Behind

by Nicole Trope

  I understand, after many years of therapy, why I am like I am. I just don’t seem to be able to control it. Or maybe I don’t want to. So, I wonder what happened to my father. Who hurt him? Who turned him into the man he is?

  The nearest I can get to an explanation is the one memory of having lunch with his parents, my grandparents. We saw them very rarely and then not at all but I do remember a Christmas lunch at our house when I was nine and my sister was three.

  The day before had been reasonably frantic as my mother cleaned and cleaned and my father pointed out all the things she had failed to clean to his standards. On Christmas day we were given our presents and then we were locked in our rooms until our grandparents arrived. My father was one of three boys in his family but his two brothers were living overseas by then. Once my grandparents turned up, we were allowed to come down and greet them. I think they gave us money but we had no real idea of what to do with that. I remember my mother being nervous and smiling a lot. She kept moving this arrangement of flowers on the table a little to the left and then a little to the right, as though getting it absolutely dead centre was the most important thing she had to accomplish that day. She was wearing a sundress made of fabric printed with red roses. The dress had diagonal pockets on the side and when she wasn’t moving the flowers, she kept her hands in her pockets so no one could see they were shaking. But I saw. I had to suppress an urge to grab one of her hands and hold it tight. I was too old to hold my mother’s hand, according to my father.

  I remember my grandmother didn’t say much at all. She was a small woman with rounded shoulders as though she was carrying some great weight no one could see. I remember she touched my head when I said hello. No kiss, no hug, just patted my head and I remember how sad she looked, as though she were disappointed in my existence. I understood why she would look at me that way. I had been disappointing my father for years by then.

  If my mother had stayed with my father, if they had grown old together, I imagine that this is how my mother would look today, bowed and deeply sad.

  My grandfather was big, as big as my father, and loud. He talked and talked about all their relatives and how well everyone was doing. My father nodded and nodded, barely saying a word.

  When we sat down at the dining room table, my mother brought out the turkey she’d been slaving over all morning along with roast potatoes, carrots and all the other stuff she usually made for Christmas. The air conditioner in the dining room was humming away because outside it was baking hot. I was dressed in long, stiff pants and a long-sleeved, starched shirt and I was itchy and sweaty and all I wanted was to be outside but I knew better than to say anything. I could feel something in the air. I didn’t understand what it was but my stomach was churning, and even though the food looked really good, I didn’t want to eat. I had been salivating at the smells coming out of the kitchen all morning as my mother chopped and stirred and fried enough food for twenty people instead of just six, but even as I looked at the honey-glazed carrots and the crispy brown potatoes, I knew it would be difficult to swallow. I didn’t know how to explain it then but now I know that I was bursting with anxiety, too full of worry and fear and foreboding to eat a bite. But I knew I would force the food down. Not eating was an unacceptable option in my father’s mind.

  When my father stood up to carve the turkey, I held my breath. My grandfather watched him pick up the knife and the big carving fork and he said, ‘No doubt this is going to be something to watch. How badly do you think you can screw this up, Leonard? Carving a turkey is a man’s job.’ And then he laughed, like he’d told the best joke. But no one else laughed. It was a long time ago but I remember exactly what he said because of the effect it had on my father. His hands started shaking and his shoulders hunched and I watched a bead of sweat make its way down the side of his face. My mother looked down at her lap and I could see that she was twisting her linen napkin around and around in her hands. We sat like that for about five minutes until my father finally spoke. ‘Maybe you should do it, Dad.’ He said it softly, deferentially, and his father stood up and said, ‘That’s right, boy, maybe I should.’

  I was only nine but I could see from the way my dad sank into his chair like a whipped dog that he was scared of his father, of not carving a turkey right in front of him. It was the first and only small glimpse I had into where my father had come from.

  When we all had our food in front of us, it was absolutely silent. I looked down at my full plate, nausea rising in my throat.

  ‘You’d better eat every mouthful,’ my father said, his voice tight with the promise of punishment.

  I looked over at my sister and I could see she was struggling to eat as well, and I know that I reached for her hand under the table and squeezed it just a little. I don’t know why I did that but I know that it made her smile and then she seemed to find swallowing easier. I did too.

  I think I tried once, about five years ago, to discuss my father’s family with him but he shut me down. ‘Don’t drag me into the sad little psychological exploration of your life,’ was what he said. ‘I turned out just fine.’

  ‘You nearly killed him, the man you beat up,’ says Dr Sharma, dragging me back into the therapy session I have no interest in participating in. Prison might just be easier. At least there I won’t have to talk about my feelings. ‘He will have many more months in hospital, and rehabilitation. Do you think you can explain your reasoning behind the assault? What led you to hurt him?’

  I try to think about what my reasoning might have been. I really try. But nothing comes to mind. Nothing ever comes to mind when I think about the things I do.

  ‘Do you know what it means when people say that they saw red?’

