The Outcast Hours

by Mahvesh Murad

  I was to occupy myself in my room in the basement. I sat with a greasy crayon in one hand and a blank sheet of paper in front of me, my ears straining, aching to hear what was going on upstairs. There were muffled voices, the phone rang, the front door opened. There were hasty footsteps between rooms. Whilst my father died, night had fallen.

  I knew it was wrong for my mother to try and cope on her own.

  “She is not like you and me,” my father often had said, tenderly, irritated. “She is… weaker. She needs caring for.”

  I had looked at my mother with her strawberry blond hair and eyes blue like the sea on a postcard from Greece and then back at my father with coarse black hair and brown eyes like my own and I had felt worried, but also pleased.

  I should have been with him, I thought. My father had gone to church. He’d asked me to come, but I said I wanted to stay home and play. This might have been a punishment. God was like that. You couldn’t quite know what would invite His wrath. I felt cold. My fingers were cramped around the crayon I had rammed hard into the paper, gaze fixed at the one strained dot on the white.

  And then my mother’s voice: “Irma, come upstairs!”

  All of a sudden, I didn’t want to see her, but I placed my crayon on the table. I stood up. I walked towards the stairs, head hanging, up the steps, just as the front door opened and my father walked in.

  There was a small noise in my chest. A funny little noise that almost immediately began to hurt. My father appeared tired, broken. With all my might, I held onto the noise in my chest, shoved it back down to where it came from, knowing nobody could stand it when noise came out.

  And then I saw who he’d brought.

  My father held the door wide open to Death, a troll with long arms, potbelly, and a beard who, as he entered, unceremoniously threw his knapsack down on the floor and kicked off his leather boots. His toes were long and rather hairy.

  “I’ll make dinner,” my mother said.

  My father observed his routine of switching on the lamps. I trailed him in and out of every room like a pet, ready for the words that would transform also this into a droll anecdote. But my father didn’t meet my gaze. He was silent, unbearably so, and Death was still there, winking at me. My father walked into the kitchen.

  “I don’t think we should talk about this with anyone,” he said to my mother.

  She did not answer.

  He cleared his throat.

  “But what happened?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Some sort of attack,” he said.

  I imagined some men jumping my father, beating him, perhaps with a stick. But there was no blood on his face, no bruises.

  “Why can’t we tell?” I demanded.

  Death was leaning against a kitchen cupboard, arms crossed, eyebrows raised. He observed us with what appeared to be genuine interest.

  “It could have consequences.”

  “What kind of consequences?” I was angry with my father, or with my mother. I wanted to have it out.

  “What would it be like if we started to talk about things like this?” my father said. “We would end up doing nothing but talking about how we felt. No, you mustn’t tell anyone.”

  He walked out. I kicked the doorpost. I couldn’t understand—surely there was a formal procedure with rules and instructions we were supposed to follow? And for sure telling people about what had happened must have some part in the ritual that made this into an irreversible event?

  I looked at Death, but he was of no help at all.

  “So what,” I said, “are you going to live here now?”

  “Guess so,” he said.

  I wondered where she would put him.

  My mother liked things you could pack neatly in a box and tie a pretty ribbon around. She liked things you could fold, things you could roll tightly, things you could position in rows and things you could name. My mother doted on linen closets where the linen was strictly folded, arranged by colour and by size, and scented like fresh air. “The linen closet is a woman’s pride,” she used to tell me in confidence. My mother smiled seeing cleaning cupboards where the bottles stood in rows with their handles outwards—easy to snatch in case of disaster—and where the dusters were crispy and felt new. She liked freezers where packages with frozen food were marked in immaculate handwriting with a smudge-proof pen and arranged by its origin: elk, reindeer, grayling, flatbread, berries, other. She loved pulling a damp cloth over a surface and when lifting it up finding it as white as when she started. She relished in re-using and economising and unendingly came up with solutions for the old: mending the broken, thinking of a new use for the redundant, altering the aged. She liked being able to touch what she had, and she kept her salary divided into envelopes in a kitchen cupboard, each clearly marked with their purpose: food, clothes, garden, savings. She liked me, even though I was what she called a dare-devil, because, after all, I was a girl and she could knit and sew all my clothes. She loved suitcases.

  My mother’s finest recurring dream: she is packing a case, thinks about it for a while, and comes up with improvements. She repacks and ties a strap firmly around it. My mother’s most atrocious returning dream: the moving van is outside our house. She has forgotten to get boxes and there is no option but to cram belongings into garbage bags.

  My mother hated things that didn’t fit, that suddenly left a mould, were too large, moved fast, or that you couldn’t control. She was frightened of epileptic people. She detested drunkards, addicts and crazy ones. She didn’t like impulsiveness, surprises, and changes of plans. My mother did not believe in the trolls. She hated the night.

  “Why?” I’d asked my father once. “Why the night?”

  To me, the night was the best of times. Time to potter around on warm floors with naked feet, perhaps steal a cookie from the pantry.

