Playthings

by Alex Pheby

  She felt the pang in the stomach felt on a Sunday afternoon when the desire is to play, but the appetite is stimulated by the smell of good things cooking. The stomach becomes ever more eager to eat, and the legs more tired, and the light begins to fade, and the colours of the garden deepen. Shadows fall long back toward the house, and suddenly, by some unspoken consensus, the children run back, and now it was her responsibility to take them and wash them and make them presentable. It seemed like this thought summoned them.

  They came in, all of them—boys and girls—soaking. She rubbed them in towels, roughly, until they were tow-headed, stretching up, the boys bowing to her. Their father came behind, smiling, and shepherded them into the sitting room. She began to dish out the food, one plate for each, to be eaten on their laps, and, once grace was said, there was no pause and no formality: the food was taken and eaten, and all the while someone was talking—more than one—the room vibrating with conversation. Though she watched Moritz without letting him know, she did not see that characteristic flushing of his face, redness across the forehead and cheeks with a strip of bloodless white on the top lip. There was no tension in the muscles of his neck, no grinding of his jaw, no distraction in his eyes that told that he was elsewhere: in that place where pain could be countered, somewhere behind his face, somewhere inside. Instead he was everywhere, in his body, in the room, and if he was not laughing he was listening with great interest to the stories told by his children of the petty intrigues that filled their lives, of their amazement at this or that. The talk was never any clearer to her than that, because she was not interested in the play of the characters and stories, she was more aware of the tenor in which those stories were told, and even then not so much in that as in the spirit with which the words were received.

  When eventually Paul saw her, he became aware of what was happening—of the significance of it—and she became aware of his understanding, and for a second, it seemed as if it would all collapse. In that second the father saw it, too. There was a moment in which everything could have changed—where self-consciousness could have undercut the living of life—but Paul’s father took his wife by the hand and walked her out into the night. In the sky the stars shone and the new moon barely spoiled the darkness, and without saying a thing they realised that, for those final days, the world had changed.

  That same moon saw him buried.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Lavinia Greenlaw and Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge for their invaluable help during the drafting process. Thanks also to Paul Stanbridge, without whom this book might never have reached Simone Davies, Sam Jordison, and Eloise Millar at Galley Beggar, who took the brave step of publishing this difficult book (something that many of their contemporaries balked at).

  I also acknowledge my debt to all the writers who have preceded me in the fields of Schreber studies and psychoanalysis, and in the unravelling of the psychological structure of fascism.