Fragile Animals, page 17
The phone rings twelve, thirteen times. I’m about to give up when he finally picks up, his voice confused as though he’d been sleeping but I know he is likely just relaxed. Probably been sitting at the kitchen table with Rebel, listening to the afternoon radio and drinking gin and tonics. Or else puttering through some housework while she drinks apple tea and does yoga amidst her jungle of houseplants. His voice has always had a vulnerable drowsy quality in the afternoons, one I know endears him to women – it has never made my life any easier.
‘Hi, Dad.’
‘Noly,’ he says. My father often surprises people by being the nicknaming kind and while it is true that he is quite a reserved man, designed best for slippers and muesli and newsprint, he does also have his little slips of fondness. I have been Noly since birth. Noly-Roly as a child, whenever I had fits of excitement. Sometimes combined with tickling, and then my subsequent squealing. I always took the name with a grudge, wanting instead the names he reserved for Her, unfathomable things like Ray and Tiger and Jewel. Names that overflowed. Names that held the sun in their palms.
However roly she might be, Noly stayed exactly wherever she was put.
I toe broken glass with my shoe. Dad’s number is just one that I’ve memorised, not the one I spewed up for Marlene. That call is for another time in another place in another dimension, by which I mean She doesn’t want to hear from me. I run one finger along the carvings in the phone booth glass made by strangers. This scratch might be a love heart, but it may also be a cock. It is kind of oblong shaped in that way.
‘This isn’t your usual number. I thought you were the carpet man.’
‘My phone broke,’ I tell my father. ‘I’m calling you from a friend’s. What are you getting carpeted?’ My father and Rebel have been renovating the house for half a decade now. It’s almost like a hobby for them.
‘Well, they’ve just finished putting up the conservatory! But it’s very cold in the winter and Rebel likes to watch the robins. So, we’re putting in carpet to make it warmer.’ The place was very modern when Rebel moved in, sleek and clean with minimal but heavyset furnishing. Catastrophic oceans hanging on the walls, and sculptural ornaments made of sea glass that were formless and phallic all at once. None of it my father’s choice. Living in our house was like being slapped and kissed at the same time. Drawn in and shoved away. As a child I would crawl beneath the sofa, where the room was muted, obscured by tan leather, often staying down there for hours.
‘Very good,’ I say.
When Rebel moved in things became comfier. Wood darker and lighting softer, little lamps and woodsy candles set to flicker all around. The paintings began to come down from the walls. Slowly. Much slower than anything else. Over years Anno Domini. As if my father and I were jumpy zoo animals, gradually being climatised to a gentler wild. Rebel’s quite patient, really.
There is a pause in which neither one of us acknowledges the time that has amassed since my last phone call. A number of months, maybe more than half a year. I haven’t been home in that long either. I haven’t intentionally stayed away – it’s just the way it’s happened. It’s just what happens when you grow up and your life unravels away from your parents. The apron strings get severed. Completely natural, right? I do send my father regular emails: links to the few news articles I’m in, funny pictures of birds with captions. Still – that kind of correspondence is unsettlingly dissimilar from voice-to-voice contact.
We have the same conversation we always have.
‘Are you keeping well?’ he asks.
‘The same as ever.’
‘Sleeping well?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And how’s the poems?’
He didn’t read my published book because I asked him not to, but he still checks in about it from time to time.
‘We’re still working on the second book. Not trying to rush anything.’
‘That’s the way. And the hotel?’
I swallow. ‘Yeah, grand. How’s work?’
He chuckles. ‘I got another raise. 0.5% more. Big money.’
‘Well, it all adds up doesn’t it.’
‘Right you are.’ Then he clears his throat and says, ‘Do you want to speak to Rebel?’
‘Yeah, put her on.’
There’s a shuffle as the phone passes hands and then the sound of Rebel’s voice, low and girlish.
‘Hi, No.’
