by Gary Fry
“Sweet dreams.”
“No stinky monsters,” she replied, a joke in her voice, even though the comment made me feel uneasy, as if I’d already said too much tonight.
I switched off her lamp and shut her inside the room, knowing that I now potentially had an even trickier situation to negotiate.
6
Ten minutes later, I’d washed, shaved and changed in the bathroom. Afterward, I listened on the landing to make sure Eva was asleep. On the basis of the silence behind her closed door, I assumed she was. Then I grabbed my half glass of wine from the dressing table to join Olivia.
She was reading the kind of dense literary novel she liked and I, preferring nonfiction, had little patience for. With a latest sip (well, gulp) of wine rushing to my head, I turned to kiss her on one cheek.
“Hello, pet,” I said, hoping she was in an affectionate mood. It had been a special day for us as well as our daughter. Our marriage had survived longer than Eva had been living, and we’d celebrate our tenth anniversary later in the year, during a warmer July.
The great thing about winter, however, was being able to snuggle under the sheets, hugging each other to generate heat. Dexter and I had done that in our early lives, before he’d grown too weird for words and chosen to become isolated, standoffish, often worse than rude.
But I was supposed to be focusing on my present circumstances, and not Dex. I should turn my attention to my wife and child and our wonderful life together…all of which I’d once put in jeopardy.
What a fool I’d been, I reflected as Olivia switched off her e-reader and joined me for a cuddle, our arms and legs entwined.
“I think the party went off well, don’t you?” she asked, perhaps feeling proud of her efforts earlier.
“I thought it was wonderful,” I replied, still keen to evade a potentially tricky question about who’d called the house in the afternoon. It wasn’t that I wished to keep this a secret from Olivia, but would rather not have the conversation this evening. Again, as in my mother’s company, I needed to see what my brother wanted, and believed that by the same time tomorrow evening, I’d know for sure. “Eva was very happy, too.”
“Is she asleep now?”
“Like a babe in arms,” I replied, pushing aside recollections of the monsters she’d dreamed about, as well as my flailing attempts to help her handle that. Then I looked again at Olivia. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just tired. I know it’s only nine o’clock, but maybe we should try to sleep early tonight. Tomorrow’s the first day back for all of us after the holidays.”
“I’ll drop Eva off at school in the morning, shall I? Save you doing it this time.”
“That would be great, thanks.”
“You don’t have to thank me. I’m her father and have responsibilities, you know. Besides, you have farther to travel to the office. So let me get our little madam up and out of bed, okay?”
“Okay,” Olivia replied, and gave me a playful squeeze. I felt aroused by the gesture, particularly where it had been administered (near my rebellious groin), but then recalled what she’d just said—about being tired and having to get up early for work—and decided not to push my luck.
Once I’d drained the last of my wine from the glass I’d placed on my bedside table, Olivia switched off the lamp perched on hers. The room was plunged into a startling darkness, alleviated only by a pale light at the window. In a day or two, this might be snow falling from a pitch-black sky, but at present was simply the moon and stars collaborating to stir my thoughts.
I need to be honest now: about six years ago, when our daughter was making the most demands on us (especially on Olivia), I had a brief fling with a mature student at my university. It didn’t last long and had resulted from a moment of weakness on my part, but I’m not making excuses. I’d been in the wrong, and what I’d done—a three-week affair involving at least five acts of sex—was unforgiveable.
After coming to my senses, I’d confessed the lot to my wife, and although the episode had damaged our relationship while easing a child into the world, I felt as if we’d got over most of it. It was just little things that reminded us—such as someone calling the house on a Sunday afternoon, when nobody in our private lives was likely to do that.
