Filter Until Beautiful

 

Ever curious about life and its many conundrums, Godnose Welshite quizzed his erudite father Cuthbert about the riddles of the universe.  

 

‘Why is it that rich people are generally more attractive than poor people?’

 

‘Ahem, simple really,’ said Cuthbert, putting a matchstick to the bowl of his pipe, from which a sprouting nest of tobacco duly shrank and crackled beneath the flame.

 

‘Attractive women are drawn to moneyed men and by extension moneyed men are always surrounded by attractive women. This, we know to be a universal truth.

 

‘Never will a moneyed man reject the overtures of a good-looking woman - what man would? But to the moneyed man, the beauty holds special appeal for she is yet another trophy, another acquisition, another pennant on his flagstaff. And a good-looking woman will never make advances towards a man of modest living. So you see, though there may seem little romance in the union, the two are in fact destined for one another.  

 

‘Should wedlock and procreation follow – and inevitably it will because he needs an heir and she the guarantee of an income - the resulting offspring will be at least 50% facially attractive.’

 

Godnose sniffed, cupped his hands together and reclined against the back of the chaise longue, poked his tongue around the hollow of his cheek, smoothed an eyebrow.

 

‘Sounds like a formula to me; sounds like a recipe.’

 

‘Well, not quite,’ said Cuthbert, exhaling yellowish smoke and pinching the shank of his pipe again between his teeth. 

 

‘The work is far from done you see. The aforementioned child could well have insufficient ‘beauty genes’ to be the finished article. Let’s say the father is moneyed and married but terribly ugly - poverty being a much stronger deterrent for certain women than plainness - and further generations of the process could well be needed for it to be complete.

 

“Consider it a process of filtration, if you will. Each of these ‘half-attractive’ children will grow to adulthood, inherit their father’s wealth, mate with ever more attractive partners and so on and so forth, until the percentage of the unattractive ancestor is a minimum and beauty is prevalent. And thus, sections of society end up both moneyed and lovely.’

 

Godnose fixed his eyes on the floor in front of his feet. ‘So which am I?’

 

Cuthbert hooked his right leg over the left - the leather upholstery of his armchair groaning as he repositioned himself, and once again placed the pipe into his lopsided mouth.  

 

‘You son, are second generation, 50/50, neither good looking, nor ugly. You are a work unfinished.’

 

Godsnose opened a gym bag at his feet and delved inside, bringing out a black pocket mirror before scrutinising his profile, beginning with his best side, the left side.

 

His hair was dark, his skin pale like stone, his cheek was high, his jaw robust and his large eye was green with pronounced flecks in the iris – like a sliced kiwifruit – all his mother’s gift.

 

‘Not bad.’

 

Then he turned his right side towards the mirror. Immediately, he could see the lopsided mouth he had also inherited - Cuthbert’s drooping maw. And what on the left side seemed a creamy, almost translucent skin tone, on the right seemed pallid and sickly, soiled in parts with random dark patches of freckles. A certain shapelessness and insipidity was about this other side. Indeed he was a 50/50.

 

‘See what I mean lad, only half attractive,’ said Cuthbert.

 

By now, the library was filled with the spicy aroma of his tobacco. The pretty, dark-haired figure of Mrs Welshite glimmered briefly at the door. And for the first time, Godnose considered the physical disparity between his parents.

 

He saw and became aware for the first time in his life of not just mum and a dad, not a mentor and a nurse, a chastener and a champion, but a loveless shallow man and a lovely shallow w***e.  

Reviews

[Tony Conaghan]

Absolutely fantastic. I am off to read some more of your work.