St. Mark's Day

Filth, food and fornication. Just a typical bug's life

Trisha and the kids are off at Flyworld®--"400 Square Feet of Shit," as the brochures proclaim. It's something of a tradition for those of our lineage round about St. Mark's Day, April 25, when there's a palpable warming of the breeze outside and the not too distant smell of summer hanging above the lawn and the blackthorn hedgerows and the lime trees. Maybe I'll join them later--though, then again, maybe not, because recently it feels as if I've become immune to all the quote excitement unquote of being around so many similarly fervid buzzing bodies, the frantic diving and scrabbling and vomiting, the clamor and the rapacious fucking and the occasional violent sideshows as everyone gets a little too stoked up and overheated and tempers boil over. I think, reader, you know what I mean. You've been there. The sinister ichneumons are always around too, looking for hosts for their hideous children, which is one reason you never find our more genteel, civilized brethren--the moths and the butterflies--taking time out at Flyworld®. Plus, those guys are not mad on shit, anyway.

Anyway, this is why I'm here now, thinking things over, just circling the light in the living room. And there is work to be done, a few little odds and ends to be tidied up with everybody safely out of the house.

Without me to keep watch, I reckon Trisha will lose a good five or so of our 27 benighted offspring, and the truth is we rowed this morning--me saying, Look, why make the effort. It's Fly-world--no ®--in here: There's shit everywhere you look, they've just had a fucking baby, and the human standards of cleanliness and hygiene have been forgotten, albeit maybe temporarily. And Trish waggles her pretty scape sadly and says, It's not the shit; that's not the point. It's a day out, it's a family thing, when did you get to be so fucking joyless, Clive--look at the kids, all of them, buzzing around by the window, they're desperate to go.

And indeed little Jermaine and Bryony and poor, dumb Edmund, the runtiest of runts, are flying headfirst at the glass, trying to pulverize their way through, bang bang bang bang they go, and they're young and stupid and know nothing, and I rate their chances of surviving Flyworld® about one in 20 absolute tops, and Edmund one in a hundred, but Trisha is resolute and there's this horrible, debilitating, acrimonious exchange between the two of us and then a dangerous silence before they all file out shrieking with glee through the ventilation grill behind the gas boiler, and the house is quiet.

What gets the kids going, apart from the promise of all that glorious shit, is the chance to see the St. Mark's flies make their first appearance. According to our popular mythology, the laws of physics preclude a creature as ungainly and heavy and inept as the St. Mark's from achieving any sort of flight. That cumbersome black undercarriage and the two pairs of elongated, limp tarsi and a pair of flaccid palps should by rights drag them back down to earth and thus to evolutionary annihilation. And in fact they don't fly too well and rarely climb higher than a bed of nettles, and you watch them and think, Right, any moment now, nemesis in the form of an avian predator, a robin or a thrush, or maybe just gravity, will strike and that's it for the St. Mark's flies for another year. But somehow the St. Mark's flies get by.

The kids are avid to watch all this and have been pretending to be St. Mark's all around the house, plummeting from the arm of the sofa to the carpet and giggling, and now they want to see the real thing, knowing that this will most likely be their only chance to do so.

And I think they hope maybe to strike up some sort of conversation, too, or ask for autographs, and that's okay because the St. Mark's are easygoing, self-effacing and approachable, which is more than can be said for most of the multitudes of kith, kin and mortal enemy spinning out their cheap holidays at the frantic, tawdry hedonism of Flyworld®, with the barkers and the colored balloons.

Here's a thing, though. Trisha and me, we met at Flyworld® during the last desperate whirl of bacchanalia just before the big autumn sleep. There she was, just inside the gates, this vision, dancing in the air surrounded by a virtual swarm of swooning, just-hatched stone flies with their soft and frankly hopeless gossamer wings and Trisha spinning above and around them in this peculiarly elegant ellipse or maybe a trapezoid, which later became so familiar and then, in the end, unaccountably irritating to me. Lust-drunk, we flew straight back to my house, and the kids were set down to mature in a large piece of unsmoked bacon that had fallen down to ripen behind the refrigerator. Hell, those were heady days, believe me!

And maybe remembering our first meeting was behind some of the fury this morning. She thinks I've become too comfortable, too attuned to and obsessed with the rhythm of this house, its frequent, dangerous interlopers and the worry and irritation of a burgeoning arachnid population--much worse since the new baby arrived--and of course the life cycle of our own dear, kind hosts. The mewling baby has meant a glut of food and new breeding opportunities (which, for some reason, I feel disinclined to take advantage of--tiredness, maybe). But you can't argue that it hasn't made for a comparatively easy life, the new arrival. However, problem is, the change in our circumstances has not gone unnoticed outside and underneath, either. The various baby smells stretch down the block and around the corner, and every day brings a plethora of grimly opportunistic visitors, usually nothing more threatening than educationally subnormal bluebottles, who, bereft of wit, fly straight into the myriad of spiderwebs that now festoon each corner of the kitchen and living room and connecting hallway, or maybe occasionally a sluggish early wasp from the big nest in the attic, fooled into an early summer by the fact that the heating is on full blast all the fucking time. No, stupid, it's not July. Wasps are so gullible. When it comes down to it, they're just glamorous, dumb ants.

