I feel too inspired to work.

Ophelia’s Pop Song
Shorten my days
I can’t breathe for all these years
Of hours, without you.
Shorten life
It passes like a ship
Without a keel, a slow hull
Listing, without you.
Shorten my breath
Kiss me til I feel the hand of death
And then release me—if you like.
It doesn’t really matter what you do.
Since I’m going to choke already, without you.

The Hellmouth Dad: Daubed Dumb
[Or] Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers (Joan Miro, 1941)

My son’s in the school play, and I’ve heard there’s this amazing stage kiss. Can’t wait. What kind of face are you supposed to wear?—when you’re watching your son kiss some person you’ve never seen before, when other people’s parents that you’ve never met are all craning round to look at your face and see how you’re taking it? The play had its opening night last night, and apparently this kiss is the talk of the town already. Well, we’ll see.

My son’s ex-girlfriend Samantha wrote the play. I think they’re thinking of getting back together—well anyway, she chose him to play her lead. It’s a life of Joan Miro—told by his cat, Sebastian. I’m not sure that Miro ever had a cat, because he’s portrayed as gay in this play, and I’m pretty sure Joan Miro wasn’t gay. Well, I asked Samantha—the playwrite—and she said, “Nah, but I thought I’d take a bit of license.” I said, “That’s some pretty wild license you’re taking though Sam.” She said, “I don’t think so. What about all those old Hollywood classics biographies of various gay composers and that, where they’re always portrayed as straight?” I felt really guilty after that. She always makes me guilty. If I was my son, I’d want to go out with her too. Wonder who dumped who.

I watch my wife put on her earrings, rings, necklace, and bracelets, and we leave for the play. I keep to my shadows on the street, some sort of game, and my wife laughs at me, and I say, “Just a habit.”

So we settle into our fifth row seats in the school hall, watch the pre-play entertainment: the junior brass band, a couple of dance students from year 12 doing a sloppy tango, then the drama teacher welcoming us. My wife holds my hand for a moment, between the seats. It’s nice, the feel of her hands in all those cool rings. Her skin’s in good condition. And her nails. Her nails are pretty good too. I imagine leaning across and telling her that she’s giving me an erection. She isn’t, but I could tell her that anyway. I wonder what she’d do. Doubt she’d check… she doesn’t like sex talk. Maybe she’d leave… Shit, the plays beginning.

Colourful backdrop, a lot of bright, bright, bright… arguably, a bit more Fisher Price than Miro, but a good effort from the art class. I’m the kind of person, though, who can’t really sit through a school play and concentrate: I’m a nitpicker, always noticing the seams where the pictures that make up the background have been taped together, always trying to determine the origins of the foil they’ve used for the flaccid play swords… then wondering, Miro? Swords? Artistic license, I guess. What goes through that girl’s head? If I had x-ray vision, I’d look straight through that backdrop, straight through those backstage curtains, and seek Samantha out, find her sitting there perched on a desk, nervously hanging on every line as her actors drag themselves through her play. Then I’d stare through her clothes, stare at her body. I’d even look through her little belly, into her smooth pink womb.

My wife’s still holding my hand. She leans across and says in my ear, “Our son’s looking great, isn’t he?” I nod, the kind of nod without eye contact that reminds people to be quiet. She quietens, squeezes my hand. Our son. I don’t know, as an actor, he’s wooden ham. He’s either mumbling, or announcing everything, and he puts about as much emotion into it as he puts into taking the garbage out. That’s harsh—but maybe it’s just that I can’t concentrate. It’s stupid, but all through the play I can’t focus on the plot, I just keep wondering when it’s going to get to the kissing scene.

At last, the lights onstage dim to a hazy pinky yellow. A sexy rosy colour. There’s a burst of steam from the smoke machine. It’s as close as you can get to a visual orgasm on a 1940s-built proscenium arch stage in a government secondary school. My son’s alone onstage. If there was a set for kissing in, this is it.

