LADY GOD
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN
Julia Bowyer gazed
into the bedroom mirror and sighed; she was a sensitive woman of twenty-three
years, mere shadows which touched her lightly and crossed her face with little
trace or effect. She was wild and pale and extremely beautiful with a profusion
of dark hair cascading about her perfect head, seeming to ripple around her in
delicate torrents. Although not very tall her stature was magnified by the
intensity of her demeanour and her physicality; her body was crafted from
thousands of years of evolution and seduction and she carried it well; her
breasts were the miraculous manifestations of motherhood, to which she yearned
– the feminine essence which spoke of the Divine Virgin Mary and the heroic
tragedy of Jean d’Arc. Yes, by design, she was exquisite and statuesque! But
today, as she sat there by the mirror inwardly gazing at her self, in the stark
reality of the outside world she seemed a thousand years old.
How like her mother
she seemed from photographs she kept, she remembered her with a deep sense of
love and loss; unfortunately Julia had lost her parents, one to cancer and the
other to exquisite pastry baking.
Julia had been seeing
a man named Steven for over a year, a man who held the promise of little
passion yet she clung to him in her familiarity. Steven did not quite realise
his undertaking when he met Julia, in fact, he had little understanding of women,
a claim most men will admit to, and he had even less understanding of Julia as
a person, as a spirit of nature or an entity free of sexuality and romantic
entanglements which obstruct the perception of individuals – ‘God must have a
sense of humour’ he would say, ‘why else would he create the fairer sex?’ to
which Julia would answer: ‘Steven, even you must acknowledge that God created
man and then realised the mistake and perfected the creation in the form of
woman!’ Julia often got the better side of an argument and Steven would storm
off, cursing under his breath or saying ‘Julia bloody Caesar!’ which he knew
she didn’t like and even hoped tormented her, which of course being of the
superior sex she rose above such tawdry irritations and episodes and forgave
Steven his indiscretions, after all he was pre-disposed to such behaviour,
being a man after all! Besides, she would always get her own back at parties
when she never failed to trot out the well-worn example of man’s, particularly
Steven’s, stupidity and would talk eloquently and at length upon his eagerness
to eat food straight from the oven, such as pizza, and in his haste burn his
mouth, and with the damage done and no lesson learnt in would be pushed another
fiery mouthful into the tender hole and if lucky enough not to be spat out he
would intake air like a floundering fish in order to try to cool the furnace on
his tongue before another flaming mouthful is added to the inferno in his face!
Julia had longed to be
a mother, to nurture some small bundle and see the magic of life unfolding
before her. She had not experienced the great emotion, the eternal anguish and
rage of loving someone so deeply that the insignificant workings of the heart
should stop or one’s world be torn asunder without the object of one’s desire
to caress and hunger after. Steven was a poor substitute for a lover yet Julia
persisted in some vision of being blessed with a child and consumed by the
powerful prayer she willed herself upon the business-end of man that gave
delicate ripples of satisfaction in order to achieve her only dream. But to
date she had been unsuccessful. She pleaded with God, she was no great believer
yet she felt there must be something who listens to the cries of the helpless
in their hours of need; some ‘great observer’ who watches over the revolving
world and all its little tragedies that unfold – such a history of tragedy!
Often she would lay
awake at night listening to the thoughts which softly issued from her mind;
thoughts which carried doubts and looming indecisions; thoughts which to most
would seem quite trifling but to Julia were unparalleled. The night was her
companion, she loved the dead hours of the night which wrapped around her for
she was soft and vulnerable and the darkness held great possibilities where
inhibitions lay unexplored. She often imagined when she was lying upon her bed
that the delicate nightdress she wore was her burial shroud which symbolised
the power of Death over the Living; this bed, this sensual and perfumed parlour
of her sex was her death-bed, all of this she thought in the ghostly hours
between sleep until she would be disturbed by Steven moving or clumsily
scratching himself in his sleep. This man, this lump of thoughtless,
insensitive and ignorant, heavy-handed, stupidly un-aesthetic flesh with his
simple ways of snoring through life often appalled her beyond words but then
there were times when he was capable of small and almost loving gestures which
took her by surprise; she stuck with him out of some measure of not wanting to
be alone. Steven, when caught off-guard, which was the best time to catch him,
would almost express a sense of emotion and say that he quite liked and even
loved Julia but he was always in too much of a hurry through life and had
little desire to live for the moment, a sort of blink and you’ll miss him kind
of guy… ‘Dear God, bless me with life within!’
