Ces objets si décevants (or disappointing objects)

The demon sighed and began its tour round hell’s district of disappointment, its newest recruit hesitantly in tow.  Alice followed it at what she deemed a safe distance, glad to be out of the claustrophobic queuing she’d had to endure to get in to hell.  Anyone who’d ever known her had always teased her that she was one of the devil’s own and she’d end up down below.  Now at last she was here and secretly, she felt quite pleased.

“The first thing to happen is you need to come with me on an orientation tour”, the demon sniffily explained, “and it’s important you know where everything is because you’re going to be here for… well, forever.”   It walked onwards down the muddy path that cut between the greyish, almost mauve stone walls, towards the indistinct building in the distance.  The demon was incongruously dressed in a leisurewear tracksuit with a luminous green safety jacket over it and it carried a clipboard.  Not a good look.

As they walked closer to the building, Alice was aware of other denizens of hell as they went about their infernal business.  Bloody hell, all of them, including her demon, looked like various versions of Tom Hanks and those bland, Pinocchio wooden boy features repeated many times were truly disturbing.   Without exception these creatures sanctimoniously rode by on bicycles, whilst clad in the all in one lycra suits favoured by all holier than thou cyclists.  The all in one lycra suit was egalitarian for its part, and favoured no-one.

Suddenly, Alice remembered an event that helped her make sense of some things.  Whilst she’d been in the endless queue, dwarf imps moved up and down it carrying hand held mobile devices, distributing them to anyone who held out their hands.  Alice had finally succumbed and on receiving it, tapped the screen of the small, black pod.  The text that appeared urged, personalise your hell - make it your own.  So she’d pressed the accept box and presumably, the hell that was here was indeed hers.    As the queue had snaked on tediously, she’d seen the screen change to ‘tell us what you think’; then ‘like us on endofdaysbook’.  Alice had dropped the device on to the soggy ground.

Back to now, the building was finally in clear sight and Alice could read the large sign above the white (was that UPVC?) front door.  The Museum of Disappointing Childhood Objects, writ gaudily in bright pink on a 3-D background of various plastic bits of tat.  Out of nowhere, Alice remembered all the toys she’d saved up for as a kid after being beguiled by TV adverts - toys which she’d then thrown away when they’d turned out to be rubbish; having far better games with the boxes they’d come in.  Wow, she thought, is this the way it’s going to be?

The demon was still ahead of her and it beckoned for Alice to follow it in to the darkened space inside the building.  As she was about to step in through the door, Alice could hear a kind of dreadful music and she momentarily wondered whether she was hearing the agonized wailing of the eternally damned.  But no, on stopping to actually listen, she recognised the turgid bleating of Coldplay in the foreground, supported by the farting, earnest notes of Sting’s lute period in the aft.  She was almost impressed by its awfulness.

Shutting the door behind her, the music was mercifully muffled and Alice found herself in what seemed to be an infinitely long corridor with a number of luridly glowing display cases, containing brassy and over ornate picture frames.  The demon stepped aside to let her get closer to one of the cases and she noticed that the frame was actually a border for a computer screen, on which some kind of object was slowly and fuzzily coming into view.

Whilst waiting for the object to clarify itself, Alice began to think about the nature of disappointment (she wasn’t stupid and thought the name of this museum must after all be leading her to something).  In her mind, she pictured disappointment as a small and mean creature, without the energy to change things that other negative emotions, like anger or even grief, could generate.  No, disappointment just was, and no good would ever come of it.

The image on the screen was getting clearer, but it wasn’t there yet and out of the blue, Alice thought of the Sartre quote about hell being other people.  L’enfer, c’est les autres.  She fiddled with the words in her head and changed it to L’enfer, c’est moi, which she thought was apt for her current circumstances.  Quite pleased with herself, she unconsciously did the pretend beard stroking self-congratulation she’d messed about with for years, only to find on stroking her chin that she had in fact now got rather a fine and lengthy beard!  She was just thinking, damn those wasted years of depilation when the demon spoke.

