What are you doing in there? by Daniel Payne

Before I was born they built me an enormous cage. I remember it well.

Mum climbed to the top of a lush green hill where the rains fell and the river began. Dad lugged the cage behind her. Nine months ago a bundle of branches turned up at their doorstep and this meant it was time for them to have a baby boy. This is what everyone wanted. This was the starting point from where I began. The result of everybody’s wanting.

Since he was a representative of the law, Dad set about using the branches to make a cage. It wasn’t his fault. He was simply doing what was asked of him. The cage was very complicated to make. I would need to be able to see out of it yet also be kept in my place. It also needed to float well. The River Thames becomes an angry tidal monster once you have travelled far enough along it. It can suck you under to the river bed, thick with bloated, forgotten bodies.

It is difficult living a life knowing that all that mess is beneath you. Sometimes it pops up - a dead fat hand - and you have to decide what to do about it. Stop and greet it, or press on as if it had never been there.

The neighbours got involved with the trickier parts of the cage’s construction. They did this without asking. It was an automatic ritual they performed silently in the background like the way certain insects fuck in the presence of a particular colour; or, I guess, the way my friends will one day take on the administration of Mum’s funeral because I am too busy howling at the earth.

The government sent their civil servants to officiate the process and ensure the cage conformed to various regulations. They recommended that the corners were strengthened because they appeared quite weak (Dad took offence to this). So Dad got some metallic string like the stuff you make guitars out of and reinforced the corners. It then received an A+ rating from the appropriate government department. Dad framed the certificate and hung it above the fireplace next to a photograph of where he met Mum. He smiled at it often. Now the cage would last at least a lifetime; perhaps even two.

Once the civil servants had gone Mum lined the bottom of the cage with woolly blankets that she had knitted, since she was in charge of softness. People said that this tough wool wasn’t an ideal material for a baby, but she told them to mind their own business and that she knew what I - yet to be born - would like. Everybody agreed that this was a fair point. When the rains started Mum and Dad knew it was time to head to the hill. The cage and the waters were ready which meant that I was ready.

The whole of society followed them. They positioned the cage over Mum so that I was born directly into it. I landed on woolly blankets that cushioned the fall but were also immediately irritating. I heard a voice whisper to me: there is so much death lined up for you, Jack. I thanked him, whoever he was. My parents put me on a boat at the beginning of a small flood that had collected over the rocks. “Goodbye Jack”, they said to me in unison. I floated down the hill.

Different versions of Mum and Dad were waiting for me at the bottom of the hill. They were similar to what they looked like before except that a little bit of light could pass through them now. I guess it had involved a lot of work preparing for my arrival. They were waiting on their own small boat and scooped me up in my cage. The stream picked up water and a little speed. It became a gentle river.

When I was eight years old I began to tell jokes from the cage. I think we were passing Reading at that point, where the river teemed with beautiful fish. Even Dad laughed at my jokes. I wrote them down on paper which was handed to me through the gaps in my cage. Sometimes Nan would join us on the boat and try to tickle me through the wooden bars. Society followed us in a support boat and handed extra sticks to Dad so that he could repair the cage. The water was taking its toll much earlier than expected.

One day on the boat, Nan was having Christmas dinner with us and she said out of nowhere: “But what exactly is a foreskin?” Dad then launched into the most technical scientific description imaginable; complete with hand gestures. Where did all this medical knowledge come from? It was as if he had had it stored there ready to deploy at any moment should anyone ask him. It was at this point I started to line the cages with my discarded jokes so that no one could see me undress. Nan passed on a secret to me. She said we were all very worried I might become a poof.

As we left Reading I celebrated my eleventh birthday where my jokes were still quite funny but I understood that there was also something about them that was not wanted. “You sound like a girl”, said Dad. Mum agreed. This was when things began to get treacherous and the cage required more intensive repair. Also, Nan died. She joined the riverbed. If you look for long enough in the Thames you can see an eel slithering in and out of her skull. Or you can push on; try not to think about it.

And then things really got bad when we reached the bit where the Thames turned tidal. The cage was starting to break up yet it was more important than ever to keep me inside. The people on the support boat handed my parents steel and copper which they used to replace some of the branches of my cage. I didn’t like this new material, which left me with cuts and bruises when I brushed against it. After they had depleted the earth’s natural resources they covered up any holes with language. “Don’t touch that bit” they said.

As the river hit central London I turned twenty five; the London Eye slowly going around to my right. Body parts swelled upwards from the riverbed. The support boat disappeared for long stretches of time, then a thousand of them reappeared without notice. Men I didn’t recognise climbed onto our boat clutching spirit levels and axes. Murderous looks in their eyes. They tutted at my cage. Keeping me inside had now become a full-scale industrial problem.

Somewhere near Rotherhithe, Mum and Dad, my dead Nan, my friends, all the people in the support boats, and every single person on the goddamn river downed their tools, stared at me incredulously and said in one great exhausted cry: “What are you doing in there?”

It was high tide. The waves crashed against the boat.

I pushed my face up against the bars. “All my life you have kept me inside this cage” I said, “and now, you are wondering why I am inside it?”

They laughed. They explained that life was like an egg and that it was up to me to emerge from it in the way that they wanted. I tried to think of an amicable solution and invited them into the cage so that they could help me dismantle it from the inside. They had already stopped listening; each of them occupied by new tasks that had nothing to do with me. The support boats left. The Thames is a busy river and there were more fascinating cages out there they needed to attend to; people much closer to the impossibility of being freed.

Then of course Mum and Dad died somewhere near the QE2 bridge. Not long after that some school friends died at Thurrock; my lovely cat; a work colleague; any relative you can name. Death really started escalating somewhere along the Thames Estuary. A smiling head surfaced from the choppy waters - winked at me - then submerged. So much death, Jack.

I look down at my body, which starts to fuse with all this metal. Somehow I am already thirty five years old. Essex is to my left, Kent is to my right, and my Italian boyfriend is reacting to the meal I just made for him as if it were an attack on his nation state. I apologise for deviating from the great ur-lasagne. We fester, him and I, on opposite sides of the boat.

I clank my copper legs over the sides; oil and sweat dripping from my joints. The river is getting impossibly wide. I look back at my simmering boyfriend and suddenly we are fifty years old. I think about how old this is. Well, now we are sixty. Sixty-five. Each second spent thinking about it adds another year that can’t be claimed back. We switch off the engine as the current takes over everything. We both start to panic and try to comfort each other but our rusty arms can’t quite reach. We’re always either too close or too far.

Together we arrive at the great yawning gap, right at the edge of nothing. I’ve always been scared of this place where the river becomes the sea. Everything very contained and then suddenly: pure horizon. No way to get back to the beginning where the rains once fell on that lush green hill. Lost forever in the infinite sea.

We sail out into a new kind of danger, far outside the range of any riverboats. You can try and get us if you want.

………………..

Daniel Payne works in a library and is working on the first draft of a novel that he started writing roughly one thousand years ago.

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