feelings of scared

“We’d better microchip the children,” said Plummer – a bald man – matter of factly. “I’ve been thinking.” He nodded as he spoke in a way that was unsettling to focus on.

“Agreed,” said Taylor, his wife. She was a pleasant woman with the face of a cartoon feline, crafted by an idiot out of cheap materials. Friendly, in its way. “There are killers.”

They were a sensitive pair, eating from a plastic dinner set, children locked within their bedrooms in protection from the shocking cruelty of the world.

“Rapists,” he said, “rapists everywhere. It is a growing phenomenon, the child rape. Growing.”

“An increase of percentages,” said Taylor, trembling slightly in thoughts. “Every street contains one, a cyber-pervert, a sex-man, an abduction-performer. Waiting behind car windscreens or UPVC window panelling to pounce and snatch and perform entries into the innocence of youth.”

“They do their rapes in the day or the night,” said Plummer, stroking at his own pate. “Perhaps the most terrifying thing about their sex – it follows no temporal routine.”

“It’s awful!” she concurred with vehemence.

“Our constant vigilance is the modern necessity. Putting a stop to the strangers.”

“No one can be trusted.”

“Everyone’s a suspect. Why is he smiling? Why is he frowning? Does he live here? Yes? No? Who are these people? Everyone!”

“Everyone.”

They drank juice from plastic champagne flutes.

“It’s symptomatic of modernity,” said Plummer amidst moderate-level mastication. “When we were in youth the world was a safe place. Television has come at the price of infant buggery.”

“Without consent.”

“Thank you.”

“A modern disease, this paedophilia. A modern luxury.”

“Childhood has never been less safe than now. The gentle games of our children must be punctuated repeatedly by warnings: murder, knifes, electrical flex, towels wrapped heavily around the throat and mouth inhibiting breathing, sexual prowlers, and endless string of physical violations. They must be aware, dammit, aware of these horrors!”

“Billboards of victims!”

“Newspaper headlines of pain!”

“Fear! Instil the fear of God into them!”

“They must be scared to talk to each other!”

“Scared to open their doors! Scared to leave their houses!”

“Scared as we are scared for them!”

“I can’t sleep for fear!”

“I’ve had to leave my job!”

“I am so very scared, every day. I have these terrible feelings of... of scared.”

“Scared for the children! If they cross the road, they will die. Abducted. Knifed. Tortured over the telephone. Broadcast on the internet. The screaming children. Oh God!”

“The men are everywhere!”

“Not just the men, Taylor. The women too. The unmentionable vaginal acts of the women!”

“Please stop, Plummer! Please don’t even say it!”

“Be strong, Taylor. We must confront these atrocities ourselves if our children are to remain safe.”

“You’re right. We have a responsibility.”

“A responsibility to God.”

“To our children.”

“To society. The rapes grow exponentially. It has become the norm.”

“The streets are certain death for our children. My heavens, what can we do?”

“Microchips,” said Plummer, his fingers interlaced. “We must microchip them. It’s the only thing to do. The only safe thing.”

“May the good conservative Lord save us from crimes of a coital persuasion!”

*

A sensitive pair who read the tabloids, embroiled in the nausea of their growing fear. The headlines became an information pamphlet, a proclamation of ugly truths, perhaps even a survival guide. Pictures of Maddy became clippings in a shrine, rubbed deliriously over breasts in a frenzy of lost hopes. It was beyond their comprehension just when things had gone so wrong, when the fear took a hold, but it was there. They knew, everybody knew, that it wasn’t safe. Nothing was safe. Sex prowled humanized, mechanical, dirty, inappropriate. Children weren’t for sex but had become so, sperm vessels of forced depravity. Thank heavens for the media who at least tried to keep us aware of the pain.

Taylor cried violently every ten minutes or so, heaving and snorting back mucus into her throat, as if some oddly humorous part of a self-fulfilling prophecy, convinced she could hear gruff male voices behind their children’s closed bedroom doors, or see big muddy footprints left in their en-suite bathroom, or smell unwashed genitalia trickling through the homestead. It was dangerous outside, even for a second, and the children were engulfed within their own insulation, stifled by an inexplicable mass terror. Asked of their fears they answer rapes, or killers, these children five and eight respectively. These words: rapist, killer. How queer to have our children saying these things amongst themselves, in the playground. The unpopular kid at school now called the rapist, the paedofreak. Snatched out of youth by a parental paranoia. Don’t play, you’ll be fucked and cut. Awareness of the risks equals avoidance of the risks: a t-shirt slogan for a parent think-tank held in post-school hours.

