all be nuns and virgins and eunuchs.

      Winston’s best man, Sean, a university friend whom Harry found rather insufferable, was making his speech, replete with anecdote, concluding with Shakespeare, the crowd having been silenced what seemed an eternity ago, by the clinking of teaspoon on flute glass.

       “…if I can ask you all to indulge me for a minute,” Sean said, “I will embarrass myself with a little poem I learned when I was at school. My motives for memorising it were perfectly ignoble, I hasten to add, someone told me that poets get girls and so I…anyway, I digress. It goes like this…Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove…”

      The man spoke unpoetically. But the famed words rang like distant cathedral bells in Harry’s mind. From far away behind the unpassable bulk of some grey hill, panging syllable upon panging syllable, so was unbearably recalled his vocation to literature, the stack of hideous first year essays he’d yet to grade, April, and her naïve, touching love of poems, and the poem that her body was. He took out his mobile, discreetly reading the screen in his lap, and noticed that he had texts from her. He scrolled subtlety through her typed clichés, and drank them in a terrible bliss: Missing you. It’s not right you’re not here. Are we still cool? 

      “…the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken,” Sean crooned.

      Harry suddenly found that he couldn’t expel the song April, Come She Will from his mind. When streams are ripe and swelled with rain, Maaaaaaa-aaaaaay She will sta-a-ay. He remembered the record turning in a distant summer. His father had screamed at the top of his voice, stormed out of the house, his mother was weeping, the LP was turning. It was his dad’s record. Harry imagined how he might have gone into a record shop in the West End, paid for it in shillings, carried it out of the record shop all the way to the turntable in his cheap apartment, heard it, its music, its words, believed in them, believed them.

      Harry felt himself begin to type. He was going to do it. He was going to tell April that they couldn’t see each other anymore. He desired her more than ever and he began to fear the effect that she had on him, he began to fear the havoc that his desire, if it was allowed to progress, might wreak upon his life, in all its already quite evident challenges and fragilities. Some part of himself urged him to tell her, to rip her from his life, rip her out like a heart. Who needs a heart? Harry thought. 

      “…though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass comes…”

      But he couldn’t do it. His finger hovered in a paralysis. He couldn’t articulate to himself what he wanted. He should like to love his wife. He should like to feel that his daughter hadn’t died. He should like to love his father.

      “Nor no man ever loved.”

      What if no man had ever loved? No, it couldn’t be so, it couldn’t be so! He was sure that no man had ever loved perfectly. Harry was sure his ear, the right, was about to burst into flame. It was extraordinary to him, the heat he felt ringing within its curved, pink porch.

      “Harry, you’ve been a bit quiet, mate. Why don’t you cut the cake?”

      “What?” Harry said, surprised to find himself on public display and his reverie expired, with such suddenness.

      “Cut the cake,” Winston said. “Bit untraditional, bit funky. Let’s have the brother cut the cake.”

      “But…I…” Harry protested, and put his phone back into his pocket hastily. Ruth looked so placid and sweet. Her father shook his head and wrang his hands in Italian disbelief at the swerve from tradition. They were culturally conservative Italians. Niccola the waitress set a glass of grappa before him and he drank it. Then she disappeared.  

      The bride appeared before Harry. His wife and his child looked at him, with a curious disappointment. 

      “Here you are,” Ruth said, a hideous smile on her lips, bearing the weapon: an enormous, weighty, serrated cake-slice, with heavy, gleaming crystalline handle. It changed hands. “We want you to cut it!” she crowed.

      “I…I…” Harry was normally so articulate, had made a living on such an aptitude. Now he was robbed of all words. 

      “Get up!” she barked.

      “What?” Harry replied.

      “Get up!” Ruth barked.

      He obeyed. She took him by the shoulders and marched him over to the white, pyramidal spectacle of the cake. The guests watched in wide-eyed apprehension. Harry’s footsteps drummed loud on the floor.

      “Now: Slice,” she said. The words slipped forth sibilantly, sinisterly.

      “But…but my…” Harry grasped his right ear. The heat was incredible, it was a larval source, like a small sun. “My ear.”

      “Your ear?” Ruth said, leaning in close. “What’s wrong with your ear?”

      Harry felt breathless: at the closeness he enjoyed to the bust bound in her wedding dress, his proximity to the intense Italianate eyes, to the stealing notes of perfume, and the dulcet cruelty in her voice. He started to cry. He felt pathetic, pitiful, like a little boy, holding the enormous cake slice.

      “It’s so hot!” he sobbed.

      “This one,” Ruth said, pointing to the burning ear.

      “Yes.”

      “I’ll take care of it,” Ruth said.

      And she leaned in even closer, took Harry’s right ear in her mouth, and sucked it, in an attempt to cool it with her spittle. The ear clicked and swilled and made sucking sounds, as its shape shifted about, filling the mouth of his brother’s bride. Then she let it go. 

      “Is that better?” she sweetly said, purring the four syllables silkenly.

      Harry touched the ear, tentatively. In trepidation he realised the answer.

      “No,” he bluntly said. It was still burning. 

      He put the blade of the cake-slice to his throbbing, immolating, fire-fierce right ear, and, quite naturally, quite mindlessly, he sawed it off. Back and forth he mowed, moving the blade in a quick frenzy until the ear came off, quite cleanly. Fainting to the floor, the wound pooling red, he was amazed at how easy it had been, at how little and how severable the flesh that held the ear to the side of his head. Various noises rose in reaction from the watching guests. Gasps of horror, screams of revulsion, odd laughter. Some were silent, unmoved. 

      Just then a woman hurried anxiously into the hall, two children with her, a boy and a girl. 

      “Has anyone seen Pearl!” she cried out. Half the wedding party seemed to respond to her, the other half remained mesmerised by the carnal spectacle before the wedding cake, red against the white of the cake and the white of Ruth’s wedding dress.

      “Little girl with blonde hair. She was playing with Tom and Dora!”

      “Maybe she copped off with a man!” somebody joked.

      Everyone laughed.

      “Lots of people get together at weddings,” said another.

      “Yes, mummy,” the little boy in the blue shirt and waistcoat said. “I told you. She went off with a man.”  

      Ruth picked up the cut-off ear and studied it, Harry slumped horizontal on the floor, at her feet. Summer looked on blankly, unmoved by the carnage. But Lars got up and ran over to Harry, where she stooped to meet his floored form. Lars’ experience of life had taught him a fear of severing, of surgical wounds. He wept, worried at her father, wept over him, kissed the wound in the side of his head, his hand uncurled and the bloody cake-slice gleaming and sanguinary in his open palm. Together they looked like John and Jackie Kennedy, in the back of the car, on that terrible day.      

     “Daddy!” Lars cried out. “Daddy!” 

      For she loved him.