  ‘I do,’ she says. She’s wearing a pantsuit today. It’s too tight. I think Dr Sharma has been eating the cafeteria food here. It’s all about starch. My father would never have tolerated my mother gaining weight. I remember her being small and delicate but I also remember her once reaching for a second helping of apple tart and my father simply laying his hand over hers and shaking his head. He liked her small and delicate.

  ‘Is that what happened to you?’ she asks. ‘Did you just see red?’

  I nod my head. It’s the truth, in a way. I don’t feel like I have the energy to explain about the black sludge – ‘seeing red’ is a close enough analogy.

  ‘He pushed in front of me at the bar. I told him I was there first and he laughed at me.’ He was not a big man. I didn’t understand how he could push in front of me and then laugh at me when I called him on it. I didn’t understand how he didn’t lift his little rat face up to look at me and just say, ‘Sorry.’ Did he not see how big I was? Was he completely confident of getting away with his behaviour? That’s what irritated me more than anything else. His lack of fear. He thought I would just smile and wave away what he’d done. You should be scared of someone bigger and stronger than you are. He was an idiot, and as my father always said, ‘Sometimes someone just needs a good smack.’

  ‘Do you remember that it took three men, three big men, to pull you off of him?’

  I shrug my shoulders again. ‘The first thing I remember is being in the back of the police van.’

  I remember the other men pulling me off him. I remember the sounds of people, mostly women in the bar, screaming and shouting. I remember the smell of alcohol from the drinks that spilled as glasses hit the floor and shattered after I pushed him into tables. I remember someone shouting, ‘Call the police.’ I remember the police storming in as the men who had pulled me off him held me and I kicked and screamed. I remember everything but an insanity defence starts with no memory of what you did, and I know how to do that.

  ‘Okay, so you understand it’s my job to help you remember what you did and accept responsibility for it. I think we can get to the bottom of your behaviour if we look back into your past, but I’m not telling you anything new here. I think you actually want to talk to me. I know from reading your file that yo
ur father is a brutal man, and I know that you’re aware that this is where a lot of your rage comes from.’

  ‘Well, there you go, Dr Sharma. You’ve solved the case. My dad is mean and I’m angry. Stick me in a cell and be done with me.’ The words come out with more feeling than I would like. I hate becoming emotional; I try to keep everything in check. Except my rage, of course. That serves a purpose. After they threw me in a cell I screamed and kicked for a while but then I went straight to sleep. I felt released, calm, peaceful. I always feel like that afterwards, and even though I have never asked my father if he feels the same way, I know it’s the truth. I watched him once, after he had yanked my mother’s head back and punched her in the stomach because the dishwasher was incorrectly stacked. I saw how he relaxed. He left her and went into the living room to watch television and I watched him slouch into the couch, peaceful and happy. My rage comes from my father and his rage came from his father, I assume. And on it goes. It’s a good thing I haven’t had a son who would inflict his own rage on the world.

  I once dated a girl whose father was abusive, but only when he drank. Otherwise he was a nice, average guy. ‘It changes who he is,’ she told me. ‘When he’s sober, he’s the best husband and father, but after four beers he becomes a different person.’

  I was jealous of that, of her. I thought she was lucky to be able to have a concrete reason for why her father did what he did. Her father was only a monster sometimes, only some of the time.

  My father drank in moderation. He never talked about an abusive childhood. My mother was practically a Stepford wife and yet he needed to hurt us, like an addict craves a drug. My whole childhood I assumed that I was an awful person. I was awful and my mother was worse and I knew that my sister was getting to the age when all her terrible faults would mean she stepped into my father’s firing line. I understood he was the one hurting me. But I blamed myself. I hated myself and I was angry at myself for years until I turned that around. Then I hated everyone else.

  ‘He shouldn’t have pushed in front of me,’ I say to Dr Sharma and I register the frustration that flits across her face. I don’t care. She needs to work for her own insights. I am not providing her with them.

  ‘Please, I’m trying to help you,’ she says and I see something in her dark eyes, something more than just a doctor with a patient. I groan. She wants to save me. She must be somewhere in her forties, which means she’s been doing this for a long time. I have no idea how she still has the enthusiasm she seems to have for her job. She is looking at me like my mother used to look at me on the very few occasions we found ourselves simply talking to each other after our relationship became this strange, strained ball of energy sitting between us. It’s a look that says, ‘I’m here for you and I’m listening.’ It’s a look that I used to trust until it was so thoroughly betrayed by my mother. It’s a look I find difficult to resist and so I decide to give Dr Sharma the highlights.

  ‘The first time he hit me, I was seven years old.’

  17

  Rachel

  She can feel herself beginning to sweat in the heated room. How had she imagined that Ben wouldn’t notice the money being taken from the account? She should have prepared her lie better, should have at least stopped at a shopping centre on her way home from school with Beth and picked her up some new things. ‘Stupid, stupid,’ she mutters to herself. But it feels like she has no choice. Having the money allows her to breathe, to function. It’s illogical but she needs it to be there.

  She is clutching her mother’s hand, holding it tight, probably too tight. She lets go and wipes her clammy hand on her jeans.