Julia knew that a day
would come, a day of reckoning for she had, like most young girls, thoughts of
an unkind nature towards those she loved the most, yet they were always
removed, as if surgically cut from her and new and brighter thoughts
transplanted in their place.
One day Julia woke up
feeling decidedly different, she felt odd, not in a bad way but in a way she
felt she could not describe for she felt as if something had been removed from
her and something else had taken its place; this seemed to last for a few days until
one morning she felt the world fall away from under her and she fainted upon
the floor. Steven, in one of his rare moments of wisdom, persuaded her to go
and see the Doctor just to make sure all is as it should be and so she made an
appointment for the following day. The Doctor made all the general noises a
Doctor usually makes having attained great satisfaction from an overblown
salary and regret at the loss of leisure time due to an explosion of
over-cautious patients; after taking first this test and then that one and
giving a simple explanation of his findings as he is a busy man and saying
casually as if it were items on a grocery list: ‘Boy or a Girl?’ Julia was
first at a loss to understand what he meant and with some surprise she said
‘are you saying I’m pregnant?’
‘But of course!
Congratulations!’ he exclaimed, and after giving her some informative leaflets
and telling her to make an appointment with the nurse, she left the surgery,
walking on air, her head a whirl of joy and confusion. ‘Sometimes’ she said to
herself, ‘things should just evolve naturally, with no desire for change.’
The news was first
greeted with a calm joy which nearly became a frenzy of painful smiles on
Steven’s part and over the coming days became merely a sigh; Julia sensed the
regret and dissatisfaction and Steven explained his fears that he was not ready
for fatherhood and was only at the fag-end of childhood himself! The distance
began to swell between them until a few weeks later Steven left Julia – it was
the first decision he had really taken for himself and both agreed it was the
right decision as any spark of love which may have been there was now decidedly
dead and so they parted on speaking terms at least, but that final ‘Goodbye’
was awkward; Steven was never very good at ‘good-byes’; in fact, he was never
very good at ‘hello’s’ either, he just sort of grunted either his
appreciation or his dissatisfaction. And so Steven packed his things and
returned to the parental nest where he could comfortably pupate until he
reached adulthood!
Over the coming days
Julia felt so alone and desperate and she harkened back to her childhood,
thinking about her father whom she loved dearly for she was a true ‘daddy’s
girl’ at heart and she remembered him saying to her in the garden ‘watch the
stones, watch the stones’ and not really understanding what he meant. But now,
after much contemplation and a shovelful of life behind her she realised that
what he was saying was ‘don’t be in a rush to get to the end; enjoy the passage
of time and the journey ahead!’ She was a special child as all young girls are,
especially to their fathers and hers was no different. He had spent all her
formative years dedicating himself with all the tender love and care a father
can provide in nurturing the delicate blossom of his daughter; in strengthening
the emotional and mental aspect of her nature and widening her experience and
knowledge of the world while cautiously protecting his little rose. And then at
the end of all that loving devotion, some errant weed creeps into the garden in
the guise of man; a weed that takes vigorous hold of his delicate bloom and
strangles it, undoing all the good that he has done and he is expected to hand
over the fragile rose of his heart to this vile clot of a man who has taken
over the reins of the young faun to lead astray at his whim – a father’s heart
breaks but once at the loss of his daughter, but it breaks irrevocably!