Before they had married Plummer had looked long into her eyes and told her that he could see she was a sensitive, warm person, and that he knew this because he was a psychic, and therefore extremely good at reading people. He was a bald, superficially friendly man of short stature, and talked at length about how he had seen ghosts whilst working at night as a security guard in a bank several years ago. He had eventually reprimanded the ghost, he said, but had been scared initially, feelings which passed of course because of his psychic gift. It was ultimately a harmless presence, banging on the walls and stairs, and Plummer had vehemently explained that he could feel the ghost’s pain, and reasoned with it that as he had a job to do it was bound to be best for both of them if they tried to get along, and everything worked out pretty well. Guys like him had to get used to ghosts taunting him at night in darkened financial institutions. It came with the gift, he said from the mouth of his bald head. He ended up a health care assistant.

Later in the date they started ripping each other’s clothes off in some ritualistic sexual celebration of their respective sensitivities, whimpering understanding ripostes like sweet nothings and crying for the pain of the world. Once they had both attained a concerned orgasm they looked pensive and considerately into the others eyes, nodding rhythmically, cooing even, as if the very essence of morality grew from their chests. She cried again, and he cried too, and they knew then that they were made for each other.

“Let’s get married,” he suggested, words muffled by her shoulder, in which he had buried his face.

“Oh God,” she said in a fresh new batch of tears. “The beautiful morning! I, fragility!” She clutched to his head with both arms, as if she were trying to squeeze it right off, and began to scream, loudly, awfully, inexplicably.

“I can feel your pain in me like the spirit itself!” yelled Plummer. “I can feel the pain of the world!”

They were married three weeks later, on a Wednesday.

*

Their concern for the children had grown with the passage of time. As they got older the worry only seemed to get worse and worse until eventually, after just one term, the eldest was pulled out of school. It was safer that way. No colds, no bullies, no teachers, no potentially poisoned cafeteria meals, no marauding paedophiles waiting with thick hemp sacks outside the school gates with semen stains on their dirty jeans. The press were twisting the perverts into a national epidemic of international proportions, publishing names and addresses and actively inciting lynch mobs of archaic mentality, all the while overlooking the maxim that perversion starts at home.

Still not safe enough. Plummer and Taylor decided it was time for a talk.

“I just can’t sleep,” he said, eyes blue.

“What is it darling?”

“The children. I’m worried about the children.”

“I know. I thought getting little Jessie out of school would reassure my enormous concerns about her public safety, but the more I read those newspapers the less sure I am about anything.”

“The newspapers speak truths, that’s what worries me,” said Plummer, shaking his head. “Times have changed. No one is safe, not even us, and not even in the sanctity of these four walls.”

“Oh helpless!” said Taylor, erupting into tears.

“Not quite,” he said. “There’s still one thing we can do.”

“Anything, anything! We must do anything for the sake of the living future!”

“Well we know that they are unsafe outside.”

“Yes!”

“And we know that any madman could threaten their safety inside.”

“Yes, yes! Any madman! I dream nightmares of disguised paedophiles, dressed in uniforms and carrying the required identification documents to present themselves as professionals in the employ of the utility companies, and knocking door-to-door to conduct a meter reading for the purposes of accurate billing!”

“Indeed,” agreed Plummer, panic spreading into his irises.

“Before I know it they are in the house and conducting unmentionable acts of hideousness onto the genitals and bodies of our helpless children! Curse these nightmares and the reflection of reality they represent!”

“This is representative of my fullest concerns, to wit the house itself – whilst apparently of safety – may in fact become more prison than sanctuary.”

“Then what can we do?” she screeched. “What? If even our home can so easily fall prey to the horrors of the sex pervert, what hope do our children have?”

“Of course for one,” Plummer went on, “one must never, under any circumstance save personal entrance and exit of the abode, open the front door. Ever.”

“Certainly yes. I shout commands from the top bathroom window to anyone who ventures onto the driveway.”

“And that’s the right approach.”

“But what else? You’ve seen the news, they’re everywhere. They could... they could see through the windows, see our children at play and use it to fuel some kind of... masturbatory development! There is nothing sacred to these men and women.”