“I think you’ll find that l’enfer, c’est moi, isn’t actually original.  It’s not big or clever and if you google it, you’ll see it’s already been said.”  Had the demon just said, I think you’ll find?  One of her least favourite expressions?  The thought crossed her mind that she’d really like to stick the proverbial red hot poker up its behind, but on looking more closely (why hadn’t she noticed it before?), she saw that in fact it already had one and this undoubtedly accounted for its mincing, pained gait.  Watching how the poker was slowly but purposefully melting a hole in the manmade fabric of the demon’s leisure tracksuit, she wondered what misdemeanour had created this most particular brand of eternal punishment.

When Alice stopped staring at the demon’s backside and went back to looking at the screen, she saw that the image was now fixed and clear.  What had appeared was a silver chain with a small teddy bear hanging from it.  And she was thirteen again, presented with this self-same necklace by Brendan, the dull and pudgy boy in her maths’ class. 

She still remembered his eager little face as he watched for her reaction when she took the necklace from its pink-hearted wrapping paper.  “Do you like it?” he’d said. “Where shall we meet if you come out with me on Friday night?”  “On the dark side of the moon”, she’d answered gothically, really irritated that he’d possibly thought she would be impressed by a necklace like that.  Walking round the side of the science labs, she’d dropped the necklace in a bin, almost as though she feared its cuteness may taint her if she’d owned it for any longer than five minutes.

The demon beckoned Alice to the next screen and as she walked over to it, she saw the image had already loaded.  This time, it was a small, china tea set that she knew instantly to be the one her grandparents had given to her when she was about seven.  It was made up of a teapot with its spout glued back on, a milk jug and various, mismatching cups, saucers and plates.  Her grandparents had been given it by a German prisoner of war who’d worked on their farm in Derbyshire and in time, this had been passed on to her.

 In terms of its placing in this museum, it wasn’t so much that the tea set itself was a disappointment; rather it signalled the lack of something that if she thought of it all these years later, still disappointed her.  As a child, her family had never had breakfast – no one made it and in fact, there was never anything in to have anyway. Up to the age of ten, Alice used to call for her friend, Sarah, on the way to school and every day, she was confronted with the amazing breakfasts Sarah’s family enjoyed.  Two types of toast, a selection of cereals, all lined up in Tupperware boxes, fruit, milk to drink, or tea from a huge brown teapot.  In the evenings after school, Alice would go home and play Having Breakfast, pouring nothing from the tea set teapot into the cups, serving nothing for pretend breakfast on the pretend plates.  The poor little girl with her china tea set.

Alice sighed and moved on to the third screen glowing steadily in the display case.  This time, the image was a pipe and although there was no actual smell of tobacco in the room, this came flooding back to her as though she’d smelt it only yesterday.  Her dad’s pipe.  Wooden, dirty and so gnarled, it always looked like it had grown from the earth.  The maintenance of this pipe had been her dad’s life’s work, the constant lighting, the feeble then dying flame and the ceaseless cleaning of its bowl.  The sucking noise he made on it when he was thinking deeply and the thin black juice that always trickled from its stem when he put it down, still had the power to repulse her and she could feel her lips curl in to a disgusted grimace even now. 

She’d stolen it once and jumped out of her bedroom window on to the flat roof below her room, the pipe wrapped in toilet paper in her fingertips.  Having quickly realised it was lost, her dad started searching for it and eventually tracked it down.  From her lofty perspective, his furiously peevish face looked particularly small and impotent as he screeched up for it. 

In remembering her dad, it struck Alice that it was not actually the pipe, but her father - the owner of the pipe - who disappointed her.  She wondered whether this really counted when the demon made a quiet ahem behind her.  She looked round to see him flicking though the papers attached to his clipboard.  “I refer you to clause seventy three, subsection twelve of hell’s code of conduct; that is, if an object is so inextricably linked to the identity of a particular person, then it is perfectly acceptable for that object to stand for that person, as well as it being able to be displayed independently in its own right in the museum of disappointing childhood objects”.

