The Next One (She Stole His Seed)

THE NEXT ONE     She Stole His Seed

The father of my three boys, Nihil,  was a most excellent sociopath. Good sex was a vital component of the respect and love I had to feel for a man in order for me to get my fingers off of the steering wheel. Niall once remarked that getting laid properly lasted me four days. After that I began to get unwieldy, testy, cranky, he said.  And belief system being everything, when I was getting laid, when I was happy from that drug and pictured my man as capable, good, caring, thoughtful, my hero…he was.  And when I looked down from that high wire, whether it was due to too little sex or too much real life disappointment encroaching, the view was often terrifying.

Nihil had trouble in England, growing up.  He was sent to boarding school at 6 years of age, and later attended St. Cuthbert’s, the same school Sting attended in northern England.

Nihil had his share of caneings but he had it coming. He put cherry bombs down toilets.  And was ADHD before the diagnosis was available. He would be called down for daydreaming and thinking the rows of sixes looked like the pretty signets in the dikes between fields on the Romney Marsh.

He was sensitive. And his mother’s favorite. She protected him for a long time.  Evidently, Nihil reminded Jenette his mother, of her first cousin, a willful girl, most fun to spend the night with, creative, living in fables and fantasies which she invited others into. For Jennette, it was no more than playing Narnia, yet when the cousin was prevented from seeing her first beau, and she tore her clothes off as her father struggled, and ran down the street naked, she was hospitalized. A lobotomy was suggested. Her name was Ann. She lived institutionalized. Nihil’s godmother was a schizophrenic who sent christening gowns with three arms. Another cousin. Should be a warning label.
“These offspring will be boys who do bars.”

His father’s peat bog ancestry made relations with his coddled son strained, and while waiting for Nihil, who dawdled, and resentment mounting as Nihilwas the only one of the four children who failed his 11 plus and monies which had to be spent to send him to St. Cuthbert’s, Patrick was not enamoured with interminable waiting.  He had a temper, and he hurled his coffee cup at Nihil’s head across the room.

Nihil’s father worked for the conservative party.  Later, he would have the honor bestowed upon him, by the Queen, of Royal Ambassador of the British Empire, for years of service to the party.

At sixteen, No longer being forced to join his siblings and parents in the tiny caravan that trailed behind their car to France and all over Europe, Nihil opted to stay at home while they sat and slept in terribly cramped quarters of a caravan. He’d had enough salt sandwiches ,cucumber tomato and cheese in white bread.  And dog hair. Bell, his mother’s hearing aid dog shed terribly. The family was much too tight to stop at Little Chef on the A1.  As small children, Brenda made them share one, four ounce can of orange juice, as a  special treat. She’d been through rationing in WWII.

Nihil spent his weekends doing hallucinogens and smoking hash. He brought  squatters into the house on the Jesmond Dene, who looted and violated their home. On one occassion his mother’s prized silver concha belt was nicked. They could no longer  trust him and his father had had enough.  The compromise his father accepted, as they quarreled over Nihil’s fate, was to give Nihil the bomb shelter and a tiny plug in heating element for a cuppa. That lasted a week. Then he hit the strets.

Nihil’s mother would sign all around downtown, and speak in her slow, unheard by herself voice, “Have you seen my son, Nihil.” She drove around NewCAstle for months, thinking, at first, that every cold, scrawny dark headed boy with shoulderblades angling out of a worn coat was Nihil.  Nihil had fled the city and gone on a mission to bust his buddy out of a Greek jail. The whole thing was a blur, really, because he was on acid and stoned not to mention cold and suffering from  malnutrition and, evidently, mental illness.  Whether he did assist the jail bust or whether he just carried around the newspaper article of his friends return to the UK, I don’t know.  In the days when I believed him and believed in him, I did so with certainty.

He told me about living in a squat in Utrecht with one loaf of black bread to last him a week.  He worked for a day on a construction site.  And then made plans to go to America and travel with his cousin Sallie.

I don’t know how he secured airfare. Maybe his uncle Godfrey, a professor of medical economics with a schooner on Block Island, paid his way. Would he now, if he’d known Nihil would be fucking his daughter, Nihil’s first cousin, and that they’d break into camps and steal artichoke hearts from grocery stores along the AL-Can. And  what would Godfreys  take have been on their claim to be husband and wife while living in Valdez, sharing a 9 mm for bear and a terrible case of non specific urethritis  Sallie contracted from  a customer at a lounge she waitressed in, to support them.

The mayor of Anchorage hung out with his gay friends at Sallie’s bar’. The memory of Johnny’s death, a suicide, struck Nihil as he swam in the bracing Aegean off the island of Corfu, years later. It was his first true psychotic break which I,  having been made love to in the past four days, mistook, in a hopeful fashion, for spiritual empowerment.  Before that episode I never really reflected on the significance of Nihil, setting fires at family campsites. Fires that penultimately caused the family to leave, ashamed and afraid, in the night.