Make Me an Instrument

Rewritten and rerecorded

MUSIC: Poulenc  Magnum Mysterium 

from four Christmas motets

Content Warning:

Strong language, strong sex, infant mortality

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, at the church a few streets away from both their homes 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, be not naked there. But D. Dim found himself unusually taken by Collette’s usual march at the Easter Sunday mass. 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 on a staff. How she walked, with the skewered Christ raised above her head, how she bounced her walk with something like dance, how she seemed to delight, how she did delight, in brandishing that skewered body about, lofting it high. After the mass, she stole a few pennies from the collection plate.  

D. felt he could ask Colette 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 both a little older than he and Collette, clicking like metronomes, chatting and giggling and squealing. Their verbal and spiritual rapport gradually gave way to caresses. He felt almost ill with jealousy, so envious of this chemistry which he could engender on his own date, much as his willed it. Collette observed D.’s struggles with dispassionate fascination. He paid for everything; and resolved not to give up.    

Still April, they met up for a second time, for dinner rather than drinks. She was warming to him, unexpectedly charmed by his forced displays of chivalry. He was beginning to dawn on her, like a morning of light that had up until now been kept from the world. At dinner, she had steak, he gamberoni and linguine. Then D. went to the bathroom. When he came back he found that his glass of the white was empty, and one of his prawns was missing, a little ruin of crushed shell on Collette’s side of the table. He noticed and received it as a test, a challenge that was being put to him. He even found it erotic.  

Indeed, when he thought about it, as he worked to generate masturbatory fervour out of her larcenies, he found it a rather agreeable transaction: she robbed him, he got the pleasure of her company. It was his way of paying for her presence in his life, the cost incurred. 

Later, things having progressed equitably, he got the pleasure of her body. Having stolen his virginity, she grew fonder of him. And he grew fonder of her. His willingness, as far as satisfying all of her conditions and demands, became more extreme 

Having stolen wine and fish at dinner, and then that which D. desired above all else to lose, the betrayals grew less trivial. Colette didn’t smoke but she stole cigarettes from D. just for the curious pleasure of doing so, since she now was the appointed agent of his deprivation- (and his reward, when reward was merited). Rather like that pierced and rigid Christ that she bore at mass, D. found himself, if he wanted to be with her, without the possibility of escape from her skewering standard. Collette stole D.’s clothes, more and more of them, on each visit to his house, starting with the dinner that was organised in order for her to meet D.’s parents. At the dinner itself, while the timid Dims weren’t looking, she lessened D.’s portion, surreptitiously thieving some of his meat and his mash for herself.   

He lost weight, and grew emaciated. Because Collette had collected so many of D.’s clothes for herself, he had often to wear the same shirts, day after day, and without having time to wash them he smelt. 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 from him every record of the work he had performed up to that point and, with all his efforts thusly erased, 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 Collette. He submitted to her strange appetites without complaint. He refused to be miserable. He sometimes felt that he was being abused but felt too complicit in that abuse to reasonably object to it. There was no question that he had permitted each escalation of the degradations visited upon him. 

And, though he’d lost so much, he’d gained Collette. She was worth everything, she was a score, she was a catch, she was a find. She was his treasure, and 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 bedroom which she had stolen from a pet shop. It was an enclosure for rabbits. She’d stolen him from his family, from what few friends he had. And, at last, she’d stolen his liberty as well. The iron cage, with her steady boyfriend inside it, sat beside a dresser with a large mirror. She often flung towels, perfumed in her wet, clean body, onto the cage, and sopping, handwashed clothes as well. They dripped down onto D. while they dried.      

Further to that, at Collette’s wish, D. didn’t speak anymore. So she’d, effectively, stolen his voice as well, any means of articulately protesting his captivity. She allowed him a few moans and grunts, the occasional howl. But use of the English language, or any human language for that matter, was strictly forbidden.   

