I launched myself into a new chapter; a flower wrenching its petals out against a barbed wind. The winding path makes me dizzy now as the memories scrape across the miles, the twisted smiles, come get me now I’m falling I’m calling I’m scratching out the words coagulating in the midst the mist the missed opportunities. Nothing lives here. Scaled beings wander through here. They circle my pillows they lynch my dreams they tug at my reason they pull me….
Once again, the hatch was opening. The only connection to my familiar self was snaking out. My boyhood memories came in uninvited, unloved.
I had never felt different. I knew I was different, but what I felt was a dislocation; being a distant witness to the life that filled the moments which drifted through the days slowly counting down my alloted span. Younger, I lived a fairly normal life, had normal fun with normal friends. People thought I was a bit weird, a bit scatty, but I attracted the companionship of other kids who were a little different in their own weird ways so somehow everything seemed to find its own balance, as my dad would’ve said long ago, before the drink sunk him.
I knew but never understood that what made me different was distance. If I’d been a fly on a few hush-papered walls in the neighbourhood, i might even have heard the word used to sum me up.
Distant.
Sure, i was painfully aware of my shyness, my many personal insecurities and physical sensitivities; the way I overdressed in summer ’cos I hated my pale skin, the awkward twitches and grunts I couldn’t seem to control, my shame for my poor tiny home and my drunken father and days that dawned blue and someone come knocking to go swimming so I’d hide, pretending I wasn’t there, so they wouldn’t see my poor home my drunken father and my pale white skin. All pretty fucked up for a boy going on twelve.
But the distance that made me different was the space I kept between myselves. OK, perhaps I wasn’t all that normal. All the normal friends I knew lived in big sunny houses in Linkside and Mill Park, they tanned by the pool in front of girls, they had dads that didn’t fade when you looked at them, they were loud and tumbly boys who never hid when friends came knocking, never tied their fathers to the bed to stop him driving drunk at night, never cut themselves with blades on the steps at school while other kids stood around watching, whispering.
Normal for me was trying to be outside my own head. Far outside.
I wrote stuff my mom loved and teachers gave me good marks for. I wrote other stuff that nobody ever saw, words that I clutched at from great distances and pounded together with a purpose and a hunger. I wrote poems for my dad who would read them and cry, crumpled in The Chair, upholstered with the words he’d once himself been proud to write, but which had smudged and streaked from their sodden pages and slowly filled the dark, sad room that held The Chair, The Chair that held the folded man who had once been dad.
I wrote stuff that sometimes came from fear, sometimes from loss, sometimes from anger and sometimes from hope. I wrote stuff that prodded at the distance I kept from myself, stuff that I wrenched from the tender pieces of my flesh and spirit, secrets and lies that lay packed and folded till I reached in and tugged at their corners and spilled them into view.
I wrote stuff way beyond my years.
When I wasn’t writing, I was fighting. Fighting a fear that had been attached to me for as long as I could remember. Every little turn my life took, fear followed me like a shadow; not a fear caused by any single experience, but a fear that seemed to have been passed down to me.
Inherited.
I feared every minute of school. I feared being singled out to read a page, being late for assembly, being called Pinky by some of the bigger, darker, normal boys. I feared being picked for a team. I hated the way my heart hammered and my hands went numb when the rugby ball came my way. I feared the confidence of others I feared the judgement of others I feared the friendship of others.
I feared home.
I feared the way my parent slept in different rooms. The way my mother floated among the dishes in the sink and my father fell asleep in the Hillman on the road in front of the neighbour’s house. I feared the heaviness that filled the rooms and seeped out through the cracks in the walls and surrounded the house and killed the grass and peeled the paint and finally forced my Mother and brother to leave.
When my father drank, he didn’t get loud he didn’t get jolly he didn’t get rude or abusive he didn’t get silly or philosophical or preachy or sing or want to dance or to love or to talk or to hope or to teach his son to kick or play a cover drive or to rig a fishing rod or stand in the sun or swim or even bath.