As a social science researcher, I’d done what I’d told Eva to do before sleep earlier that evening, applying ruthless logic to the issue of why I’d been weak enough to lapse into temptation. I’d traced the problem back to my childhood, when Dexter and I had experienced the lack of confidence that an abusive father could induce. As a result, I think my brother and I had both become reticent in relation to members of the opposite sex, particularly back in the village of Dwelham, where hardly any girls lived. The only ones we saw were those attending our school on the fringes of Middlesbrough, but few were interested in “country bumpkins” like us.
As far as I was aware, my brother was still a virgin, while I’d remained so until my later teens, when I’d met Olivia at Leeds University and we’d dated for a few years before marrying. Until my affair, my wife was the only woman I’d ever slept with, and I have to say that the sense of release triggered by that first hedonistic encounter in our student digs had led to a preoccupation with sex in my mind, which, for a long time, had struggled to become satiated. I’d wanted to make love all the time, and although Olivia had been eager for similar pleasures, I often suspected that, for me, there’d been more to this than mere carnal satisfaction or—worrying to her, perhaps—love for my future wife (even though I genuinely felt that).
In psychological parlance, I’d possibly sublimated powerful libidinous urges during earlier life into my academic work, achieving lots of GCSEs and A-levels and, later, a good degree and a master’s in Research Methods. I imagine that Dex suffered a similarly suppressed sex drive, leading to private obsessions and dark crafts, some of which I might become reacquainted with during my visit the following day.
But if my desires had eventually been satisfied with Olivia, what must my brother’s be like now? What had he been driven to achieve since I’d last seen him, perhaps as a way of negating the positive drives of sex and love? Hadn’t Freud claimed that the only alternative was death and destruction?
I was becoming fearful, holding Olivia tightly while observing that astral luminescence at our bedroom window. I remembered lying in bed as a teenager back in Dwelham, wondering what time my dad would get in from work (or whatever else he got up to on that long road south to York, where he held down a job as a printing engineer). Would he come into mine or Dexter’s rooms with a fresh-off-the-press rolled-up newspaper and wallop either of us for no better reason than that his day- or nightshift hadn’t gone to plan?
By this stage in life, I’d reached puberty, while my brother was a few years younger, only just in double figures. We’d quit sleeping together half a decade earlier, mainly because we’d both wanted privacy, but for different reasons. As Dex had concentrated on his morbid interests, I’d discovered other furtive pleasures of early masculinity, such as masturbation. If I’m being honest, however, I can’t say I enjoyed this secretive activity—or rather, didn’t relish its aftereffects. For some reason, whenever I’d indulged in the act, I’d suffered nightmares afterward, but by the following morning had forgotten what they’d been about.
It was different later, once I’d met Olivia and we’d had regular sex. I’d always slept peacefully after that, possibly because I had someone I could cling to and didn’t feel as if I was at the mercy of what had felt, during my youth, like an indifferent universe. Or perhaps I was no longer concerned about my dad stepping into the room and asking with his usual perniciousness why I didn’t have a girlfriend and was wasting my “precious seed on the sheets.” That was one of his rare potent phrases; most of the rest involved him calling Dex or me homosexual in a viciously inventive number of ways.
After all these thoughts passed through my mind, Olivia turned over, trapped within a hoop of my left arm, but soon facing the other
way. I also swivelled to that side, eventually holding her from behind, my hands at her comforting breasts. That was when she spoke again.
“By the way, Harry…”
“Hmm?”
I’d responded sleepily, because I was drowsy after the wine. But what followed woke me like the shrillest of alarm clocks.
“…who was that on the phone this afternoon?” asked Olivia, her voice as sharply focused as it had been all day.
Had she lulled me into a false sense of normality, ensuring that the light was out first before making her inquiry? In darkness, it was easier to avoid conflict, all the ambiguities of facial expressions eliminated. Now there were just two voices, and I had a chance to be either honest or continue to be deceptive.
But why wouldn’t I want to take the first course of action? Yes, it was true that Olivia had never got on with Dexter, finding him creepy if not a little intimidating, but that was hardly a reason for me to avoid him, was it? I didn’t expect her to approve of my visit tomorrow, but there was no reason why I should keep it from her.
