The Jeremy - Snaps of the Dragon
By Jo S. Wun
Smashwords Edition
ISBN: 978-1-4523-2581-1
Copyright © 2010 Jo S.Wun
Cover design & illustrations © 2010 Jess Harpur
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A Note From The Author
If you came by this eBook by, shall we call it "illegitimate means" (which in blunter terms means you neither paid for it nor received it as a gift from the author), and you also intend to ignore the license terms above, then I doubt anything I write here will change that. But if it turns out that you get something out of reading it, then I humbly suggest you at least make a donation (any amount) to Médecins Sans Frontières; they'll make good use of your money. Thank you.
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Dedicated to our ancestors and all who came before them.
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Table of Contents
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The Jeremy - Snaps of the Dragon
Album No. 1
On the 4th day of June, in the year 7460 – according to the Byzantine calendar – an event took place the real significance of which was barely conceived at the time. Nevertheless, we can be reasonably sure that the conception of the Jeremy did, in all likelihood, happen while his parents were indeed stark naked. After all, although not entirely beyond the realms of possibility, it seems unlikely that the Jeremy’s father – despite his generally conservative British attitude – kept his socks on during a warm African night in June. However, this fact has never been verified – it seems an indelicate question to ask – which adds a modest amount of mystery to the event, don’t you think?
His conception was significant in as much as the creation of any child is significant. Of course, the creation of children does not absolutely guarantee the continued existence of our species; there may be some catastrophic event – perhaps a cosmic process – which kills us all off, or we may even manage to make ourselves extinct through some lunacy of our own, a possibility which seems to be gaining ground in an apparent race to oblivion. But for many of us, creating children is the best and possibly only way to make a meaningful contribution to the future.
Later in his life, the Jeremy would struggle with the morality of the argument that, in certain cases, the best contribution to the future some persons could make would be not to have children at all.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. He wasn’t even aware of his own existence yet. That happened some days after the closing ceremony of the Spermatazoan Olympics, so graciously hosted by his mother.
In true Olympic style, one sperm, who at the start was merely another contender among many, having proved beyond doubt his absolute fitness for victory – over a long and gruelling course – thrust himself headlong into his moment of glory with a cry of, “Long live the embryo!”
As challenging and arduous as the course may have been, this Prince of Sperms was but a sprinter carrying the baton of life to the marathon runner who would be the Jeremy.
We can safely leave it to qualified scientists to determine the exact moment that his awareness began to flourish. For our purposes, the knowledge that there was such a moment – a moment at which he began to feel – which inescapably occurred at some point between the Prince’s victory and the emergence of the Jeremy into the outer world, is sufficient.
What was it that he felt? His very first sensation? Did he feel warm? His environment was undoubtedly warm by our standards, but to judge warmth he would have needed some experience of different temperatures against which to make a comparison. His mother’s body was working hard to maintain a Goldilocks environment for him, one in which conditions were just right, where variations were kept to a minimum.
His first sensation didn’t really do justice to the word. It was nothing more than the registration of the state in which he found himself – the norm, the baseline, the point of reference by which he would notice changes as they happened.
And happen they did, and he was duly aware of them. But at this stage, it was very much a case of things happening to him, rather than him making them happen. He was pretty much a sitting duck at the mercy of his surroundings. And, as it happens, he looked much like a duck at a similar stage of development, too.
However, life was easy. He didn’t have to do anything much at all, except grow at an astounding rate. But that also just happened, without any conscious effort on his part. Indeed, very little seemed to be under his control, but it would not be long before he could deliberately dip his toes into the deep waters of human endeavour, by literally wiggling them.
At first, his source of knowledge about his environment was restricted to the detection of movement. But as time passed, his other senses began to awaken, and in due course, he was able to make his limbs move, blink his eyelids and hear sounds. Most of these sounds were of his mother’s body gurgling away as it carried out its normal digestive processes, but later on, he began to detect sounds from the external world, a world of which he had no comprehension.
The Jeremy inhabited a perfect playground, where he felt safe and secure. But, as the saying goes, ‘all good things must come to an end’. And what an abrupt end it was. One moment he was playfully kicking with his lower appendages while simultaneously attempting a spot of rolling and tumbling, the next his world had literally collapsed around him. And before he had time to come to terms with that, he found himself being forcibly pushed towards a gash in the now fluid-less sack which had so recently been his haven. He struggled violently against this unwelcome turn of events, but no matter how hard he tried, he was powerless to prevent it. It seemed he was about to die!
“Waarrrghhhh!” he screamed (and had this event occurred at any later, vocabulary-rich date in his life – as if that was possible – he would still have screamed ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ ), in precise expression of his feelings.
And so it was, that at a few minutes after midnight on the 11th of March, in the year referred to in the Christian calendar as 1952, the Jeremy found himself forced into a cold and uninviting world.
*
And the rest, as those fond of a cliché might say, is history.
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Album No. 2
History? That’s as may be. It was all in the future for the Jeremy. In the present, ‘cold’ and ‘uninviting’ about summed it up. It was cold, not just because he was naked, but also because, ’twixt conception and delivery, his parents had returned from East Africa to dear old blighty. And it was uninviting because – well who in their right mind could describe the clinical environs of a hospital delivery room as inviting?
“Waarrrghhhh!” he yelled.
The shock of recent events was of galactic proportions in his mind, and on top of that, he was experiencing new shocks, nasty ones which were jostling for pole position in his consciousness.
“Waarrrghhhh!” he screamed again, without any thought for the fact that he was repeating himself – something he would later be taught, somewhat dubiously, is a heinous crime against both literary and oratory style.