When my father drank, he faded away; bits of him peeled away like the paint on the walls or the rust on the Hillman. The sharp Glaswegian wit, the soft poetry that coloured his eyes, the talks about cricket and writing, the familiar leathery smell of his skin all the last remaining essence of Dadness were stripped away.
By the time I turned 12, my mother had had enough. She’d tried pleading, threatening, promising, Alanon, Churchmen, the Bible, drinking, weeping, praying and of course denial. But leaving, she said, would shake him out of the bottle. He had brought her all the way to Africa, when I was four and my brother two-and-a-bit. We came out to Africa from Scotland on the Windsor Castle, to work an engineering contract, he’d said. She’d left her sheltered, humble village life on the Isle of Skye to come to a country she was terrified of.
She must have loved him deeply. And she still did, all those years later, when she threatened to leave him and go back to her home. She said it would break her heart to leave her family but she couldn’t bear to see herself fading away with the sickness that infected us all. Something in me pressed me to plead with her not to go; that I would never leave. I pleaded with Dad to put the drink down and to promise to never pick it up again to keep the family together. I promised my mother that everything would be OK and Dad would get well soon, when I knew sure as little arrows that the only reason I wanted to stay was I feared what might happen to my Father left all alone.
For a few shiny weeks, my Father managed to remain sober, and the songful soul he’d smothered in years of drink and regret began to bud back out and reach for his boy, even reached out to the garden which somehow seemed to look a little more colourful.
At school, I became more visible and connected with one or two of the boys who seemed not to see me the way I thought everyone else saw me.
Funny how I knew that.
Not only was I an unusually sensitive boy, but sometimes I felt translucent; which is really like being noticeably invisible.
So almost-absent to be stand-out obvious.
There was hardly a minute that went by when I was in company that I didn’t feel the object of someone’s amused attention, curiosity, pity.
But in the weeks that my Father came back, so did I.
I introduced little Dan Wigget to Lucky Strike Plain, and laughed with the other boys as he puked into the birdbath and asked for another. 12 years old and a packet of Lucky and a little nip of Dan’s moms Cane Spirit then a jolt of the brandy and the gin and the whiskey and the sherry that filled Dan’s family booze cabinet.
Normal people had booze cabinets. My dad had bottles under the bed and in the garage where he parked the Hillman and stayed till morning.
It completely escaped me that the longer Dad stayed sober, the more my new friends and I skipped school and craftily drained the liquor from the Wiggets’ booze cabinet (always refilling with water that nobody seemed to notice).
The drink made us giggle and padded us with a sense of invincibility and gave us horns and bones and all the things that began to nudge at our boyness and challenge the ideas of where the child in us should be wrapped and buried.
Then in the third week of Dad’s sobriety, God said let there be mayhem and my Father died.
Guilt and pain moved in to the empty house and filled the rooms vacated by the sickness; guilt and pain and shame and loss that seeped out into the garden, burning the newly greened grass and staining the walls and the gutters and the windows and the view.
Somehow I knew that the few weeks my Father had come back to me was a time that twisted back on itself and shaped something in me which made no sense at all and tossed me deeply into the wake of the fear I’d thought had passed me by.
The day of the funeral I turned and ran and instead buried myself in tears and rags soaked in Benzyne and Lucky Strikes and stolen booze and an emptiness that sat still and dark around me where nothing moved or echoed.
I couldn’t get out of my head. I saw every moment of my life as a sequence of freeze-frames drained of colour and sharpness; a blur of fading images that I knew were once rich in colour and texture and focus and meaning but which now seemed to spill off the reel and fall into the garden where the celluloid blistered and popped on the burning grass that would turn to thorn later that Winter.
I began to spend more time down at the archery, where I took my shirt off and let the African sun burn my skin as I lay in the hot sand by the black lake and stared with hollow eyes into the cave on the far shore.
Darkness came for me, shivered and shifted me to a place where there was a flash of Family; Mom, Dad and brother on a blanket next to a shiny blue Ford Anglia in a field in The Valley of a Thousand Hills.
It was a perfect snapshot, framed on a page that quickly turned, its breeze stirring the feathering edges of the darkness that now had a distinct outline.
Comentários