by Gabrielle Sicam
1
Meek is the name of my namesake. My name is Meek because someone up the line decided to name their baby Meek. That Meek will be a saint soon. Without Meek, I am indistinguishable from the rest of the world.
This is what Otto reminds me, saying-without-saying, as he pushes his shoe into my front door. He has lost his words; he has only his shoe. I don’t usually answer the door, and am very rude to missionaries and pamphleteers who manage to catch me, but Otto looks sort of attractive in the peephole. So I open it. Then he starts talking and I go to close it. He is indignant. That’s how we get here, to his equally indignant shoe. The spirit emanates down to the toe. In the opening he has forced, I make out two photographs on the floor. He gestures to them.
“Meek’s my great-aunt,” he says. Rats.
Otto likes the tea that I offer. Upon examining him closer, I see how much he looks like me. Maybe my initial attraction was narcissistic. How fucked up. I apologise for trying to close the door. He sips. He doesn’t mind. “I don’t know if you’ve had Teapigs,” I say. He says yes. He has a weird accent. He wears loose clothes, softening the initial impression of haste, and has ‘come from somewhere’. He assures me that he is here for good reasons. He makes documentaries for a news corporation. He is Catholic-raised, like me, and still Catholic. So more like the Meek in his pictures. But he says it’s in a ‘seventies communist, tie-a-yellow-ribbon’ way. Which isn’t very her. That’s a bit more me.
“I actually remember seeing your name in something on the way here, Meek,” Otto says.
“So you saw your own name.”
“No. I can see how you would think that. But I’m not an Origenes, if we’re getting specific. My father changed his name to Tanaka when he moved to Tokyo. By the time I was born, the Origenes-ness was far gone. And when he divorced my mother, I took her name. I never had yours. I wish I had. It would make all of this a lot easier. And it’s nicer. I like the silent letter, the romantic gap. Not like Tanaka, definitely not like Jones.”
“You’re a very open person,” I say, not quite having made sense of the jumble.His openness makes him an Origenes. It’s loud like the rest of the family. It’s not like mine. It’s inherent, and colours his admissions of vulnerability, even early on, as sincere. I envy this. It’s a very Filipino sensibility. Very American. And probably Filipino-American also. He self-describes as having ‘blended’ origins: born in Tokyo, raised in Boston, finished up in Oxford, worldlier and wittier than anyone I’d been told about.
Otto has met my relatives. He hasn’t met Meek but he knows more about her than me. Once he had been told her story, he says, he flew to Leyte. He shows me pictures. He has a picture for everything and follow-ups for everything. He offers recommendations for my bookshelf. He offers to cooks me a meal so that we could share something as he informs me of ‘the situation’. He offers up his narrative, admirably at ease with its interestingness, which sets him up wonderfully for delineating his connection to Meek, who, undoubtedly, has the most interesting narrative out of anyone in the family. She’s been dead for twenty years, something like that, and still she’s the standard for our mythology. Her habit swamps us all.
“The simplest way of putting it is that we have the same great-aunt. And she’s a very interesting woman. I’m sure you’re aware of that. I’m not sure if you’re aware of the campaign. I’d like to make a film about her, and about our family. I thought, maybe, that you’d be looking for a research job. Your mother told me you needed one. It was easier to find you than I thought.”
My mother has not told me about Otto. She has vaguely mentioned something going on with Meek. Otto has pictures of me and they are her copies. He’d seen me, or the Martian moon that formed around me, months before reaching out. I was a massive baby. A few months after I was conceived, my mother experienced constant rashes and flares. She was allergic to me. “You were an angry ball,” Otto says. “That’s what they said. You turned your mother the colour of cartoon blush.”
“I’m not sure about the research,” I lie. “I’m a bit busy at the bookshop.”
Nobody is ever busy at the bookshop. It’s the perfect job for me; I dropped out of uni partly because I realised doing nothing paid. Sometimes I have conversations with customers that irrevocably change my life, but most of the time, I’m pretending to shelve to avoid talking to my leery manager. There’s really not more to it. I like it at the bookshop. I like the smallness of my life.
This fails to deter Otto. “You opened the door,” he points out. He hands me the picture of me in my mother’s belly. The development is shoddy, overexposed. Somebody is touching me. The somebody is Meek, he says. Her face is empty. Her darks look to compete with, if not swallow, the lights. I’m intruding, even in the belly, stretching out my mother’s top, hanging lop over the brim of her jeans. Meek looks afraid of her own hands.
