L’amour que nous n’ f’rons jamais ensemble
Est le plus rare le plus troublant
Le plus pur le plus énivrant
Exquise esquisse
Délicieuse enfant
Ma chair et mon sang
Oh mon bébé mon âme
Gainsbourg - Lemon Un Zest
An early realisation of the parents’ independent relationship is experienced by the baby as a gigantic combined figure, penis joined with breast, stomach, mouth or vagina in endless mutual gratification, creating ever new riches in the form of faeces-babies.
Under the influence of anxiety induced by the death instinct, the baby projects his envy and rage into this monstrous figure, which then appears as a powerfully evil force, conjoined in mutual distruction and threatening to annihilate the baby and his world
Gomez, An Introduction to Object Relations
Melody Coakes was not afraid of her father, but she could not exactly have been said to love him. He was, with his drooping belly, flaky hands, oily sweat, constant flush, and worst of all his ‘omnipresent’, ‘unseemly’ ‘flatulence’ (terms Melody and acquired in her AP Lit studies class), a ‘grotesque’.
‘Symbolic’ was another word Melody had been introduced to this semester, as in ‘Iago’s outer ugliness was symbolic of his inner corruption’. A linear correlation, like alcohol consumption and irresponsibility, she thought. Melody enjoyed linear relationships, straight forward cause and effect.There was she suspected, from her reading of unfashionably psychodynamic undergraduate psychology texts, a linear relationship between a daughters feeling for her father, and her ability, the whole rest of her life, to prevent herself from hating men; and so Melody, in her earnest, overly educated, 11 year old way, tried harder than anyone in the world to like Iago Coakes.
Things that Melody found it very much easier to like included the author Phil Pullman, smooth organic hazelnut butter (which was a little like peanut butter, but with less carcinogenic aflatoxins), reruns of the teen drama Dawsons Creek, and that shows lead actress, Katie Homes, to whom Melody was certain she possessed a deep resemblance. To the world Melody, with her waist length and ruler straight blonde hair, her very round glasses, and her fixed toothy smile, resembled more the missing daughter of some wholesome white bread, American nuclear family, a little lost Partridge or Brady, or perhaps a Mormon.
Coakes drove his big car through the regimented chaos of the San Fernando valley. On each side wind tossed warehouses and business parks sat like tumbleweed, permanently temporary prefabs, ghosts of the aerospace and silicon revolutions. His daughter, who had planned their trip, sat in the seat beside him, a little Kumari, gaze flicking eagerly with little movement of her head, from one enormous business complex to the next. Coakes watched her warily out of the corner of his eye, as he leaned in close over the wheel. One weekend in four was the deal he’d cut, reduced visitation for decreased alimony. A win win, yet still too much somehow, forty eight hours a month with a pre-teen intellectual. He snorted involuntarily. Melody looked over and smiled, removing her ear buds.
‘Excuse me dad?’
Coakes thought fast.
‘What are you listening to these days, huh? You like that Brittany Spears? I could probably get you her autograph, how about that shi..’
Coakes had certainly acquainted himself with Spears. Their introduction had been a rough frig, as the girl had lain unconscious in the mens bathroom of ‘Inferno’ on the Sunset Strip. He’d had to wash the semen from his fingers. Melody was saying something.
‘..podcast from NPR.’
Christ, Coakes thought, public radio. He resisting the sudden urge to swing the car into oncoming traffic. Melody’s destiny as a radical feminatzi was suddenly clear to him. He could see her now, years into the future, riding an electric bus from her Berkeley commune to a pro-choice rally, arm in arm with her wrinkled butch ‘wife’, hair full of fair trade braids and packed with vigorous new breeds of lice. Coakes scratched himself, and Melody looked politely out her window.
‘Look dad,’ she said, suddenly excited, ‘Nvidia!’
As the little girl began to regale the corporate history of some hallowed tech firm, Coakes fumed inwardly. He had flown up to San Francisco, a city he hated more than any other, just to take the little brat on this tour, knowing how much he’d regret every moment. Coakes searched for a fantasy number he could run to distract himself, something with sex or food or preferably both; all the while sweating curdled butter, and every now and then grunting a feigned assent.
‘Sure,’ said Coakes, and ‘No way, really?’ His mind elsewhere.
In Coakes’s fantasy number, he drove a red Ferrari convertible - like Magnum PI - over the golden sands of Venice Beech. He slowed to motion over a cute young jogger, who coo’d at his motor and bent over the passenger door, exposing soft, pendulous breasts. Coakes leant back casually, and hocked, landing a fat spit right in the cleavage; then sped off, unbalancing the girl, leaving her fallen in the sand.
Female humiliation made Coakes think of sex, and thinking of sex made him hungry.
‘Lets stop for a bite,’ he said, smiling disingenuously, and steered their rented four by four toward a Dairy Jr.
Melody sat up, dead straight in her seat and wrinkled her forehead.
‘Dad, you know I can’t eat that stuff.’
Coakes pulled into a parking space and cut the engine. Pursing his lips he checked his watch and opened the driver side door.