Having life within her
caused Julia to think about the concept of God or whatever it is that manifests
within the soul. As a child she drew her own conclusion about God from what she
heard and saw and in her mind God was male and benevolent and blessed the whole
world with His love, but as she grew up and reached adolescence Julia began to
see the world, the anger and the hatred and the catastrophes and turned away from the picture-book image of
God, the old man with a flowing white beard; it was just a fairy story,
something the church had invented to keep the populace subdued and fearful of
sinning – all that stuff about the angels and the devil… she would say what she
really thought about all that but she was too polite! But now, since she felt
the stirrings of new life within her she felt her mind dwelling on spiritual
matters, not the Christian mumbo-jumbo but the real essence of the spirit, the
pagan energy that flourishes through all life and even death, that great altar
fire where burns the brightness of the whole universe; a brightness which
compels us to love beyond measure! She had always been aware of the mystery of
her sex, or perhaps it is more appropriate to say the misery of her sex, for
she was continually ground-down by gratitude and resisted any temptation to
persist in unworthy ventures with the opposite sex; within herself she saw a
vision of God, a being of perfect strength and beauty, a feminine beauty which
was reflected in her self and in all women. Man, if he must be categorised in
some sense was akin to Lucifer, the fallen angel while woman rose above him and
transcended his earthly gender; for it is the woman who carries the child
within her once the unfortunate business of the male is over with, once he has
attained his animal satisfaction and shut his eyes as easily as he shuts his
mind and heart to things. It’s not that she hated men; she just thought they
were extremely over-rated throughout history, casually denigrating women’s part
in evolution and stepping over her ambitions – that is why wars have been so
prolific from nation to nation since man first dominated woman! Why man
furnishes the temple of his God with holy relics such as some Saint’s scrotum
revered behind a glass screen or curled away in some old wooden chest. Such a
vile and vulgar thing is that which protrudes from man – an extension of his
forceful will; a corrupt intrusion of his dark heart: how could nature allow
such a blasphemous betrayal? Perhaps the outward manifestation in man mirrors
his progressive and destructive path through history while the woman’s inward
void reflects her serenity; her inner journey of self-discovery? But all
women’s dreams have been dashed against the rocks of gender equality, yet, a
time will come…
Over time Julia forgot
about Steven’s part played in the conception and even doubted if he were ever
capable of such a thing in the first place, preferring to believe that the
blessing of the child was given by Divine Intervention; the whole act was
reformed in her mind to erase his wayward member and clumsy touches and in
their place she invoked a celestial bright light which wrapped around her
protectively and comforting; a light not bound by the restrictions of manhood
but overwhelmingly subtle in its asexual beauty. This thought alone gave her
the strength to continue on her new path of discovery, a path free from the
intrusive weeds of man.
It was towards the end
of October when Julia gave birth to a healthy young boy which she called Flame
Hypsus Bowyer, she had not wished to satisfy convention by labelling the child
with a gender-defining name as in masculine and feminine, but chose something
from the world of nature and mythology. Her God-born vision had become a
reality and she would pour love plentiful love upon the child. She had brought
a concept into the world.
The silver threads of
time wore wearily onwards and caressed the dark tresses of her hair with its
magical streaks. The seasons seemed to merge and bluster through the intensity
of motherhood, which did not as she assumed come naturally to her, it was more
like a prelude to oblivion, a looming disaster of bandaged knees and cut
fingers. ‘Dear God help me!’ she would say when it all got too much for her.
All her life she was as some maiden in the Temple of Moonlight
What would he grow up
to be, this thing, this animate creature torn from her all arms and legs and
smells? She could hardly bring herself to look upon the boy for she felt its
eyes rip into her soul, condemning her for being a bad mother, or so she
thought, and wishing it had chosen a better host to hatch from; a mother the
perpetual essence of goodness and overwhelming love – the resentment shone from
him like beams of hate! She saw all this clearly and felt the anger of God for
having such faith turned to disappointment that the blessing had become a
burden to her. Time wore away at her soul and ate into her instincts to protect
the child which had become something other than her own child and God knows she
desperately wanted to love it but felt for all the world that a great mistake
had occurred and that there was no way out; her life had ended before it had
begun! ‘God help me!’
Steven, that useless
lump who proclaimed to be the father but in Julia’s eyes was just an immature
good-for-nothing waste of space, suddenly turned up on Julia’s doorstep, so to
speak, well he knocked on the door to her bed-sit after failing to receive
replies to letters he wrote to Julia throughout the pregnancy; it seemed there
had been a change of heart and Steven was ready to take responsibility for the
child and for Julia. He was here in the mask of humble man with an armful of
emotions as yet unexplored – perhaps there was hope for him yet! With no answer
to his knocking he spoke to the young student who had the room above and who
seemed to be concerned that Julia had not been seen for a few days and that
there had not been any sounds from the ‘nursery’, as Julia called one end of
the kitchen. Steven spoke to the landlord who came round in some big flash car
muttering about wasting his time when he had important things to do and tenants
to pester for rent and so forth. He put the key into the lock and they slowly entered
to find Julia and the child. Steven rushed towards them and the landlord fled
the scene in panic, muttering all the swear words he knew in one sentence.
Steven knelt beside the Mother and Child who looked like something ghastly yet
godly from a biblical scene. Not yet a round of the planets – the child was
just five sunsets old! And there, covered in the blood and tears of its mother
who could only cradle the dead child; Julia like some awful Madonna held the
infant with her eyes glazed in other worlds, repeating in some half-crazed
whisper ‘watch the stones, watch the stones.’
