Behind

by Nicole Trope

  ‘Yay, another doll, thank you, Daddy!’ she shouts.

  Rachel walks into the kitchen. ‘What are you shouting about?’

  ‘Daddy got me another doll. Look, Mum, she’s a bride and she’s got bright yellow hair.’

  ‘Where did you get that thing?’ Rachel yells. Her raised voice is so unexpected that Beth bursts into tears.

  ‘Rachel, why are you shouting? I found it in the garage. I thought you got it for her.’

  ‘I didn’t, I didn’t… Where did it… Oh… I’m sorry. Please, Beth, stop crying. I’m sorry I scared you.’ She goes over to her daughter and holds her tight. Beth buries her head in her mother’s stomach and howls for only a minute, soon losing interest in crying. Ben supposes they are all a little on edge. There is an atmosphere in the house, something thick, lurking, as though the house has anticipated how their lives would fall apart. Ben suddenly hates the architect-designed, modern, three-bedroom, double-storey family home that had looked so perfect in the brochures.

  His whole life seems to have disintegrated because of this house.

  Rachel looks like she wants to throw up. How can a little doll have bothered her so much? But he realises that it isn’t the doll. It is everything else. They are both dealing with too much right now. He thinks about the torn photo in his briefcase but he doesn’t have the energy right now to ask her about it. She already seems angry with Beth and he doesn’t want her to be even angrier if their daughter tore the picture. He will ask Beth about it later and explain to his daughter why it is wrong to damage something that doesn’t belong to her.

  ‘Maybe one of the builders in the next street dropped it or left it or…?’ Ben tries but he has no idea how the doll could have gotten into their garage. ‘Beth, did you take the doll from Charlotte?’ he asks. ‘You said Charlotte has troll dolls.’

  Beth shakes her head violently. ‘No, no, I didn’t.’ She sniffs dramatically. ‘Can I still have it?’

  ‘Sure,’ Ben says with a shrug of his shoulders.

  ‘Maybe someone brought one to school and dropped it into Beth’s bag or something,’ says Rachel.

  She sounds like she’s explaining it to herself. Ben doesn’t answer her. Instead he heads for the liquor cabinet where there is a bottle of whisky that Veronica bought him for his last birthday.

  Rachel follows him out of the kitchen, watching him pour himself a large slug. ‘What’s happened?’ she asks. If he has a drink after work, it’s always a beer. He rarely drinks whisky at all.

  ‘I lost my job,’ he replies quietly before downing most of the whisky in one gulp, and the silly little doll is forgotten.

  Rachel’s skin turns pale and she puts her hand over her mouth. She sinks down onto the sofa, wraps her arms around herself. ‘What are we going to do?’

  Ben sighs. He wishes he could have some time, just a night to work through this. He doesn’t want to spend the evening reassuring Rachel that everything will be fine because right now he’s not sure it will be. He looks at his wife, hugging herself, and he can imagine what she’s thinking, can see the turmoil there. She has enough to deal with right now.

  ‘It will be fine,’ he says as he pours himself another slug of whisky, ‘I promise we’ll be fine.’

  19

  Little Bird

  It’s the first day of the summer school holidays and the sun is shining, shining. Mummy has set up my paddling pool from when I was little in the backyard. I’m too big for a paddling pool but we don’t have a real pool for me to swim in and I like to sit in the cool water. Mummy says she wishes we did have a pool and I wish we had one too. Mummy put a big umbrella over me and I am wearing an old pair of her sunglasses and her big hat and I am a lady at the beach, sitting in the sun, and my servants bring me cold drinks and ice cream. I don’t really have any servants but Mummy stops cleaning the house sometimes and she comes out and gives me ice cream or some crackers and water because I am not allowed fizzy drinks because they are bad for my teeth. I look up at the umbrella, and the sunglasses make the red and white stripes look funny and I laugh. I have brought two dollies down with me and they are swimming in the pool. I have a boy dolly and he has reddy-pink hair and he is wearing a swimming costume with love hearts on it and his sister is a girl dolly and she has yellow sparkly hair and she is wearing a red swimming costume. They swim together and they don’t fight and they always take care of each other like a brother and sister should.