“Waarrrghhhh! Waarrrghhhh! Waarrrghhhh!” he shouted.
There was nothing about his new environment which could persuade him there was any more suitable comment to make. These sensations were not pleasant. He’d never felt cold before, and now that coldness had somehow got inside him, apparently through the holes in his face.
“Waarrrghhhh!”
And it was noisy. The gently muffled sounds he’d been used to, had been replaced by sharp, harsh noises which managed to find their way right inside his head. And that could only mean one thing. He had more holes in him.
“Waarrrghhhh!”
Even his ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ attacked him.
And there were completely new sensations. There was this stuff called light which was bouncing around all over the place, and some of it was getting inside him too!
“Waarrrghhhh! How many holes have I got in me?” he wailed, in a state of near panic.
He was shortly to discover there were indeed more, but he would find, to his relief, they were for output rather than input. Much, much later, he would initially be very surprised to find that, for some people, this was not always the case.
What horror would be next? During his teens, he would hear stories about alien abductions wherein strange beings would – amongst other unspeakable deeds – prod, poke and peer at their victims, who were completely powerless to do anything about it. These stories would trigger an uncanny resonance within him.
It took a moment for him to comprehend it, but the next sensation was pleasant. He was nestling on some sort of soft, warm cushion. He could hear reassuringly gentle sounds, and the cushion moved ever so slightly, in a pacifying, rocking motion. There was an attractive smell too. His fear and panic began to melt away, and practically without realising it had happened, he found he was drawing in a warm fluid which had a very pleasing taste.
It was almost as if things had gone back to the way they’d been before. At least, if he concentrated very hard on this latest development, he could very nearly convince himself it was so.
His distraught ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ turned to a contented ‘Mmmmmmm’.
*
“Mmmmmmm,” he murmured.
What a wealth of meaning in a single, barely spoken word. In the following days, weeks and months, the Jeremy fluctuated, often erratically, between ‘Mmmmmmm’ and ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ From this elemental vocabulary, an eloquent verbal practitioner would eventually grow, but there was an intermediate stage through which he would first have to pass.
Gurgling, in all its varied forms, was his first step on the road to literacy, and soon after the start of his journey, his verbal expertise would expand to include not only ‘Wahraarrrghhhh!’ – an extension of ‘Waarrrghhhh!’ reserved especially for use on any occasion which required extra emphasis – but also ‘Gusk’, ‘mish’ and ‘guck’.
In the meantime, in common with most babies, he displayed an effortless capacity to seize the moment. ‘Seizing the moment’ often meant taking the opportunity, when lying naked on his back, to conduct experiments regarding the capacity of bodily fluids, of the not-so-precious variety, to combat gravitational forces when expelled. Unlike some babies, he had an insatiable appetite for experiments of this type, industriously persevering long after most of his contemporaries had succumbed to the bidding of their mothers.
This behaviour should not be confused with what some say is the dark art of pooping in a freshly donned nappy. While he did indulge in this form of behaviour on more than one occasion, it was merely an example of the natural proclivity of living creatures to dispose of waste material with little regard for the convenience or sensibilities of others.
Whether accidental or deliberate, his pristine-nappy soiling activities provoked his mother to respond, “Oh you naughty boy!”
But although those were the words she used, she always said them as if they meant, “How sweet you are!”
Language comprehension was not his strongest suit at this early stage of his life, which was probably just as well. He would have plenty of opportunities later on to figure out why people say one thing, but mean something else. In the meantime, even though he’d neither understood the words nor that he’d done something ‘wrong’, he was astute enough to decipher the underlying message.
His mother was full of love for him. Given time, he would learn to exercise some control over his bodily functions, but there was an implicit promise in her tone that his failure to do so would not result in any form of punishment. Nothing he could do would make his mother angry. Nothing he could do would make her say ‘Waarrrghhhh!’
His conclusion that his mother doted on him was entirely accurate. Nevertheless, he appeared to test this theory on a daily, hourly or, on some occasions, even a minute by minute basis, but it would be many months before he faced the first hint of his mother’s wrath.
What a joy it was to have the freedom to explore the limits of his world, even if it was a relentless struggle to overcome the barriers to his explorations. Barriers which included, for example, his propensity to poke himself in the eye whenever he grasped an object and raised it with the intention of giving it a thorough once-over.
For the most part though, the Jeremy’s life was everything he could hope it would be. His apparent efforts to test his mother’s seemingly unshakeable love for him had done nothing but confirm the truth of the hypothesis. Consequently, he trusted her with his life. Of course, he had no other choice, but there is a world of difference between absolutely trusting someone because you believe you can, and trusting them because you have to.
*
Where, you might be wondering, was the Jeremy’s father during all this time? Working of course! And if he wasn’t working he’d be in the pub, or failing that, in his chair, reading the newspaper or listening to the wireless, or perhaps snoozing off the effects of a visit to the pub. Like most British men in the nineteen-fifties, in his view, it was a man’s duty to be the breadwinner and a woman’s place to be at home, looking after the children. Actually, that attitude had begun to change as a result of the war. Women had taken on traditional male roles while the men were away fighting, but it had yet to be fully accepted as normal, especially now that things were back to normal! Men and women knew their respective roles, and woe betide anyone who voluntarily crossed those invisible demarcation lines.
So it was that the Jeremy had the equivalent of an unreliable dial-up line to his father, and an always-on broadband connection to his mother.
*
There was another face which sometimes appeared in his field of vision. It was curiously similar to his mother’s, but smaller, not only in its physical aspects but also in its capacity to convey the impression it could be consistently relied upon.
