| Secunda’s Lament Alice is now sixty with her battleship hips ungainly despite the pills, the mushrooms and the diet drops, all those thin cigarettes the worm turned her onto. She sees her granddaughter, Dinah, flounce off near a suspect rabbit-hole and the mystery overwhelms her. She considers calling 999, donning a magic pick and shovel, but the brat returns, untouched. Was she ever that young? Her best friend all but abandoned her the moment she bloodied her underpants, falling off the roof. He blushed when he stammered that the camera no longer loved her. For a year she bound her breasts, pretended to like hot cocoa and treacle. The Dees and Dums wanted to be her firsts, but frankly they were too fat, too belligerent, too prone to fetish. Her friend endured while one fiddled with her right areola and the other with her left. Her friend grew hard then pensive behind the lens, this had to be the end of a checkered childhood. She finally confessed what she really wanted, what she would later come to miss was a needle-skip-skip-skipping Yes, or some savory private endearment. In her heart, she wanted him to thrust her straight into another White Rabbit’s house, no longer blond but a widow’s peak of grey. She was not able to believe in 6 impossible things a day, and never mind lunchtime with those nasty diet Cokes. She wished her knights to be dark, confident and titillating. The final humiliation, was seeing her grandson change from a baby to a pig right before her very eyes. That awful business with the snooker table and the neighbor’s daughter Bunny. That DoDo Bird accusing her and him of who knows what and when; who did it and ran, again? And with which beast? This only brought up deep feelings of shame, years of Twelve Step Work, memories that keep her up nights, the scratching of her old friend’s nubby thick pen. |
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