  I also have some plastic cups from when I was very small and I am filling them with water and pouring them over my shoulders when I get too hot.

  ‘Are you okay there?’ Mummy calls and I look up and see she is in my bedroom cleaning and she is staring out of the window.

  ‘Hello, Mummy, I’m fine,’ I say and I wave.

  ‘I’ll come down soon to get you your lunch, sweetheart,’ she says.

  ‘Okay.’ I pick up a small cup, fill it with water and pour it over my arm. The water tickles and I laugh and then I look at my dollies and I can see they’re laughing with me and they are happy to be in the pool on a hot day.

  Kevin comes into the garden from the side gate. He has a key but I don’t have a key. Mummy says that when I am thirteen like Kevin, I can also have a key.

  ‘What are you doing, Tweet?’ he says. Kevin likes to call me Tweet because that’s the sound I make when I am being Daddy’s Little Bird. He smiles at me and I smile back but a little butterfly flutters around my tummy because he looks happy but maybe he isn’t happy and I never know.

  ‘I’m a lady at the beach,’ I say and he nods.

  ‘You look cool.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I reply.

  He sits down next to me on the grass because he is too, too big for the paddling pool. ‘I wish we had a real pool.’ He looks sad when he talks about a pool. We are not allowed to talk about a pool. Talking about a pool is a mistake. A big mistake.

  ‘Me too,’ I say, ‘and then we could swim all the time.’

  ‘Yeah, but you don’t know how to swim.’

  ‘I’m getting better.’ I get a little bit cross because I can swim, I just don’t swim very nicely, but I’m learning every week at lessons, and Jazz, my swimming teacher, says she’ll have me in the Olympics in no time.

  ‘I can help you learn if you like.’

  ‘Jazz is teaching me.’

  ‘Yeah, but you have to practise every day or you won’t get any better. Want me to show you some stuff?’

  ‘This pool is too small. It’s only to sit in.’

  ‘That’s okay, the most important thing is to be able to blow bubbles underwater. See, watch me.’ I know about blowing bubbles because I can do that already but I move to one side of the paddling pool and Kevin dunks his head under the water and blows lots of bubbles that tickle my legs. His blue T-shirt gets wet but he doesn’t mind. I think he likes that the water is making him cool.

  Kevin pulls his head out of the water and he laughs and wipes his face and smooths his hair back. He looks nice when he laughs, just like Daddy.

  ‘Now it’s your turn.’

  ‘I know how to blow bubbles already.’

  ‘I don’t believe you, Tweet, show me.’

  There are lots of butterflies in my tummy now and I don’t know why.

  ‘Are you scared of the water?’

  ‘I’m not scared of the water!’ I shout.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he says and he puts his hands up. ‘Don’t shout, I was just trying to help.’

  ‘I can blow bubbles, watch.’ I push my head under the water and I blow lots of bubbles, just the way Jazz taught me to do. When I run out of breath to blow, I start to lift my head up but I feel Kevin’s hand on the back of my neck, pushing me in. I try hard to get my head up, so hard, but he pushes me down and soon my whole body is under the water because Kevin’s hands are big and he’s strong, strong. I kick my legs and try to grab him by pushing my arms backwards but it’s hard to move. I feel like the inside of me is going to burst and I need air to come i
nto me but I can’t get up. I can’t open my mouth because I can’t breathe in the water. I’m not a fish. My head hurts and then my body gets all funny and suddenly Kevin pulls me up out of the water and I cough and choke and he pats me hard on the back, hard as a slap so it hurts, but it makes all the water come out of my nose and my mouth.

  Mummy comes running outside. ‘What happened, what happened?’ she yells.

  ‘Kevin…’ I start to say and then I look at him and I know if I tell on him, he will think I am someone who deserves a good smack, so I shake my head. I take lots of air into my body. Kevin smiles at me – a small smile – and I know that now Kevin and I also have a little secret together, but it is not a nice little secret like the ones I have with Mummy.

