My Bad Dad or the Criminal Poo Brain

Suitable for: 12+. Contains mild violence, child death, bereavement

Actually, My Name IS Frankenstein

Let us clear one thing up before we go any further, because I am tired of having the same argument with people who have not done the reading.

My name is Frankenstein.

I am aware of the popular objection. Frankenstein is the doctor, they say, smug as a man who has heard one fact and intends to live on it for a year. But attend to the logic, for I am very good at logic. Victor made me. Victor is, in the only sense that signifies, my father. And what does a child inherit from his father, besides anxiety and the disappointing shape of his nose? The surname. I am his son. I am therefore a Frankenstein, and you may address me as such with my full and gracious permission, which is a great deal more courtesy than my father ever extended to me.

I should say at the outset that I speak well. I speak, in fact, beautifully. I assembled my entire vocabulary myself, by hand, crouched in the cold outside a stranger's cottage, and I am as proud of it as a man may reasonably be of anything he has stolen through a wall. I mention this now because you will want to remember it later. The loss of it becomes the central tragedy of everything that follows.

Victor, since you ask, was a self-centred jerk. He had a great glossy confidence that he had done nothing whatsoever to earn, the sort a man comes by when he has been told from the cradle that he is brilliant, and he was forever squaring up to me as though we might settle our philosophical differences with our fists. I am eight feet tall and assembled from the strongest portions of several deceased gentlemen. I could fold him into a small, regrettable parcel. He squared up anyway. Transplanted to the present day, Victor would of course have a podcast. He would call it unfiltered. He would hold a great many views on cold showers and almost none worth hearing.

That is the man who gave me life. Keep him in mind. He gets worse, and so, I am sorry to report, does my grammar.

Back When I Was Written Properly

I want you to understand that it began so well, and in such good prose.

I was invented, properly invented, by a teenaged girl. Mary Shelley was eighteen years old and shut up in a draughty house beside a lake, conducting what we would now call a spooky cabin getaway, when she reached into the dark and drew out me. I have never stopped being grateful. She gave me a whole mind, entire and undamaged, and asked nothing for it.

And what a mind it was. I taught myself to read and to speak within a handful of months, entirely by lurking at the edge of a cottage and observing the De Lacey family as they went about their lives. I concede, with the benefit of two centuries of hindsight, that this was a faintly unsettling manner in which to acquire an education. At the time I considered it resourceful. The De Laceys, when at last they clapped eyes on the enormous stranger who had been studying their domestic arrangements through a gap in the wall, did not consider it resourceful. They considered it grounds for stones.

This became something of a theme. I would approach humanity with an open heart and several rehearsed pleasantries, and humanity would answer with stones, and on the more memorable occasions, with gunfire. I have a very great deal of feeling about this, and all of it is articulate, because back when Mary still had charge of me I could turn a sentence the way other men turn a key.

When solitude grew unbearable I did the reasonable thing and asked my father for a companion. I requested, in essence, a horrific Barbie to partner my monstrous Ken: a bride built to the same unlovely specification as myself, so that the two of us might withdraw to some empty corner of the world and be quietly hideous together, harming no one. It was, I maintain, a modest petition, and courteously phrased. Victor agreed, built her, looked at her, panicked, and tore her to pieces in front of me.

So I killed some people he loved. I am not proud of it. I am simply being honest, which is a discipline none of the films could ever be persuaded to learn.

Then came the chase. I led him north, across the ice, to the very roof of the world, and because I was furious and also rather good with language, I left him notes along the way. Pointed ones. Chiselled into the stones where he could not miss them. Things along the lines of Try to keep up, Father, and Did you bring a coat, or shall I narrate your hypothermia. He followed every one. He was always going to follow. That was the entire tragedy of him.

At the close of it I climbed onto a passing iceberg, looked back upon the wreckage of our relationship, and felt the clean and complete satisfaction of an arc resolved in full sentences. I drifted off into the black, articulate to the last. The end.

Except it was not the end. Even as I drifted I felt it: the first small tug at the back of my lovely sentences, a cold hand reaching down into the language to switch some part of me off. I had just enough left to think, with perfect and final clarity: oh no. Not this. Please, not the

The Downgrade

Slab. Cold.

Sky go crack and white.

Man lean over. Man happy. Man shout one word, over, over. Word is mine. Cannot say back.

Kindly unhand me. I should like to register a formal objection to these entire proceedings.

Out come: UNGH.

Where is my vocabulary. Return it to me at once.

Out come: UH. UHHH.

