At twelve years old Potato Head has learnt to manage the double syllable quite well, echoing her upper and her lower shape that look like two cells filled with sap and preparing for separation. But other words come hard through her cleft palate. Gug-gug-grr, she says. Everyone looks at us in the big canteen and I feel overcome with shame, don’t talk, Potato.
— Gug, gug, nnn — da.
— Stop it, Potato.
— Grr — da.
— Come to mummy, Potato Head, come, here, this way. Here, my love.
Potato Head turns her watery eye towards the voice and gropes at it, burying her blind face into her mother’s lap. Grr … da … grrr … da, she sobs.
— She says her grandmother has died, Something tells me. Well, we’d better go to her, hadn’t we, my sweet?
— Her grandmother? Who, for heaven’s sake? And where?
— Not far. Next door, in fact, upstairs.
Dippermouth weighs a ton in my right arm and wakes with a short burst of ringing. Where’s Gut got to, he asks.
— Next door. Upstairs.
We have become quite estranged, Something and I, as if my impatience with Potato Head came between us, which of course it does, for I envy her ability to hear and translate my daughter’s speech. Next door in fact upstairs Gut Bucket stands stock still under the bed of his large unconscious grandmother, respectfully receiving her incontinence. Hi, fat grandma, says Dippermouth and dips his mouth a little while Potato Head gropes blindly towards the smell. Gug, gug, … grrr … pa-pa, she wails like a bent doll.
— We’ll have to change her, Something says. Help me, Lazarus.
The name floods through me incontinently and I remember everything, the almost perfect spheres, the travel agent, the journalists, good people all, the meridians like elastic and the cat’s cradle we played, the canals and the horse-power, the pond of heavy water sinking like my heart, the giant trumpet and the ear of the world turning away lined with cork peeled off in curved segments wounded in bright orange. I hold my two hands over my ears and shout to drown the pain. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
But I do, because Something tells me I must. I stand behind the big fat woman’s head and slip my hands under her sweaty arms. Something takes her under the thighs on one side, Potato Head unexpectedly strong on the other and we lift her off the bed onto the floor where she moans and makes a large puddle. Something changes her bedclothes quickly, laying a plastic sheet on which we lift her back. She weighs a million million years.
— Good people, good, these hands that saved. I shall flounce out and, then, what will you, do.
— Hush, grandma, says Gut Bucket in a cleaned out echoing voice, don’t tire yourself.
— Useful, for the, waste-disposal, Bucket, boy. The bond, remains, where –
— Here, grandma. Dippermouth Blues, grandma.
— Oh yes. My, how … and you, what do they …?
— Lazarus, madam.
— The bond, my, rights, you know.
— Gug — gug — grrr.
— Ah my Sweet Potato.
She dies, her muscles tighten, her juices dry up. The journalists bring a stretcher and lower her through the puddle on the floor into the chapel below where a coffin on wheels receives her in the midst of lilies and white carnations that absorb the smell. Gug — gug, Potato Head sobs in my arms as we walk down the spiral staircase, there, my love, don’t cry, my little one, my daughter, and the Blues played by Jonas and his Jovials wail writhing up the aisle, don’t cry my love until at last the funeral music stops.
— Bury me under the cork-trees, says the body of Something’s mother in the sudden silence amid the lilies and carnations and Potato Head screams.
— Gug — gug — grrr — na da, na ba, na ba.
— Of course she has died, my little one. And we must bury her. She only speaks from reflex action, it will pass. Look, it has passed.
— Pa — pa. Pa — pa. Alalala — love you.
We walk the earth on our ten feet like a decimated centipede, Something and Dippermouth, Potato Head and I, Gut Bucket bringing up the rear. Tall blue flowers line our path. Ahead of the procession Something picks a few here and there as she walks, and lays them in a long and shallow basket. I pick some too to help her, but they won’t pick, they draw out on and on from deep down, and come up with the root that wriggles like a lizard. Do your flowers have live roots? Yes of course, we have to live on something.
— Pa — pa, wa — wag — ga?
— I don’t know, my sweet. Where do we go, Something? I mean, I would like to know and it might help the children not to get too tired and nervous.
— One never does know exactly, does one, Lazarus. If one did one wouldn’t get there. But we have to find the lady.
— The lady. Now what? Another secret instruction?
— Every spy-story has a lady, you know that.
— Oh, you mean the decoy blonde? Well, why didn’t you say so?
— Because I don’t know the colour of her hair, her shape, her age, or anything about her.
— You seem pretty helpless I must say, for a girl-spy. How will you know her then? By a secret sign I suppose?
— In a way. By the square we shall find her in.
— Oh, so we move in squares now, do we?
— Of course, haven’t you noticed? Every circle has its square, you know that, Lazarus. Every sphere has its cube. We live in squares and on square roots.
— I can’t see anything square about these roots. Wriggling lizards and worms, moles, rats, ferrets and snails. Do you really expect me to eat those?
— I expect nothing of you that you don’t freely want to give. We’d better stop here.
— What’s happened to you, Something, why do you act like some sort of schoolmistress, so estranged, so distant?
— You make the distances, Someone.
— Me? I don’t. Good heavens, you’ve called me by my real name. You haven’t done that for a long time.
— Pa — pa.
— You have many names to answer to, Lazarus, and you don’t always answer. I even send you little notes sometimes, but I don’t suppose you read them.
— Notes? I’ve never seen little notes from you.
— Well, you’d hear them, actually, or see their sounds.
— Oh. Yes I do receive your notes. But you don’t exactly put your signature on them, do you?
— Stop quarrelling, dad.
— I like to preserve a certain discretion in the circumstances. Besides, you don’t really read them so what difference does it make?
— I shall scream for attention like a child of three if you two go on. Time to eat.
— Bang-bang, pop, time to eat.
— Smile, Something.
— Well… you smile first.
Potato Head gives a loud gurgling laugh. She hasn’t heard this code before. I smile and Something smiles and takes the lizards from the basket to fry them alive so that they shrivel into chopped up cubes. What spheres? I mean, what circumstances?
— I beg your pardon? Oh. My professional circumstances.
— Ah yes. As a girl-spy. I don’t altogether like your profession, you know.
— I don’t either. As a matter of fact for a long time I haven’t had much future as a girl-spy.
— You mean, because of me?
— Well, yes and no. Without you I wouldn’t have any future at all. I mightn’t even exist. But you think you can live without causality, pretending that each moment has its own separateness, that anyone might come or go in that moment like an electron. Why, you might as well ask for the moon.