A Lizard With No Tail
The black mole growing in her head. The idea that the more birthdays you collect, the more likely life will hide behind a corner, stick a leg out and make you trip.
Personal Essay
You can’t see all that dust sitting in your ears until you stick in a cotton bud. The issue though is that cotton buds really do no good to your eardrums. At least, so they say.
Our light green wooden bedside tables, our bespoke indigo dye wardrobe, the bathroom cabinet with Aloe Vera skin products and charcoal toothpaste, all grew a second skin. Our books sorted by colour lying on the floor, you can draw a smile on them with a finger. And this is not wood dust. This is thick, cloudy, 100-year-old imperial bricks stuck together with lime and horsehair dust. At least, that’s what the builder said.
Take down a wall to open up the kitchen into the living room making a single open area to host dinners with guests we never have. It was a 5-week job. The builder said that too. That was 12 weeks ago.
Now every time the hammer hits a nail or the grinder starts spinning to chop another piece of plasterboard, my finger shakes on the keyboard and stuttering emails pop up on my colleagues’ inbox.
Our bed is covered in breadcrumbs not even the dog wants to eat. We used to cook green mint soup, red lentil dahl, spicy fish and rice bake in tomato sauce. Now we just wait for dinner to be delivered to our doorstep.
We eat on the bed because we really don’t have a kitchen or a living room anymore. The only table left is this Japanese handcrafted wooden piece of art. It’s ankle high and now we use it for our dog’s bowls. Because wee lamb, she didn’t ask for any architect, build warranty or the open living room.
My wife says not even students live like this. Olives fall off her pizza leaving all these Dalmatian oily dots on the almond tree printed on our duvet. She says this is disgusting and squints so much half a tear spurts out of her eye. She says, “No one should ever know about this.” I say, no worries, no one ever will.
So we left breadcrumbs, dust and builder behind, and flew to see my parents. My hometown sits by this beach that gets smaller every year with the sea eating up one beach towel at a time. It gets so hot that all shops shut down for lunch and reopen when kids wake up after their siesta.
Now we have a clean working kitchen, but we’re only chewing fresh fruits bought from the street market because even turning a stove on, sweat starts dripping behind our ears.
On the upside though, my mother doesn’t sweat much. So she keeps preparing dishes before she goes on shift and my father brings them over in aluminium trays. Aluminium trays that we wash and reuse. You never know someone gets an environmental stroke because of an aluminium tray.
We’re happy. And my mother is happy too. Most of all because she doesn’t sweat much. But there’s a dim cloud floating over her head. There’s a sharp fatalism in her look, a sad temporality in the way she finishes her sentences. She says things like, “We better have dinner tonight, now that we can.” Or, “I’ll always enjoy prepping food for you guys for as long as God will let me.”
It’s all about God letting her do things. Time not leaving enough time.
And maybe that’s a job trademark.
Work in a care home where old velociraptors strike your forearm with their fingernails, where nappies are never big enough and linen never stay white for more than half a day, and you get a deep spirituality for free.
Also, those night shifts are a killer. Wish the old Marianne good night, and at your second walk in the ward, Marianne has her eyes rolled back and forgot to inhale forever. Then it’s a waltz of phone calls to an ambulance and sleepy relatives.
When you see the dangling end of so many ropes at work, you start seeing them everywhere else.
Jobs do what your kids’ crayons do to your favourite top. They leave a mark.
The sad dim cloud over my mother’s head got darker only recently. When I was visiting over Easter, I walked into the kitchen and my father was sitting on the sofa waving at no one. His heart pounding on his face, his hand flapping over the phone typing an infinite random number no one would ever pick up to. He was hiccupping words. He said, “Mo”. I said, “What?”. He went again, “Moth”. My father, a woodpecker without a tree.
“Mother,” he said. “Call your mother.”
My father, we dragged his jelly knees all the way downstairs and then I’m driving through the A&E gates with my hand stuck on the horn. Then the ward doors swallowed a wheelchair with my father sitting on it. I jumped on my flight back home without saying goodbye. I begged, I smiled, I cried, but I couldn’t. Post-Covid intensive care unit policies.
My father walked out of hospital a few weeks later and jumped straight into a meeting. After that, the cloud over my mother’s head got sadder. It got darker. The black mole growing in her head. The idea that the more birthdays you collect, the more likely life will hide behind a corner, stick a leg out and make you trip.
It’s always about those legs you don’t see.
We made a new friend here in the countryside. It’s a lizard with no tail. I told my wife, that’s not as bad as it seems. A Lizard’s tail always grows back. Like weeds in your back garden. Like a bad thought in your head. And my wife, she said, “You kidding, right?” I said, no. At least, so they say. But now I’m sure anymore.
We drink tea outside, feet up on a wall, looking at all these country houses, olive trees and the world spinning below. We run by the beach before work and we just plunge into the water for a dip. It’s like having a bathtub that can fit in an entire football stadium. That’s a big improvement considering that a few weeks ago we got even dirtier after a shower.
The builder texted us saying that he has a kidney infection, but he thought it was cancer, so that’s really good news.
Now we slow down time playing cards with this game my parents know since I was in school. And my wife is getting so competitive, I really don’t wanna play anymore because after one week she’s already beating me at every game.
The builder says everything will be done and dusted in 3 weeks, God willing. He promises. He swears. I tell my wife, it’s not as bad as it seems. I say, it could be worse. We could stumble and trip on a leg sticking out of a corner. And my wife, she said, “Sure. I’m booking a flight to Spain though. Just in case.”
You really transported me with this one. Felt like I was there. And you left me with that melancholy feeling sitting heavy in my gut again. You've got a knack for that.
Hi Benjamin,
I ran an online workshop with Suzy Vitello the end of last year and we are doing it a second time from Feb to April. And I'd like to invite you to join us if you have the time. (We will make the time difference work.) Here's my email: randydongshi@gmail.com. Let me know via email if you are interested and I can share with you all the details!
Maegan, Oliver, Karin from New York Story Night, just to name a few, but many strong writers from Chuck's community is a part of the workshop. If this nudges you at all!
Best,
Randy