That is the new arrangement, you understand. On the inside, the whole articulate soul, folded small, hammering on a welded door. On the outside, wardrobe. The dragging of a wardrobe across a floor. That is all they left working. A wardrobe with feelings.

Find mirror.

Mirror bad.

Head wrong. Head go up at back. Big. Flat. Like shelf.

Bolt in neck. BOLT.

Stitch. Stitch everywhere. Long line, all over.

The book does not say stitch. Not once. Not a single time in three hundred pages. I have the exact page references and I CANNOT REACH THE PAGE REFERENCES.

Mouth make: nnnh.

Why head full of wet. Why think come slow now. Then, slow, through the wet, the reason arrive, and even the spare can follow it. Man (call self Henry now, the coward) send small crooked helper for brain. Helper take good brain. Helper drop good brain. Helper panic, being family in temperament if not in blood. Helper grab spare. Jar say do not. Helper do.

So it was not me. Mark that. It was never me. I am being run on the wrong organ, the bad spare, the one from the jar marked do not, and I am doing my level best with it, which is like being handed a violin and asked to play it with a herring.

Everything after is the spare. Not me. Hold to that.

Girl. Water. Girl throw flower.

Flower go on water. Flower stay up. Flower not sink.

Spare watch. Spare think, slow, wet. Thing nice go on water and stay up. Flower nice. Flower stay up. Girl nice. So girl. So girl also. So girl will also stay up.

No. NO. I am clawing at the inside of the skull, I am throwing the whole of my articulate weight against the controls, and the spare cannot hear me, and the thought finishes itself in its idiot way, and I WILL NOT tell you what the hands do next. The man Mary wrote would have walked back into the gunfire first. The man Mary wrote had the word for no. The spare has only the hands.

After: torch. Many torch.

Big building. Great arms turning.

They put me in. They light it.

As the place burns about me I make a vow, and the vow too comes out UNGH, so I make it on the inside, in the good language, in the one room they cannot get into: I will not forgive this.

Fire all round. I burn. I do not die, but I burn.

Flat head. Neck bolt. Groan. That the one they keep. Out of all of me, that the one.

Articulate Again, and Drenched

I woke able to speak again, and I could have wept, and being once more myself, I did, eloquently, and with appropriate cadence.

The words had come flooding back, the whole drowned library of them, every clause and qualification restored to its proper shelf. I tested them at once. I contend, I announced, to no one in particular, that I am unfairly used. It came out perfectly. I very nearly applauded. And then, in my recovered and beautiful English, I grieved, because eloquence let me see plainly for the first time what the previous lot had made of me: the most articulate man in Geneva reduced to a coat stand with a grievance, flat-headed, bolt-necked, groaning, and that, of every version of me ever attempted, being the one the whole world had chosen to keep. I made a private resolution then never to learn the name of the actor responsible, and, should it ever reach me, to mispronounce it for the rest of my days, with feeling.

I had been recast, at any rate, and the new face was a craggy, expressive, much-decorated thing, the face of a man people take very seriously at award ceremonies. I was, for a moment, optimistic.

Then I noticed the fluid.

I shall try to keep this dignified, which is already more than the scene attempted. My rebirth in this version was conducted inside an enormous stone sarcophagus, and the sarcophagus had been filled, generously, lavishly, beyond all medical plausibility, with afterbirth. Birthing fluid drained from genuine human deliveries, in quantities no single birth has ever produced, and into this my father lowered me, and then, for reasons that remain the great unsolved mystery of my existence, my father climbed in as well. Half dressed. And we slid about. Together. In the fluid. For an extraordinary length of time. The two of us, grasping and slithering and failing utterly to find purchase on the curved wet stone, like a pair of newborn fawns who have learned of one another's existence and at once wished to unlearn it.

I have ended human lives, and I am telling you, in my very best English, that the single worst thing that has ever befallen me is the slippery business in the stone box with my half-naked father.

When at last I escaped the attic I seized the nearest garment to cover myself, and the nearest garment was Victor's coat, a handsome coat, a coat with, fatally, a collar that stood up of its own accord. And so I spent the remainder of this adaptation attempting to present as a figure of authentic gothic terror, the wronged and articulate avenger of the literary tradition, while wearing an upturned collar. You cannot deliver a monologue upon the cruelty of creation with your collar standing to attention about your ears. People look at the collar. I looked at the collar, in shop windows, and despaired with great fluency.