“I’ve been speaking to your mother,” he says. “She believes it, too, that Meek will be venerated in our lifetime. I have another picture of her somewhere, an ambrotype. It’s not been kept very well, but you can see the saint in her. The obliteration. When I visited, there were nuns from Spain and France sitting at the table. They have all made sacrifices to see her.”
“You make me feel like a terrible descendant.”
He shrugs. “None of them know how you feel. They’re far away. I doubt they care. I don’t, really. Unless the feeling is helpful.”
Before I dropped out, I was working on a self-portrait. It was the sole project I managed to finish that year. I drew a sketch of myself long-haired, naked and carrying a baby, also myself, swaddled in a Marian blue shawl. For my adult body, I worked from a polaroid that an ex had taken of me. I also worked from a picture of Yoko Ono I found on Twitter where her and John were posed naked, backs to the camera. A Paul McCartney fan had scanned it and edited John so that he appeared to have a crack three times the length of hers. I did not tell my tutor about that. I was only taking from Yoko. I did not need a reference for the baby – I drew a lump, which is what I looked like until I was two.
I was working with watercolour. I liked it over the thicker stuff. I thought texture was something you should fly through, something you shouldn’t notice until it’s cold against your face, or up your nose. I was sprawling over like Helen Frankenthaler, washing my giantised body, and lying next to it while I waited for it to dry. This took several days. I persuaded my tutor to let me do it in the drawing studio, a big, airy room for an eight-person course, so that I could lie down comfortably and without interruption. Art people let you do anything if you ask in a rude or arrogant way.
My tutor liked the painting. She knew as well as me that I was going to go. I had produced so few works in my second year, compared to my unnervingly rampant pace in my first, that the department was convinced I was going through a bout of depression. I rode on this for a while, and then felt bad about it, which further prompted my leaving. Over a drink – the tutors detested the formality of an office, as the university all required glass openings to be clear at all times, threatening the clandestine objective of fucking students – mine asked me if the piece had anything to do with the separatedness of my heritage:
“Down to the yellow undertones, which are so pronounced. Over-pronounced, almost. For a moment, I thought the baby was jaundiced. And I’m very aware of how prominent Catholicism is with Filipinos. Filipinas. You’ve never painted yourself before. Or maybe you’ve never painted yourself as part of anything before. I just think, for a final piece, it’s telling you where you want to go.”
The work begins with cataloguing pictures. This is simple work which suits me. Otto has gathered an impressive number of pictures of Meek, which means he has collected about thirty.
He shows me the one he promised in his flat. It’s not an ambrotype. I’m not able to remember the word for what it is, though, when I attempt to correct him, so I say, “it’s an old tin-based thing,” which he doesn’t take much from.
Meek doesn’t photograph well. That’s the immediate strain that I gather. She’s sort of ugly, even. She has a look of constant trouble that emphasises her wrinkles. She is born sometime before 1930. She’s dead by the time I’m born, 2004. In the tin picture, she can’t be any older than twelve, but I can make out creases. Before the convent. I don’t think she was raised there the whole time, otherwise she’d look more comfortable. But maybe she’s not comfortable anywhere. Maybe she is just unfortunately bug-like.
She’s standing by a tree, transfixed by something out-of-field. Her mouth hangs open, as if it has been open for some time; drool collects in the left corner. She is wearing a nightgown with a petal motif sewn into the hem. One hand goes past the frame; the other she uses to prop herself up onto the tree. She could be reaching for a fruit, or just out.
In another picture, an instant, this time, she is maybe in her sixties. She is holding someone’s baby. This baby is not me, I think. It seems to be taken at the moment of handing-over, because the baby is less a baby than a spurt of swaddled skin, and Meek looks uneased. As I write these observations down for Otto, I add: maybe this is you. Then I cross it out. Some observations I keep myself, too special. Then I feel bad so I add it in again above.