  “That’s often when things happen,” he’d said.

  “What kind of things?”

  He’d shrugged. “Bad things. People die, people get hurt. That is when human frailty is at its peak.”

  I thought about it. I didn’t feel frail at night, but peaceful. Perhaps things got different as you got older.

  I needn’t have worried about my mother finding a place for Death. No, the problem seemed to be Resurrection. Resurrection, the little bundle, was full of beans. She just couldn’t sit still, and she was quite unruly. She was like a glowing hairball bouncing up and down our hallways and I think, to my mother, Death just seemed more sophisticated, more established. Perhaps Death was less imprecise: at least you knew what you got with him.

  I thought it might have been easier for my mother if my father had not bothered with Resurrection. My mother would have grieved, there would have been practical issues, but then she could have laid the incident tenderly to rest in a coffin, ordered a glorious gravestone, and buried him during a distressing, yet dignified, ceremony.

  That night I began a bed time ritual that I would follow in some shape for all years to come:

  “Good night?” I shouted.

  I started walking slowly down the stairs to my room in the basement (thump, thump, thump).

  “Good night,” my father and my mother called from their bedroom.

  “Goood niiight,” Death echoed lazily from where he was sitting at the kitchen table picking his teeth.

  “I love you?” I shouted (thump, thump, thump).

  “We love you.”

  Me, heart pounding, dread in my voice: “Dad, I didn’t hear you? Dad? Dad, you also need to shout!”

  “I love you.”

  “No, now we need to start over.”

  (ThumpthumpthumpthumpthumpTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP Me walking up the stairs again)

  “Good night?” I shouted, again starting to walk slowly down the stairs (thump, thump, thump).

  “Good night,” they responded.

  “Gooood niiiight,” Death echoed.

  “I love you?” (thump, thump, thump).

  “We love you.”

 
“Loooove yoooo.”

  “See you tomorrow?” (thump)

  “See you tomorrow.”

  And then there was silence. Death gave no guarantees.

  If something immense and unexpected happens, it will be accompanied by change. Not because nature demands it, or even likes it, but, because human beings are human beings. They think they need to deserve everything—even that which is already complete.

  That autumn we were unclear as to what needed to happen. There was no precedent involving Resurrection: no “I remember when Aunt Anita resurrected herself and we all went home to have black pudding and lingonberry jam.” No, we had no idea what to do.

  I observed my father closely.

  “Positive thinking,” he finally imparted. “It’s the answer.”

  “Is it?” I asked.

  “The answer to everything,” he confirmed. “It is actually very simple. It is all about trying harder. Our words are the only real thing, the rest merely circumstances. Nothing is ever a problem, apart from our attitude to those circumstances. And positive words create positive thoughts and the right attitude. Brilliantly simple. All that is ever missing is a: ‘I feel fabulous today!’ …but you need to say it with force,” he added as if he just thought of it.

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  “It was in the American books all this time,” my father said.

  He looked as if he had been up reading all night. His hair stood up even though my mother patted it every time she passed his chair.

  “All this time,” he repeated, shook his head and chuckled, “it was in the American books.”

  On my father’s desk: one almanac, five pens, toothpicks, a pair of nail clippers, two alarm clocks, one notebook, and one telephone. In my father’s bookshelf: the Christian books and the American books.

  The Christian books had been gathered by the whole family over time. The American books had all come in one batch to my father’s mother from a brother that had emigrated to America in the 1950s. “This is what made me,” he had written. “It is better I send you this than money. Spread them far and wide.”

  My father said that his mother had looked in astonishment at the box full with books and then she had started laughing. “We could just eat the American books,” she had said. It became a family joke: “We could just use the American books for firewood.”

  “From now on I ban negative words and mannerisms from our home,” my father declared. “No more local newspapers reminding us of neighbourhood miseries.”

  He hesitated, and went all the way: “No more Bible reminding us of gloom on a global scale either. From now on we read Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill.”

  I felt a prick of fear. God wouldn’t like this. “But we will still be saved?” I asked.

  “We’ll always be saved,” my father said. “There is God. We have no choice.”

  My father expected me to learn by heart Dale Carnegie’s: Six Ways to Make People Like You; Fundamental Techniques in Handling People; Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking; and Nine Ways to Change People Without Giving Offence or Arousing Resentment. On that front it was somewhat easier to please my mother, she only ever asked me to memorize one rule: “Tell your mother everything.”

  Every day my father and I practised a firm and trustworthy handshake. It was like playing a game, we would shake and shake until we both laughed. Sometimes I tried walking away and he hauled me back by the hand that securely held mine. Sometimes I gave him “the dead fish handshake.” My father screamed in horror. “And look at me!” he wailed. “Always look people firmly in the eyes. Now smile! Now tell me things are great.”

  If at some point we didn’t feel great, all they had to do was to go out and “run like crazy for eight minutes.” My father had read that was the best remedy to depression.

