Alice in Tartland

Chapter 1 - The Caterpiller Bites

The Queen was in her parlour making bread and honey.
‘I spent three hours making them there tarts. Jack is a bottomless pit. No Manners!! Shouldn’t’ve ‘ad ‘im.

pages 3 - 7

Alice had found her self watching though it was wrong of her to do so.
What is a tart? Thought Alice.
Something to do with jam. Red sticky jam. Jam always reminded her of congealed blood. The duchess informed her that her dress held a secret meaning – that it was up for grabs. Just at that moment Alice noticed that the wind was about and that the rabbit was looking up her dress.



The duchess had said that pockets were to put things in or for imagining putting things in. Alice gazed at her pockets. She slid her hand into one of them and felt the threaded texture of the cotton. The warp and the weft as she had learnt. The tufts of fabric seams and the dust that felted between the tufts each time the pockets were washed. Then she slid her hand back out. Really she could not think what the Duchess was about. Sometimes she put lollies in her pockets. They would roll to and fro along the seam. Sometimes dust gathered in the crease, even after washing there would be a matted sliver of dust. If you forgot about your lollies they might end up with this dust attached to them which became like fur on your tongue if you hadn’t looked hard before you put them in your mouth.



“What kind of establishment is this. Hair in that one already! Don’t get hair in my cup, oh look there’s a . . . don’t worry he’s as dead as a dormouse please.

Alice was unsure. Well hair did find its way everywhere no matter how hard it was trimmed back and the dormouse was still alive. It was hard to read whether people were joking with her or for her – in which case she didn’t understand – or whether they were being deadly serious and she didn’t understand. Anyway the man with the hat on his head was looking at her legs and she regretted wearing the stockings with the seam down the back. After work the staff always finished off the undrunk bottles of wine.


Oh dear thought Alice what sort of a drink me was that and is a white puffed sleeves dress really suitable for breastfeeding six pigs with wings. She remembered what the Duchess had said about a white dress and thought to remove it. Her legs blushed.


Hurry up said the white rabbit. I have 9 other females to visit today.

pages 8 - 12

She noticed that the rabbit was white so what did that mean about him.
Alice was dismayed and indignant all at once. “Who designed this dress she thundered!!”


When she felt small
she could see the undersides of things she only saw the top of before.


Then along came three power walkers with blonde hair and satiny alice blue headbands. They had yellow tracksuits and clenched fists but they didn’t mean it.
(Married women thought Alice and with the decency not to look up.)



They were glamorous wearing push-up bras even though they already had husbands with jobs. (What’s that about?) At least they weren’t wearing white.


Alice was told never to touch the delicate undersides of mushrooms. That’s where the spores are. Don’t even think about it Alice. It was incredible that nature could make such thin velvety slices and sit them so neatly in formation. It was a circle shape. The circular spots on the tops of the mushrooms signified the poison underneath. The poison in the flesh if you ate it. Colour in nature also signifies poison, the Duchess had once said this in one of her tirades. That you shouldn’t eat anything brightly coloured really. Not even the jaffas on top of cupcakes. Alice’s thoughts had strayed to the lipsticks and the lip glosses with flavours in them strawberry, peach. They were fun to wear but not bright. The brighter colours were for older girls.

pages 13- 17

One million Labium.


Can I touch your puffed sleeves?
The violence of the caterpillar alarmed her but at the same time it was like being in a movie and she was the star.


The hairs on Alice’s arms stood on end. She didn’t know if it was fear or something else.

Now she really needed to get it off. But couldn’t be rid of the voluminous blue satin.


I shall not be able to sleep tonight thought Alice, unless I can take off this blue dress. At the same time she thought she must get things into proportion. It was a hot night though and the fabric was sticky with sweat. She had to peel it off her legs but it would go no further. She was encased in a cocoon. She must get things into proportion for her bottom half had grown being almost a creature all by itself.


It was another t-party and the grown-ups were carrying on again as if no-one was listening. They were in a circular conversation that washed around a familiar dish only this time Alice’s iniquities were included.

“that young girl has had three children all to different fathers!”