Sometimes it smiled and chattered noisily, sometimes the opposite. Sometimes the face would be contorted into a strange caricature of itself, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing. At other times, it would extend its tongue and waggle its fingers while inserting its thumbs in its ears. But its most distinguishing feature was that it appeared at seemingly random intervals, for no apparent reason, did whatever facial gymnastics it deemed suitable, and disappeared again, often without warning.
He’d utilised his entire vocabulary in an attempt to establish a stable relationship with the small face. But the inconsistencies of its responses had defeated all his efforts. Even his trump card, the judicious use of a well-timed ‘Wahraarrrghhhh!’, failed to produce predictable results. Sometimes the small face would attempt to use its diminutive arms to pick him up, more often than not failing miserably, leaving them both in complete disarray. At other times, it would disappear before he’d even finished the second syllable. Its erratic behaviour remained a mystery.
*
Much of the Jeremy’s world was a source of mystery.
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Album No. 3
The day started like any other. The Jeremy woke to find himself presented with a slightly blurred view of the ceiling, adjusted his focus to include Gusk – his name for the little furry creature that always hovered a few inches above his face – checked he still had the use of his arms and legs, and in so doing, confirmed what had come to be an unsurprising and exceedingly tiresome fact; he was lying in a pile of shit which had been generously marinated in urine. The knowledge that it was his own shit and his own urine was not much of a palliative. There was only one possible course of action.
“Waarrrghhhh!” he shouted.
He knew he’d probably have to repeat it several times before his mother’s face appeared next to Gusk. He also knew that some days he’d have to repeat it more times than others. But it rarely got to the point of ‘Wahraarrrghhhh!’ And on those very rare occasions when it did, his mother would be extra loving when she arrived, apologizing profusely.
The crux of the matter was, he knew she would come. She would appear and that would signal the start of the morning ritual. Not a ritual he particularly enjoyed, having exhausted his fascination with fluid mechanics, but one he happily endured because the end result was worth it. Besides, all through it, his mother would speak to him in soothing, reassuring tones.
On this particular morning, she appeared right on cue. She had an exceptionally chirpy disposition too – it was as if her face was bathed in the light of her own personal sun. He smiled and gurgled appreciatively.
“Mish,” he said.
Often, he would find that his ‘mish’ – a multi-purpose word somewhat similar to the Joker in a pack of playing cards – would be followed, moments later, by an involuntary ‘guck’. The ‘guck’ would be in response to his mother touching parts of his body. It was a touch which produced a pleasurable sensation, but one which could not be endured for too long.
“Guck, guck, guck, Guck, GUCK, guck, Guck, guck, Guck,” he giggled, as his mother playfully tickled him.
He noticed, with some interest, that he was being dressed in new clothes. Mostly white, with a bit of blue here and there. They had a smooth feel where they touched his skin, and made a rustling noise when he moved. He laughed, jerking his arms up and down. These were funny clothes! His mother laughed too. There was a hat as well, made of the same material. It felt a bit cold to the touch when his mother put it on his head, but not an unpleasant coldness. He laughed some more, and dribbled some saliva down his chin.
He was startled by his mother’s swift reaction. In a blur of movement, she produced a handkerchief and the saliva was wiped away. The Jeremy found this unexpected behaviour disconcerting and expressed it with a ‘Wrhgh’, an abbreviation he sometimes used as a forerunner to a full blown ‘Waarrrghhhh!’
“Oh I’m sorry my darling. I didn’t mean to startle you. I just want you to look your best today. There, there …”
The sound of her words permeated his mind as she gently picked him up, clasping him to her. He didn’t need to understand their linguistic meaning. He settled into his mother’s arms, listening to the beating of her heart while searching for the nectar. Soon his startlement was forgotten.
*
He must have drifted back to sleep for a while, because the next thing presented to his conscious mind was the movement he’d come to associate with an influx of lots of interesting visual stimuli. His mother was carrying him while she walked. Not the way she’d carried him earlier – that was comfort mode. This was travel mode. She’d propped him up so he could see over her shoulder. He liked it when she carried him that way because things stayed in his field of vision for longer. When he was facing the direction of travel, things were forever disappearing before he could get a good look at them. Besides, it was a bit cold today, and it felt warmer this way round.
There it was – the big expanse of grass. He’d seen it before, but when he wasn’t actually looking at it he could never picture it the way it really was. The green of it. He spent a little time pondering the different greens he’d observed and their relative greenness. But it taxed his faculties just imagining colours in his head.
There was a bird strutting about in the grass. It spent most of its time looking around with little darting motions of its head and neck. Every once in a while, it would apparently glimpse something, and pause to peck at it before resuming its staccato perusal of its environment. Then, in a flurry of jumps, skips and wing-flaps, it took off and flew into the sky.
The Jeremy was not in the least bit amazed by the bird’s ability to fly. Birds just did that. But he was fascinated by their flight. He watched the bird fly away, first in this direction and then another. It held his gaze for a long time, until his concentration was interrupted by a change in his mother’s pattern of movement.
He felt the g-force acting upon him as his body was accelerated upwards with every step. His head wobbled in response, echoing the motion. He heard the change in the sound of his mother’s footsteps as her shoes made abrasive contact with the stone steps, which obligingly appeared under her heels. And then he heard other footsteps from unseen feet. Whose feet were they?
His mother paused. He noticed there were hundreds of little specks of colour randomly placed on the ground. Of course, he hadn’t yet mastered the art of counting, so for him, quantity was a simple matter of one or many. In this case, even ‘many’ seemed inadequate as a descriptor. As his mother turned through ninety degrees, he was just able to catch a glimpse of a cluster of the coloured specks rising from the ground. Picked up by a gust of wind, they swirled about as if they were all joined together by invisible elastic ties.
