He chewed his bottom lip and tried to think of all the clichés he could. Storm clouds on the horizon. Trouble was brewing. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife. He chewed his bottom lip and whispered mantras to himself inside his head.
She opened her mouth and knives fell out. Pointed daggers like you saw thieves carry in fairy stories. Silver, shiny, bright and sharp. He opened his mouth in response, and set free fat ineffectual duvets.
Under the blanket, where they couldn’t see, where they had forgotten he lay hidden, peering under its edge, under the blanket he couldn’t understand the words that fell or streamed or jerked from their mouths, but he could see the knives and despise the duvets.
He tried not to move. Keeping very, very still was a skill. He treated it as such. He honed it. Barely breathing, eyes like slits so he wouldn’t even blink, he lay under the blanket, waiting.
It was almost like an opera, their daily performance; the same words and phrases said over and over. Her with her knives, him with his duvets. A soap opera, but real. Factual entertainment. Although, he never felt entertained. Just frightened. Sometimes her knives were extra-sharp and shiny.
It was dark under the blanket. Peering under its edge with his eyes half-closed made the room around the blanket seem slightly dark, too; although, he supposed, that could partly be the metaphorical storm clouds having an effect.
A snatch of monologue, recitative; her favourite refrain:
“You always f-ing bring it back to that, don’t you?”
His sighing response lost in a cushion of duvet smothering. Duvets so thick, her knives never seemed to get through. Perhaps that was the point.
He closed his eyes and started humming gently to himself. The room around the blanket went silent. Then his father spoke softly.
“Sh1t.”
He stopped humming. Stupid of him to have started. He heard his father take a couple of steps towards where he lay under the blanket. Please don’t look at me; please don’t pull back the blanket, he whispered in his head.
“It’s okay, son. I’m not going to look at you. I won’t pull back the blanket, promise.”
His father was very near to where he lay. He continued to lie, and let the silence stretch; let his father’s words evaporate. It interested him, lying there in the darkness of the blanket, in the freshness of the silence, that his mother never spoke at this point in the opera. He sensed her, standing behind his father, arms folded; her turn to chew her bottom lip now, with impatience. In her head, he knew, words would be tumbling and fighting, challenging each other to duels. Bright shiny knives clinking and clattering in her head. She must be very tired, he thought.
His father crouched beside where he lay under the blanket. Please don’t look at me. Don’t move the blanket. Even said in his head, the words came through clenched teeth.
“I promise, son. I promise I won’t look at you or move the blanket. But, if you’re okay, will you just nod your head, or something? No-one’s looking, I swear.”
Don’t swear, it’s bad. He nodded his head once, sharp, made himself still again as he heard his mother barely stifle a laugh that had razor blades at the edges. His father patted him through the blanket.
Razor blades from her mouth, not knives this time. You took a shallower cut from a razor blade, but it stung more. His father’s mouth let out steam in response. No duvets this time. Steam like an old-fashioned kettle, or the miniature trains at that place in the mountains they sometimes took him to; always bright and overly cheerful on those trips, brittle pieces of coloured glass fell from their lips, tinkling as they hit the floor, and sparkling as they fell; pieces of glass as cold and lifeless as the fun he knew they were supposed to be having.
But here the hiss of steam under pressure. He pushed his fists into his eye sockets, as though that would stop him seeing, even though it was dark under the blanket and he was no longer peering under its edge.
Then the blanket ripped back with a violence unwarranted. He opened his mouth but no sound came out. Still, his mother accused him:
“Stop howling. Stop it. STOP IT!”
“Leave him be. It’s not his fault. Leave him, Sarah. Please.”
She turned on him, the razor blades skittering at the edges of her words:
“Leave him, Sarah, please. Oh please, please, pretty f-ing please.” She let the blanket drop, but he was uncovered now.
“I’m so f-ing tired of this,” she said to his father. Her words were spoons now, heavy metal spoons, like the ones his gran had in the drawer in her kitchen. Old heavy metal spoons that tasted of metal as you looked at them, the tang wet and sharp against your tongue.
His father stepped towards her, his arms open as though to gather her up, but she was too quick for him, and she stuck her own arms out in front of her, two prongs, a barrier to his comfort.
“No. I don’t want that. I don’t want any of that. Any of this.”
The spoons’ clatter against one another created white noise in his head. He hummed to try to clear it. His mother dropped her arms to her sides and walked out of the room. He listened to her heels clicking on the wooden floor, moving away from him, ticking like a metronome. Softly he clapped his hands together, in time to the beat of her footsteps.
His father stood there looking down on him. Don’t look at me, he said in his head.
“I’m not looking at you,” his father said softly, sadly, daisies and purple clover falling with the words.
And then he was in the garden, beneath his favourite tree. He was watching the pattern of the sunlight through the leaves on his leg, studying one particular patch of light and memorising its shape. The shape was right. He hummed and sat very still so that he wouldn’t miss anything out of the shape as he imprinted it on his memory. A breeze stirred the branches and the shape changed. He hummed louder to let the breeze know he was annoyed. The breeze died down and the shape went back to how it was. He hummed with satisfaction.