  “For-the-one-God-loves,-all-works-out,” I shouted as a departure greeting every morning.

  “Always-be-happy-and-nice,” my father answered. “Success-leads-to-victory.’

  But Death still lingered. Ah, if at least he were polite! But he was insolent and intrusive, a real piece of work. I saw him in the hallway trying on my father’s fur hat—the one my mother regularly threw out, that had learnt to find its way back in on its own. I came to watch the children’s show on TV only to find him on the sofa. He was in the kitchen drinking milk directly from the carton, flipping through her mother’s cookbook.

  I wanted to shout at him to behave, to know his place, but I knew he wasn’t the type who cared about what people thought. Without really deciding to, I started collecting things to remember my parents by: shopping lists in my mother’s immaculate handwriting, to-do-lists scrawled in my father’s, ink napkin doodles, old bus tickets, photos. I hoovered around our house like a sentimental vacuum cleaner—only Death seemed to love those things too. I continuously found him there, his long fingers touching things, lifting them up, and then putting them back again.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Just lookin’,” he said.

  He sighed loudly.

  “What?” I said.

  “I was just thinkin’…” he said.

  “What?”

  “Aw, nothin’…” he said.

  “What!”

  “I was just thinkin’ it’s a shame none of these things will remind you of what they were really like, y’know?”

  I looked at the things on the table in front of us.

  “What about the napkin doodles?” I said triumphantly.

  “Aw, you think?”

  No, of course, the doodles wouldn’t do it. I could see that too.

  Resurrection bounced by making shrieking noises, but we ignored her.

  “Any ideas, smarty pants?” I asked.

  “Recordings,” he said. “D’you have a tape recorder? I’ll help.”

  Over the next few weeks Death and I interviewed my parents and recorded their answers on cassette tapes. Death held the microphone and I asked the questions we had prepared beforehand. It was mostly questions like: “What is your favourite food?”, “What is your favourite colour?” “How old are you?” “When do you think you will die again?”

  The second time my father died was on Jesus’ birthday. Outside the window the morning was blue. In every yard along the village road lofty pine trees twinkled, shrouded in lights and silver tinsel, on every driveway torches burnt and had done so all night. In the windows Christmas stars shimmered.

  My mother was in the living room. There were sounds of wrapping paper being folded and sticky tape drawn.

  “Schh…” she mimicked. “Don’t tell! Don’t look!”

  Secrets. The good kind.

  When my mother went into the kitchen, I went to look under the fir tree. I counted the gifts and then furiously made and wrapped some more: everyone would get the equal number of presents, everyone was loved the same.

  From then on, it was all about waiting.

  Dinner was prepared: pickled herring of all sorts, salads—beetroot and mimosa, a colossal breaded ham, a towering carousel with smoked and cured meats—my favourite—smoked reindeer heart, rice porridge smelling of cinnamon and butter, cheeses as large as my head, bulky baskets with different kinds of bread: thick and thin, soft and hard, white and yellow and brown.

  “Sit down,” my mother would bid and we would sink and sigh into the red velvet chairs.

  We would eat and eat and eat. And when we just could not fit anything more in, not one little piece, we would clear the table together, eagerly now, running in and out of the kitchen. Then my father would state solemnly he needed to go out to buy the newspaper. We would wait until he returned, now dressed in ugly clothes and a grey long false beard. “Are there any good children here?” he would shout, for Santa wasn’t a large jovial man, but a small evil goblin with grey beard who lived in each barn.

  I was too old for this, my father too impatient. But tradition meant so much to my mother.

  My father and I were standing b
y the dining table dressed nicely. My mother was in the kitchen, the walls, the windows, steaming it up,

  “Did I tell you the lesson about leaving nice traces after you, the one with McNamara?” my father asked.

  “Many times,” I giggled as my mother entered carrying the Jansson’s Temptation.

  The Temptation was golden and fat, alternating layers of potatoes, sprats and chopped onions, simmered in cream. It smelt heavenly. My father and I oohed and aahed. My mother’s cheeks were red. She glowed.

  Suddenly my father sat down, heavily, on the floor. His body lurched over and his glasses broke against the table leg. For a moment, I didn’t know whether to run towards him or away.

  “Dad!” I shouted. “Dad!”

  My mother dropped her tray, she started towards my father and fell, her knees hard on the parquet floor, slipping in the hot potatoes and onions. She tried holding him up with her hands but he was too heavy and he was gone.

  We screamed his name.

  Then he came back. He opened his eyes, he drooled, he was confused.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he mumbled.

  He slept the whole Christmas evening.

  I couldn't sleep. I walked upstairs to steal a cookie and found Death and Resurrection together at the dining table. Death had put his arm around her shoulders.

  “How long are you going to keep this up?” he asked.

  She was just making noises, something like “Pfft, pttt, trrrrrr.”

  “Leave her alone,” I said.

  Death raised his brows. “But she is disturbing matters,” he said, “complicating things.”

  “Leave my dad alone, too,” I said to him.