Sure enough, the dark figure enters. Did I tell you about the dark figure? Oh, well the dark figure has been appearing—cloaked—through all the scenes when Miro’s painting. He’ll be touching up the nipples on a nude, tenderly sketching the outline of a mad modernist fish—and then the figure will appear, like the shadow of Eros, hanging in the background. And then he stops working, and he looks up, and the figure’s always gone… actually, my son’s not too bad at acting that part. I like how he looks up when that figure appears. The way his shoulders fall when the figures gone.

And now the figure’s here. The figure, stage right, my son, stage left—dropping his over-sized paintbrush and taking a single, symbolic step forwards. I shift in my chair, slightly uncomfortable, suddenly. My wife’s hand’s not in mine, and I start folding the program, a little anxious maybe, but really just fiddling. It’s a bit awkward. The silence of this scene makes me realise there was background music in the others. You can actually hear the floorboards creak now as my son takes another step towards her… it… the figure.

They both approach each other. Converging, as inevitably as the convergence of Renaissance lines of perspective. Their bodies, in the red dark, as shadowy shaped and organic as Miro’s best black blobs daubed in oil. They’re within a feet of each other, only a massive canvas separates them: homme a la pipe. They both reach out a hand to each other—that’s all you can see of the figure, just this bare, slender hand. You think their hands are going to touch, and then… shred. Their hands don’t touch—they grab the canvas itself, and shred the painting. Shit.

I’ve been holding my breath. I don’t know why. I glance up and down the rows of audience seats. Everyone’s just looking at the stage, everyone looks all right. But now I’m slightly short of breath… I bet Samantha’s nervous too, backstage.

When both halves of the torn portrait have fluttered to the floor, my son—his athletic body cut in sharp profile by the red backlighting—puts his hands out, and pushes the cloak gently back off the head and shoulders of the figure. Slowy the lights rise, a sexy, peachy pink… and it’s a boy. The figure’s a boy. Why didn’t I think of this. My son’s stage kiss… it’s a gay kiss.

They kiss. Oh yes, they kiss. The boy, this oddity, this other… boy… He kisses my son. I stir, repulsed? Repulsed or what? In my seat, I stir and shift. That boy: he’s beautiful, he has amazing shaded eyes that leap up from their mask of stage makeup, bright… the planes of his cheeks glide upwards, his stance is upright… and my son is kissing him, Joan Miro is kissing him, as I’ve never seen my son kiss anyone. As I’ve never seen anyone kiss anyone. As I’ve never kissed.

The scene ends, of course—all things end—and soon we’re back with Miro’s chatty family, and soon Miro is dying raving mad punch drunk in a gutter, dying like a whore in gin alley, the shreds of all his work and all Van Gogh’s work and all Beethoven’s best sonatas blowing round him—what the? and I glance at the program and it tells me a little about the very long, very normal, very middle class life and death Joan Miro (1893-1983) led, and I wonder what deep sac of virulent fancy in Samantha’s mind this play burst from. As I watch my son, Miro, scream for the dark figure to come back to him from hell, coughing up the confetti of his greatest paintings into his own filthy salivary hands, I feel the end coming, prepare to applaud…

To applaud. My son is gay.

My son, the artist, the gay artist, is a corpse onstage. My son’s dead. Slowly, he rolls his head to one side, eyeballing us as we sit waiting for the curtain. He utters his last words: “Ceci n’est pas…. Renee Magritte.” The rest is silence. Postcoital—no what’s the word?—posthumous silence.

The clapping begins. A roar of clapping hands. Oh it’s so stupid, oh its so so stupid, such a stupid play. I lean across and whisper in my wife’s ear, “Wonderful.” She returns the nothing nod I gave her earlier, she’s too busy clapping, stars in her eyes, awkward sharp-edged stars that she can’t blink away… she looks discomforted. The actors, hands joined, come out to take their stage bow, the second, a third, more and more applause… yet that beautiful dark boy is not among them. I look for him, and he’s not there. It seems so strange, that the dark figure… so elusive throughout the production, so insubstantial… should not be there for the applause… it seems so right. So right, until I realise—that he’s there after all. That’s the dark boy, there, in the white hat. He doubled as the milkman.