In his new orientation, that which came into view was the small-faced person, who was looking up at him from below. One of its hands was clutching his mother’s coat belt. It made no funny or peculiar facial movements. It just looked up at him, and began absent-mindedly twisting the belt. He returned its gaze. It wasn’t a stand-off sort of gaze, just two observers observing each other but having nothing to say.
He tried to adjust his position, but found his movements were restricted. He gave another wriggle. As he did so, he felt his mother’s grip on him tighten very slightly, and then the steady thunk, thunk, thunk as she patted his back. The rhythmic thunking had a hypnotic effect and was sufficiently distracting that he forgot about being unable to move. Dr Benjamin Spock would have been proud of the Jeremy’s mother. She adjusted his shawl to keep it snugly wrapped around him. He quite liked his shawl. It kept him warm even if he couldn’t do much wriggling, something he liked to do for no particular reason now and again.
They were on the move once more, and he detected the change in ambience as they passed through the big, open doorway. He’d noticed the effect before, but it was still interesting.
There were a lot of people inside, mostly of the big variety, and more were following behind him. He thought he might have seen some of their faces before, but things were moving fast. He found it hard to focus on any one face long enough to be sure. But he could detect that lots of them were smiling, and the smiles appeared to be aimed in his direction.
“Mish,” he said.
But this time there was no involuntary ‘guck’.
*
The Jeremy resurfaced from a reverie. A quick check of his sensory inputs told him he was still in the big building, safely in his mother’s arms.
“Mish,” he said again.
Still no ‘guck’, but it did generate a gentle squeeze in response. His mother stood up and moved again. Not very far this time. She simply took a few paces forward. Then he heard a voice which was vaguely familiar. ‘Familiar’, in as much as he’d heard it in this building before, but not in the sense of being particularly fond of it. It sounded slightly surreal. Of course, he had no awareness of the surrealist movement, but even so, the voice was no less surreal.
It was a good deal closer to him than usual. Every so often it would pause and his mother would speak. Her voice was slightly odd too, not at all like the way she talked to him. Then she fell silent, gently rocking him in her arms. The voice continued on in its surreality, this time the pauses filled by his father’s voice. It was more difficult to tell if his voice sounded odd because the Jeremy had much less historical data to go on.
The surreal voice was at it again, the only noticeable difference being the filling of the gaps, first by one voice, then another. He thought he might know those voices too, but he couldn’t see the faces to which they belonged, so the identity of the speakers remained just out of reach. His mother continued to rock him gently.
Things were happening again. His mother was removing his hat which was a bit of a surprise. The contact with the air made his head feel somewhat chilly. It didn’t make any sense to him, but she often did things he didn’t understand. He was used to that.
What she did next was strange. She held him out in front of her, not quite at arms length. It was as if she was going to give him to someone, but he couldn’t feel any hands preparing to take hold of him. He lay there in her outstretched arms, looking up into the vast space between him and the curved shapes of the far away ceiling.
A face appeared a short distance above him. When it spoke, it proved to be the source of the surreal voice. He couldn’t remember any previous occasion when he’d seen it at such close range, and certainly not from such an angle. It was smiling, or rather, had the appearance of smiling. He felt unsure if this was a face he could trust, and he was certainly glad his mother was holding him, no matter how strangely. The face spoke again and, as it did so, in to view came something else.
It took a moment for him to figure it out, but it looked a little like the jug his mother used when she bathed him, except this one was a bit more fancy. It had a pattern on the side, but he couldn’t make out the detail due to the angle at which it was held. Almost as if it was able to understand his difficulty, the hand which held it slowly began to turn, enabling him to get a better look.
Time decelerated to very nearly a complete stop at the exact moment the meniscus of the water appeared at the lip of the jug. That is, of course, everywhere except inside the Jeremy’s brain where the neurone cavalry had already begun its charge, mobilising all idle cells as it went. The order for adrenaline was given and it was there in an instant, a testament to the impressive efficiency already in place in this developing environment. Next up was the order to take evasive action. Like fire-fighting bucket-chains on steroids, the message was passed from cell to cell on its concurrent journeys to the muscles in his arms and legs. The muscles obeyed without question, but in a tiny fraction of a second, the feedback showed their efforts were not producing the expected results. In a last ditch attempt to prevent what was rapidly becoming inevitable, the Jeremy’s vocal chords were primed for action.
In the conscious part of his mind, the foregoing events could be translated as, “WHOA! BE CAREFUL! THAT WATER IS GOING TO FALL OUT OF YOUR JUG AND LAND ON MY HEAD! HEY!! IT’S SPILLING!! IT’S SPILLING!!! WHAT’S GOING ON!!? HELP!! I CAN’T MOVE!! SOMEONE HAS PUT ME IN A STRAIGHT JACKET!” swiftly followed by,“MUM!!! HELP ME!!!!!”
But help was not forthcoming. As the cold water splashed onto his head he yelled ‘WAHRAARRRGHHHH!’ as loud as he could, over and over again, partly because of the shock and partly because he desperately needed his mother’s help. This was a living nightmare. Dreadful things were happening and yet his mother seemed oblivious to them. No, it was worse than that. She was aiding and abetting the perpetrator, and, at the same time, she was smiling and talking to him in the gentle tone she normally used after he’d had a bad experience. But this one was still going on!