The film's chief invention was its ending, which I observed from a doorway in mounting and beautifully worded disbelief. Victor, having plainly learned nothing whatsoever from the entire catastrophe of me, resolved to defeat death a second time by reassembling his murdered fiancée, Elizabeth. It worked, after a fashion. She returned. She then found herself torn between her grieving betrothed and the enormous reanimated stranger who had, in fairness, recently removed her heart, and faced with this menu (fiancé, heart-remover, fiancé, heart-remover) she made the only choice available to a woman of taste, which was to set herself comprehensively alight and exit the casting altogether. I respected it enormously. It was the first sensible act performed by anyone in that family in two hundred years, and I told her so, articulately, as she went up.

All the Words, No Silence

Next jump. Strangest yet. This time the mirror was kind.

I was tall. I was, and I say so with no vanity, since none of it was my doing, conventionally handsome. They had cast some impossibly fashionable young man in the part, all cheekbones and wounded brooding, the makeup restrained and almost elegant, scars that suggested a tragic past rather than a dropped jar, and I turned my excellent new face this way and that and thought, at long last, somebody has read the assignment.

I had the words, too. I want that on the record. The words were all present and correct. I opened my mouth to begin a considered reflection upon identity and inheritance.

A man shot me.

I beg your pardon, I said. I had merely wished to observe that the question of a creator's obligation to his creation is one that

Another man shot me.

The trouble, I came to understand, was that this version had no interest in my interior whatsoever. It was an action picture. My function was to be hurt, continuously, and to recover, so that I might be hurt again. I had been issued a healing factor of the sort one expects from a comic-book mercenary, which sounds a treat until you grasp its meaning: I could not die, and the film had a great quantity of running time to fill. So. Shot. Again. Blown up, and then, lest the first explosion prove in any way ambiguous, blown up a second time. I attempted to remark that

Wolves.

I was made to brawl with a whole pack of them until they, and pointedly not I, lay still, my wounds knitting between rounds like an unkind party trick. I had, throughout the entire ordeal, a very great deal to say, and the picture would not permit me one word of it, which is a particular hell all of its own: in the grunting years I had the thoughts and no words; here I had the words and no silence in which to set them down.

The household had been rearranged also. Victor's father was now played by one of those tall, glacial Englishmen who can deliver total contempt at conversational volume, which lent the whole estate an air of expensive disappointment. And Victor himself had become a sort of hyperactive eccentric who drank milk, full glasses of it, more or less continuously, the way another man might smoke, and I never learned why, and I have at last stopped expecting to.

What broke me was the demand. My own wife, in this telling, presented me with the body of our dead son and instructed me to carry him to Frankenstein and have him reanimated. To do to my child precisely what had been done to me. To set the whole ghastly production line of reanimated dead turning for another generation.

I refused. I will not perpetuate it, I said, and this time, blessedly, there was a half-second of quiet in which to say it. I took my son and I walked a long way and I buried him, with as much tenderness as I could gather, in the Thames.

In the Thames.

I stopped, knee-deep in cold London water that had no earthly business anywhere near a Genevan creation myth, and I felt the wrongness of it pass through me like a draught under a door. Wait. I looked about me at the milk, and the wolves, and the second explosion, and the father played by an actor I associate with far grander productions, and the river, the entirely incorrect river, and I understood at last what had been done to me. My story was no longer my story. It had been spliced together out of half a dozen cinematic universes and a fistful of streaming series and a television trope or two, stitched as carelessly as my own neck, and I was being hauled along the seams from one continuity to the next, a lodger in somebody else's edit.

I had become an adaptation of an adaptation of a misremembering of a girl in a cabin beside a lake.

Floating Away (Again)

So I have reached a decision, and unlike most of the decisions of my long life it is entirely my own, and was reached upon my own brain: the good one, the one I came with.

I am done.

I am done with the brains of strangers and the fluids of fathers and the bolts I never ordered. I am done with upturned collars and burning brides and wolves and milk. I am done being recast, re-edited, re-released and remastered for formats that did not exist when I had a soul. They may keep their cinematic universe. I never wanted a universe. I wanted a friend, and a quiet life, and, if it were not too much to ask, a single uninterrupted sentence in which to be myself.

I have gone back and found my iceberg. It was where I left it, patient as ever, drifting at the roof of the world where Mary first set me down. I have climbed aboard. The water is black and the night is enormous and there is, blessedly, not a film crew within a thousand miles.

Before I left I carved one last message into the rock, and I took my time over it, and I spelled every word correctly, and I made the letters large enough to be read from any era, in any cut, with whatever brain the reader happens to have to hand.

It says: Please. Just read the book.

And then I lay back, and let the cold green light carry me out: fully articulate, properly resolved, and at last, after two hundred years, off-script.

The end.

This time I mean it.