Kristin Hersh - Rat Girl

“Is freeing owls all you can do, Dave?” interrupts Leslie.

“He can kill mice, too,” I say. “I’ve seen him.”

“Don’t make me kill mice,” Dave says quietly.

“You can borrow my hair spray,” says Leslie.

“Well, no, he wouldn’t wanna use up his murder…” I reply. “ Free the mice!”

“Yes!” yells Tea. Dave looks relieved.

Leslie’s voice echoes from the top of the barn, “Counterfeiting! The perfect, victimless crime!”

“I think we could work that in,” says Dave. “If you’re talking Robin Hooding in the Everglades—”

“I’m confused,” I interrupt. “Who’re you murdering?” Dave starts to answer when Gil comes in to get me for the next vocal. “Gil, if you could commit any crime—” I begin, then notice that he looks upset. “What’s wrong?”

“Deep Purple’s kicking us out!” he yells.

“Deep what’s what ?”

“Deep fucking Purple is kicking us out of the bloody studio right in the middle of the fucking session!”

Leslie sits up and swings her legs over the loft. We look at each other. “What’s ‘deep purple’?” I ask.

She looks grim. “It’s an old-fart band.”

“An old-fart band with wads of cash,” says Gil bitterly. “Collect your bags and move into the control room. They don’t want to have to see you lot, so you have to vacate any room they might feel like walking into.”

My stomach drops. Dave’s eyes are huge. “ What? ” he says.

“We can’t finish the record?” I ask.

“I’m fighting to keep those fuckers out of the studio itself as long as they’ll stay out, but you have to leave your rooms and you aren’t allowed anywhere else in the building. No food, no telephone.” He shakes his head. “I don’t believe this.”

We don’t move, just sit in silence. “Look,” continues Gil. “We’ll do everything we can today, but we’ll never be able to finish. We’ll just have to save the rest of the recording for the mix in London next month.”

Dave and I look at each other. We both know I can’t go to London next month; that’s when the baby’s due. I push the lamb off my lap and stand up.

Gil looks defeated. “When you leave your rooms, spit on the floor.”

We file out of the barn. Dave and I walk together. “I’ll go to London,” he says. “I’ll make sure it’s good. Just do whatever you can today.”

I look at him. “What’re we, cursed?”

He smiles. “Let’s plan our crime.”

My mother tells me that she was “sad” before I was born. I ask her what she was sad about, but she won’t say.

“It doesn’t matter, because after I had you, I was happy again. Because you were perfect. Because all babies are perfect. Do you know what I mean?”

I don’t. I think of the ugly baby with the monkey friend.

“I could hold you and say, ‘This is my baby,’ and then everything was okay.”

In the hospital, they put me in the shower room, alone. It looks like a shower room in a correctional facility: gray on gray. Just shower heads on the walls and a big drain in the middle of the floor.

This pain is sending me out of myself, is not limited to my systemic reality. It’s more like a shift in the room. I pass out between contractions and then wake up as the next one begins, the sound of the shower spray getting louder and louder as I come to.

Like slow flashing lights: one bright minute is silvery water pouring into the drain, then darkness. The next bright minute opens to a world of cold metal. Not the way cold metal looks, but the way it’d feel to be made of it. Then it’s dark again.

Water pours over me. I’m curled up in the fetal position.

hysterical bending

A little universe. With eyelids, shoulders and tiny lungs, yeah, but also with fingers, toenails and knees. Babies are perfect.

Another hell to another heaven—and this has been going on for millennia. Crazy.

Now I know I’ll never be numb again. A mother is condemned to feel everything forever. And I’m finally afraid, condemned to fear everything forever. But that makes sense: feel someone else’s pain, feel someone else’s everything.

And he’s my baby, so everything’s okay.

I absolutely did not invent this.

cartoons

KRISTIN HERSHis a songwriter, guitarist, mother of four and the founder of the seminal art rock band Throwing Muses. Over the course of her two-decade career as a musician, she has released over twenty critically acclaimed albums, including nine solo albums and four with her current band, 50FootWave. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New Orleans.

Kristin Hersh recorded with 4AD records until 2007, when she helped found the nonprofit Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders ( http://cash-music.org), recording and releasing music without the aid of a record company. She is entirely listener-funded and makes her music available, free of charge and free to be shared, via Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licenses ( http://creativecommons.org).

For more information or to get involved with CASH Music, please visit http://kristinhersh.cashmusic.org.

Kristin’s personal Web site and the online home of Throwing Muses and her newest musical project, 50FootWave, is http://kristinhersh.com. There you’ll find a mailing list and regularly updated content, including a forum, a shop, essays, new music, tour dates and more.

Throughout the first year of this book’s publication, Kristin is making available a series of four intimate session recordings in which Throwing Muses performs songs from the book Rat Girl . These collections will be available for download via her Web site and will be released in four special-edition compact discs entitled The Season Sessions — Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer.

Readers can access these free, high-quality digital downloads on the first day of each season, beginning September 21, 2010, by visiting http://kristinhersh.com/seasonsessionsand entering the first word found on page 10 of this edition.

E-mail Kristin: kristinhersh@cashmusic.org.

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First published in Penguin Books 2010

Copyright © Martha Kristin O’Connell, 2010

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