But it's the stuff at floor level that has gotten more worrying. Silverfish slither around the gloopy mess beside the sink; black beetles and cockroaches hide beneath the stove. Black ants scurry around the slatternly melamine work surfaces in search of powdered baby milk and spilled sugar. And even those fucking weird things from the damp gray earth beneath a stone, devil's coach-horses, have colonized the cool and musty pantry. I try to explain to these enormous, stinking creatures, in words of one syllable, that there's nothing for them here, just shit, so leave, guys--do yourselves a favor, make for the garden. But the coach-horses can sniff a slug from 40 paces, and I can't disguise from them the glistening, bejeweled trails leading haphazardly from the front door to the cellar and the kitchen, and the coach-horses just wave their fat tails at me and say in that coarse, primitive lingua franca of the garden, "Minda your owna fucking business, mosca, shadduppa you fucking face."

And apart from the new spiders, which make even the most elementary navigation of our home a tricky business--especially the frankly fucking terrifying Tegenaria gigantea now installed in a crumbling plaster crevice to the left of the kitchen window, growling and slavering and uttering dire threats and imprecations while nimbly skittering across its deadly, cloying web or sometimes just sitting there, waiting, waiting, its face contorted in a rictus of evil--things are changing with the humans, too, and I mean more than just the rather mundane advent of a human infant.

Thing is, there is a suspicion of entropy in the air. More than a suspicion, in fact.

Hell, I mean, we're all grateful for the mess, for the patent lack of energy to go that inch or two farther and sweep up the bread crumbs. Heaven, after all, is a slovenly house. But there are issues with the humans, bad issues.

(continued on page 160) St. Mark's Day (continued from page 86)

Thing is, I think the man is going mad.

I watched him the other night scurrying on all fours across the living room floor after a pair of perfectly amenable cockroaches. He'd been waiting for them to appear, and when they did he was onto them--with a fucking hammer. I mean, why break a butterfly on a wheel? I shouted out a warning but too late, too late. Just another brown gungy mess on the carpet. And he didn't stop there, either. He was off after the silverfish next, although with less luck.

And this is the problem: The increased insect activity has tipped him into a psychosis that will find its release only in the extermination of all of us. Obviously, it's a paranoiac fury whose subject has been transferred from the baby--which, according to human social convention, he is precluded from attacking with a hammer--to other small and inarticulate creatures whose murder will attract no opprobrium. That's my theory, anyway. Whatever the case, we were once left alone. Now fear stalks the home. And this means that either I limit the incursions of my brethren to a sustainable level or we all suffer the consequences.

I swing down to the window. Outside in the tiny garden, a walled rectangle flanked by impoverished shrubs and tired perennials, hellebores and geraniums, an ichneumon is poised above some helpless fucking caterpillar--a cabbage white, I think--its enormous ovipositor trembling in the breeze. It catches my eye as it plunges the thing in, a look on its face of disinterest or maybe even contempt. Most denizens of the outside world think of us as decadent, which I think is a bit fucking rich. Especially from those creatures who rear their prey in the still-living bodies of other animals, if you'll forgive me for sounding sententious for a moment.

I wave to the ichneumon and mutter a silent prayer for the caterpillar and its dead parents. Imagine, to be orphaned at three weeks and then devoured alive.

Who'd be a caterpillar?

Anyway, the first task today is to deal with a thuggish horsefly, a cleg, which I saw banging its way around the bedroom first thing this morning, as brazen and conspicuous and threatening as an insect could possibly be. Nasty, provincial, unsophisticated, biting beasts they are, with no conception of tact or subtlety. Quite what it's doing here is anybody's guess. We're miles from the nearest livestock, clegs' usual hangout. They love thunderstorms, the clegs (a strange affectation, in my opinion, but each to his own), and there's been not even a suspicion of rain for days. It's a noisy and dangerous presence. Maybe I can persuade him to beat it. And then again, maybe not.

I fly through the living room, down the hall and up the stairs and check out the spare bedroom, through the open window of which Mr. Cleg must have blundered, unbidden and unwanted. He's not there now. This is potentially good news--he may have left the way he came in. But I suspect otherwise. Call it ESP if you like, but I can feel his presence in my house, and I've a good idea where he's gotten to.

