The Family Clause

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  There are the towel hooks without his towel. There’s the toothbrush holder without his toothbrush. There’s the shower curtain with the purple parrot on it, the one she only put up because the bathroom would be as steamy as a rainforest every time he took a shower, and she would have to change the roll of toilet paper. How could she be angry about a few puddles? There’s the bathroom cabinet in which he had the bottom shelf, because that was how high he could reach without having to climb up onto the white stool. He kept his deodorant and the disposable razors that he didn’t yet need on that shelf, along with the collection of moisturising creams she brought home from hotels whenever she went away with work. The bottom shelf in the bathroom cabinet is now empty, and, when the man who thinks he is her boyfriend put his clippers there without asking, she responded by throwing them in the bin.

  When she comes out of the bathroom, the man who isn’t her boyfriend is playing with his phone on the sofa. Bit too much to drink? he says with a smirk. Not at all, she says. I was on fizzy water all evening. Didn’t feel like wine. He puts down his phone. What? she says. Why do you look so worried?

  * * *

  A son who is a father checks the time. Almost midnight. His sister hasn’t called. His girlfriend sent a message an hour ago. He replied that the plane was delayed and he was on his way home. He got ready to leave. But he didn’t leave. He doesn’t know why. He tries calling his father’s number abroad. Then the Swedish number. Both phones are switched off, or out of juice, or confiscated. He listens for the key in the lock. He thinks about when they stopped going to pick up their father from the bus station. Was it three years ago? Five? He can’t quite remember, but he suspects it was roughly around the same time he became a father and the father a grandfather. Something happened then, though the son is still responsible for the practicalities. He keeps an eye on his father’s bank account and post. He pays the bills, does his father’s tax return, cancels follow-up appointments and opens letters from the Social Insurance Agency. He is also responsible for giving the father somewhere to stay whenever he comes to visit. Regardless of whether he’s here for ten days or four weeks. That’s how it has always been. That’s how it will always be.

  The son takes his mug into the kitchen. When he switches on the light, he hears the scuttling of cockroaches vanishing behind the oven. From the corner of one eye, he sees the shadow of two disappearing beneath the freezer. On the sink unit, a glossy red cockroach is sitting perfectly still, trying to be invisible, its antennae swaying in the air. The son leaves the mug on the hob and slowly reaches for a piece of kitchen roll. He wets the paper, kills the cockroach, wipes up after it and then throws the paper straight into the toilet, to avoid spreading any more eggs. The sticky blue paper traps from Anticimex have been in place for several weeks now. The man with the poison was here last Thursday, spraying new lines of toothpaste-like death cream between the oven and the counter, between the fridge and the freezer. And yet they still keep coming. There are two kinds, one slightly blacker, the other slightly redder, but when they eat poison and die, they do it the same way. On their backs with their legs folded up. Their long antennae wave back and forth like blades of grass. They look so harmonious as they lie dead, ready to be crushed by a damp piece of kitchen roll. He always uses one sheet per cockroach. The roll lasts longer that way. If he accidentally takes two pieces, he has to kill two cockroaches; that makes it fairer for everyone and means he doesn’t have to waste money buying kitchen roll all the time. That wasn’t his voice, it was his father’s. One piece at a time, he always used to shout through the door when you were on the toilet. Two pieces if you’re wetting them. I’m wetting them, the son said. Then you can have two pieces, said the father. The son took two squares, dampened them and wiped. Now another piece to check you’re clean, the father instructed. Just use the whole roll, the mother shouted from the kitchen. Don’t listen to her, said the father. The son did as he was told. All his bloody life, he has done as he has been told. Time to change that, he thinks, grabbing a pen. He doesn’t write that this will be the last time his father stays here. He doesn’t write that he wants to break the family clause – the father clause. Instead, he writes: Welcome, Dad. Hope you had a good flight. Here’s your post. Let me know you arrived safely when you can, so I don’t have to worry that something happened.

