I dont like it when you erase gender from the equation

My Grandma on my fathers side was a writer. My Grandma on my mothers

side was a painter and a drawer. When I was little people sometimes asked
me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Both my Grandmas were artists.
Both my grandmas were abused as children.
A artist!
My mothers mother had a childhood I can only gauge in blurs. I believe it was
lonely and hard, and people close to her died. She painted landscapes and
seas with people in but my mum always liked the ones without figures. She
gave my mum a picture of the sea, a woman standing on the beach wearing a
large hat. My mum asked her to paint out the person. It hangs upstairs. I think
of great smells when I think of Nan, and bright cardigans and boiling leeks
and loving hugs.
My dads mum was married to a writer, who got more fame and acclaim than
she did. She was successful too, and wrote a fiction that was more a thinly
veiled fact. Dressing up the truths of her life by changing a name a bit too
conspicuously. John was Jake was Jake was John. I was 12 when my Granny
died. I remember her more in the things associated with her. These objects
whirl around in the cathedral space of my childhood like satellites; stopping
now to group themselves into the planet I call her.
She kept mini cans of coke in the fridge. Delicious, red and cold. I can
remember lying on my front on the carpet, a pale avocado green with soft
fronds like flat grass under my chest, and watching a TV version of Jason and
the Argonauts.
MUHDEWSA!!
I walked my Grandmothers dog around the block fixed on this statue-woman.
A Henry Moore sculpture all bluey green and curved with knives. A gem
encrusted mould coating her skin. Is it because Granny kept sculptures in her
garden that medusa has stayed this way for me? Boys worn green by the rain
in the bang of her lawn, wings lopped off by time and the wind?
Medusa, de-duce her! The dog tugged the lead and the woman with snakes
for hair turning turned turned men to stone with her head.
I see my Grandmother lying down in her conservatory, very ill, with clear
plastic tubes coming out of her and other satellites I know she looked great in
belted jeans.
I know she had an apple mac computer that we would flock to, typing our full
names in wingdings.

Was there a terse mood in the car on the way up her drive sometimes? A
steering wheel gripped a trifle too tightly?
I know most of what I know of Granny from reading her books. In
conversations she achieves a difficult moniker. Or mad. Or impossible.
Other difficult or prickly women writers people read who are any good
become like granny. And, almost invisibly, thud, she becomes synonymous
with an intelligence that isnt celebrated.
When do boys stop holding each others hands like its nothing?
queues of twos in protective jackets
small vested sunbeams
smile-lit Ishmaels vestibules thames
shepherd.
II
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
MEDUSA is onmyheadinmyhead now lookiiiiing strrrrrrrraaaaiiiiiiiiggghhtttt
atttttttt mmeeeee. She is sleeping with her self! She is wedded to her twisting
demons. She is using that seething nest of matted vipers for a pillow.
But this is not a story about Medusa. It is a story about a story set in France.
My Granny had her first daughter Madelon 17 years before she had my dad.
Madelon was born in occupied Austria and I remember her telling my girlfriend
and I when, nineteen and pinched, we visited her house in France that she
had a swastika stamped on her birth certificate. She told us the trick to
speaking French was to pretend you were speaking French, lots of groaning
and exaggerated oeff noises. She died last Spring. We travelled as a family to
the south of France, outside Montpellier, where she had lived in the heat and
green up on a hill for 30 years. We went together to visit her now she was
gone.
Crazy old dear all that shock treatment I imagine my cousin titters reading
from my Grandmothers journals. Anyone want an illustrated edition of The
Story of O? my aunt shouts from a different corner of the house. What do you
do with dead peoples pornography? Where do you file the beats and starts of
private desire? Under O?
I went to this conference recently where a woman from an American
university talked about an ancient dildo that had been found in someones
chimney well. It stayed there for years, captive to the cavity, before anyone
dug it out. The professor, who had a touch of Karen from Will and Grace
about her, talked about how pornography for men had become mainstream
and innocuous vintage playboys harmlessly lodge in glass display cases in
museums across the US. But the relics of what women do in the dark must

stay there. In the way that Penelope makes her stitches with every moon only
to unpick them.
My Grandmother was called Penelope.
Thefuriouswritingthebroodofchildrenthelowstheelectricshocks

the astonishment
of roses!
Ive heard about the roses since. My mum explained in a Scottish botanical
garden that Granny took up gardening in her 50s. And she did it very
academically and very properly, buying and consuming all the literature there
was on growing and tending weeding and pruning. And she was exceptional
at it, making roses bloom in mad bursts across the lawn. The garden wasnt to
my exact taste mum says but she could grow roses, I mean really.
I never appreciated how spectacular the roses were at the time.