“I found marijuana in my son’s sock drawer”

“What is the world coming to, it gets worse every year”

“They say sodomy’s on the rise!”

“Alice had put buttons on the front of her dress!”

pages 18 - 22

“When we were young we didn’t need sex and drugs and we still enjoyed ourselves.”

The Duchess had told Alice what buttons mean but Alice didn’t know that everybody knew. She thought that only some people knew about the secret code, since hardly anybody ever spoke of it, though it seemed that everybody used it unconsciously.
Am I that transparent she thought. Yes Alice you are transparent. You are standing in their cups of tea and they are still talking about you. They think your shadow is an ominous sign of rain or significant of the general malaise of deteriorating society.


Its far too easy for the tarts. No-one blinks an eye when they don’t have a dress on. She didn’t want to be disgusted (what a great word!) She knew she should cheer them on but she hated them. Beside that they always looked so pleased with themselves and so self-assured. They seemed not to have ever met the Duchess or were oblivious of having been the subject of conversations. Perhaps they knew it all but enjoyed it.


Pram tarts were the worst. The babies cried out as evidence.
“My mother’s not a virgin!!”
The mothers dressed as if they needed to procreate immediately event though it was obvious that they were still breastfeeding. The period of lying –in completely and unceremoniously abandoned.


Can I touch your puffed sleeves?


What would happen thought Alice if I was inside the caterpillar and the caterpillar was inside me?

Chapter 2 : POCKETS AND CHECKS

“Children were empty vessels to be filled up with information. Give me a child under the age of seven ( a confident man had said) and I can mould it as I wish.”
“Your head is full of nonsense”, screamed The Duchess.
“Some things you just cannot get through a child’s head. Thickheaded they are.
Their ears are closed to all sense.

Oddly shaped diamonds formed in the spaces left by overlapping contradictions.


Everyone was having a go at pinning something onto her. Someone was siphoning air into her sleeves. Everyone was having a go at pinning something onto her. She began to rise into the air. Someone was siphoning air into her sleeves. “Too many pockets”, Alice cried” What will the duchess say if she sees?”

pages 57 - 61

A saucer had tightened around her neck. “ Hold still”, said the Duchess,
“Here comes Deportment and Grooming”.


TOO MANY POCKETS

Alice was told that cups should not be stacked inside each other, because it is suggestive.


“FLIMSY HUSSY SPENT STRAPS”

“PIPS, FLESH AND FRAGRANT SKINS”

There were suddenly two duchesses. One lamenting on the leotards that circus girls were wearing and the other proclaiming that young women should not be eating fruit in public!


There was not one thought that didn’t lead to another.
What was Alice left to think?
Dare she think?

pages 62 - 66

It was like the nightmare that she had of checks increasing and gradually covering the earth. She would be shoved off or consumed by the checkerpattern that had grown and extended unchecked.


“Alice, What’s wrong!”
Alice had to run from the science test. She was trying to think of molecules and elements but the checks had invaded her thoughts. The checks multiplied and spread like cells out of control. The other children thought that she did not know the answers.


It was a dirty trick thought Alice. She had to make her own gingham apron. All girls had to cross-stitch into the fabric their hopes for the future. (Alice’s hopes shrank in the wash). The apron covered their breasts but drew attention to them at the same time. And then there were the pockets!
Later in life the apron still sat preserved in a cupboard, too laboured on to wear, encased in a thick starch of pancaked home ec. Teachers, the boy who wanted to do more than hold her hand, the dirty girls doing things at the bottom of the oval, the crushes, the girl who swore she’d “bash ‘er”.


Pockets were things you could put things in. “Purses are the same” said The Duchess, quite agitated. “They don’t always snap shut! Not nearly fast enough. Thieves are always about.
Where will you put things if you don’t have pockets, thought Alice. In a jam jar? Things were always safer in pockets.

Soap money fairness
salt buttons rice
safety pins a hankey
Thieves are often lanky

pages 67 -71

The shape that was the entrance to pockets was also the shape of the eyes of the chesire cat. And then there were the spirals. . . . . . .