The master bedroom is dark and has this sweet, heavy, milky smell. The woman is asleep in the bed, her ludicrously demanding and indulged child similarly reposed in a cot alongside. She sleeps whenever the child sleeps, which isn't often. Usually it cries, especially when the father is around. Trisha gets irritated by it, the constant mewling, and even more by the mother's limp and cadaverous appearance. She should look after herself better, Trisha always says, watching the woman stagger from room to room under some new baby-related burden. Somehow Trisha gets to be reproachful to me about the man's alternately slothful and eccentric behavior, as if that's what I'm like, too. It may sound absurd to you, but she accuses me of forgetting what it is to be an insect and of the freedom such a state necessarily confers.

And lo, sure enough, there he is, the cleg, making a circuitous approach to the cot, circling and then flying away, checking out the best seating for lunch. I fly across and join him in a holding pattern, but he breaks away and lands on the top edge of the yellow blanket pulled just below the baby's face. He doesn't even bother to register my presence. I rub my wings in an approximation of nonchalance and then glide down beside him.

"Hi, friend," I say with cheerfulness. "Name's Clive. Don't get many of you guys in these parts. You lost?"

The cleg looks at me curiously. "Am I lost?" he asks, the deep, rasping, country-bumpkin voice laced with sarcasm. "Am I lost? Now, let me see...." He affects a ruminative expression. "Here I am, hungry for lunch and scarcely two centimeters from the soft skin of an immobilized, prostrate and perfectly delectable infant. In the great scheme of things, that doesn't strike me as being especially lost...Clive."

This is not a promising start. I persist with my friendly and unassuming demeanor but come straight to the point. "Suppose there's no chance of persuading you not to bite that child, is there?"

The cleg fly snorts. "I think less chance than there is of me persuading you not to wallow in shit, housefly."

"It's just a friendly request, is all. I have to live here," I tell the creature.

The cleg grins at me and moves a few centimeters onto the child's face. "Where's the baby?" he squeaks in a mocking cartoon voice, covering his huge compound eyes with his flimsy antennae. Then suddenly he pulls them away. "There he is!"

A bite from a mosquito is a subtle and delicate operation. Humans often don't realize they've been bitten until the anticoagulant has long since done its work and the mosquito is gone. Not so with a cleg. I'm telling you, it's possible to hear a cleg fly's bite from 30 yards away; those great big jaws chomp down and the pain is instantaneous and intense.

The baby lets out an appalled wail. The mother wakes immediately with an expression of inarticulate panic, tears back the bedclothes and stumble-rushes to the cot.

"Christ!" she gasps, brushing her hair away from her eyes and watching a rivulet of scarlet blood trickle down onto the blanket. She picks up the baby and cuddles it, wiping the blood away with her nightdress, and looks around the room for the culprit. The cleg is circling the light triumphantly, replete for the moment, baby blood fresh on its hard bristles. The woman sees it but, sleep-dazed and encumbered by her son, is not quite sure what to do. Jesus, she looks wrecked, the poor cow, all gray lines and red eyes and sunken pallor, her hair matted and taupe-colored. She looks as if she's going to die, or has already died maybe, like a mayfly clinging on through the humid depths of August. She grabs a magazine from beside the bed and swats awkwardly and ineffectually at the cleg. The cleg hardly needs to swerve and simply hangs above her in the air, cackling to himself.

"Quick way out of here?" shouts the cleg.

"Try the spare bedroom, first right out the door. Top window is always left open, the way you came in," I mutter, grudgingly, hidden from view on the outside of the bedroom curtain.

"Much indebted, much indebted. Thank you, Clive."

And he's gone. The air currents ruffle the hairs on my back.

The woman is still hugging the baby and making cooing noises at it and kissing its forehead, but it nonetheless continues to wail like a fucking creature possessed; the blood on its face is even now still flowing. The cleg bit deep.

And the upshot of this is that the man will go on another killing spree with his hammer. And maybe he'll throw in an aerosol insecticide and sweet-dripping, mesmerizing flypaper this time. I worry about this every day and wonder what the hell I can do. But I get no moral support. Trisha is pretty laissez-faire about the state of the house. Bring one cockroach, bring on 10, is her mantra, whatever shall be shall be and so on. If the man persists with his campaign of annihilation, then we just move somewhere else. Come on, Clive, she says, exasperated, you're worse than he is, pointing to the madman hunched up on the sofa, his brain under alien control. We're not meant to be like that. We're flies, she says. We don't worry about stuff.

We stay or we leave.

And of course she's right. Traditionally, we do not inflict ourselves upon others of our brethren. But the notion of moving on is too exhausting for me to contemplate--another house to suss out for spiders and this time with 27 kids in tow. I just think, Nah, it's too much too late in life. Sometimes I see death fizzing and shimmering before me in the middle distance, like columns of dancing air warped by summer heat, except it's no mirage. Death really is just out there in the middle distance.