When I first met Rebel, it was obvious she was the nicknaming kind, but I also knew she was scared to be too familiar with me. ‘I’m not trying to be your mother,’ she said once as I helped her pot tulips in the garden. Her blush then was so hot she had to go inside and splash water on her face. Now we have settled in this strange liminal space, neither casual nor formal, and she simply calls me ‘No’. A nickname steeped in kind-hearted denial. Her nicknames from my father, for the record, are: Rubble, Lady, and, bizarrely, Milkbone.
‘Hey, Rebel. How’s things?’
‘Good! Good, actually.’ The way she talks makes me think her cheeks are pink. Excited about the world pink. ‘I’ve started running breathing workshops for teenagers at the church.’ She means of Satan – Rebel travels far to participate in her non-spirituality. ‘So I’m all wrapped up in that now. Lesson planning and whatnot.’
‘That’s cool. Are they getting better?’
‘Better?’
‘At breathing.’
‘I’ve only done one so far.’
‘Ah.’
‘But yes!’ she chirps. ‘They’re very intuitive. I suppose because they’re so young.’
‘Do the young often have intuition?’
‘Oh, yes. Children have the most intuition of all of us. They’re highly, highly sensitive. To all things.’
‘Right.’
Then we chat for a while about a whiskery tomcat who has been coming to visit them from the neighbours’ garden, arriving for a second dinner each night. The cat she tells me is very handsome and quite content to be petted, to purr against her hand, but has just this morning caught and killed a robin. It cannot expect any jellied tuna tonight.
‘What did you do with the robin?’
There’s a pause as Rebel thinks. She never scrutinises any of my questions, ponders everything respectfully and equally.
‘I sprinkled some rose petals on it and moved it beneath the birch tree where the tulip bulbs are. That way when it rots it’ll feed the earth.’
‘What were the rose petals for?’
Rebel sounds startled. ‘I don’t really know.’
The call does the job. Slots a few things back into place for me. Everything I have left behind me is unperturbed, unaware of the state of my life, unchanged as I’ve left it. They’re holding bird funerals and being good to one another. I’m standing in a phone booth rubbing a cockheart.
‘How’s Lorne?’ I ask her.
‘You’ve not been texting him?’
‘I broke my phone.’
‘I’ve not heard much from him, but I think he’s fine. Pratting about with some bad boy, I’m sure.’
‘I think Lorne is usually the bad boy, Rebel.’ I’ve never been jealous of Rebel being Lorne’s sister. He loves her of course but I have always filled that role for Lorne better. I know more. Know him closer. So our wounds burrow deeper. I really miss him.
She laughs a little jingle. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Here. I’ll pass you back to your dad.’
There is more shuffling and the sound of stubble against the receiver. I am about to talk more about the tomcat but Dad says he needs to free up the line for the carpet man and so we bid goodbye and I promise to call soon. He takes me for my word. He hangs up.
The windows in the phone box have all fogged up with the steam of my breath and so the world outside is softened to a blur and I can convincingly pretend that it doesn’t exist. I stand, clutching the phone and waiting for nothing. All that exists is me and this plasticated phone booth and cockheart and the shoes I borrowed from Miss Fraser because mine got wet. They are a raspberry colour, waterproof and fur lined. My toes are fully warm. It’s a peaceful thought.
Suddenly the phone emits a violent ear-piercing sound. It’s ringing and I’m at a loss for what to do. I pick it up and press it tentatively to my face.
‘Hello?’ I say in a deep tone, trying to disguise my voice in case it’s a murderer or a mob boss or another vampire or something.
‘Noly?’
‘Dad?’ I hesitate. I cough into my normal voice. ‘This is weird. I’m actually in a phone booth.’
‘Noly, Rubble’s just reminded me there’s something I need to tell you.’ His tone ducks in that consolatory way. I think he’s about to comment on my health. I think for a second that Lorne has intervened, told him about that night a few weeks before we stopped talking, where I appeared on his doorstep at 4am with fresh blood soaking through my jeans. I’d slashed up my thighs but gotten a little giddy with it. I was scared and I wanted him to hold me. He had to send out his one-night-stand.