“Oh no, this tablecloth has sixes all over it, 666 the number of the beast,” cried the Duchess, “and the moral is . . don’t listen to music backwards because it becomes a mass of sixes instead of treble clefs”.
They are just spirals, said Alice slowly and clearly tracing her fingers around the curves that led inwards.
The Duchess dashed alice’s hand away from the tablecloth.
“Everyone knows that spirals are just overwrought sixes. The sign of the Devil is everywhere and has a tendency for wrought iron.
Alice had a strange vision of bodies wrought around one another trying to make shapes of sixes.


The entrance to the pocket
Was also the shape that formed
Circles when overlapped.



Although The Duchess had told Alice not to wear a “V” shaped neckline because it points down to you know where, SHE HERSELF OFTEN wore a dress that had a “V’ shaped on the bell of the skirt pointing up to you know where.

pages 72 - 76

Once when Alice was asleep, The Duchess had even said,
“I’m not wearing any undies!”
But Alice could not confirm this when she awoke to find The Duchess going through her dreams with a fine-toothed comb and comparing them to her women’s journal collection from the 1950’s.


No Petting!


Petting?
Everybody talked about it but no-one would say what it was.
Pettifogger pets pettish petaurist petrified
Petersham petrochemistry for pete’s sake
Pestle petunse pittitus petrole petit peter
Pays paul peter pets pail petrolatum petty
Pets? Petticoat petrel petunia petal
Then she found out it was to do with the holes in your clothing. The pockets, the gaps between the buttons, the slither between the fabric and your waist, the neckline of your dress, the belts and buttons, the press-studs and clips. The Velcro, the ties and the meeting of lips.


Meanwhile she suspected The Duchess of saying one thing and doing another. Whilst her long sleeves and high collars covered her amply, the wind could still whistle up inside her skirt to flirt with her bare legs. Besides, where did she get that whining piglet from?


In Alice’s mind, there was a father for the piglet.

pages 77 -81

Alice decided that sometimes The Duchess just let the big pig muck around under her enormous skirt, whilst The Duchess arched her neck and mumbled soft noises, the likes of which Alice could not even imagine. Alice decided that the “V” at the front of The Duchess’s dress was a little doorway. Perhaps the duchess was always dropping her food so that someone further down could have a feed.
Alice began to look at The Duchess in a new way. Each time The Duchess exhorted her to watch her p’s and Q’s and carried on about how appropriate companions could be selected by observing people’s cutlery use, Alice began to watch for a subtle arch of the neck or the big pig’s tail peeking out from the hem of her skirt.


Alice began to read between the lines.
Rinse again
Open the door
Don’t let the dust gather
Don’t sit still


“I see a pattern said the caterpillar”, who was earning some cash in hand as a psychotherapist phD ADHD.
“No,” said Alice, “I told you about the pattern. The pattern is the problem. Its going to take over the world, beginning with each centimeter of my mind and then working outwards.”
“Let’s try hypnosis”, said the Caterpiller, “Then I’ll sleep with you whilst you’re under and all you angst can be transferred to that issue and you can forget about the patterns. Problem Solved!”


All I have to do is disrupt the patterns, thought Alice. That bloody caterpillar must be a Freudian psycho. She shuddered but held her own. She was beginning to expect the worst and she was still only 24. (Fairly wealthy though, having received the baby bonus 856 times.)


There were factories pumping out repetitive shapes and patterns and patterns of people of all shapes buying them, discarding them and then beginning again. Then there was the disrupted pattern made formless by the forms which were no longer in a pattern. But still it was a pattern because there are plenty of formless things around to make patterns with. Like checks inside checks, double entendres, ironies and palindromes and paradigms. There were, even though obviously unregulated, parts of life that made patterns of their own. There were patterns that everyone was able to observe other people participating in, unaware that they themselves were part of the pattern of watchers.
“Here, suck on this and the patters will alter” said the caterpillar.
Others could see patterns in tea-leaves and some people could read patterns where the cloth on your dress wears thin. They could read between the lines made by the threads and they could also see through them. Alice clutched at the pieces of her that she didn’t want others to see through her dress. Unfortunately she only had two hands to clutch with and three pieces to hide.