  The son turns out the lights and steps into the stairwell. He locks the inner door, the outer door and the security lock. Then, just to be on the safe side, he checks that he has locked the security lock. He leaves the building and starts making his way home. Turns back to double-check that he didn’t forget to lock the security lock when he was checking that he had locked the security lock. He passes the square where the pub is being renovated. He passes the food store on the corner, run by the kind but confused old man who seemed to live in the shop but now appears to have shut up for good. He passes the chained-up signs for Hälsan Thai Massage and K & N Hair, the green throne-like urinal and the notice board covered in photocopied A4 sheets advertising dog walking (‘Devoted Dog Lover Since 1957!’), feminist stand-up, bike repairs and Zumba classes. He passes the metro station, the espresso bar that has shut down, the dry-cleaner’s that has shut down. He is about to nod to the spot where the beggar usually sits, but it’s empty, nothing but a couple of blankets, an empty bowl and a piece of cardboard with a picture of the beggar’s children on it. The son turns left onto the footpath. He takes the gravel track that has recently been tarmacked, past the big Astroturf football pitch, the red changing room and the clump of trees where, for several days now, a fallen tree has been waiting for someone to remove it. He passes the villas, the roundabout, the building site. Did you see him? his sleepy girlfriend mumbles as he crawls into bed beside her. Not today, he whispers.

  II. THURSDAY

  A grandfather who is a forgotten father is waiting for an airport bus that never comes. He is sick. He’s dying. He is coughing up his lungs. He is almost blind and probably won’t make it through the night. It’s all his children’s fault. Damn this stupid country with its freezing autumn weather, its scandalous taxi fares and its boring TV channels to hell. He can still remember the listings from when he first moved here. The weather first, then a children’s programme – two different coloured socks with sequins for eyes and hands for skeletons, talking about how vital class struggle was for a happy society. Then more weather. Then a special broadcast in which the state shared tips on how to treat burns in children (get the child into the shower, fully dressed, and douse them with cool, not cold, water for twenty minutes), followed by a feature about how important ice spikes are if you go long-distance skating, then the news, then the weather, then an evening film that was always, 100 per cent of the time, a documentary about Latin American poets or Ukrainian beekeepers. Still, whenever he couldn’t sleep, he stayed up at night with the TV for company. And though he felt lonely he wasn’t alone, because he had her. She was the reason he had come here. She had made him leave everything behind. It wasn’t a free choice. Love is the opposite of free choice. Love is 100 per cent undemocratic, 99 per cent of the votes go to him with the moustache, him in the uniform, him with the military background whose portrait is in every tobacconist, on every street, in every hairdresser’s and in every café, until the revolution is over and all the old portraits are torn down, stamped on, burned and replaced by the image of another man with a moustache and a military background, who says that the old man with the moustache and the military background wasn’t a real leader, he was corrupt and didn’t take care of the country the way it deserved. Love is a dictatorship, the father thinks, and dictatorships are good, because he was at his happiest when he had the least freedom, when all he knew was that he would go under if he couldn’t be by her side. Her. His wife. His ex-wife. And if there is one thing he has learned from the failed revolution, it’s that there are benefits to having a strongman in the middle. People’s votes have no intrinsic value. People are idiots. People are li
ke ants. They don’t know what’s good for them. They need to be controlled so that they don’t build anthills everywhere, swarming into unfamiliar summerhouses. He can’t remember who said that. Maybe it was something he came up with himself. It’s perfectly possible, since he is 100 per cent smarter than 100 per cent of the world’s population. He knows things ordinary people don’t dare know. He knows that the Chinese will soon take over the world. He knows that nine out of ten people with influence over the world’s media are Jews. He knows that the CIA was behind the attack on the World Trade Center. He knows that NASA faked the moon landings, that the FBI killed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, JFK, John Lennon and J. R. Ewing. He knows that the banks want people to pay by card because it enables them to keep an eye on us. They know exactly where we are and have complete knowledge about every last person, which means they can start to control us from above like ants. But people aren’t ants. People are smarter than ants, bigger than ants; we have intelligence, language, we have two legs rather than six, we have hands rather than antennae, we walk upright rather than with our bellies to the ground, and those are just a few of the many reasons why we humans will never accept being controlled by a dictator.

  The grandfather had tried to explain all this to the woman lucky enough to be sitting beside him on the plane. She was impressed by his knowledge, her poor brain just struggled to take it all in. After the meal, she started to yawn and said that she needed to sleep. You sleep, said the grandfather, who had drunk two small bottles of wine and hidden the third in his hand luggage. Sleep well. The truth is best administered in small doses. The woman put on her headphones and immediately dozed off.