And as if that’s not enough surprises, here’s Sam, authoress extraodinaire, striding onto the stage in military jacket and retro legwarmers and the shortest skirt I’ve ever seen, looking appallingly artistic, and she takes a bow as the applause rises on cue, and bows once more, gives a kind of haughty curtsey to the drama teacher… and then strides right across to my son in a bee-line, and gives him a great big wet one, right on the lips. Smooch. Smooch, smooch. They kiss like rabbits fuck. Jesus Christ.

So. They are back together. The milkman claps.

Bunches of flowers all round, mutual congratulations between all the players. A kiss like that, I think, admiring that skirt, could get you pregnant. I keep up my clapping: well done son.

My wife’s ready to leave—she’s gathering program and handbag, and patting down her hair… my son’s leaving the stage too… the applause has died… we’re offered refreshments in the common room… I suddenly feel so alone, as people leave around me in their chatter. I’m full of thoughts that can’t be shared, surrounded by people who wouldn’t understand, I feel like a stranded black blob left hanging in the top right of a vacant huge too-bright canvas. I feel so proud.

Apparently Miro had something to say about this, I discover as I flick through the program, while we’re squeezing between the clusters of pooling parents. Miro wrote:

“tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.”

“Out here darling,” my wife reminds me, steering my elbow outside.

We wait around for our son to meet us, and we’re kept waiting a good thirty minutes, before one of his friends—outlandish in theatrical eyeliner and bejewelled with kitsch beaded sweat—skulks up and tells me he’s gone out drinking with some of the stagehands. “Ok OK,” I say.

He goes, and my wife and I stand on the spot, in our close coats, a little lost.

She says, “Oh well. I’d have thought he’d at least want to say hi, but, boys will be boys I guess.”

“Yes,” I grin back. No: of course he didn’t want to see us. How could he?

How could he, after that? How can we ever speak to each other again?

Empty spaces, empty horizons… everything bare… empty horizons…

We get to the carpark. It’s only then that I notice the play’s title. It’s in French. I turn the front of the program to my wife, and ask her, “Know what it means?”

“Easy,” she says—she did French at school, “La Naissance du Monde. It means, ‘The Birth of the World.’”

Poem 1.

Paint the rooms suicide blue
Feel the blurring breeze of despair waft in
And throw the mood into relief.
Here’s the chair, here’s the chair
Sit there and read the old rhymes
From the storybook. Oh, the snow queen…
How they chased and ate him,
How she slept, and was kissed.
How they deceived each other, all these folk tale
Freaks. How he slept, and kissed you, and left,
How you sliced your toes in ribbons on a broken glass shoe.
Draw the blinds shut,
And listen to the wilting prison air.
It’s winter, and you wear a summer dress,
Watch your automatic hands tremble in distress
And your cold knees shake, and all the carpet floor,
Muffled, like a padded cell.
Time hisses leaking out,
Escapes into the outside. All that’s left
Is breath chasing falling breath,
Alone (turn the page of the book)
Alone, not wanting life or death
Or white or red.

Poem 2.
I’m stupid and I don’t know what to do.
I’m stupid and I don’t know what to do.
I took my temperature, mercury turned blue
I’m stupid and I don’t know what to do.

3.
A song came on I love
My favourite, full of passion, comfort, happy tears
But I didn’t want to hear it
With these dead sounds in my ears.

I’m babyish, I want to crash.
You know that glass pane that’s been smashed
But hasn’t fallen apart: it hangs together
Covered in a web of cracks?
Ooh ooh, I feel like that you know,
Ooh goody, I feel like that.