Make Me An Instrument

"Now he's in love with you, he's in love with you
Love is like a high prison wall
But you don't leave me standing so tall"

-Gold, Spandau Ballet


(Content Warning:
Strong language, strong sex references, and emotional distress)

Transcript

Make Me an Instrument

Collette Wile and D. Dim went on their first date in the April of the year. Collette and D. were a pair of shy, unrealised creatures. They had met at church, the church a few streets away where family tradition had them altar-serve. White as turtle-doves in their surplices while they performed their ceremonial Sunday duties, they were not so much armoured as hidden, not so much protected as concealed. A soul could hide, cower, not be naked there. But D. Dim found himself unusually taken by Collette’s usual march on the Easter Sunday in April. He was behind her, carrying a candle to the altar, and she was ahead leading the procession at the start of the mass with an immodestly large crucifix staff. How she walked, with the skewered Christ raised above her head, how she bounced her walk with Him with something like dance, how she seemed to delight, how she did delight, in brandishing, bandying that skewered body about. After the mass, she stole from the collection plate. D. felt he could ask her out. They were both in fact of age- if years junior in spirit- to drink together, and so they drank, hesitantly and ashamedly at a pub a few miles away. They had nothing to fear in each other. Some force- an inarticulateness which reminded Collette of history papers- stifled her. D. was stymied too in his attempts to reach her at first. At one point, he felt himself flash a withered, forlorn look across the bar at a couple, a man and a woman a little older than he and Collette, clicking like metronomes, chatting and giggling and squealing and swelling like a thing for which there is no simile. He was so jealous of that transcendent rapport he did not feel on his date: so he told himself to seek it more furiously, and then he immediately corrected that with the realisation that if he made himself come over too eager then all he would do is he would bury himself and any chance at a relationship with Collette. He quietly hoped, and left his desperation in the urinal where he had his midway piss and returned to the table and found that things improved, the mood at their table improved. He was happy to pay for everything that evening. Still April, they met up for a second time. Dinner this time. She was warming to him. The repellently mild exterior melted away gradually, and he dawned on her gradually, a morning of him gleamed and she recognised the gleam. Things were going quite well. They drank wine, both white, very grassy and cool, and ate linguine and garlic and shrimp. Then D. went to the bathroom. When he came back he found that his glass of the white was empty, and one of his shrimp was missing. He was gratified by his progress with Collette so he pretended not to notice but, secretly, he came away very hurt. He caught her eyes a couple of times. He refused to be hurt that she had stolen from him and so he made his eyes loving. Hers were so deep, so articulate, so fetching: yet was there a glint? A spark of malignity? Was she testing him? D. was happy to pay for everything but he would have been gratified- in a way relieved- if Collette had at least offered to contribute, made the gesture of contribution, of willingness to contribute by an excavation of her purse from her handbag and a cordial laying of it upon the table. Christ, he wouldn’t have expected her to follow through. But when he thought about it, as he tried in vain to masturbate over her in his bed, he didn’t find it such an intolerable transaction: she robbed him blind, he got the pleasure of her company. And, later: her body. For about thirteen seconds. He talked a lot, he felt a need to fill silence with the sound of his own voice. She stopped him talking, stopped his mouth with a kiss, she even said “stop talking” and gave him permission to do rather than talk about doing. Having stolen his virginity, she grew fonder of him. And his fondness matured to an infatuation, a gentle infatuation at first. It soon became a more intense fervour that took him. Collette’s casual and undiagnosed kleptomania intensified in turn. Having stolen wine and fish at dinner, and then that which D. desired above all else to lose, the betrayals grew less trivial. She didn’t smoke but she stole cigarettes from D. just for the curious pleasure she took in his deprivation. But rather like that pierced and rigid Christ that belonged and indeed was trapped in her lively hands, D. found himself without the possibility of escape from her skewer: if he wanted to be with her, that is. Collette stole D.’s clothes, one after the other, each time she was around at his house. When she ate dinner with the family she lessened D.’s portion by surreptitiously thieving some for herself. He lost weight, and then grew emaciated. And she never left the house without a garment, an item of clothing that belonged to D. So his wardrobe shrank and he only had three shirts after about six weeks. He had to wear the same shirts often without having time to wash them and he smelt because of this. He took courses in chemistry and French at the local college, and Collette stole his textbooks and exercise books, pages full of equations and laboratory notes detailing the mixing of compounds to violent results, tables of verb conjugations and vocabulary, translations and composition: she took every record from him of his work, and it was as though he had never tried. He became brainless, his intellect ebbed, and he quit the college. Everything he had to give he gave to her, or lost willingly. He submitted to her strange appetites without complaint. He refused to be miserable. Though he’d lost so much, he’d gained her, Collette Wile. She was worth everything, she was a score, she was a catch, she was a find. She was treasure. He treasured her. He got to touch her, to violate her, just as she had violated him and would violate him right back. By September he lived in a cage in Collette’s room. She didn’t spend any money on it. She just stole it from a pet shop. It was an enclosure for rabbits. Effectively, she had stolen D.’s family and friends, he wasn’t free to see anyone, to do anything. He wasn’t free period. So