by Paul Pen
She also groaned in a way I could barely hear. When she sighed a few times, I thought she might be crying. There was a high-pitched screech when she turned the handle again, followed by a louder flow of water. If the shower curtain hadn’t been closed, the drops I heard splashing against the plastic would’ve reached me. Then the gargling started. A gurgle and then the mouthful of water falling into the basin. Followed by a moan, or rather, a stifled whimper. She repeated the exercise several times. I wanted to peek out by lifting a corner of the curtain, like I had before, but the sticky sound of the skin on my hand when I peeled it from the tub ended any attempt to move. If my sister didn’t know I was there, if she thought I was sleeping in my bunk like I did every night, she may not be wearing her mask. In the darkness of the room I might not manage to see her deformed face, but I could perhaps make out some grotesque contour. The flat profile of a noseless face.
I recognized the sound of the soap dish sliding a little. It was fish-shaped and it gripped the soap with plastic scales. Its three resting points squeaked when they slipped along the ceramic sink. The bubbling and friction I heard next told me that my sister was washing her hands. It was for longer than even Mom spent washing hers after chopping garlic in the kitchen. The sound of my sister washing her hands was followed by a flicking sound that was repeated five times. Then the curtain moved and a piece of material landed on my chest.
I used the hand I’d peeled from the bathtub to touch it, feeling the circular contour of a button. It was the blouse my sister slept in. I understood that she’d undone the five buttons before leaving the blouse on the edge of the bathtub. Where I was.
There was also an elastic sound, but not the one made by the strap on her mask. I remembered her taking off her bra the afternoon when we’d had a bath together. The garment fell onto the blouse. One of the straps brushed against my shoulder. The soap dish skidded again. It was followed by some kind of friction sound. It wasn’t two hands soaping each other. It was different. There were more muffled whimpers, like the ones Grandma gave sometimes when she was sitting in the living room, her face in the direction of the wall for an entire afternoon.
Another noise broke through the darkness of that bathroom that my sister and I shared without her knowing it. A noise from out in the hallway. My sister drew in her breath. The bar of soap hit the washbasin. The bra strap and bottom of her blouse escaped from the bath as fast as wasps retract their sting after using it. The quick movement made the hoops holding up the curtain tinkle. I also heard the door latch clicking into place.
My sister had left.
The bathroom was silent again.
The apparent peace lasted a few seconds.
Until the bathroom light suddenly came on. I held my hands over my eyes to ease the pain from being dazzled.
“So,” I heard my father’s voice say, “how’s your night going?”
The curtain was thrown open with a metallic racket. The sudden light and deafening noise made it hard to believe I was in the same place where a moment before a fly would’ve given away its position just from the noise of its heartbeat. Even if a fly’s heart is nothing more than a throbbing organ that pumps hemolymph and not blood.
“Sleep well in there?”
I opened my eyes and could only make out stripes of light through my hands. The curtain rail made its noise again. Dad was shaking it. When my vision finally got used to the bright light, I could see my father’s silhouette, a diagonal line that ran from the left of my field of sight to the center. Like how a corpse would see the figure of its burier.
I blinked to focus better. At first I thought he was naked, his torso marked by the flames like a choppy sea of dark flesh, but then I saw the worn elastic of his sky-blue cotton underpants. I looked at him without saying anything, detecting a smile on his face from the shape his hair scar had taken. “Where did you get that pillow?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. In response to my silence, Dad let go of the curtain, which then dangled between us like a plastic barrier.
I tucked my legs in as I raised my back until I managed to sit myself up in the bathtub. Then I lifted the corner of the curtain to poke one eye out without making the hoops jingle. I saw Dad standing in front of the toilet bowl, his back to me. He had the key hanging from his neck on his back and the elastic on his underpants down, so I could see part of a vertical line of black hair. I saw him use toilet paper to dry himself with in front, as Mom insisted I did whenever I’d finished peeing, although now I hadn’t heard a trickle. He did it while looking down and then to one side, looking out perhaps for any movement of mine behind the curtain. I was scared that my hand’s trembling would be reproduced in the portion of material on which he kept watch.
I discovered two pairs of scratches crossing his back diagonally, from his spine outward. Two new wounds on creased skin. He didn’t seem bothered about them at all.
He threw the piece of paper into the toilet and pulled the chain. He stood watching the mechanism work. We had to stay to the end to make sure it drained out properly. It often didn’t, and Dad would get angry if he found dirty water in there when it was his turn to use it. Once it was broken for a few days, so we had to use the washbasin to get rid of liquids. For the other, we used the bin.
The last sucking noise preceded the dripping that filled the cistern. Dad pulled up his underpants, which was when I carefully lowered the corner of the curtain. It didn’t make a noise. I sat looking at the plastic.
His voice came from the other side.
“I discipline you so you learn to follow the rules of this house, and you break them a minute later?”
I didn’t know what he meant.
His fingers appeared at one end of the curtain. He pulled it. I sat there looking at him.
Dad was holding the pink bar of soap in his free hand.
“When you use this”—he raised his eyebrows to look first at the soap and then at me—“you put it back where it belongs.”