“Sanctity is certainly rendered meaningless by the paedophile,” Plummer agreed. “For which reason we must ensure that a permanent closure of curtains is operative within the homestead.”

“I’m still so very scared, my darling.”

“I know you are, and so am I. The world is a cruel place for children and adults alike, and it is the responsibility of the decent parent to hide and shelter them from that world. And that is exactly what we shall do. For Jessie and little Christopher, the world has gone. I think it’s safer that way.”

“I love you Plummer,” she said, still crying.

“You know love and safety are very much two integral halves of the same whole,” he smiled.

They lay there in silence for a while, punctuated only by Taylor’s sensitivity. Plummer turned to her, propped up on one elbow. She did likewise, her bottom lip quivering.

“I still feel as though it’s not enough,” he said sincerely. “I’m a dad and I take that responsibility very seriously, and I know you feel the same about being a mum.” Taylor was nodding, tears streaming down her puffed cheeks. “And I think – as a dad – that the best way. The only way I can really know that I am being the best, most responsible dad I can be is if I...”

“What? What do we need to do?”

“I need to... we need to... or rather, we have to fully engulf the children. Physically. Be all over them. Inside them, outside them. We need to be one with them.”

Taylor kissed him and he felt the warmth of her emissions on his hairless cheeks.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “You’re a beautiful man.”

“I knew you’d know it was the safest thing to do,” he said, returning her kisses.

“How do we engulf them?” she asked.

“It’s simple,” he went on matter-of-factly. “We make love to them.”

“Make love to them?”

“Exactly,” he said. “It’s so beautiful, so safe. Remember, love and safety are two sides of the same reassuring coin.”

“But we want to protect our children from the sexual violations of the perverts,” she said with uncertainty.

“Of course we do, and that’s what we’re doing here. Think about it,” he said, sitting up animatedly. “If we’re making love to our children, it means that someone else – some stranger, someone we don’t know or trust – isn’t. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said. “It seems to make sense.”

“In fact, it’s the most sensible thing we can hope for in this awful modernity. And because we love our children so much, and because we are not dangerous or harmful individuals, we are the only two people who should be making love to them, as no one else can ever love them as much as we do.”

“That’s true.”

“And, perhaps most true of all, it is only by crossing this final bridge of spatial closeness that we can know, with the utmost certainty, that we are truly protecting our children. It will make us closer than anything, and we will sleep well at last knowing that we are keeping them safe from all the evil people the modern world produces. Total physical protection. Our bodies will join as one familial bodily unit, shielded by intimacy and by proximity!”

Taylor was smiling with such love in her eyes. “Oh Plummer,” she said. “You are the kindest, most sensitive man. You understand the danger intuitively. The children are lucky to have a father like you.”

“And you’re a terrific mother,” he said, nodding in agreement.

Overcome with the passion of it all, Taylor moved into a position conducive to fellatio, which she proceeded to perform, calmly, slowly and with a sensitive attention to detail. Plummer leaned back, hands folded behind his head. He was relaxing for the first time in nearly five years.

With the efficient regularity of clockwork, the abuse began the following morning.

*

The Bratz headboard bangs rhythmically with Plummer’s plunging buttocks. “You... are... safe!” He is breathy in his speech, and Taylor looks on with a handkerchief dabbed to the corner of an eye, like she was watching little Jessie riding a stabilised bicycle for the first time, and not this terrible act of intercourse.

She doesn’t have to cry anymore. It’s just another part of her day. And if she closes her eyes she is safe. She’ll always be safe if she closes her eyes, if she doesn’t see or feel it. With the curtains always closed her world is now a construct. She isn’t afraid. The fear is all her parents. Bad bad parents. Later she’ll have to lick mummy and daddy will sing “Water of life” and feel relieved that they are together in here, a family, and not susceptible to the social dangers of kidnapping sex maniacs with their penises, and knives, and homicidal ideation.

What about the sex maniacs on this side of the curtains?

Oh, they’re family.

*

“Oh God I miss Maddy!” mourned Taylor, sobbing into palms.

“But mummy, you didn’t even know her. She wasn’t your little girl.”

Slap. “She was. She was everyone’s little girl.”

A symbol.

“Are we safe mummy?”