Then Dad says, ‘Fath-…Noly, Donald McBride has passed away.’
It takes me a minute to hear him, too caught on the fact that after all this time he is still wired to call the man ‘Father’. But then I realise what he is telling me. Head on. In simple terms.
The phone booth’s temperature merges with that of my breath.
‘What?’ I say.
My father never minces words like he used to. He was forced to learn to communicate. ‘He died three weeks ago in the intensive care unit. He had a stroke at the wheel and crashed his car. The funeral has been and gone. It was at the church. I thought you should know.’
‘Okay.’
I do not ask why he didn’t tell me sooner because we both know that neither of us had respects to pay. Of course the sick fuck got buried at the church, despite the deadly sins he’d committed, all the sacraments he’d broken, the million times he’d made Jesus cry. He must have made Jesus cry. When you really think about The Church, like the whole thing, the big looming mass of it, you realise contradiction is rife at every turn. Love thy neighbour but not thy gay neighbour. The very act with which you were conceived is also the ultimate carnal sin and we can’t all be virgin mothers. God’s will is perfect so better not think about genocide. Let the cunt be buried in the very soil that he perverted.
The point is if it was in the church then She was in the church too. She returned to Crail. She was right there, praying, and She didn’t try to speak to me. Where had they fled? It took intensive online stalking but I managed to find an announcement from some nursing home in the highlands. Father would be their new head of chaplaincy. Very Catholic move when you think about it. Praying on the feeble. The brief article let me know that a ‘kind wife’ had moved to town with him. This was a few years ago. Then nothing else until recently.
I don’t tell Dad I already knew, and therefore already knew he’d decided not to tell me. My chest is hot with an incomprehensible rage that I also feel sharply ashamed of.
‘Are you okay, Noly? Where are you?’
I don’t have words for him. ‘Bye, Dad,’ I mumble before putting the phone down.
I take a deep breath that’s still shallow. I finger cockheart on the glass. So Father McBride Father McDied. I try to muster up some feeling for this man, who I saw once a week for the duration of my childhood. A man who has brushed his thumb over my head, reached his finger into my mouth and pressed wafer onto the back of my tongue, listened through the grate of a dark box, consumed my confusions and guilts, shamed me for them, gossiped about them to his prized disciples. But I find I cannot. He was not real to me. He was cruel and he liked Her and that was all. Most of the things I know about him are too confusing to categorise: a devout man disturbed by swearing, capable of mapping out his throbbing lust on paper, wrathful and intolerant of queer young men. Is he in hell now?
Instead, my mind turns to Alistair, who by now must be a twitchy nosed man of twenty-one. It disturbs me to imagine him. He seems to me preserved at age fourteen, still wearing that awkwardly fitted uniform, ginger as ever, eyes shining with grief. An adult orphan. Alistair’s mother, I knew from eavesdropping on mine, had died giving birth. She was never even supposed to have been pregnant at all what with priests and their supposed celibacy. In the violence of tragedy the congregation let their consummation swing. Later, I found out from my father that priests aren’t even supposed to marry. That Father McBride was never officially married (not in His eyes) and that Alistair’s dead mother was the original scandal, way before She ever came along. Funny how it tips on like that.
Alistair at his father’s casket-side, a hole burning through his heart. Alone now, save for–
The dam ruptures. It has been leaking for days but I have at least avoided the word. The last twig snaps and I cannot hold back the torrent.
Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother,
The word is heavy, sharp, brutal, barbaric, stinging, aching, longing. I can see her long fingers on Alistair’s shoulder, not affectionate but present; her untameable hair held back with that butterfly clip (it was an heirloom, she told me once, which made me believe it would one day be mine). What would she say to him? How would she comfort him? I don’t know but I’m sure the fact of him being someone else’s child has softened her instinct for callousness. She has always been more formidable within the theatre of other people.