He let go of the curtain and returned the soap bar to the dish. The same fish-shaped dish whose sliding I’d heard in the darkness before my sister had again and again washed her hands, mouth, and whatever else she’d washed.
“It’s not so hard, is it?” my father said.
I wanted to tell him it had been my sister, but Dad didn’t even give me time to speak. With a snort of contempt he closed the curtain. I heard him turn the water on once more before the light went out and the bathroom door slammed shut, followed just after by his bedroom’s metal door.
I stayed sitting in the bathtub for a few minutes. With my eyes open looking at nothing. I got up, grabbed a towel, and dried all the water that had been splashed on the washbasin, curtain, floor, and mirror.
That way Dad wouldn’t find a reason to tell me off.
I got back in the tub and made myself comfortable. If I lay on my side and bent my knees a certain way, hugging the pillow, it wasn’t too bad. I lifted a corner of the pillowcase to pinch the material inside. I stroked the soft fabric between my fingers again and again.
Then I heard the chirp of a cricket. A few chirps. A shiver ran down my back each time.
I covered my ears. I thought of my fireflies, on the other side of the wall. I couldn’t see it, but I knew they’d be glowing.
14
My mother came to see me in the morning. “You can come out now,” she said.
And I must’ve been deep asleep despite how uncomfortable my hard, curved bed was, because somehow I absorbed her sentence into the dream I was having, where I saw myself standing in front of the locked door in the kitchen. Scratching the concrete. Then my mother had said the sentence, and a vertical line of yellow light had appeared around the door’s edge, growing wider and wider.
The beam of light kept getting thicker as the door shrank.
It was opening.
“You can come out now,” my mother said again.
And then the door disappeared completely. And I looked through it with my fa
ce reddened by the bright blast of light that came from outside. Like what happened to my cactus under the spot of light in the living room. The same particles of dust that danced between its prickles while I pushed it with my finger along the floor now danced between my eyelashes. I could feel the light’s heat on my cheeks.
But that second time, my mother’s sentence was followed by a rattle.
A noise that couldn’t be absorbed into the dreamworld I was in. Because it was a very familiar noise. The shower curtain as it was drawn back. Reality began to take shape around me while the light that illuminated me from the other side of that dreamed door went out.
The cold pressure on my leg replaced the heat from the light that didn’t exist.
The white of the ceramic bathtub blanked out the yellow from the outside as soon as I opened my eyes.
“I said you can come out now,” said my mother for the third time. One of her hands rested on my face. I smiled. That warmth was much better than the one from the nonexistent light in a dream that I was already beginning to forget. I rubbed my cheek against her wrinkled palm. Her nose whistled.
“Thank you for bringing the pillow,” I whispered.
“A pillow?” she asked, holding back a smile. “Me?”
I stroked her hand the same way I had in the night. The wrinkly fold between two of her knuckles. The circle of burned skin at the base of the thumb. The wide, smooth scar near the wrist.
She received the message. “Come on, give it to me so I can take it to your room. Dad mustn’t know,” she said. She took hold of the pillowcase that emerged from between my legs and pulled. I sat up in the bathtub to make it easier for her.
“Dad already knows,” I told her. “He was here last night.”
My mother’s eyes opened in an expression that I couldn’t identify. Her cheeks went red.
“I’m not going to get angry over a pillow now, am I?” My father’s voice surprised us from the bathroom door.
Mom spun around. She hugged the pillow as if she could make it disappear.
“And did you have to wake up the boy?” she asked.
“Well,” Dad said, “the kid was sleeping there in the bathtub. And I had to turn the light on. He would’ve woken up anyway.”
He spoke as he walked over to the toilet, the lid still up from when he last used it. He positioned himself in front of the toilet bowl and stood with his legs a little apart.
“You make it sound as if it was the boy who decided to sleep there,” my mother said.
He let out a short groan of pleasure when he started to urinate.
“That’s irrelevant.”
A tremor began on the other side of the bathroom wall. Then some quick steps advanced through the bedroom and hallway, almost like the clatter of a train. The half-open bathroom door hit the wall when my brother burst in.
“Dad,” he complained when he discovered my father at the toilet bowl. “I have to use it.”
My brother was gripping his crotch with both hands.
“So use it,” Dad replied as he made space for my brother.
“But I have to do it kneeling down,” he explained.
Dad let out a snigger. Mom gave him a slap on the shoulder.
“I know, I know,” he answered, turning his neck to look at my mother. “Sorry.”
When Dad finished, he made way for my brother, who knelt by the toilet bowl. He let out a groan of pleasure, too, when he started to urinate, but much louder. His stream of pee traveled upward before falling. I saw it as I stood up in the tub.
Dad was already washing his hands. When he’d finished, he said to me, “Watch and learn.” He picked up the bar of soap, the same one my sister had used in secret in the night, and placed it carefully on the blue fish.
“You put it back in the soap dish,” he told me. “You. Put it back. In the soap dish.”
“Come on,” my mother broke in, “get out of the bathtub now.”
My brother pulled the chain.