  Now he is standing on the pavement, the wind blowing at an angle. A car approaches. Could it be? Surely not? No, it isn’t his children. His son is at home listening to music that isn’t music. His daughter is out drinking. They only care about themselves. The grandfather recognises the woman in the car. His neighbour from the plane. Their eyes meet. She says something to the man behind the wheel. She says: Stop the car, darling! There’s that interesting man I had the privilege of chatting to on the plane, the one with such bold thoughts. Look at him. He looks tired. Let’s drive him all the way home so that he doesn’t have to wait here in the wind for the airport bus. The grandfather smiles and raises a hand to the car’s headlights. The woman looks away. The man behind the wheel leans forward and meets his eye before speeding off towards the motorway.

  Somehow, the father who is a grandfather manages to catch a bus to Cityterminalen. With the last of his strength, he carries his luggage down to the red metro line. It’s almost one thirty in the morning when he finally leaves the train at the right station and is helped up the stairs by a kind bearded man with orange headphones and suspiciously large pupils.

  The grandfather walks through the trees, past the grocer’s shop, past the restaurant. He is standing outside the door to his son’s office. He doesn’t have the energy to carry his bags up the stairs. He gives up. Collapses. He gets back to his feet and summons the last of his strength. He can do this. He can just about do this. He opens the door and wrestles the bags up to the first floor. Then he falls asleep on the sofa, still fully dressed. He doesn’t have time to plug in his phone. He doesn’t have time to brush his teeth. All he has time to do is turn on TV4, loud enough for him to be able to sleep.

  * * *

  A son who is on paternity leave wakes at ten to four on a bad day and four thirty on a good one. The one-year-old is usually the first to wake up. He can sometimes be kept calm by feeding a picture book or soft toy into his cot, but he generally loses patience after fifteen minutes and wants to get up. He stands and points at the door. He shouts mooo. He squeezes out a morning poo into an overnight nappy threatening to leak at any moment. When the father finally turns on the light, the one-year-old starts laughing and tries to pull himself out of his cot. The four-year-old wakes around five, emerging from her room with squinting eyes and tangled hair. She has her baby bottle with her, the one she still uses, though the father occasionally tries to suggest that she drink from a glass instead, or a plastic mug, or a supercool sports bottle. But the daughter refuses. She wants her baby bottle. Let her have it, says the mother. It’s her last baby thing. And so the father lets her keep the bottle, though he really wants her to stop using it. He tells her that if you’re four and walk around with a baby bottle, it’s very possible that your friends at playschool will see it and tease you. They might shout baby girl, or bottle loser or something like that, and that’s why I think you should stop using it. The daughter just looks at him and shrugs. I don’t care about them, she says, pushing the bottle into the waistband of her pyjamas like a pistol. You hear that? the mother says as she emerges from the shower with damp hair and pours herself a coffee. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, says the father. In this particular respect, the apple has fallen pretty bloody far from the daddy tree, his girlfriend says. She laughs and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek. I’ll be home at five, she says, sipping her coffee as she stands by the counter. You’ve never in the history of the world been home by five, he thinks, though he says nothing. Let me know if I need to pick anything up, she says. Don’t worry, he says. I’ll manage.