Sometimes the work is in a reading room if it’s not in Otto’s flat. But I prefer to be in his flat. The lunch break is better. I get to embark on my own work, the one I keep secret, which is to learn where he fits into the family. I think it’s where I could infiltrate. The lunch break is ideal for this because we’re often cooking together, providing me ample opportunity to bump elbows and pry for stories. I supposed he could have Meek’s eyes, which would be my eyes. But this is not terribly hard to do with brown eyes. Convincing me towards a worrying suspicion – strangerdom – was the fact that he looked cleaner than both of us. All of my relatives look like greyhounds; I’ve always thought myself to be their terrifying-looking Last Baby, all dark-on-dark, circles and moles and all. Otto’s similar in some shapes. But he’s not dotted by anything, as we all are no sense of wear, no playground scars. My mother has a bullet-shape impressed in her arm from a gun-cleaning accident; my uncle has his knees scraped almost to the bone from a business deal gone wrong. Aren’t there always these signs? I’ve marked my whole family by their accidents.
“Well, I was an accident,” Otto says.
Yes, I suppose. The suspicion’s too perverted to follow through without questioning myself. Cooking is maybe the only thing, if anything, that I can match Otto on, the only thing, at the moment, aside from his incontestable knowledge, that reassures me of our relatedness: our middling, modulated approaches to Filipino food. I have the tongue for British blandness, and he for Japanese mildness, so our version of sinigang is clean and watery, lacking the delicious residual fat or scum from a meat. We use stubby aubergines. We dislike garlic rice. As if he’s lost his Otto-ness, his clean performance, he delights in our bastardisation. And we cook, almost, like siblings, with a matched messiness, like, had it not been for decades and oceans, we’d be elbowing each other’s sides.
I take an aubergine out of the soup, bruise-purple. It asks me whether I’ve considered contaminating him.
2
Sometimes I take a picture for the week. Otto is more or less permissive about this. He isn’t precious with handling them, which surprises me a bit. It’s not that I feel wrong keeping it. Maybe I do. But Meek is mine, too. She shares me. For a while I was secretive about the practice, until I realised that I hadn’t told anybody, and I wanted to complain about it like I complain about the bookshop.
I pick up the phone to tell my mother. Then I remember that Otto has already spoken to her. She’s saved in his phone as ‘Mama Meek’. Were we now omitting things from each other, me and her? Weekly calls, trailing about our day-to-day lives, detailed descriptions of our meals and the steps we had walked and the dogs we had pet and the hot baristas we had flirted with, but no Otto-shaped aside.
I think of calling my lover but I know he won’t answer. He is seeing me later and before then I would rather not chance being ignored. I attempt to tell one of my flatmates, Han, who listens to my story as it competes with the verbal minutiae of favourite reality show. She’s getting ready for a night out at Infernos, the preparation for which overtakes her investment in either narrative. She says that Meek looks ‘cute’ and envies her tan.
So me and the photograph of Meek have dinner. She looks my age, maybe. She’s smiling. She looks better. The last time my mother and I spoke about her, I wasn’t really listening. Something about a campaign, as Otto said. I knew people were crazy about her. I knew she died before I was born, starving herself in the convent. People thought it was some sort of miracle that she stayed alive so long. My mother, privately, insisted it was like Weekend at Bernie’s.
Meek gets splattered by pasta sauce and by the end of the meal she has Grana Padano hair. The defacement is put right with a triangle of kitchen towel. I wonder, then, if she is so precious, so worthy of veneration, why Otto carried her pictures all rumpled, tied together with a blue rubber band. Is he not precious with his subjects? Doesn’t worry about them dirtied?
Searching Meek on Google comes up with pictures of me and some cousins and the homepage of a biscuit manufacturer. Everything else is paywalled. The university has repealed my e-journal access. And searching is hard when I am so bad at the computer. I have always been bad at it—I click the wrong tabs and ads and am terrible at keeping up with the changes. Once, I tried to explain it to my mother, a Facebook daughter, a whiz at balancing video calls, maintaining her Farmville farm and making inane purchases on the Marketplace: how it feels to have gotten so used to something being in one place, to have weaned yourself off of real life and onto this flat thing, only to wake up and find that it has taken a stroll to the other side of its little world.
It comes to me that I don’t have to care about anything Otto asks for. I could list a hundred Blogspots of dubious origin. He has a hobbyist interest in Meek no better than the average religious conspiracist, even if he is related to her. And so do I, with even less responsibility in this documentary. ‘Picture research’. The photographs don’t add up to the picture of a saint. She’s all earth. Like the saint title would pluck her up from a more natural state. Like the story would make her more of a person and therefore worth following and knowing. She is worth untying the blue band and uncrumpling the photos. She didn’t starve to be forgotten. She needed to be uprooted from black-haired, brown-eyed, nothinged life.