Well, at least that told her, Alice thought as she walked over to the next display case! Ah, the naval greatcoat.  There it was on the screen, as bulky and ugly as it had been in life.  When they were fifteen, she and Sarah had saved up and bought it from the army and navy stores.  Dark blue, brass buttoned and already shabby, they had done their own alterations on it to try and make it fit using first, cotton, then Blu-tack and ultimately staples along its newly created, fraying and uneven hem. 

They’d stored it under a willow tree in the jitty between their houses, as neither of their mothers would have allowed them to buy it, let alone wear it.  The idea was to share the coat, and the willow tree seemed a fair and equidistant storage place.  However, the damp, the dirt, the insects and the catkins made it even more horrible than it probably was at the beginning of its life.  Alice winced a little when she remembered looking at herself in the mirror at Sarah’s house, knowing in her heart of hearts that it didn’t look darkly cool, it looked shit.  It was no better on Sarah, so she couldn’t vicariously admire it – Sarah was a plumpish girl, not the wasted goth she wanted to be.  Must have been all those breakfasts…

Alice noticed that there was only one more display case lit by a glowing screen and after that, the corridor led off into infinite blackness.  The image on this last screen was that of an old sit up and beg bike.  When she was sixteen, her granddad had made this bike for her from one of the adapted 1920’s post bikes that he collected and stored in her gran’s wash-house at the back of their terrace.  It was large, sturdy and the most hideous shade of brown she’d ever seen.  Her granddad had spent hours tinkering with the bike to get it working and polishing its chrome bits. 

The look of complete disdain that crossed her face when he first took the dustsheet off it to reveal it to her was not her finest hour.  She already had to cover up her posh music case with a Tesco carrier bag to ensure she wasn’t beaten up by the rough kids and now this monstrosity.  She’d wanted a Raleigh chopper and had got a Frankenstein bike.

Damn, she felt disappointed.  In fact, she felt disappointed with everything, even hell.  She’d imagined hell would be all black, bony glamour, but instead it was all so overwhelmingly bland.  When had mediocrity got so powerful she wondered?

“You’re very self- absorbed, aren’t you?” Alice looked round at the demon as it hissed.  “You’re very self-absorbed, I said.  What gives you the right to be so disappointed? It’s always been all about you.  You didn’t get sent to hell for being a lovely person, you know.  Have you spent your whole life waiting for people to please and entertain you whilst you sit back in judgement?” She considered what the demon was saying. “You’re not here to learn anything and there’s no Scroogian road to Damascus moment for you”, it ended, with the mixed metaphor phrasing of the fatally unimaginative. 

With that, the demon moved towards the white plastic door that had abruptly appeared out of the darkness of the corridor ahead.  Alice was mulling over what the demon had just said to her and although she inwardly laughed at the idea of being told off about her attitude by a demon from hell, she thought it had actually made some fair points. 

Now, they were outside the museum and back on the path - the demon ahead of her with Alice following it more obediently than before.  She had the sense it was leading her to the next point of orientation and she wondered what this would be as they passed a bunch of demons huddled in front of a column that seemed to be carved out of the stone wall.  On the column was a flat-screen TV attached above a pine fireplace.  The demons were watching Stephen Fry’s faux modest simpering as he gave a lecture on how the whole of the human race would eventually become meat.  Oh how she loved Stephen Fry and TVs above fireplaces!

Alice suddenly felt very tired and shut her eyes so she was momentarily comforted by the crinkly darkness under her eyelids.  The demon stopped sharply and turned to speak to her.  “Next, we’ll be visiting the field of situations where you felt you wished the ground would swallow you up instantly; but which in fact never seemed to end”.  The demon sneered.  “Brace yourself, we’re going to be here a long, long time.”

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