Julia Back to Time and Space, please!

You are nine years unborn on the day that will soon be known as G-day. You find me and your aunt in the kitchen of our newly bought house in Kato Paphos, Cyprus. She’s scrubbing the residue of dinner off the plates and I’m sitting on the countertop, in a crisscross-applesauce position.

‘Get the lemonada and meze out sweetie, will you?’ your aunt asks and I pull out a chilled jar of lemonade and a tray of savoury delicacies from the fridge. She wipes her hands on stiff napkins and holds the door for me. We cross the living room en route to the veranda, where your mother awaits, yawning.

There follow candlelight conversations and halloumi cheese binge-eating. We talk fitness and beauty over rousing rounds of UNO. We get carried away, rehashing the same conversations on Cyprus history, while dipping pitta bread into humus. We cover a time period from the island’s earliest human activity (dating back a mind-boggling twelve millennia) up to the Turkish invasion in 1974 – refilling glasses of lemonade amid bouts of laughter and tears.

‘Cheers, my fellow homeowners,’ your aunt says, and we touch glasses; the clink sings through the torrid Cypriot heat.

Everyone grins, takes a sip of their drinks. Suddenly, your mother fixes her gaze on something behind me. Her glass slips through her fingers; she screams. I turn around and confront them for the first time: three hulking figures, barrel-chested with arms as thick as tree trunks. Three piercing pairs of beetle-browed primate eyes are sizing us up. I go into hysterics and instinctively push everyone back.

Soon enough, we discover that the Gorillas aren’t there just for the three of us. They’re everywhere, following everybody, and they’re here to stay.

#

Different theories circulate about what the Gorillas stand for. Some say they are outward-bound manifestations of our souls: angels, observing, yet deprived of free-will to interact with humans. Some others, the TV expert with the gaudy necktie for instance, says they’re higher-dimensional beings. As great apes, they have knuckle-walked into our time-space continuum to remind us of our Darwinian evolutionary past.

Each person’s Gorilla is like a fingerprint. Jenny, your mother’s Gorilla, is a pot-bellied female, with warm, hazel-coloured eyes and a grey X-shaped patch above her brow. Irene, your aunt’s, shares a striking resemblance with Jenny, save the grey spot. Mine, Maria, has a cute little white rump patch. She’s hiding behind her mother, Irene, holding onto her leg.

#

Time stirs, seasons whir by. Life moves on, our sorrows and joys no less intense than the presence of these hyper-apes. The tears we shed over your father’s sudden passing are no less bitter. The toll of your mother’s fertility treatments no less distressing, almost but not quite tearing us apart. The joy when we see those hard-earned blue lines and the group-hug we share, with the pregnancy test wedged in between us, is no less wondrous.

#

It’s a Friday in the March of G08, when you enter this world like any other Friday’s baby. You can see the beam on everyone’s faces, which quickly evaporates as the realisation sinks in the room. Jenny, Irene and Maria are present per usual, on standby, but a fourth gorilla, one that should belong to you, is nowhere in sight.

#

Your entrance into this world is marked with much boundary-setting. They hold you up and observe your tiny body as if you’ve descended from another planet. They examine your bio-chemistry and map out your neural system and activity.

Then, it happens like they say it will: we blink and you’re nearly six. They now measure and process your IQ; a slew of ink-blot images arrayed in front of you. You throw a tantrum and squeal: ‘Nouni, make them stop. I feel sick.’ I rock you and “sush” you and promise you we’ll be gone soon.

Your nightstand bristles with a not-so-short list of medication and other paraphernalia of the chronically ill. You cannot swallow tablets, so we resort to liquid medicine alternatives. You open your mouth but lock your teeth together. The liquid drips over your clothes, my hair, and the floor creating a paddle you step in with your white ruffle socks. They carry out every test conceivable, trying to locate some glitch in your makeup that will tell us why you lack what everybody else has. Science whittles your complexity down to a bunch of sophisticated words and algorithms; all couched in the rhetoric of a diagnosis: Down syndrome and a blocked intestinal track.

But we pay no mind to these scientific tales. For us, there’s no such thing as complexity in your case, only uniqueness. For us, you’re a gracious girl who enjoys sketching suns at the corner of pages and reading Sherman Alexie books. You progress slowly but steadily, taking your time. We do all that’s humanly possible to keep prying eyes at bay, but short of isolating you indoors, we fail to protect you from the “tsk-tsk-tsks” and whispers that follow your every step; your lack of a watcher, your Gorilla and so-called Guardian, drawing the world’s attention and judgment.

When you stab us repeatedly with the plea for your own Gorilla, we give you a plush toy gorilla instead, and you clasp it as though nothing has ever fulfilled you more. But I see it, that swelling loneliness, as you perch by the window and cling to Savvas, your toy gorilla, watching everyone passing by accompanied. I see it and wonder: will you ever feel you belong in this world? What will happen when that loneliness creeps in and wipes you out?

#

And so it happens on a balmy afternoon in June G17. The air is swamped with wildflowers and the drone of bees. We’re home-schooling you, but you’re nine already and curious as a naturalist. When I leave our books to prepare pancakes, out you go, sneaking from the veranda into the field – Savvas is tucked beneath your arm.

What happens next, I can only assume. A swerving truck? A ruthless stream that swallowed you whole? Maybe. But most of all, I imagine a crowd: kids who have grown up knowing their Gorillas tossing mistaken giggles at you, believing you’re a freak for not having one. I see them ripping Savvas’ head off and laughing as you run away screaming.

#

In a flash, you were gone. Our home hasn’t found sleep since. Your aunt empties overflowing ashtrays of stress-ridden cigarette butts, as I call them, while your mother flips pillows to the dry side; the other side is drenched with tears. I trawl the news all day, hoping to track down an extinction-degree catastrophe: an asteroid hurtling toward the Earth, dead set on blowing humankind to smithereens.

So, we’re all forced to venture into the abyss of the unknown; into some comforting utopia, where we can live happily ever after. No, I refuse to do so. Because, you see, there is one thing I know for sure: in a world where you, my sweet Julia, can will yourself out of our typical spatiotemporal coordinates, I, your godmother (Nouni) and number one fan, can sure as hell will you back.

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Julia Back to Time and Space, please! last modified: 16 December 2020

Cover image: Illustration of artist Francis Bacon - 'Study Of A Child' - (1960)

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