Coccyx
by Polis Loizou
26/02/2020 | creative non-fiction | 3 minute read
‘Your great-grandad had a tail,’ you said one night in front of the TV. There’d been that opening scene of The X-Files – a maternity ward, and its not-quite-human arrival. Then that spooky theme tune that gets in your marrow. It came through our boxy screens on a school night once a week, and we all pushed back our bedtimes to see a monster and lose more sleep. In the lunchtime playground, we’d blabber about them with flaking pastry matting words to our tongues. Oh my God, the guys who hibernates! That bit with the escalator! Now it was the monkey-babies, human animals with a limp extra limb at the base of their spines.
I looked at you, astonished. ‘What do you mean, like a tail-tail?’
‘Well. Sort of. He was born with an enlarged coccyx.’
I was eleven, it was 1996, the end of God. Because if grandad’s father had a tail, it meant Darwin was right, grandma was wrong. Grandma, whose name we anglified to Gloria for giggles, who burned olive leaves in a censer to bless the house, who warned us that the archangel Gabriel would swing a scythe to chop the heads off children who misbehaved, who bowed her head and confessed her sins to the priest at Apostolos Andreas, kissing his hand when she saw him on the street and calling him Teacher.
But what had he taught her? Adam and Eve and a serpent on a tree. Lazarus and greed and betrayal. Mary Magdalene, who I later discovered was never a prostitute. The Virgin Mary, decided a virgin by old white men in Rome. When I explained to my friend what a virgin was, his mother was incensed. She crossed herself against me, refused to let me back in her house.
That Christian English girl who sat beside me in Maths: sixty-year-old Women’s Institute Finance Manager on a prepubescent head, a high fragile voice singing Whistle Down The Wind at the end-of-year assembly. Angel with a flute. She hummed to herself as she lined, in order of rainbow colours, her bottles of nail polish along the length of her pencil case. She gasped when the Biology teacher (red cheeks, hesitating) made us open our books to p.72: Sexual Reproduction. She balked when the English teacher (young, parachuted into her wedding) wheeled in the box TV to pop an episode of The X-Files in the VHS player.
‘But it’s a 12 rating!’ whined the Christian. She sat rigid straight, her faith a backbone, a corset.
‘So? We’re almost twelve.’
Mine was one of the voices batting her down, me, the one who was even more hated than she was. Because something about her unnerved me; not the commitment to goodness, because God – no, not God – knew I was a prude, and softer than the other boys. Clash of the Outcasts: because I was different too, a boy who liked boys as well as girls. And though nobody knew, of course they knew, revulsion hacked up and spat out on a daily basis. The Christian and I, in that class of normal humans, stood out like babies with tails.
For years I stood hidden, rattled, a sceptic amongst believers. Sneaky queer. Holding my long white candle outside in the church yard at Easter, Christ is risen, shielding my sin, and the quivering holy light from the breeze.
And what of my ancestor, the man with the tail, walking around that mountain village in the 1900s? Did the whispers of neighbours snip at his ears? Or was it tail-between-legs (so to speak), a lifelong secret shared between wife and lover, mother and midwife? Every Sunday he would go to church, and lower himself to a pew, where the bone he shouldn’t possess, not in God’s plan, not according to grandma’s Teacher, coccyx versus crucifix, rubbed against the wood.
about Polis (he/him/his)
Polis Loizou is a multidisciplinary artist who draws on history, social politics, folklore and queerness in all its forms to find the personal and cultural connections in situations of conflict. Being a queer immigrant, he has a preference for depicting marginalised/outsider characters in order to engage audiences and readers with stories potentially outside their own experience.