The Jeremy was frantic. His safe world had been shattered. And up from the depths of his mind came horrifying memories. Something he’d previously buried so deep he had no knowledge of its existence. But now the memory of the terror and pain came flooding in like a mental tsunami. He could see the eyes peering at him from behind the mask. He’d been just as unable to protect his penis then as he’d been unable to protect his head now.
He could yell ‘WAHRAARRRGHHHH!’ no more. His defence mechanisms had done all they could. His mother was holding him close again, but there was no substantiating evidence to suggest she’d retracted her arms in direct response to his cries.
His vociferous yelling subsided, becoming virtually silent sobs. He was quiet. Not the contented quiet of an infant-in-arms, but rather, the quiet of a creature whose nervous system has been so overloaded, it is afraid to open its eyes for fear of what it might see.
And just to top it off, he was pretty sure he was lying in a pile of shit again. But it would have to wait until a lot later in his life before he would see his plight in regard to the wretched contents of his nappy as having any symbolic significance worthy of a smile.
*
Afterwards, there had been spirited attempts at urbane conversation, interlaced with tea and cucumber sandwiches, about the standard of the catering, the décor and Mrs You-Know-Who’s ‘misfortune’. But that had all passed the Jeremy by. He was far too busy conducting a large-scale damage limitation and repair exercise. It demanded, as a pre-requisite, copious amounts of sleep, which the remains of the congregation indulgently interpreted as him being ‘watched over by angels’, with much attendant ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’.
Had he remained awake and also been endowed with the superhuman zapping powers he would later imagine for himself, the ‘remains of the congregation’ would not have been a polite reference to the fact that not all the attendees at the earlier ceremonious violation had accepted the invitation to partake of tea and cucumber sandwiches
He slept, but he wasn’t aware of any angels. Indeed, for quite some time he wasn’t aware of anything at all. His sleep was the deepest of sleep. The sort of sleep that is needed to shut down the system for essential maintenance. The sort of sleep from which we emerge a slightly different person.
When he did emerge, life appeared to be normal. The rest of the day was much like any other. The next morning, the customary ritual came and went with the usual pile of marinated shit. Small Face put in a fleeting appearance and made the obligatory strange faces. Gusk’s little-furry-creatureness seemed unchanged. And yet, there was something different. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it but it was definitely there. Of course, in the strictest sense, at his age he had trouble putting his finger on anything. He was, after all, still in the early stages of learning motor control.
It would have been obvious to any reasonably adroit observer, that the difference was in the Jeremy himself. But for him, it was not obvious at all. Indeed, had it been obvious, its effect would have been severely diminished.
His family had no need to do anything special to come to terms with recent events. None of them had perceived his experience as traumatic, and, perforce, none had any feeling of guilt or duplicity. The Jeremy, on the other hand, had faced a decision he wasn’t expecting to face. It was a decision which had to be made at a level where intellectual weighing of possible outcomes had no part to play.
*
Fortunately, homo sapiens, in common with other living creatures, have what can be thought of as layers of security which ensure their best chance of survival. For example, had he found himself abandoned somewhere north of the Arctic circle, although he obviously wouldn’t have lasted long at such temperatures – no doubt expending some of his valuable energy on shouting ‘WAHRAARRRGHHHH!’ for all he was worth – his system would have done all it could to ensure his continued existence. This would include the sacrifice of body parts less essential to continued life, such as hands and feet, while all resources were directed to maintaining the function of the vital internal organs, such as the heart. Drastic circumstances demand drastic actions.
He hadn’t been physically abandoned, neither in the Arctic nor in any other location, but he had been emotionally abandoned, even if it was only temporarily. At his young age, his physical survival depended almost exclusively on his mother’s care and attention and, just as importantly, on his acceptance of it. There had to be a bond of trust. But that bond had taken a severe beating and the memory of it was a danger to his survival.
System Maintenance had no hesitation in wrapping it up in a leak-proof container and burying it as deep as possible. No qualms here about suppressing the Truth. No room for agonised debate and bleeding-heart hand-wringing regarding the rights of infants. The system knew what it was doing. Truth was a luxury item which survival could ill afford.
And it worked. The Jeremy did feel a bit strange, but only in as much as he thought he might have forgotten or perhaps mislaid something. He didn’t spend an awful lot of time pondering the matter, and having noticed that a revelation did not appear to be imminent, pushed the whole thing to the nether regions of his memory.
“Oh well,” he thought, “I must be getting old!” 1 and switched his attention to gazing at the ceiling with its wonderful myriad patterns, unaware of the truth that they were in fact either cracks, marks of an indeterminate nature, or water stains from leaks in the cottage’s old slate roof.
*
And so the days passed. Each one bringing more opportunities to learn the lessons vital to continued growth. Sometimes his days were filled with joy, sometimes with frustration. Sometimes, it was the sort of frustration you might feel if you were trying to thread a needle in the dim light of a restless candle, while wearing thermally insulated suede mittens, in temperatures cold enough to cause exhalations to condense into an instant personal fog, and the only available thread had a frayed end.
But whatever the content, his days were always filled to the very brim. Each day a new adventure.
::::: Album Notes :::::
1 This is, of course, an out and out lie. The Jeremy’s intellect was nowhere near sufficiently developed to understand the nuance of such a phrase, let alone capable of constructing the sentence. The author simply claims to hold a full and current artistic license (but declines to reveal if it contains any endorsements).
~:~:~
Album No. 4
“What happens if I push down with my right arm and my right leg at the same time?” queried the Jeremy.
Very little intermediate filtering took place between his thoughts and their conversion into actions. So little, that to all intents and purposes, there was none. Not really surprising considering his skill with language, and therefore his ability to reason, was at such a rudimentary stage of development.
