In the cosy room of the seaside B&B, the hand on my throat tightened. The earth-toned red room swam. The TV showing an old episode of The Twilight Zone flickered. I clutched at his wrist, struggling for air. My eyes watered, body wriggled, head smacked against the double bed’s rustic headboard. The voice over from The Twilight Zone spoke. You can never know what will happen during those quiet moments of night we take for granted. I tried to speak but he was squeezing hard, face twisted unrecognizably. Greyish white television light bathed us. I kicked wildly, digging my nails into his wrist before the pressure finally eased. I flung my body sideways, grabbing the glass of cold water beside the reading lamp, throwing it in his face.
“What the fuck?” he mumbled, wiping the wetness off his face, sitting up immediately. “Are you crazy? What did you do that for?” His New Zealand accent was even thicker during moments of irritation.
“You were strangling me!” I screamed. My voice sounded paper thin despite the volume. My eyes stung. I spluttered, relieved to be able to breathe again, stumbling from the damp bed as credits rolled on the TV screen. In the bathroom, I ran the cold tap, splashed water on my face and neck, trying to ease the burning sensation in my throat. I heard him knocking about in the other room. The portable fridge door opening made a whoosh sound. Cold air. I sat on the toilet seat trembling, touching the marks forming on my throat, waiting for bruises to come and transform under his bloodshot gaze.
I looked up, silent as his frame filled the doorway. “I’m sorry,” he said, holding a small bowl of ice. He wrapped some cubes in a white cloth, pressed them against my neck. “I didn’t mean to get that way.” His touch was gentle. The same broad hand and tapered fingers were capable of being both tender and destructive. He placed a hand on my shoulder. His handsome face was feral yet apologetic in the bright light. “You’re alright aren’t you?”
“You thought I was someone else!” I accused, still frazzled, nerves shot.
The television was now off.
“No, I didn’t know it was happening,” he answered, mouth a grim line. His shoulders were tight. He let out a slow breath as if releasing an internal pressure.
“Death doesn’t have to be frightening; it’s just a transition into another phase,” he said. It was such an odd comment; I shook my head in disbelief.
“Fuck you!” I exclaimed. “And you might want to be fully awake before you start giving lessons.”
He leaned closer, face inches from mine, and smiled sardonically. His golden eyes gleamed. “Watch your mouth.”
“How can you be so relaxed after what happened?” I asked. “What if I hadn’t been able to wake you?”
“What do you want from me?” he roared. “You want a written fucking apology? You want to hold this over my head is that it?” He walked out, flinging the door open.
I stretched my legs out on the floor, confused by his reaction, trying to ignore the roaring in my head, the clammy feeling on my neck. The pale floor glistened, I tried to stand slowly but my legs buckled. The sentence in my throat was a breathy wheeze.
I began to crawl on the floor. Fear came thick and fast. I couldn’t breathe. Panic attack. I felt around the floor for something, anything to steady me. Rangi appeared in the doorway again, calmly whistling. I hated myself for my weakness, for showing vulnerability too early. I knew I was crawling into the whites of his eyes, disappearing. He watched me struggling on the floor, coolly mouthed “fuck you.” Then everything went grainy black.
When I came to, it was still cold, hard floor beneath me. Rangi held a pillow and there was an intense concentration on his face as he brought it down. The burning in my throat persisted; it felt like sandpaper. The room was hazy, smudged. I couldn’t make out the lines of objects surrounding me. I sat up awkwardly.
“Steady,” he instructed. “It’s okay; I was just going to make you more comfortable. I didn’t want to move you yet.”
“What happened? “I asked, vaguely aware of the weakness of my limbs. He stroked a damp twist off my forehead, pressed a kiss there. “You fainted. Has that happened before?”
“No, not that I can remember,” I answered, confused by his concern and unpredictability. The sleeping blue flame inside him singed my fingers. Somehow I was grateful, it made me feel alive. He carried me out of the bathroom, took my gaze away from the ceiling. After attempting to strangle me, he fucked me gently on the damp, sunken bed.
We left in slanted, heavy rain, hurtling down tight, twisted roads in an older black Mazda I was certain wasn’t even his. Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside played on the radio. I placed my feet on the dashboard. It was hard to see through the thunderous showers but I spotted her at the top of the curve ahead, Anon, running towards us, clutching something round. My heart sank. Did you think I wouldn’t come? she asked.
Suddenly the car swerved, as if Rangi had seen her too. “Be alert,” he ordered, squeezing my shoulder. That odd intensity he had magnified. I didn’t know what he meant. Was it an opening for me to confess what I saw? Or tell him what I was feeling? I turned to look behind me. Anon sat in the back seat, wet from rain, you let me in she said. She was holding a paperweight; a chunk had been taken out of it. An image of me broken, crawling on the bathroom floor turned slowly inside it. I realised she’d been there all along, not pushed out by different oxygen.