His back was against the tree trunk. His t-shirt was thin and red. The redness made the knobbles of the tree trunk more scratchy. He didn’t move, but let the redness move apart so that the knobbly trunk could scratch into his spine. His legs were straight out in front of him, his arms hung loose at the side of his torso, his head was down, his chin resting against his chest. He stared and fixed the feeling of the tree trunk through the redness of his t-shirt with the shape on his leg. They were right. It wasn’t possible now to have one without the other.
His mother came down the garden, towards the tree, towards him. She had a cardigan wrapped tightly around her, as though she was cold. But the cardigan wasn’t green, so he didn’t know why she was cold. He didn’t move as she stood and looked down at him. He just focused on the light pattern on his leg. She moved a centimetre closer, then another, and another. Her shadow lay across his legs. He hummed sharply, hummed and stared at the shadow.
She pulled his arm and the rest of his body followed, upwards, away from the tree. His feet were supposed to find the ground, but he chose not to cooperate. So she pulled harder on his arm, then exasperated, a cry fell from her mouth like a ball of wire wool, it fell to the ground at the same speed as his body. Still his head hadn’t lifted once, and now, instead of staring at his legs, he was staring at the soil beneath the grass. The grass was blurred and icy green, but the soil he could see in minute particular detail. The arm she had pulled was still raised, the other still down by his side, as though he were executing some strange semaphore message to the soil.
She moved, walking back up the garden, hugging herself once more. The cardigan was soft and creamy, he told himself in his head. That stopped her in her tracks. He heard her counting inside her head. Counting to 10 like the chimes of the clock over the fireplace at his gran’s house. Then she stiffened, and her legs were like pegs as she walked back to the house.
He lay there, staring at the soil. It was brown and made the same sound in his head that eating crisps did. He looked up, and the sun was gone, but his father shoes had appeared.
“Come on, sonny Jim. Time to go in,” he said. His words were lilac feathers, floating down, settling gently, forming a carpet that they walked on back up to the house.
And then again, the blanket. He was still, it was dark; had he moved? Was this then again, or another now? He peered under the edge of the blanket, remembering not to hum. But the room around the blanket was empty.
He was sitting on the sofa, staring at the window, memorising the shape. It matched the shape he had memorised before. He hummed with pleasure.
She was there. Suddenly she was there. Don’t look at me, he whispered in his head.
“Okay, here’s the deal. I won’t f-ing look at you if you stop f-ing humming. I have to spend my life trapped in this f-ing house with you. I have nowhere to go to get away from you. I have no f-ing choice. Do you hear me?”
He looked at the fish scales that littered the floor around her feet. They were flat and shiny, and he knew if he touched them they would be hard, would slice into his skin. So he didn’t touch them. But he didn’t hum either.
Don’t swear. It’s bad, he whispered in his head.
That brought her one step closer, walking over the fish scales, crunching them beneath her shoes. She placed her hand gently on his head, ran it down over his hair, down so that it cupped his chin and raised his face towards her. His eyes glided away.
“I’m not looking, I promise,” she said, “And I’m sorry that I swore.”
At his gran’s house now. The heavy metal spoons in the drawer in the kitchen. His mother and his gran talking behind him as he stood, perfectly still in calm repose before the shiny heavy metal spoons. He couldn’t see to know what they said; he couldn’t see what fell from their mouths. He tasted the wet tang of the metal spoons against his tongue as they lay there in the drawer.
One’s missing, he told himself.
Gran. She looked down into the drawer with him.
“How can you tell that, just by looking, little man?” She asked.
“How can he possibly tell that one’s missing just by looking?” she said over her shoulder to his mother.
His mother replied, but he couldn’t see to hear what she said. Couldn’t see the shapes. The spoons were wrong and it was like lightening in his head.
His mother. Looking down now, not into the drawer, though. Looking down at him.
“Stop howling. STOP IT!”
She didn’t touch him, but the wire wool scurfed his skin, and he flinched.
“Leave him, Sarah,” his gran said. “I’ll shut the drawer.”
Nonononononono, he said inside his head. The drawer had closed, now it opened again. Still the spoons were wrong. The lightening was flashing.
“For god’s sake,” hissed his mother. “For god’s bloody f-ing sake, what did I do to f-ing deserve this?”
His dad. Not at Gran’s house. Next to him as he lay under the blanket. His dad and someone else. A different voice. He peered under the edge of the blanket. Her words fell like raindrops with sunlight through them. He watched them fall. He wanted to put out his hand to touch them.
Her hand touched his. He didn’t flinch. Her hand was soft.
“Hello, Jake,” she said.
“How on earth did you do that?” said his dad.
“Who knows,” swam through the sunlit raindrops falling from her lips. Inside, he smiled.
“I’ve never seen him do that before,” said his dad.
Her t-shirt was pale blue and had a bird on it. A bird made up of other, smaller birds. He stared at the birds. They were right. He counted them. There was the right number. He hummed contentedly. It was right.
© J R Hargreaves 1 May 2004