  ‘I wish you’d wake up, Mum,’ she whispers, conscious of Sam and the other nurses just outside the door. ‘I wish you’d wake up so I could talk to you about this. I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know why I’ve got the money stashed away. It’s not enough for anything.’

  She knows that taking the money, hiding it, was an impulse, just an impulse because it was what Veronica did every time they found somewhere new to live.

  ‘Our sprinting money,’ was what Veronica called it because if he found them, they wouldn’t just have to run, they would have to sprint away. They would have to move faster than they had ever moved.

  But he never found them. If he got close, if someone seemed to be asking more questions than usual, they just moved.

  ‘But how would he find us?’ she knows she asked her mother when she was around thirteen.

  ‘Private investigators. He worked with a lot of them. He used to tell me all the time that he could find anyone anywhere in the world.’

  ‘So, we’re not safe,’ said Rachel.

  ‘We’re safe unless we tell,’ her mother said, ‘but if someone starts asking questions, I know it means that they are being asked the questions and it’s time to go.’

  And so, they had gone. They had run from one place to another to another until Rachel got to sixteen and refused to run anymore.

  But now she knows she should have kept running.

  She takes the brush off the bedside table, runs it through her mother’s hair. Veronica has only a thin covering of hair after all her rounds of chemo but she uses the soft brush to neaten the strands. She feels peaceful and calm when she does this, just like she feels when she combs Beth’s hair. ‘If I tell Ben, I don’t know what will happen. He doesn’t know any of it, Mum, you know that. He thinks my father died from cancer when I was seven. I wish we had talked about what to do if he came to find us, to find me. I wish we’d talked about a lot of things, Mum. What am I going to do when you’re not here to talk to? I think I need to tell. I know I promised not to but I need to tell the truth and I don’t know what will happen when I do.’

  She puts the brush down, lays her head on the bed and places her hand on her mother’s chest, feeling the shallow rise and fall of her breathing. Her mother will be gone soon and, along with her, the secrets she has been keeping. What would he look like now? She was born when both her parents were thirty years old. That would make him sixty-five now, the same age her mother is. Would he still be fearsomely big? She stopped having nightmares about him years ago, but when she did, he was always the size of a giant, stalking her through a shiny, sparkling landscape of white stones and white trees and white mountains. In her nightmares she ran away from him, ran and ran, her feet pounding beneath her, her chest heaving, but she could never get far enough away from him, not until she panicked herself awake.

  She stands up and looks out at the garden, where the grey clouds dull the colours of the winter plants. She shivers despite the heated room.

  It would be comforting to think that age had mellowed her father but the dolls indicate that’s not the case.

  The dolls are a way for him to torment her. They are a threat, a way to unbalance her, a power play. The dolls mean he is still the same man. He knows how much they meant to her. He must know how broken-hearted she was to leave them behind. He wants her to know that he still has them, still has a part of who she was and therefore still has some control over her. It was always about control. It was the only thing he really seemed to take pleasure in. What might a man like that do to her, to Beth, to Ben?

  If she tells, she will put her husband and child in danger. His anger at her and her mother for leaving would be extreme now. It’s had twenty-eight years to fester. And he can only direct that anger at her now. It would have been directed at someone else all these years. The guilt, the remorse that is a stone inside her, makes itself felt.

  She closes her eyes. She is so incredibly tired all the time. ‘It’s grief and worry,’ Sam has told her. An hour ago, he came into the room to check on Veronica, and Rachel had jerked awake as he moved near her chair. ‘Oh, I don’t know what happened,’ she said, embarrassed to be sleeping in the middle of the afternoon.

  ‘Don’t apologise. I can see how tired you are. Sleep is a natural defence for the body.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be asleep – what if she needs m
e?’

  ‘I’m here, Rachel, and I can tell you that your exhaustion is natural. You know what’s coming so you’re already mourning her but you’re also afraid of what’s coming. It’s normal, trust me. Try to take more breaks, to give yourself a little time off every now and again. Go outside and take a walk. It’s cold but it’s refreshing. It will help, I promise.’

  She should take a walk outside but she can’t seem to bring herself to leave.

  Rachel looks around her mother’s room with its pale blue walls and linoleum floor and thinks back to how excited she and her mother had been when they had signed the lease to rent their flat for two whole years when she was sixteen. It wasn’t a nice building or in a particularly nice part of town but it was what they could afford.

  It was the first time they had ever actively decorated their home. In all the years they had been moving around, Veronica chose to rent furnished flats, and so they lived with someone else’s bed and sofa and, in one case, even their cutlery and crockery. Rachel had hated it. It felt like they were living in someone else’s home, using someone else’s stuff, and she couldn’t help worrying that, at any moment, the owner of the apartment would return and tell them to leave.

  When they finally moved into the flat in Sydney, Veronica began bringing home things from second-hand stores. Lamps with quirky-coloured shades and prints filled with colours. She bought an old timber dining table and reupholstered six chairs in a deep maroon velvet. The chairs were all different styles and shapes, nothing matched. The flat was forever messy because Veronica and Rachel always had two or three novels on the go, and piles of books littered the space.