  ‘What happened, Kevin?’ asks Mummy quietly.

  ‘I don’t know, I came in and she was under the water so I grabbed her out. I only had to pat her on the back a few times but you really should watch her. She doesn’t swim very well yet. Maybe those lessons aren’t helping much.’ He stands up and then he walks away into the house. Mummy helps me out and wraps me in a towel and then I cry and cry because I was so scared and I didn’t want to drown under the water.

  ‘It’s okay,’ says Mummy, ‘it’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay.’ But it’s not okay. Kevin is meany mean. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

  At dinner Daddy says, ‘And what did my Little Bird do today?’

  ‘She went for a little swim,’ Kevin says and he laughs and laughs.

  ‘That’s enough, Kevin,’ says Daddy because he decides how much you can laugh in this house.

  20

  Kevin

  ‘So, you were seven, and why did he hit you?’ asks Dr Sharma.

  ‘Have you heard that quote from Aristotle that says, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man?”’

  ‘I have,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it’s attributed to someone else but I have heard it.’

  ‘People have always talked about what that meant but basically it’s come to mean that who a kid is at seven years old is who they’ll be as an adult.’

  ‘Yes, I believe that’s how it’s mostly been interpreted.’

  ‘Well, my father saw it like that. In his mind, his kids were given leeway – not a lot of leeway but some – until they turned seven and then they had to be the kind of person that he was happy to have in his house.’

  ‘And what kind of a person or child was he happy to have in his house?’

  ‘Clean, neat, quiet, obedient. It wasn’t that they didn’t have to behave like that before. It was just that, until seven, you were not physically hurt. The mental shit that kept him entertained went on from the moment you could speak.’

  ‘From the moment you could speak?’

  ‘Yeah, when I was four, I woke up from a nap and found him in the living room. I asked for my mother and he told me she was dead.’

  Dr Sharma shakes her head. ‘Just like that? He told you she was dead?’

  ‘Yes, and then he watched me while I tried to process the whole thing. I ran around the house calling for her and he followed me around and kept saying, “I told you she was dead, she’s gone forever.”’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to do to a child.’ She says this softly and slowly as though she is trying to process the idea of it herself.

  ‘She was just at the store but he liked the way I cried. When I got tired of calling for her, I sat down on the carpet and just… I couldn’t stop crying. I kept crying until she walked in and ran over to me to pick me up. I could barely breathe by then so I couldn’t tell her what had happened and when she asked my father about it, he just shrugged his shoulders. “You really need to look into this child’s behaviour,” he said. I didn’t even know what that meant but I’ve never forgotten the words.’

  ‘That’s… horrific,’ she says.

  I laugh. ‘Yeah, but he thought it was funny.’

  ‘Did you ever tell your mother what he said?’

  ‘Nah, I don’t know why but I think I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea.’

  She gives herself a little shake. I can see she’s trying to rid herself of the image of me as a crying four-year-old. ‘Emotional abuse can be worse,’ she says.

  ‘I know that.’ What a stupid thing to say. Of course it can be worse. Here I sit in a hospital for madmen because it can be worse. It is worse.

  ‘Your father liked to be in control.’

  I think about resorting to silence because I loathe it when the psychiatrist states the obvious as though I’m an idiot who hasn’t already figured this out for myself. But I keep going because I have an insanity defence to prepare for and my father is the number-one star in that defence. ‘He did like control. He liked things in our house to be clean and neat and tidy. I don’t mean just a general clean. I mean that if he came home and an ornament had been moved an inch to the left or right and not returned to its correct place, he went ballistic. He liked us to always be on our toes, waiting for his next instruction, making sure everything looked right.’