Luka is the name of my lover. I called him the person I was fucking until I fell in love with him. This was not something I could prepare for, and it’s not really something he knows. But now he is my lover. When I referred to him, for the first time, as my lover, he assumed I chose it because it sounded bohemian. Some byproduct of art school. But I tumbled into lover. I did not prepare for it.
I meet Luka after dinner at a pub that I dislike. I know he loves it and will do anything for him, such as getting a drink. A gig is happening at the venue down the road and I am prepared for it to be bad. Nursing two millennial peach-tinted lagers, we attempt to hold a conversation over arrogant pub quiz ambience. The quizmaster lurches around with a bullied-in-private-school swagger, making occasional digs at our lack of participation. He could not be king anywhere else but here. Answers to his questions include Death Stranding, wood motifs, shakshuka, Deptford Beach and Jerskin Fendrix. There are three teams playing for the jackpot of £50, likely to run over, bound to it; the runner-up prize a bottle of house wine. For a while, we entertain ourselves by crafting poems out of the answers he lists.
“I have to tell you something,” I say, very seriously, true-to-the-sudden, cutting off our cypher. “Over the past few weeks I’ve been involved in a strange project. A stranger turned up at my door with pictures of my great-aunt. She was a nun and then she went crazy and died. Our hometown is campaigning for her sainthood. He’s making a documentary about it. His name is Otto and he’s very suspicious but is winning me over through money and cooking. He’s sort of sexy, is it fucked up to say that? I think my mother would say that. I look at pictures of my great-aunt all day and try to log her ages and emotions. My mother knows about it but hasn’t talked to me about it and I haven’t told her. I have no idea if any of it is true, if any of it matters. It could all be fabricated. It could be the most important thing that’s ever happened, the only thing to happen.”
Luka says nothing but holds me very tightly. When we get to the venue he is still holding me. We manage to get there for the end of the second set and find a bathroom stall for before the third. The door is covered in leaflets and as he lowers his face into my thighs I look at the Byzantine halo collaged around him, advertising friends’ gigs, sample sales, solo shows, group shows, duo shows, life-drawing classes, Marxist reading groups at members’ clubs, folk circles, FLINTA-only hours at the local snooker club. But he seems anachronistic to it all. His sincerity juts out and ages him. He pulls me into the anachronism, so that against the buzz of discordant synths and city chatter we appear more like hungry farmhands, the way he eats me is like one, the way I pull him, like he might bring me closer to God or at least the upper rungs of the rota fortunae, is like one. I bite into his shoulder and breathe into it hard and hot enough to create our own little fog. “They can’t hear us,” he says. I say yes they can I hope so yes into his shoulder.
Luka slips back into the crowd, his mouth wet. I follow. Then I feel the urge to lie that I have left something in the bathroom. Then I feel a more intense, immediate sensation, more violent, more sacred, than the absence of a thing in my pocket. A top-of-the-duomo sensation that realises in my body after knocking my head on the full-length mirror and running two taps on full and screaming and terrifying a woman who comes out of the last stall. A flyer is stuck to her shoe and as she runs out of the bathroom, damp-handed, it rips and leaves multi-coloured riso strings across the floor. I kneel to pick them up, wetting my jeans more than her hands. Her nails, dripped across the floor like they were newly painted, creating the unfortunate impression of a menstrual accident. I zone in on her hands, her nails, lay mine on the sink. My rings fall in and scratch like on a whetstone. I am losing my grip. The sensation is pain, now, that bastard horseman that I’ve yet to really encounter; I was a colicky baby but once I left the hospital I left. This isn’t hospital pain, I don’t think. It’s not something to explain, I don’t feel the words come and I don’t want to labour for them, so I try to head back into the gig. Piss labours down my leg. The band isn’t playing, but the woman is still terrified, and crying into someone’s shoulder. Then she lifts her head, as if she feels me even though, to my knowledge, I’m obscured from her. She’s bitten her nails raw. She wears Meek’s face, her eyes.
When she spots me, and I her, already having spotted her but pretending to again, she grabs me by the shoulders and ushers me outside.
“You have no idea,” she says. She repeats it again and again.
______
Gabrielle Sicam is a writer from South London.
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