“Only in here,” she said, kissing the little Maddy photograph. A child sacrifice on the altar of mass hysteria. Portugal – England – World. The facts had ceased to matter the minute she was out of sight; she had become a statement of terror more real than any act of terrorism. Child victims of illicit adult fetishism. The nonce was the master citizen of the media kingdom. She could have been a photograph, a news report, a grief-stricken interview with parents, a fantasy, a falsehood; it didn’t matter, for the statement she had made united the world in madness, saw an end to any meaningful understanding of childhood, saw windows locked and doors bolted, saw nations stands as brothers against a horror unimaginable.

Maddy the grand narrative.

And the other abuse, unreported and unceasing, behind the closed doors of family, was forgotten, paled into insignificance by the pretty blonde girl and the suspicious parents. Resources and venom pumped to bursting into the Maddy machine while friends and neighbours and doctors and teachers and police look rapists and monsters in the eye and are too busy worrying about this distant child they hadn’t ever known to notice the domestic abnormality that’s right in front of them. Old Maddy, a case to worry about, to hide away from, to extend scorn to shifty men everywhere, to use as evidence of the decaying morality of the world at large, but still distant enough for comfort. Doesn’t infringe upon the unwritten respect due to blood relation.

Where does it all end, this hysteria?

In Plummer, fucking his little daughter because he’s scared to let her out of the house.

In Taylor, wanking Maddy’s memory with brittle fingers.

In all the confused parents terrified by their own imaginations.

*

Plummer ran up the stairs clutching an A5 jiffy bag in front of him. “The microchips,” he shouted. “They’re here!” He burst energetically into the master bedroom, where Taylor was laid out flat on the floor, the children lethargic and groggy on the bed next to her. The room smelt stale and unusual, relentlessly dulled by the absence of light, bathed depressingly in a sixty watt smear of electrical representation. Jessie and little Christopher didn’t sit up, but Taylor leapt to her feet, clapping her hands compulsively while tears poured down her cheeks and words fell heavily from her mouth.

“The microchips, children! Children, the microchips! Oh thank you, father, for this the next level of responsible parent-child safety interaction!”

“Yes Taylor!” whooped Plummer, striking a well centralised high five to Taylor’s feeble right hand. “Another nail of reassurance in the coffin of familial security.” He smiled broadly and turned to the children. “Here they are kids,” he said, as if he were revealing the most coveted electrical gadget of a new generation. “Microchips.”

Jessie and Christopher peered into the jiffy bag, feigning interest. He was right all right: microchips, a couple of centimetres square. Jessie snorted quietly and lay back down.

“Not just microchips, either,” Plummer went on like a desperate salesman, “but tracking devices, too.”

Taylor gasped audibly and cried even harder. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful.”

“Yes!” screeched Plummer in an awful pitch. “This way we will always know where you are! Isn’t that terrific.” Christopher started to cry, but didn’t really know why. He had never been outside the house, it was too dangerous. For Jessie the world outside the detached family home was a difficult memory, but for Christopher only an imagining, a possibility.

“How, oh God please tell me, how?” Taylor felt nauseous with delight.

“A special tracking device,” said Plummer, folding his arms triumphantly. “It’s being sent in a separate jiffy bag.” He and Taylor slumped into each other’s arms, as if in the throes of some bizarre sexual union. The children lay still.

“Chip them, my darling,” said Taylor. “Chip them immediately.”

“Good idea,” Plummer concurred. “The sooner we act the safer we are.” He nodded at the children. “We’re doing this for you,” he said gravely. “We do everything for you. You’re our children, our lives, everything we have. As adults we know that the world is not safe for you. We’re all better off in here, together.”

“Away from the paedophiles and the fiends of a publicised contemporary deviant sexuality!”

“Very much yes,” he said with a genuine loving affection for his wife. “Away from the perverts. Just us, together, one big happy family. I mean, what could the world possibly have to offer us?” he asked, arms extended in invitation. No one said anything, it was a well-practised ritual. “Precisely,” he said, basking in the collective silence of denial. Did the world even continue on the other side of these walls? It was a meaningless contemplation for the children, who flopped almost lifeless amidst the coordinated linen set, so very, very bored.

“Now,” Plummer continued, unfastening his belt and lowering his trousers first, then underpants. “Microchips!”

*

The newspapers sing their dirty songs. Parents feel hatred with the community vigour of a lynch mob, inexplicably and mindlessly angry. A fine example for all of our children.