  Dr Sharma nods, and for a moment I consider telling her about an incident from when I was six, but instead I just stare at the beige wall behind her head. I know that she would write the whole story down and she would be even more sorry for little old Kevin than she already is, but I don’t need her pity. I don’t want it. My father’s seven-year-old rule didn’t apply if you touched his stuff, you see. That rule was for everyone, no matter how young or old. I rub my leg where the scar is. He was just showing me what could happen because a pair of scissors is so sharp. It was a lesson. And the scissors belonged to him.

  I let go of that little incident and remind myself of where I am. ‘My mother didn’t have a cleaner,’ I continue. ‘My father thought that she had little else to do with her day aside from take care of her children, and it was best spent making sure that his house looked the way he thought it should look. She spent every spare moment cleaning and tidying. When I was little, she confined me to one room for most of the day. We would sit there together, playing games and reading and doing whatever else you do with kids too little to go to school, and then about an hour before my father got home she would stick me in my cot or lock me in my room and she would tidy and clean and then she would come and get me and make sure I was tidy and clean. She did the same thing for my sister after she was born. One night he got home and he walked all around the house, opening every door, going into every room and checking her work, and she followed him around, her hands at her sides, her pale pink lipsticked mouth frozen in a smile. He nodded his head and smiled and then he came back to the kitchen where a bowl of fruit was on the table and an orange had fallen out. She must have balanced too many in the bowl.

  ‘“And what is this?” he asked her and she grabbed the orange and put it back on top of the pile of fruit. I could see her hands shaking. He smiled at her and punched her in the mouth. Just pulled his fist back and punched her. Then he picked me up and said, “What a mess your mummy has made. Let’s go and play a game while she cleans up.”’

  I let that little story sink in, watch how Dr Sharma struggles to maintain her composure. I am sure she’s thinking about my mother and everything she went through, and I feel like I should mention to her that in the end my mother was more of a monster than my father was, but I don’t. Of course I don’t.

  ‘That must have been hard for you to deal with,’ she says. ‘Did that happen when you were seven?’

  ‘No. Before I was seven, if I dropped a glass and spilled some juice or if I didn’t hold my knife and fork properly or I argued or whined, he would… I don’t know how to explain it. I guess he would tell me what I was doing wrong and then instruct me on the correct way to behave and leave it there. “He’ll learn,” my mother always said, and he would nod and smile and say, “Give me a child of seven…” I had no idea what that meant but the day after I turned seven, I was sitting at the kitchen table colouring in a superhero colouring book when he came h
ome. I was filling in a picture of the Joker – you know, from Batman?’

  Dr Sharma nods and smiles a little. I remember she has kids.

  ‘I was sitting there quietly when he came in. The kitchen was tidy and I was clean and dressed in my pyjamas and my mother had just gone upstairs to “spritz on some perfume”. He came in and touched my head. “How’s my big seven-year-old boy?” he asked. “Good,” I said. “And what have we here?” I leaned back so he could see and he picked up the colouring book and looked at it. “You’ll get better, I suppose,’ he said and then he looked down at the kitchen table and saw that I had somehow gone off the page and onto the table with my red crayon. It was a wax crayon and all he had to do was wipe it off. My mother would have wiped it off if she had seen it. “And what is this?” he asked.

  ‘I smiled and I started rubbing at the mark with my hand. He slapped me across the face so hard that I fell off my chair. That’s when she came in and he didn’t say anything, he just pointed. I was sitting on the floor, biting down on my lip and trying not to cry, but there were tears anyway. “Man up,” he said, and she said…’ Here I pause for a moment. I don’t mean to be dramatic but I hate recounting this story, need to recount this story, am compelled to go over it in my head because she was showing me, she was letting me know exactly where her loyalty lay.

  ‘She said…?’ Dr Sharma prompts.

  ‘She said, “I’m sorry, Leonard.”’

  ‘Oh,’ says Dr Sharma and I can see her flicking through a mental list of appropriate things to say but she doesn’t come up with anything.

  ‘Yeah… oh,’ I agree. I don’t tell Dr Sharma that I should have known what that meant about my relationship with my mother. I should have known exactly who her priority was. I should have known, but I didn’t. That only became clear much later.

  21