“Woohoo! This is fun!” he thought, as his eyes relayed the rapidly changing scene to his brain, the optical messages supported by synchronous tactile sensations.
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NB. At this point in his life, his thoughts were still in the native language of his brain cells, chattering amongst themselves. The English translations given here are for your convenience only.
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Rolling over unexpectedly like that broadly offered two possible responses. He plumped for fun rather than fear, for the simple reason that his capacity for recognising potential danger was extremely limited.
So far, almost all of his ‘what happens if’ experiments had returned benign information. These propitious outcomes were due, in large part, to the care provided to him by his mother, who assiduously paid attention to potential dangers at all times, making sure his immediate environment was as safe as possible. The fact that up until recently he hadn’t been able to actively do very much, either, had also contributed to this happy state of affairs. But regardless of all that, most of this benign information was cast into the boring category in quite short order.
These were the days during which he metaphorically wore a large L-plate to designate his learner status. One could be forgiven for thinking it was also a magical plate, if one was that way inclined, because it was simultaneously visible to everyone, no matter what the angle of their approach. As a novice, no one expected very much of him socially, which meant that numerous exceptions to normal etiquette were extended to him. He could dribble down anyone’s clothing without fear of retribution, regardless of their social standing, and could, at least until he ‘went onto solids’, even throw up his dinner on their best suit with just as much impunity.
Of course, this relaxation of social mores was not uniquely proffered to the Jeremy. Such concessions are given to any infant of a similar age. The old and infirm are often the recipients of such concessions too, albeit, in certain circumstances, a little more grudgingly. Those ‘certain circumstances’ usually arise, when the grudgor believes the grudgee, is wittingly using their age and apparent infirmity, to blackmail or bully the grudgor into relaxing those social mores. But let’s not get caught up in that digression.
The peculiarities of social customs had no relevance to the Jeremy because they presuppose a level of self control which was far in excess of his capabilities. For instance, expecting him not to fart in a lift was a preposterous idea when he had yet to gain sufficient control over the peristaltic actions of his anal tract to master the art of regulating his faecal excretions – a rather convoluted way to avoid saying that he still randomly shat in his pants.
All the same, learning was what his life was all about, simply at a less intellectual level than pondering the vagaries of human social conventions. There was a whole heap of stuff he would have to learn before he even got close to such considerations.
*
If learning can be defined as the receipt and assimilation of information, then he’d been learning from the moment of his conception. His mother’s ovum had been the schoolroom. It contained not only her wisdom but that of her ancestors too. To this house of learning, the Sperm Prince brought the wisdom of his father and his ancestors. The Jeremy came into existence as the recipient of their combined wisdom, a wisdom he stored at his innermost core.
In that schoolroom, layer upon layer of the embryonic Jeremy learnt from that core, the knowledge disseminated to each new layer at a hectic pace in order to fulfil the nine month curriculum.
After the graduation ceremony, despite its somewhat messy and frightening nature, he had quickly and enthusiastically embarked upon the next stage of his education. Much of it was learnt at the same subconscious level as the lessons in the kindergarten of his mother’s womb, but he was also learning to consciously use his senses to understand the world around him.
These were thrilling days, packed full with lessons. But thrilling or not, he wouldn’t consciously remember them. Many were to do with the management of his body, his motor functions. Indeed, his occasional over enthusiastic use of them would, before long, suggest a tendency towards reckless driving.
Nevertheless, as infants go, he was rather quiet from a verbal perspective. But when circumstances implied it might be beneficial, he didn’t hesitate to engage in the demanding business of making use of his personal vocabulary. It was personal because it often seemed that only he knew what his ‘words’ meant.
It is quite astounding the number of variations that can be achieved by careful use of inflection, emphasis and tone, but when your vocabulary consists of five words – ‘Waarrrghhhh!’, ‘Mmmmmmm’, ‘Gusk’, ‘Mish’ and ‘Guck’ – there is a limit which is all too easily reached. And the fact that three of his words didn’t always sound the same when they came out of his mouth, and the other two were barely words at all, didn’t help much either.
Nevertheless, unaware of his own shortcomings, he often concluded that his listeners were either deaf, inattentive or just plain dumb-headed.
For instance, how many times had he tried to tell his observer that he was tired but couldn’t sleep because the tinkly-tinkly tune was getting on his nerves, only to find his ‘words’ had been interpreted to mean, “please make sure the tinkly-tinkly tune (which I dearly love and wish to hear twenty-four hours a day, every day, if at all possible, thank you very much) does not stop”.
It was enough to make even the most patient person ‘WAHRAARRRGHHHH!’ very loudly. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the consequences of that. More tinkly-tinkly bloody tinkly!
Things took a turn for the better when he filled his mother with delight at his first utterance of the word ‘mama’. Of course, that utterance was completely unintentional, amounting to no more than a happy juxtaposition of random sounds. But he was quick to perceive the enchantment on his mother’s face, and vaguely connected it to the sound he’d just made. His perception didn’t include the comprehension that the rapid appearance of not only Small Face but also his father, both visibly excited, was a signal that he should repeat it.
His new audience were mouthing sounds at him in a rather exaggerated way, somewhat similar to the way some people talk to foreigners and those they believe to be half-wits. Not especially for their benefit – he would have done it anyway – he continued his experiments with various combinations of sound. But nothing he came up with had the effect on his new observers which he’d just witnessed in his mother. He felt slightly disappointed, which mirrored the countenance of each of the three faces before him.