‘Come on, there’s plenty of time for us to catch that tour of Banana Computer later.’
‘You have one dad, it’s Apple. Apple Computer.’
‘Sure, whatever honey,’ said Coakes, leaving his daughter to lock the car as he strode purposefully toward red and yellow paradise.
Melody didn’t like to be a trouble. At Guides she’d even earned an advanced merit badge for ‘Quiet Obedience’. She wordlessly followed her father.
At the counter he ordered two super size ‘Farm N’ Sea’ specials, which Melody could see from the poster consisted of patties of cod fillet, pork and beef, wrapped in battered bacon, caked in American cheese and sealed between white-bread baps. Each burger came with a a half gallon flavoured corn syrup and a cartons of fries, each larger than her head. It took two servers to carry the food to their table, while her father barked directions. As the tray settled, the table bendt oddly at its center, threatening to implode.
Melody said nothing as her father packed fistfuls of fries into his mouth, squeezing single service ketchup sachets straight in after them. She looked out the window, half listening to a Reith lecture on her iPhone, and thought about math camp at Carnegie Mellon, and Steve’s chocolate factory in Cupertino. She thought of the Valley of Hearts Delight, of venture capital from vested options, of Microsoft and Apple growing from home brew computer clubs and cheap semi-conductors and the geeky kids of aerospace engineers; she thought of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and Keynesian pump priming. A jab in her ribs, her fathers fleshy finger, broke her reverie. He was speaking. Melody paused the lecture and looked up smiling.
Coakes was purple from the speed at which he’d eaten. Two black rings joined at the centre of his chest from the faucets of sweat under either arm. As he spoke, flecks of fat from his full mouth stuck Melody on the face and neck, and the rich garbage of his fetid breath made her cover her nose involuntarily. Coakes slapped her hand away.
‘I don’t care what wheat grass hippy crap your mother feeds you. This is wholesome American fodder, and you will eat it young lady.’
Swirling in his mouth, Melody could see something that resembled a half masticated eyeball. She shook her head wordlessly.
Coakes could not believe the girl. If he, a noted critic, a well paid and respected personage, could stoop to eat around these blacks and spics, then by fuck, this little princess could forget for five minutes, whatever vegan homo crap passed for patriotism in Seattle.
‘Well? Are you going to join your father in a civilized meal like a grown up? Or are you going to cry like a little baby?’
Melody paled under the stares of strangers who’d turned to rubber neck her fathers explosion.
‘Dad, I wish you’d stop’ she whispered, ‘People are staring’.
‘Of course they’re staring,’ Coakes roared, rising to his feet.
‘They want to know why you think you’re so special. Look at you, typical fucking woman, you think you’re just better than ornery folks, don’t ya?’
Melody tried hard to keep from crying. It had been months since she’d allowed herself, and even then she’d only cried a little when Feynman, her Cocker Spaniel, had escaped and been crushed to bean curd under a Domino’s delivery truck.
She took a deep breath.
‘I’m lactose intolerant Dad, and I’m vegetarian.’
Coakes planted his hams on the table, and squared up to the eleven year old. Christ he thought, the spoilt little bitch is actually going to humiliate us, and blub like a squeezed diaper.
Melody’s lower lip quivered, and she met the sympathetic glances of the restaurants reluctant audience. One woman moved her kids to the other end of the room, muttering. An old African American man made as if to stand and brandish his cane, but she shook her head. Melody spoke up.
‘I wish..’
Coakes interrupted, ‘There you go with that wishing stuff again. I wish you were a wishing well, so that I could tie a bucket to you and sink you.’
She watched his hand rise, felt it clamp her jaw, and her little palms lifted instinctively to paw at at his big fingers; which squeezed her cheeks, vicing her lips open.
With his other hand Coakes tore a hunk of steaming cheese-meat from Melody’s burger, and fed it to her. As he held her nose, forcing her to swallow, the righteous indignation began to recede. He was in control. After two more lumps, he allowed her to eat on her own, watching closely to ensure she finished everything. Coakes could not abide wasted food.
Shakily, Melody tried to wipe her mouth, as her father dragged her bodily from the restaurant. Her lips stung, and her belly felt hot and tight. Melody’s tongue wriggled in her mouth, trying to find a place to escape from the taste of itself. Half way across the lot she stumbled, and her father let her go. Her stomach jerked into contractions, and the corners of her vision began to blacken. On her knees on the ground, Melody started to vomit, hunks of half chewed meat steaming into milky glugs of fizzing soda, that steamed off the hot blue tarmacadam.
In the hospital, Coakes cursed himself a fool. Estimating the rental cars cleaning bill, the green he’d have to cash out for the doctor, and the hush money he’d already paid, and would continue to pay, to that bitch at the check-in desk who’d booked Melody under an assumed name. Still he thought, thumbing through the TV shows on his daughters iPhone, he could probably trust the little girl not to tell her mother what had happened. She was, at the end of the day, not the worst kid in the world.
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