I push the phone box door open. The grey swoops in to cool me. In truth, I’ve known about Donald McBride since his car first crashed. I’d followed the story quietly online, stalking Crail newsletters and the Facebook pages of people from high school, finally messaging little-lover Jacob McEwan for information then fleeing to Bute at his response. I couldn’t be trusted with my phone anymore. But where my mother developed her tendency for cruelty I developed one for silence. Me: a creature of taboos. I don’t push until the rock is already tumbling down the hill. So until my father put our lives into words, I did not consider it real. It was the death of any local person. Just the collapsing of cells. Early but understandable. And now?
Now I must strip Her of her capitalised presence in my brain. She’s nothing to me. She can’t control me. And is there anything more pathetic than a grown adult woman who is still obsessed with her mother? I never even called her mother, even as a small child, I already understood that she’d made a mistake and that I was its physical form. That she was meant for art and extravagance not this awkward owl-eyed little girl. No point in trying to claim her. She was never mine. Yet my blood is fifty percent hers. I wish there was a way to suck that half out.
The sky gives a polite cough, a few snowflakes tumbling to the ground like spores. It is as though the clouds are asking to interject. By all means, please. A few more flakes pedal downward. Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother. The world sounds like a shell over the ear.
Goodnight Prayer
I must have been four or five, still too small for school and the letters had not started arriving yet. It was eleven years bc. I was following my mother around the house. Unemployed, she swept and tidied. Don’t get me wrong, my mother was not a domestic woman and should not be imagined as such. But she had no tolerance for disarray that had not been decided by her so she was frequently snatching up mine and my father’s things. If she found the same item left too many times she would throw it away. This fate had befallen a beloved childhood teddy bear I liked to drag around, sometimes sucking the ear for comfort. My mother had said, ‘I assumed because you forgot him, you didn’t care about him anymore.’
It annoyed her when I snapped at her heels, not yet old enough to covet invisibility, still constantly getting under her feet. Sometimes I got the hiccups and that only aggravated her worse. My stomach would growl and her nostrils would flare in resentment of my deafening presence. My cacophony of childish sounds. Worse still the short phase I had of whining, bleating her name as if I didn’t already sense my mother could not be called. Would not ever be familiar in that way. On her best days she would ask me to help, and I would feel useful using my small hand to get difficult dust out of tight crevices, praying for her to praise me. On her worst days she would lock me in my bedroom from the outside, murmuring, ‘I’m sorry. I just need a few hours.’ Later I would steal that key and go down to the sands and hurl it into the mouth of the ocean.
I never questioned that my mother didn’t work, all of us relying on my father’s wage (which was sizable enough for the lifestyle we lived). She kept all of her hours as her own.
On that day we had not yet reached her limit of annoyance and she was tolerating me still. I helpfully picked up a stray book of my father’s, but she plucked it out of my hands as if that was where he’d left it, as if I, too, was a short end table.
Then we went into my bedroom which was as neat as a pin. She unmade then re-made my bed. I detached myself from Her heel and wandered over to my desk, seeing something amiss in the fish tank we kept there, the home of our goldfish, Goliath, shimmering gold in the afternoon sun. But he was swimming upside down. Gazing sideways, his gills fluttering with the motion of the filter.
I stood and stared until my mother walked over behind me and stared at the tank as well. Goliath was a birthday gift from my parents but presumably more so from my father who thought all children should be instilled with a fondness for small animals. As a child he read me Wind in the Willows, doing all of the voices as well. I’d had Goliath for two months at that point and had indeed grown very fond of him. Yes, he was another body in my home who did not like to be touched – but if I put a finger to the glass and dragged it around, he followed, and he was endlessly appreciative of the smelly fish flakes, which I provided nightly in generous portions.