It didn’t last long. His mother picked him up and cuddled him. He was in the process of going over the sounds he’d made when out popped ‘mama’, again. To his surprise, they all began doing a kind of dance in which it seemed important that he should be the centrepiece around which it revolved.
Big people were mighty strange. It was hard to fathom what made them tick. He was often taken by surprise at their reactions to seemingly trivial events, particularly when those trivial events emanated from him. But he had, despite the oxymoronic nature of the notion, become used to being startled. In much the same way that in later life he would relish the thrill of riding a roller-coaster, he’d learned to go with the flow when, for example, he was picked up and tossed, sometimes literally, into the air.
There were exceptions though. Sometimes, a big person – one with whom he was not very familiar – would begin this activity. He often felt disconcerted when that happened. There was an important element missing. He simply didn’t feel safe. Fortunately, his vocabulary was perfectly equipped to deal with that situation.
“Wahraarrrghhhh!”
That usually did the trick.
But wait. Let’s not build up the wrong sort of picture of this boy. Most of the time he happily and quietly enjoyed himself, closely examining everything he could grasp, while remaining safely within range of his mother’s watchful eye. Sometimes, he even enjoyed the company of Small Face, who mercifully, had developed a little more finesse in her dealings with him, being less inclined to prod, poke and maul. He enjoyed the company of his father too, when he was there, but the most comforting times were with his mother. It was always good to know she was nearby. Gradually, he gained more and more confidence, embarking on unaided explorations of his immediate environment, the boundaries of which, he soon came to think, were only there to be pushed.
Good days were these. Long gone were the endless hours spent staring up at ceilings while he lay almost helpless in his cot or pram. Those days were indeed gone, consigned to the pages of photograph albums and neural network storage. Time moves implacably on, dispassionately ticking off the seconds, one by one, constantly consigning NOW to the history books on a journey to a bright new future – a somewhat romantic view which ignores the fact that much of NOW bypasses the history books altogether, effectively disappearing without trace. But that’s what makes romance so attractive.
*
For the Jeremy, it was all about NOW. Life was something that happened in the present, lingered for no more than a moment, and sometimes presented an enticing invitation to the immediate future. With his mind uncluttered by preconceived ideas, conventions and taboos, he never hesitated to poke his nose into whatever took his fancy – even if the consequences proved, on post-mission analysis, to be undesirable. Health & Safety was a concept that had yet to penetrate or encumber his world.
Exploration of everything within range, or even a little beyond it, was his raison d’être, and the fruit of his labours was knowledge. He knew much more than your average Joe about the look, feel, smell and yes, the taste of many things, including that interesting patch on the inside of the right rear leg of the kitchen table, the sticky one just beneath the change in the pattern in the grain of the wood. Now that was something which took an explorer of the Jeremy’s calibre to find.
About half of his free time – which may at first seem a rather daft notion, but there were meal times, bath times, nappy changing times and more besides, none of which fitted with the Jeremy’s idea of free time – about half his free time was spent on his hands and knees. Careening here and there, just following his fancy (and sometimes his nose), this was the period when his tendency for occasional recklessness was in danger of becoming a reputation.
His explorations kept him happily occupied most of the time, but there was a problem. The returns on investment from his voyages of discovery had recently been diminishing at an alarming rate. Not only that, he’d also incurred the wrath of his mother on a number of occasions, a relatively new experience and one which was truly alarming.
It was particularly upsetting because it all seemed so arbitrary. His simple logic didn’t make much use of multiple levels of ‘what if’ enquiry prior to taking a particular action. For example, he’d found the best way to find out what a hole was for was firstly to look inside it, and then, if that didn’t provide a satisfactory answer, to poke one of his fingers in, or all of them if he could fit them inside. This usually produced some useful data and sometimes, on some happy occasions, something tasty (his concept of what constituted a hole included the interior of a jam jar). What was so different about the three little holes in the box on the wall?
One of the advantages of being conscious almost exclusively of NOW, is that the unpleasant things that happen, such as your mother throwing a wobbly when she sees you about to poke your finger in an electric socket, quickly pass into indirect memory. There, the reference to the experience, with all its pain and suffering, is carefully filtered so that only a hint of the original flavour remains, but it’s enough of a hint to remind us to avoid situations which might unleash the full-flavoured version in the future.
The remainder of his free time was in large part spent, for want of a better description, sitting on his arse. Note that the description did not include the word ‘idly’. The Jeremy was rarely in a state which, even by imaginative scoping, could be described thus. Quiet yes, idle no. His waking hours were spent investigating whatever was to hand.
He was a natural exponent of a primitive version of the scientific method, a characteristic shared with many, if not all, of his peers. While he didn’t posit his hypotheses in very sophisticated terms, preferring to keep things simple – so simple that his hypotheses were often indistinguishable from those usually presented prior to executing that old favourite, the Bullina Chinashop procedure – he was certainly thorough in the testing phase.
The concept of non-destructive testing was an alien one to the Jeremy, who felt there was a risk that much valuable information would be lost if he didn’t go ‘all the way’. Indeed, his experience had proved this to be true time and time again. For instance, had he not adopted that attitude, he would not have discovered the source of the noise in the ‘shake-it-shake-it-shake-it-make-a-lot-of-noise’ thing. True, it no longer made any noise no matter how much ‘shake-it’ was applied, but that seemed a small price to pay, a sentiment unfortunately not shared by his parents.
*
A small but increasing percentage of his time, was spent undertaking a new activity to which he’d aspired for quite some while. He wasn’t very proficient at it yet, but nevertheless, it intimated future possibilities of exploration which, up until then, had been stuck squarely in the realms of his wildest dreams.