“It was my brother,” I said with casual neutrality, holding my wife tighter, as if conveying a further message without the use of language: It will be okay. I won’t let him get involved with us unless his motivations seem honorable.
But then, with either relief or surprise, Olivia replied, “Your brother? You haven’t heard from him in years, have you? What on earth did he want?”
I told her.
Olivia thought for several seconds, probably weighing up the implications of this new development in our lives. I imagined her being pleased that it wasn’t anything more furtive, like me getting involved again with another woman, but even so, I’d thought she might be unsettled by the fact that I’d agreed to see my brother at all. The truth was that it had taken Olivia a long time to get used to all the weird dynamics involved in my family, possibly because her own was so straightforward. She’d found my dad most difficult of all; “scary” and “intense” were words she’d used after I’d reluctantly invited him to our wedding.
In a voice as drowsy as my own had been before her question, she said, “Okay. But be careful, Harry. We’re moving on now, actually getting somewhere in life. And we don’t need any further complications…do we?”
“No, Olivia, we don’t,” I replied, ever the dutiful husband, but the sad truth was that I hadn’t been sure what she’d meant or whether she even trusted me now.
It took me a lot longer than her to get to sleep that night, mainly because, on top of other matters, that cosmic light behind our tenuously secure curtains never failed to lose its luster.
7
The following morning our digital alarm clock went off at six, and Olivia got up first as usual, washed and changed in the bathroom, and then went downstairs to make hot drinks. When she returned carrying a mug of coffee for me, I raised myself against the headboard and accepted the beverage, watching as my wife drew the curtains from the window.
“How’s it looking out there, love?” I asked, mindful of my long drive north today.
“Still no snow,” she replied, pulling from our wardrobe a thick jacket, which she was soon wearing over a smart skirt and blouse. She was lovely, my wife—in her mid-thirties, but still with the fresh-faced look of someone at least a decade younger. “I’d better get off, Harry. I imagine we’re going to be busy in the department for a few weeks. I want to get on top of things as soon as possible.”
Olivia was a full-time lecturer, and the way higher education had run more recently meant that this involved a lot of teaching and little protected study-time. I was relatively lucky; my post was half research-based, which allowed me some wriggle room, as indeed today would demonstrate.
I held out my arms, inviting my wife to step across before exiting the room. She offered a thin smile, which might be harried niceness or something less innocent. At once I remembered our brief exchange before sleep the previous evening—“And we don’t need any further complications…do we?” she’d said—and then hugged her with firm reassurance.
“Take care on the roads, pet,” I said, once I believed that my body language had done sufficient preparatory work, holding at bay further comments from her. “Black ice can form underfoot. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
I might have been talking about something else, the vagaries of language leading me down some dark experiential boulevard. But Olivia pulled away seemingly impervious to any double meanings in my comment, and finally made to leave.
“Give Eva a big kiss from me,” she said, passing through the gaping doorway like an insect sucked inside the maw of some giant beast. Her voice trailed behind as she slipped down this monster’s gullet (merely our staircase, of course): “Tell her I hope she has a good day at school and that we can talk all about it when I pick her up.”
Olivia had a flexible working arrangement built into her contract, allowing her to start at eight a.m. and leave at three p.m. This was useful, because I commonly stayed in the office till later, waiting for the mad rush-hour traffic to dissipate before travelling home.
But that wouldn’t be an issue today. With this troubling recollection in mind, I quickly supped my drink, got out of bed, and went to use the bathroom. I was glad Olivia hadn’t again mentioned my imminent trip to see Dexter, but that didn’t make the act any less daunting.
Lapsing into automaton mode, I prepared myself for the day and then descended to the kitchen where I washed up Olivia’s and my mugs, before preparing breakfast for our daughter. When I went back upstairs, I found her sleeping under a heap of bedsheets, facedown on her pillow. She’d always been difficult to rouse on a morning and, after all the excitement of her party yesterday, this occasion looked like being no exception.