  She walks towards the metro station. She has her new bag, her new haircut, her coat, her gloves; she looks so professional as she heads out into the world. He stays behind in the chaos of the kitchen. He is wearing a dressing gown with the one-year-old’s snot on one shoulder, handprints from the four-year-old’s porridge-covered palms on the pocket. The one-year-old is running around with his walker, roaring with frustration every time he gets caught on a rug or in a corner. The four-year-old wants company in the bathroom when she goes for a poo, but he also shouldn’t look at her while she is pooing; he has to stand close, but with his back to her, because she is afraid of being alone on the toilet. The one-year-old climbs onto the sofa and tries to knock down a picture frame. The four-year-old wants to read a story, but the story needs to be scary enough that the one-year-old will be too scared to listen. The one-year-old does another poo, and the four-year-old wants to look at it. The one-year-old refuses to lie still on the changing table, the father asks the four-year-old to fetch a toy for the one-year-old, the four-year-old comes back with a troll pencil topper with bright purple hair. The father thanks the four-year-old, the one-year-old briefly eyes up the troll and then drops it, like a stink bomb, straight to the floor by the changing table, only the floor turns out not to be floor but an open toilet, the troll falls into the toilet, its hair becoming one long rope, the troll looks dead, floating on its stomach, the four-year-old laughs hysterically and then starts sobbing, the father uses wet wipes to clean the greenish-yellow liquid poo from his hands, from the white plastic mat, from the one-year-old’s buttocks, and then puts on a new nappy and tries to distract the one-year-old and comfort the four-year-old as he fetches a plastic bag which he pulls onto his right hand in order to reach into the toilet and fish out the troll. The one-year-old hauls himself up using the chest of drawers in the hallway and roars with satisfaction when he doesn’t fall. The four-year-old wants to help him walk but manages instead to knock him down. The one-year-old starts crying. The four-year-old laughs. The one-year-old bites the four-year-old’s shin. The four-year-old starts crying. The one-year-old disappears. They find him beneath the living-room table with two plastic beads in his mouth. The father carries the one-year-old into the four-year-old’s room. Everyone needs to get dressed. The four-year-old wants to wear shorts and a football shirt. The father explains that it’s winter, or late autumn at least. She wants to wear shorts beneath her normal trousers. The father gives in. The one-year-old has disappeared. They find him in the bedroom, next to the bedside table with the sharp metal corners; he has just managed to pull off the white plastic protector that they put there precisely because the corners are so sharp. The four-year-old wants to play with Duplo, but only if the father joins in and only if t
he one-year-old isn’t allowed. They play with Duplo. All but the one-year-old, who is sitting away from them with that pleased look he has whenever there is something in his mouth. The father coaxes one of the mother’s earplugs out of the one-year-old’s mouth. The one-year-old starts to scream. The four-year-old builds a garage. The one-year-old destroys the garage. The four-year-old throws a ball at the one-year-old. The one-year-old thinks this is a game and fetches the ball to give back to the four-year-old. The four-year-old hides the ball. The one-year-old finds a Lego wheel and pushes it into his mouth. The father fishes the wheel out of the one-year-old’s mouth with the same hand which, just ten minutes earlier, was down the toilet. The four-year-old says she is bored with the Duplo. The one-year-old rubs his eyes. The father checks the time and realises that the four-year-old doesn’t have to be at playschool for another hour and a half. He wishes time would move faster, he wishes the playschool had a place for the one-year-old. Sometimes, when they sit down to eat pre-breakfast, the breakfast they eat as a starter to the breakfast the four-year-old gets at playschool, the father tries to talk about grown-up things with the four-year-old. He takes out the paper and shows her pictures of the president of the Philippines. He explains what riot means. He says that a humanitarian intervention is what is needed when people are really short of food. The four-year-old nods and seems to understand. Then she says that everyone who wears a rope around their neck is a president. And the father agrees, very often when you see someone in the paper wearing a tie, they are a president, or at the very least a politician, he says. After pre-breakfast, they change the clothes that are now dirty. They play space explorers or tiger family or cops and robbers or fire thrower and fireman or rhinoceroses who stamp one foot to signal that they’re angry and about to charge. Then he changes the one-year-old’s nappy one last time before they have to leave for playschool. The four-year-old dresses herself and everything is a competition, the first to put on their fleece wins. I win, the four-year-old shouts. First to put on their overalls. I win again, the four-year-old shouts. First to press the button for the lift. I’m the very fastest on earth, the four-year-old says and the father nods, the father agrees, the four-year-old really is exceptionally quick, incredibly smart, fantastically good at everything it’s possible to be good at. And yet . . . Somewhere, deep inside himself, the father hears a whisper that says: like hell you are. You’re nowhere near best at everything. I could, for example, get dressed incredibly quickly if I wanted to. I could beat you so easily if I really put my back into it. I’m much better at mental arithmetic than you, because I don’t need to use my fingers to add three and three. And you know all those letters that people are always so impressed you know? I know them, too. All of them. Much better than you.