He took a few more steps, teetering slightly like a drunk who has fallen down enough times to know how to roll with it, laughed loudly as he marvelled at his achievement, and began to think of the places of interest to which he could now gain access.
Sadly, the ability to walk didn’t deliver everything it had appeared to promise. He could live with the occasional stumble and, once in a while, the unexpected appearance of a doorpost directly in his path when his guidance system malfunctioned. These were minor inconveniences. And it was true that walking enabled him to get around marginally quicker, and gave him a more normal view of his surroundings. But the disappointing aspect was that his surroundings changed almost as soon as he conquered gravity enough to take a few steps.
All the interesting objects, which had been tantalisingly just out of reach before he’d successfully adopted an independent vertical orientation, were no longer where they had been. Most of the newly accessible places, which had held such promise, were now devoid of anything at all, let alone anything interesting.
It didn’t seem fair. Much of his incentive to master the art of standing unaided, and then walking, had been his perception that the rewards for his efforts would be access to new objects. He hadn’t understood that all the encouragement he’d received wasn’t about gaining what he perceived as suitable rewards, it was about learning the skill itself.
He concluded that his parents should have made it clearer, but not being one to hold a grudge, he soon put the whole affair down to experience. He would, however, be a little more careful in the future to ensure contracts were well defined, and to examine the small print for gotchas.
On the whole, he welcomed his new toddler status and enjoyed it for its own sake. He could often be seen walking round in random circles, accompanied by unabashed giggling.
His new skill was also the cue for new apparel. Light blue in colour, his walking reins were a perfect fit. During practise sessions indoors, he found his mother was adept at using them to prevent him falling all the way to the floor when he stumbled. He liked his new reins.
After their first excursion outdoors, he didn’t like them nearly so much. It wasn’t that he was fickle, it was simply that he constantly adjusted his opinions to take account of new data. The new data, in this case, was that a secondary property of walking reins had revealed itself to be their easy use as a restraining tool. To be fair, his mother only used them in that manner when she detected he was in imminent danger. And it was just as well she did – he had yet to get to grips with the idea of his own mortality.
*
That the words ‘walking’ and ‘talking’ rhyme so well is probably an irrelevant coincidence, but it does seem there is a strong link between them. In many toddlers, walking encourages and accelerates talking, their new mobility allowing them to find new things to talk about. And for some, talking is what becomes their defining characteristic. Toddling helps them search out donkeys with hind legs of suitable proportions on which to practise.
The Jeremy regarded talking as a useful means of communication, but he couldn’t agree with the assertion that you can’t have too much of a good thing. He was not a babbler, not even close. Donkeys were definitely interesting creatures, but he was happy to leave their hind legs in place. Besides, he’d have had a hard job talking the hind legs off anything with a vocabulary which consisted of just ten words: ‘mama’, ‘up’, ‘cat’, ‘book’, ‘ball’, ‘dadadadadada’, ‘bibi’, ‘bobo’, ‘bababa’ and ‘koko’.
The fact that the last four in the list were not recognised as ordinary words by lexicographers was of no concern to him. He regularly used them to mean all sorts of things, and sometimes, just because he liked the sound of them. ‘Dadadadadada’, although hinting that it might fall into the same category as the last four, was slightly different because it was simply meant to be ‘dada’. It was just that once he got going with the ‘da’ sound, he usually found it hard to stop after only two repetitions.
He also found himself at odds with the lexicographers over the meaning of the words he used. For example, a typical lexicographer1 might define the meaning of ‘cat’ as firstly, ‘a small domesticated carnivore, Felis domestica, bred in a number of varieties’, secondly, ‘a member of the family Felidae, carnivores such as the lion, tiger, leopard etc.’ and then finally, via increasingly esoteric definitions, as ‘a woman given to spiteful or malicious gossip’.
Ignoring the more esoteric definitions for the moment, the Jeremy felt the lexicographers were being a little on the strict side. For him, anything that was at all furry, had features that could be described as a head and body with a number of appendages attached, which moved (or did not), made a noise (or did not), or possessed any of these attributes in almost any combination, was most definitely ‘cat’. He would also have argued that the correct word to use for the ‘woman given to spiteful or malicious gossip’ was ‘mama’, but for no other reason than all female humans – who were not Small Face – were tentatively ‘mama’, at least until he got a good look at them or heard their voice.
While it is true that his increased vocabulary removed many of his previous communication frustrations, there were still times when his words were misinterpreted.
“Up,” he said, thinking it a simple matter for his mother to understand that he wanted her to get the ‘shake-it-shake-it-shake-it-make-a-lot-of-noise’ thing from the high place where she’d put it.
The fact that she’d placed the rattle there due to its non-functioning state after his intimate examination of its interior, had no bearing on his desire to have it. Maybe the ‘make-a-lot-of-noise’ bit had been restored to its former glory. But it all came to nought anyway because what did she do? Gripped him under his armpits and lifted him above her head, jauntily chanting ‘up, up, up!’ as she did so. Fortunately, on this occasion, her misunderstanding had resulted in an enjoyable experience, but that was not always the case, and sometimes, exasperation took hold.
He was very fond of the taste of apple. It sometimes made him screw his face up in a distorted fashion, but he liked that exciting taste. His word for apple was ‘ball’. After all, apples were spherical enough, and if you glanced out of the corner of your eye at the fruit bowl on the table at the end of the room, you would be hard pressed to say, with 100% certainty, whether it contained solely apples, a mixture of apples and apple-sized balls or solely balls. The fact that oranges, grapes and even pears were also described by the Jeremy as ‘ball’ was not the point.
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