I once heard a quite connected story delivered with some delight by the Head of The Drama Department at my university. He attended my ethically bizarre wedding believing it to be a grave mistake on the parts of his two star students from that particular year. I remember him catching my eye whilst I was in full flood doing a Richard Burton on my reception speech- he’d seen the lie of it laid bare and in that glance he’d told me so. But I was young and thought an agreeable lie to make my family smile would be compostable. He knew differently and ultimately he was right. Every lie has inescapable resonances.
After a short seminar I’d been asked to stay behind with him and share a coffee- agreeable but not in itself an honour, he punctiliously favoured everyone the same. Though we would become close- friends almost, as I was with the Head Of College. At that time we discussed the urban myth of alligators in the sewers. Maybe he was testing my suggestibility. We went on to talk about the effects of increased levels of female hormone finding its way into the water table because of the vast uptake of the contraceptive pill and how it was reportedly changing the gender of fish and other water creatures. I remember feeling a little like a small boy who’d just twigged the awful truth that his dad was about to tell him old hat shit about the birds and the bees.
He sighed very wearily, just this safe side of despair and said that he had a friend, a research biologist, whose life’s work had concerned the cross-breeding and in-breeding of fish. This man’s house had an aquatic lab attached to it. In there, he said, were things he wished he’d never seen, living things that should have had no right to life. Apparently the embryos had been subjected to a variety of ‘foreign’ conditions. I do remember low-level radiation being one of them.
Now I am not generally a fan of freaks- three headed fish do not excite me. As a child, my father had taken me on his bony shoulders to see a travelling Freak Show. I was there being compulsively repelled and attracted a whole decade before Diane Arbus’ images hit me. There was a two headed lamb and a bearded lady and a darkness that smelled of wrong and straw and dried piss. I confess to a not altogether healthy fascination with dwarves and, before you waste your time, I can tell you there are no gay dwarf sites on the world wide web. Yes. Sad, I know. I have looked. A number of times. My man is 5’ 5’’. More than a dick’s length shorter than me.
I just wanted to say to the ignorant masses that the reproductive sex acts between a married couple where the man is gay and the woman is a lesbian do not produce freaks per se. Yes they will be different. They will be different because primarily their parent’s auras are somewhat gaudy and could not be described by Dulux as Papyrus. I rather like that. I’m not altogether sure that they do all of the time.
Next to that Senior Lecturer’s Study was an empty costume room I was using to construct savage crowns for a production of Oedipus- six inch nails and galvanised chicken wire. I was on my own. The door opened. I had company and he locked it, this adventurer from the year below me. With no pretence at subtlety he got his cock out. And so it went on- me alarmed that our gasps of breath might carry though the walls. He kissed my cheek before he went. Always knew you were, he told me, the engagement never fooled me.
I don’t remember his name but he was small in all departments except his eyes. His eyes were memorably huge, enormous, like you sometimes see in inbred goldfish. He waived his arms like fantails and was somewhat cold and noticeably slimy. Following in the footsteps of Lyall Watson, he was doing a degree in oceanography. We never exchanged another solitary word.
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