“Eva, it’s time to get up.”
She didn’t move—not even twitch.
I shook her by one shoulder.
“Eva. Eva.”
Then—just as I was about to entertain every parent’s nightmare, the one always lurking beneath the joy children bring—she responded, humping her back to elevate the sheets and yet somehow continue snoozing. How was it possible not to awaken while sustaining such a crooked posture? As a perpetual light-sleeper (this was hardly surprising after being permanently on guard as a child), I’d always marvelled at Olivia’s and Eva’s ability to sleep through both thunderbolt and lightning storms.
“Come on, pet. You’re going to be late for school.”
That was when she did waken, eyelids fluttering open like exotic insect-wings in operation. “I…I…I…” the girl said, presumably trying to start a sentence, without enough conscious control to complete it. “Up I…I come.”
Chuckling at this unintentionally amusing comment, I helped her sit up against her pillow to accept the bowl of sugary cereal and glass of juice I’d brought.
“Morning, darling,” I said, and swallowed before adding, “Did you…sleep well?”
“Yes, it was lovely, Daddy.”
“Lovely? That’s good. Now how about some breakfast?”
She hadn’t mentioned any dreams, sweet or otherwise, and I didn’t intend to pursue the issue. I simply encouraged her to eat and drink, before helping her dress in the freshly washed uniform my wife had left in her drawers yesterday. This was an efficiently run household, with everyone familiar with its routines and happy with their roles in fulfilling them.
After returning to the kitchen, I used my phone to access the university email server and sent a message to the head of school, explaining that a personal matter had arisen and that I’d need an extra day away from the office that I’d make up for later. Gordon Reynolds was a good guy and wouldn’t ask for further details, which was just as well, because until I’d made the trip to my brother’s, I wouldn’t know what to say if he did.
Eva descended five minutes later and we were ready to leave. As soon as Eva stepped out of the house ahead of me, she gave a sharp yelp, but when I asked her what the
problem was, she simply said, “It’s freeeezing, Daddy.”
I tugged her hat farther down her head until she couldn’t see, and she giggled while trying blindly to reach my car parked on the double driveway. I was pleased about that, because it allowed me to snatch up a piece of paper my wife had presumably left under one of my windshield wipers—a note perhaps relating to something she hadn’t felt able to mention that morning. At any rate, before unfolding and reading it, I tucked this in one pocket as Eva, freeing herself from darkness, climbed into the backseat as I got in the front.
“Strap yourself in good and tight,” I instructed, and after I was assured that the girl had obeyed, I quickly drove the few miles to her school. Once I’d parked in the curbside, Eva got out at the gates, saw some friends who’d attended yesterday’s party, and then kissed me on the lips through my rolled-down window. I smiled. “Have a good day, darling.”
“You too, Daddy.”
And then she was gone, one child among many, each of them vital to someone like me.
Have a nice day, I thought, while removing the piece of paper Olivia had left for me earlier. Would that be possible? I wondered, but then read the note from my wife.
DON’T LET US DOWN AGAIN, it said in her usual neat handwriting.
8
I held a theory I’d never been confident enough to explore as a researcher, and it went like this: violent parents are ineffective disciplinarians because they give all they’ve got from the start. The child, familiar from an early age with how bad punishment can become, has no reason to fear more, because, short of murder perhaps (which even my dad wasn’t capable of), there are no further threats to make.
This could be contrasted with more restrained forms of parenting, where a raised eyebrow or a stern tone could hint at unknown measures a child wouldn’t ever wish to invoke. Many of these punitive acts might be illusory, but the fact was that, unlike offspring held in check by unspoken mechanisms, the child of a violent parent might behave as badly as he or she pleases, knowing that the cost of committing a major transgression was similar to a minor one, and so why not do their worst?