Not that we have short lives, as you conceive of it. You may pity us what seems a paltry allowance, but it's not a short life, really. It's all we know or expect. And now I reckon I have about one quarter of my allotted span left. Maybe a fifth. Who knows? The days are uncountable.

I thought about killing him, the man. But you guys are getting resistant to our toxins: Maybe we insects should put our heads together and come up with something new. A few days ago--after another orgy of violence, directed this time at a harmless if aesthetically questionable pair of slugs who'd made it to the entrance of the kitchen and only then realized they weren't traversing the garden wall after all--I slipped outside through the hall window and buzzed low down the street looking for shit. Thank God pooper-scoopers never took off in this neighborhood. I found what I was looking for in about five seconds, a long, gleaming, pale brown dog turd, the end of which deliquesced into a pool of diarrhea, evidence of a typically remiss dog diet. I swooped down and nibbled and then took off vertically straight back into the house through the same window and glided low and noiselessly to the hastily manufactured ham sandwich on a plate by my host's left elbow. I padded around on the bread, puked a few times, padded some more, rubbed my front legs together and then swung up and away with a quick "Bon appétit" and watched from the wall all feverish with the excitement of a job well done as he consumed his despoiled lunch. It was a risky business. I could have been flattened against the table in a nanosecond, and all he got as a result was a three-day bout of mild food poisoning, probably streptococci, which allowed him to wallow like a big Jessie on the sofa and whine at his wife.

I'd hoped for toxoplasmosis at least. Blindness, dementia, etc. Maybe even kidney failure. But no, instead just that vague physical unease and lassitude and a markedly increased commitment to wage war against the rest of us.

Back in the master bedroom, when the whirl of activity has died down, I find a companion sitting doggo on the curtain. It's a member of that most unfairly maligned and equable of species, the mosquito. You have some big animus against these fuckers, don't you? But you're barking up the wrong tree. Hell, they've adapted to malaria, why can't you? This one's a male, so of not even minor irritation to humankind, but I assume his wife is zumming around in a room nearby with her delicate and hungry proboscis. I bumped into this character yesterday and we exchanged the usual pleasantries; he told me he'd be gone pretty soon, back to hang out at the dank and stinking brick culvert from whence he was born, a few hundred yards away from this house. I signal a cheerful hello to him. He shakes his head in sympathy.

"Cumbersome bastards, those clegs, but there's no reasoning with them," he says.

"Tell me about it," I sigh. "What I want to know is why the fucking oik was here at all. You could smell the farmyard on him. Must have flown miles."

"Him and plenty of others," the mosquito replies. "There was a bush cricket in the living room yesterday: totally bizarre. I asked what it thought it was up to, but all I got was, you know, Na na na na na na na."

The mosquito rubs its big back legs together in a passable imitation.

"Plus," he goes on, "what's with the cockchafers and the centipedes? Totally out of order. House is falling to bits. I'd get out if I were you. There's something weird afoot. And there was a fucking raven in the garden yesterday."

"Thought about leaving, believe me," I tell him.

"Our fourth child, Alex, got eaten by that huge fucker in the kitchen, the tegenaria. I shouted out, but he couldn't hear because the radio was on, just flew straight into the web."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well, kids, you know? Anyway, we'll all be out of here as soon as Emma's had her evening repast. Watch it, she's pulling the curtains...."

We both take off and almost collide in the widening gap as the curtains are pulled back. We settle as unobtrusively as possible in the middle of the bedroom wall. Looks like mum's decided to take the baby downstairs, maybe to treat the cleg bite, although she needn't bother: The cut will heal and be gone by this evening without a risk of infection. Me and the mosquito tarry awhile in silence, each of us with our own thoughts. I wonder a bit about the centipedes, evidence that the house is returning to a sort of primordial state, the thin patina of human involvement diminishing by the hour. Next, the wood lice will come, but whether anybody will be around to greet them is a different matter. Trisha is, as ever, absolutely right. Dissolution is not something we're equipped to battle against: It happens and we succumb. You, meanwhile, battle--and succumb all the same, that extravagant expenditure of energy like the thinnest of vapor trails across an evening sky, clear and sharp before blurring almost imperceptibly into nothing at all.

After a while the mosquito mutters a brief good-bye and spins away to join his mate. From downstairs I can hear the building blocks of the evening argument being slowly put in place, human voices rising in cadences of complaint and antagonism. And beyond all that, the brush of insect wings against glass, of insect feet upon linoleum and carpet, of insect jaws upon wood and stone, and the gentle ticking of the clock on the wall.

Silverfish slither around the goopy mess beside the sink; black beetles and cockroaches hide beneath the stove.