In general, D. enjoyed his captivity. He didn’t just enjoy it, he enjoyed it immensely. It played a huge part in his sexual arousal and thus in his ability to perform sexually, this animal existence, this existence of food, water, excrement, sleep, and mating. Without his captivity, his being stripped in so many ways, he was sexually inarticulate. Together they had made something potent and effective. The mating was of course the sweetest of the few essential functions that D. was not denied. The mating, or fucking, was the only source of pleasure in his life, now. He looked forward to it and relished in it, with gleeful gusto. Collette would open the cage, and received his savagery on her bed. It was a form of revenge: it was the revenge, or was it the recompense?- of penile generosity, genital charity, for all that she had thieved. In giving, he’d take as big a sum as she had taken from him, using his instrument. 

At some point, deep into proceedings, it was tacitly agreed that procreation should be the new objective.  

The procreative ejaculation. He roared with satisfaction and then whimpered softly. Collette pushed D. back into his cage and, after a few contented, post-coital snuffles, he slept on the hay, his silent red length curled up in a foetal ball. 

D. lovingly watched, through the bars of his cage, as his girlfriend swelled with child, with the baby in her womb, with the fruit of his insemination. Catholicism would not look approvingly upon the bastard when it was born, but neither of them cared about that. To abort it was morally disordered too. 

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 nun, very old and fat, was soon clambering up the stairs. 

The nun went over to Collette and readied her for delivery, feeling for the baby’s progress, gripping the infant shape in her plump and expert hands. She turned Collette onto her side and had her raise her left leg up. The agony was intense as the silver sphere of the baby’s head edged, with amazing slowness and effort, into the world. 

From within his cage, D. jumped up and down, whooping like a monkey and nickering like a horse, as he watched the birth. The nun ignored him. All too soon the baby slipped out, still corded, into the bed. It was a little girl. She lay there, silent and glistening and female. The room remained quiet. The rumble of the nun’s low-level words, the gradual calming of Collette’s breaths, a few curious grunts from the cage on the other side of the room. But no birth-cry.      

Out of the mother, the afterbirth slithered, in pursuit of the infant who lay on the bed. The nun dealt with the placenta in a kidney dish and cut the cord that linked it with the motionless child. She took up the baby in firm, holy hands and attempted some manipulations and caresses and motions that might coax a response from it. After fifteen desperate smacks of the tiny buttocks, she gave up. The nun suggested Collette meet the baby and say goodbye. The infant mouth was open, a purple bruise of slumber in her little face. 

No-one said anything, or uttered even a syllable of noise, for a long time. 

“Open the door,” she said to the nun, hoarse with weeping. The nun was carrying away the baby in her robed 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 and unmoving, though his eyes were wide and animated.

“His?” the nun asked.

“Yes”. 

The cage door wasn’t locked. It couldn’t be opened from the inside, but from without no key was necessary. 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, to see her so he might remember her face before saying goodbye. 

When that sorrowful act was over and the nun had departed with the corpse of the child, D. leapt softly onto the bed and joined Collette where she lay. Very lovingly and very tenderly, he stroked her wet cheeks and the disarray of her hair with his nose. He kissed her, and held her, fast, in his arms. He swaddled her supine shape in his own arms and legs. He was very loving. 

***

Two years later. It was April. Collette went into church. It was a wretched rainy morning. Mass was about fifteen minutes away. She no longer altar-served. She passed the pieta, Mary blue and sorrowful, and the corpse of Christ, adult and formidable and scored, in her arms. Next to this, 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 grip her at first. But a few lines on, she found herself stirred:

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.

Collette thought about D. Dim all mass. From the attentive quiet of the pew, 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. Considering it more carefully, the words of the priest’s homily issuing unheard, she found theirs a love that had been fulfilling and lively. While their relationship had lasted, until what had given it life in the beginning became depressing and harmful, it had given their two disparate lives the shape of something whole.  

When the priest opened the tabernacle for communion, Collette was sure she heard the sound of a baby crying. When the priest put the host in her hand, the crying loudened. She was sure that there was a baby crying, that she was holding a crying baby in the very palm of her hand. 

“It’s…it’s crying” she said. 

The priest who stood over her said nothing. He waited for her to consume the host with patient severity.