she’d stolen his liberty as well. And D. didn’t speak anymore. It was the last that could be taken from him. But he was content to part with speech at Collette’s command, just like the way she’d stopped his voice from doing its banal work that first night they’d had sex, and led him on to greater pleasure. D. started to enjoy his captivity. It started to arouse him, this animal existence, this existence of food, water, excrement, sleep, and mating. The mating was the sweetest of all these. The fucking. It was the only thing he had to look forward to. She opened the cage, and received his savagery on her bed, his revenge for all that she had thieved. He’d take, as big a sum as she had taken, using his instrument. She’d made him an instrument of procreation and so he procreated with her, brutally, feeling vicious, rewarded, and equitable. He roared with satisfaction and then whimpered. She pushed him back into his cage and he slept on the hay after a few snuffles, his silent red length curled up in a foetus curl. The baby’s coming like the rest of the situation was, to all Catholic standards and practice, deeply disagreeable but a bastard birth seemed less of an infraction than a bastard abortion. Many months rolled by, and Collette swelled with what D. had given her. His bovine eyes looked longingly through the bars of his cage at Collette’s growing snowball belly, his child. When he didn’t get sex he’d bark in anger and she’d deprive him of one of his meals or refuse to empty his leavings. The baby arrived early. Collette’s waters broke in a burning gush of amniotic blue onto her legs and she swayed and rocked and beat her temples with the pain of labour. She dialled the number of the midwife and a very old and fat nun clambered up the stairs, almost expiring with exhaustion from the journey. She went over and readied Collette for delivery, feeling the baby’s progress with her plump expert hands which she clasped upon the baby’s shape. She turned Collette onto her side and had her raise her left leg up. Agony tore huge screams from her throat. The baby’s head was effortfully edging its silver sphere into the world, and D. started jumping up and down and whooping and nickering like a horse. The nun looked at the cage with D. in it and decided that she no longer felt comfortable having a man in the birthing room. She dialled the number of a building company and asked them to come to the address in order to remove the cage with D. in it by crane. Mother screams going all the while, the tall vehicle arrived, pulled up next to the right window after some confusion, and the nun clamped what looked like a harness with a hook on the end of it onto the cage. The window, however, was too small an exit for the cage so the removal was abandoned. The cacophony remained constant. But all too soon the baby slipped out, still corded, into the bed. A little girl was born. But no birth cry. The room was silent but for Collette’s panting breaths, the rumble of the nun’s deep, quiet words of explanation and consolation, and D.’s not incurious grunts. The cryless baby born, the afterbirth slithered from Collette in pursuit, and the nun dealt with it in a kidney dish and cut the cord. She took the baby between the encompassing, doughy hams of her hands and attempted some manipulations and caresses and motions that might coax a response from the silent baby. Five firm and hearty smacks of the tiny buttocks, and she gave up. It was a still-birth. The baby was limp, glistening, somehow vital and yet her flesh was plastic. The nun suggested Collette meet the baby and say goodbye. The infant mouth was open, a purple bruise of slumber in her little face. Collette sobbed into the cooling grey human littleness in her arms.
“Why me?” she said. “Why me!” she cried out.
Her child had been taken from her and she couldn’t bear it. She was a terrible thief. But now she knew better than anyone what it was to be robbed.
“Open the door,” she said to the nun, hoarse with weeping. The nun was carrying away the baby in her blue arms.
“What did you say, child?” the nun replied, a little hard of hearing.
“Open his door,” Collette Wile reuttered, no louder. The nun pointed to D.’s cage. He was soundless, though his eyes were animated.
“His?” the nun asked.
“Yes”. The cage door wasn’t locked, though it couldn’t be opened from the inside. The nun opened the cage door and D. crawled out on all fours. The nun offered him the baby, a chance to hold his daughter, see her, remember her face, and say goodbye. But he couldn’t bear to see that, and he turned away sadly. The nun enfolded in cloth and enclosed the baby in her medical bag. D. leapt softly onto the bed and joined Collette where she lay. He stroked her wet cheeks and the disarray of her hair very lovingly and tenderly with his nose. He kissed her. He held her in his arms. He swaddled her supine shape with his arms and legs. He was loving. He was tender. He was very loving. *** In an April two years after, Collette Wile and D. Dim were not together. It didn’t work out. The presence of each was painful to the other. And each had their pecadilli- to say the least. D. moved away from the area and Collette turned for consolation to her faith, her family’s faith. She did not obtain it. Until one day she went into church on a wretched rainy morning. It was not even 9 o’clock. She passed the pieta, blue sorrowful Mary, and the dead body of her grown child in her arms. By the image, which she had seen many times before but could only now bear to look at so knowingly, there was a printed prayer. It said:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon…

It didn’t hold her attention. But then:

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

She thought about D. Dim all mass, as she pranced and self-importantly gallivanted with that large, tawdry crossed Christ in her hands. She thought of what she’d done to him. How good he’d been to her. She thought of their little baby that did not live. When the priest opened the tabernacle for communion she thought she heard a crying sound. When the priest put the host in her hand the crying sound got louder. She was sure that there was a baby crying, that she was holding a baby in her hand. 
“It’s…it’s crying” she said to the priest who stood over her, refusing to budge until she had consumed the host. 
The priest shook his head. And she ate it