My sister appeared in the doorway. Her face, those two eyes like creatures that had fallen into her mask’s traps, scanned the inside of the bathroom. I examined her blouse. The five buttons I’d heard her undo in the night. I remembered the wet sound of her retching.
“Come on, son,” my mother insisted.
I took the hand she held out to me.
“What’s the kid doing there?” asked my sister.
“Don’t call him the kid,” my father corrected her. “He has a name.”
“What’s he doing there?”
My father put the towel back in its place. “Sometimes a telling-off isn’t enough. A child has to be punished.”
My sister stood in silence. She didn’t seem to quite grasp the explanation.
“He made him spend the night in the bathtub,” my mother spelled out as she pulled me toward the door. “Because of the thing with the rat poison.”
I brushed past my sister. A spider of fingers clutched my shoulder.
“You spent the night in the bathtub?” she asked me. “You were here? All night?”
I nodded. Something shifted underneath her mask. The light in her eyes changed.
“And . . .” She paused to swallow before continuing. “Were you asleep the whole time?”
I understood the real meaning of her question.
“Well,” Dad replied on my behalf, “he was poking about around the washbasin. Like one of those rats. When I came in I found the soap down there.” He pointed at the inside of the sink.
My sister ran her fingers over her blouse buttons, as if looking for one she could do up. From her mouth escaped the unconscious murmur triggered by a bad thought. She tried to catch my eye again, but Mom was pulling my arm and managed to get me out of the bathroom before I could say a word. The white mask disappeared from my sight behind the wall.
“Did you wake him up?” was the last thing I heard my sister say. She was asking my father.
Mom led me to my room. We put the pillow back where it belonged. She peered at my brother’s empty bed, felt his sheets, and wrinkled her nose, before pulling one of them off and rolling it around her arm.
“Go to the kitchen,” she said. “I’m making breakfast now.”
When she left the room, I opened my drawer. The eggshell danced in its T-shirt nest. The fireflies greeted me with random flashes of green light. “No,” I responded in Morse code, tapping the lid five times, “I haven’t left the basement.”
When I came out, I found Grandma in the hall. She was carrying the baby in her arms. “Good morning,” I said to her. I approached her to give her a hug, to squeeze her soft body, sink my face into her clothes, and smell the talcum powder, but she walked off before I could catch up with her.
“Not so good,” she replied, and when she was in the living room she added, “The baby won’t wake up.”
I heard something behind me and turned around. I saw a corner of my sister’s mask, poking out into the hallway from inside the bathroom. One eye still behind the door. When she saw me looking at her, she disappeared as fast as a dragonfly takes off.
“What do you mean, he won’t wake up?” my father asked. He was sitting in his striped armchair. In the afternoon and evening he turned the chair toward the television, but in the mornings it normally faced the kitchen. From there Dad watched Mom making breakfast. He usually asked if anything needed fixing. If there was a cupboard door that was starting to come off. If it’d be better to change the height of some of the shelves. That way he could use his toolbox and have something to do for a few hours. Once I caught my mother loosening some hinges herself, so she could then ask Dad to fix them.
Mom dropped two eggs whose shells she’d already broken into the frying pan. She dried her hands on her apron, and ignoring the little explosions of oil, she approached my grandmother, who was pacing around the dining table. Grandma was hissing and tapping the baby’s mouth with a finger.
“Come on, wake up,” she said.
“Let the baby sle
ep if he wants to,” Dad blurted out from the armchair. “He cries enough as it is without anyone encouraging him.”
“But what’s the matter with him?” asked my mother. She stopped Grandma, grabbing her by the waist. She made her sit down. Mom sat opposite her.
“He’s not sleeping,” my grandmother said.
My mother’s back straightened. My father leaned forward in his armchair. I ran to the baby.
“What do you mean, he’s not sleeping?” asked my mother. She took the little boy from his great-grandmother’s arms.
“He’s not sleeping,” she said again.
The eggs spluttered in the frying pan. The smell of burning began to spread around the living room.
Mom lifted up the baby. She gave him a puzzled look and then touched her lips to his forehead, before holding him near her ear. She sighed with relief.
“You say such silly things,” she chided my grandmother. “Of course he’s sleeping. His breathing’s perfect. He doesn’t even have a fever. You must stop scaring us.”
“So why won’t he wake up?”
“He’s a baby,” I answered. “He can sleep all he likes.”
Mom laughed when she heard my reply.
Grandma’s expression stayed the same.
“Go on, wake him up.”
Mom put the baby on her legs and shook his little face with two fingers. There was no reaction.
“It’s him who wakes me up every morning,” my grandmother continued. I noticed a trembling in her throat. She took the crucifix from among the folds of her nightgown and spun it around in her fingers.
My mother began jolting her legs, rocking the baby. Her heels came out of her slippers, like Dad’s had when he played with me when I was little, gripping my hands and making me trot on his lap. I’d look at the spot of light in the living room and become a cowboy riding a horse through one of the deserts in those movies that Dad never stopped watching. If I felt brave, I’d yell and free my arm to crack an imaginary whip. Until my father decided I was too heavy to keep riding his legs like a horse.