'A bundle of angry nerves, with the baby screaming, and a toddler in tow….’

(From The Green Lady, a work in progress)

The complete sentence above reads:

A bundle of angry nerves, with the baby screaming, and a toddler in tow, caught in the spokes of the pram.

I am trying to write up jangled nerves: the nerves of a young family that run firstly through the person of the father, then the mother. They take turns being nervy. Mess is the substance of this domestic entrapment: emotional mess, emotional and financial entrapment. The framing consciousness here is Mr. Hickman, an impecunious English teacher who finds himself caught in the spokes of a marriage and family life he cannot manage. His wife is not managing either, and both regularly break off to visit pockets of private worlds. For Mr. Hickman that world is poetry. For his wife it is drink and sleep and song.

I wanted to write up a disassociated sentence. Disassociation occurs under extreme emotional stress: when very tired or when facing loss. It is a state of self-removal, like losing your head or your legs, but I suspect mostly your head. Part of you suddenly floats off. Families can disassociate altogether, with one member following another. The bundle of nerves emerge from the mouth of the screaming baby. This is the nerve centre of the sentence — of the entire family, — the baby who sits above in his pram while the truculent toddler is carelessly dragged behind, stuck in the spokes of the pram wheel. It is a cruel image, suggested by the syntax, which is jagged and broken like interrupted sleep. The cruelest aspect relates to the toddler, who is never ‘the’ but only ‘a’, indistinguishable from the bundle of angry nerves running from and to the mouth of the screaming baby. The mouth (implied but not stated) is the dark feeling centre.

Everything is flung together in four poorly related parts: the bundle of angry nerves, the screaming baby, a toddler in tow, and the clumsily turning spokes of the pram. But where are the parents? We imagine they lag behind, or drift ahead, each in a state of acute disassociation, but nowhere to be seen within the realm of this sentence.

In actual fact there are parents, they are just lagging behind; there is the sleepless mother, there is a distracted father, and they trail out of the end of the previous sentence:

‘he and his wife too, both with flaming red hair to match their mood.’

Here I’m playing around with pronouns, which in families shift quickly from an ‘I’ to an imperious ‘we’ — and then back to ‘he’ and ‘she’, with no names mentioned — before converting into a shared and lumpen ‘their’. Their stuff, their pram, their children, but nothing of them. Loose possessives and possessions follow these unhappy parents around, producing ‘a bundle of angry nerves’; but nothing is definite and nothing is fully realised or known; just a sleepless fug of irritable, sometimes viscous resentment, which is its own moody thing.

For all teachers, and all parents, but especially for Meg and me.