Are you ready for something cerebral?
BRAIN THE SIZE
A PLANET
Chapter One
FANTASTICALLY THICK FRED, ICE CREAM MOONS & BREAKFAST WITH NANABANANA
……
Cillian Custard was a natural egghead yet was taught and imposed upon the methods of memory, however this is the romance of his early moments.
First every night before the natural crash of his senses, his mother Floella would tuck him in at Funny Floor Cottage with his Steampunk stuffed Rabbit Daisy Doughnut. She wouldn’t read him a book or anything, as she was too thick for that. That was Nanabanana’s job. And one of his six senses would wonder what the Soup Sisters next door were concocting for the next day’s menu, as the odour of their cooking invaded the crevices in the brickwork.
As by oneself his imagination could see the Ice Cream Moon, of those mind’s eye wonder years. Floella thought he was a fruitcake, with thoughts that only he could invent and see. All Cillian had to do was look into the eyes of his anthropomorphic Daisy Doughnut, and he was off. This stuffed doorstop doll animated his imagination and followed him on his endless spectrum of adventures in his mind that he could with fantasy simply shape and change. And Cillian always whispered to his much loved soulmate steampunk doll so as not to disturb the Soup Sisters of the Something Tasty Soup Shop next door. So Cillian and Daisy Doughnut had many therapeutic conversations at night of Newtonian Classical Mechanics and the latest offerings at the Rinkha, like the smooth rich creamy toffee ice cream with honeycomb pieces intermingled or the lemon ice cream with a swirl of lemon curd and a scattering of meringue pieces. Sometimes if Daisy Doughnut had a real brain or soul, she would wish she was free from this nonsense and back in the Belfast Love Shop for stuffed toys to escape Cillian Custard as he was such a torturous and cerebral geek.
Daisy Doughnut was the insufferable ears for Cillian Custard and his young evolving mind. As he would say things at night while looking out the window, ‘‘Look at Mister Marshmallow face the Moon just like Wordsworth wandering lonely as a mass of water particles in air with those cloud shapes’’ he murmured. ‘‘They are so like the pigs from the Shankill Shambles Slaughterhouse, as he covers the ice cream moon.’’
The story telling device Daisy Doughnut obviously does not answer. She had a face that was embroidered with an expression as if to say “What the Dickens?” As this doorstop doll from Downpatrick listens to his endless repetitive fables, and how the intervention of Cillian’s sensational senses that make his childhood happy with the chemicals in his brain doing their thing.
However this Steampunk Daisy Doughnut was not knitted by Freud, and is so unaware that sometimes human brains go a bit funny in flight of fancy with illusions and that is okay. Her stuffing has no substance or soul and this his actual imaginary friend the punk of steam, just goes along with everything young Cillian had to say. Every night it is the flight of the ice cream scoop moon and all the goodnight ghosts, that only Cillian in his child’s eye mind and creativity can see. Ferris next door was never one to experience this joy, as his brother had his own prison of venomous ways that sometimes negatively impacted upon the emotional ways of his brother Cillian. These two were complete other sides of the coin apart. Fred & Flo of Sandy Row would always ask why Cillian and Ferris could hate each other without actually wanting to know each other. But Ferris was not one for thinking like Cillian. His mind barren of creativity but more eminent in engineering as he knew the workings of those magical Etienne Lenoir Internal combustion engines invented in 1860 but was empty of human connection with Cillian. A great mind is sometimes something two sibling persons cannot share.
However in the morning his mother Floella who is also blind to his brain, calls him for breakfast. Cillians’s mother Floella a delightful creature, was definitely the hen who hatched the genius duck. And her flair was with food and fabrics. Her homecooked provision the sense grabbing taste of fare of fried soda, fried farls amidst potato bread and eggs of dairy with that heart desisting cardiovascular of bacon. Touting sauce too, as nothing tasted like Floella’s Ulster Fry as chambers of the heart cried in fear.
And also sharing the table every morning was the magic and verbal wisdom of his Grandma Nanabanana with more lines on her face than the fourth rock Mars. She was an oracle of information and Maud is never seen without a Guinness. Yet quite an ugly creature but in her day, she was once as hot as Helen of Troy. But some people are truly gifted with beauty of a timeless kind, and Nanabanana to Cillian Custard who understood his promethean vision was surely one of those souls.
She wore a wart on her nose like the clowns at the Astronomical Acrobats Circus, yet she was also wise and indifferent as she too had a brain the size a planet and smelt of old books.
And every breakfast his much loved Maud Nanabanana once some great social hierarchy of the Island of Rathlin and proprietor of The Custard Cake & Cuppa Fun Teashop, and she would impose information and hilarity to inspire his intellect. And even over Ulster Fry, Nanabanana would read from memory the musings of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, riveting Cillian with this English literary classic. And sometimes Nanabanana would read macabre gothic fiction and poetry by Edgar Allan Poe. It was so much fun over the first meal of the day.
Her knowledge was never ending, and Fred who did not enjoy her trespass on his eardrums wished that he had a chastity belt for her mouth. She knew in Cillian’s company over breakfast, that he was from these early days possibly an enormously gifted child. She never once thought that his mind of great pictures was away with the fairies let alone the milk from the dairies.
She was his rock and almanac of information. Even over breakfast she would smile and say, “My Grandson Cillian of Tea Lane, it is you and I and an Ulster Fry”.