She’d been there, in the sneaky half smile of the woman serving at the chip shop, in the hands of the B&B owner, whose fingers lingered overly familiar on my skin as one blue iris became brown. She’d been there at the beach, rising to the surface of rough waters. My feet cramped on the dashboard. Rangi’s nose began to bleed.
“That happens sometimes,” he said, grabbing a tissue from the glove compartment, wiping his face, then tilting his head back, one hand on the wheel. Blood trickled from his nostrils, seeping into the paperweight scene.
By now the bruised ceiling of our room at the B&B had washed up on the shore. The gulls from the beach had followed our departure too, each sporting one blue and one brown iris. They flapped their wings violently, screaming down the sharp bends, trailing in exhaust pipe smoke.
Keyholes
It was summer when I discovered keyholes spinning in the ether, hiding figures made of dark matter that let me catch a finger in their mouths. I was seven. Nighttime in our household found me tiptoeing down red softly carpeted stairs to spy on my mother, the memory of the school day’s activities sticky on my skin. I’d worn a dead blue oleander flower in my cornrows to school and the fed up expression on my class tutor Mrs Phillips face had been worth it. For God’s sake Joy, take that thing off your head! It’s morbid.
The week before that, I’d re-enacted the birth of Christ for classmates during break time, focusing particularly on the birth scene, complete with tinfoil Jesus and ketchup blood on my thighs, huffing and puffing and crying out, the way I’d seen a woman do on TV. Mrs Phillips had been furious, barging through the circle gathered, glasses steamed up, chest rising and falling rapidly as if it would detach from her body. Her creased, knee length grey dress was fit to burst and her thin features were pinched.
What on earth? What is going on here? She zeroed in on me; lips curled back looking like she was ready to fling me into an advert for starving African children, never to see another English dawn. And my tinfoil Jesus would accompany me by a murky, half-hearted lake, counting flies hovering over our distended stomachs.
This attention seeking has got to stop! My audience of co-conspirators sniggered, scattering like marbles, they slunk off to entertain themselves in other ways, swapping their canoodling expressions for innocent ones. Honestly, I don’t know what your mother exposes you to Mrs Phillips continued, shoving aside the small coats I’d used as straw and the paint splattered plate that acted as my moon.
You said you liked creative interpretation, I piped up defensively.
I know what I said, she spat, hauling me up. You look absolutely ridiculous.
I swiped a blob of ketchup from my thigh
and licked it, thinking of hot dogs. The tinfoil Jesus and I were dragged into Mrs Phillips office.
Later, in afternoon art class I sucked on strawberry bonbons. Streams of sunlight fed the artificial plant life cut-outs stuck on the classroom windowsills, forming a surrounding jungle. The smell of wet paintbrushes and chalk hung in the air.
Draw pictures of your family on an adventure, anywhere you like. Mrs Phillips instructed in her typical, grim faced manner. Sadness crept into my fingers as I drew on the scratched wooden desk harbouring hangmen in its corners, that seem to be plotting to meet each other in the middle to converse in a language only unhappy children could interpret.
Everybody else’s family had a roundness to them; father, mother, brothers and sisters, smiling by the Eiffel tower, eating pink candy-floss at the fair, on the carousel ride laughing. Mine seemed uneven, filled with absences I tried to measure using hands that hadn’t grown wide enough to do so. Strangely loaded sentences my mother never bothered to explain lingered in my strokes. You come from me she’d say. And your father has powers beyond imagination. I considered drawing my mother sleeping in the afternoons, for hours sometimes, or the secretive, quiet conversations she had at nights to somebody at the other end of the phone. But they’d ask me why and I didn’t have any answers. Lead-drawn fathers from other children’s pictures surrounded me, their sympathetic expressions faint. The classmates took turns holding my dead oleander, breathing thin breaths into it in hope of a resurrection. Mrs Phillips stood over my shoulder peering at my drawing; a picture of my mother and I wearing duck heads in a rippling pond, surrounded by broken bits of bread and large footprints in the sky.
What a curious image, she commented. Whose footprints are those?
My father’s, I said.
And who is your father? She asked. I’ve never met him.
God, I answered seriously, punctuating the response with a flick of my paintbrush.
Orange paint splattered onto Mrs Phillips’s frumpy, grey dress. She pursed her lips. An uncomfortable silence followed.
I stood by the slightly open door that hot summer night, peeping through the tiny crack. A man sat on our deep mauve sofa. His brown torso had a light sheen, its own exotic animal in the lowly lit room. I pictured it falling at my feet, waiting for a spell from my hands by the edge of the doorway. I couldn’t see his face; I’d have to adjust my position to do that. If I leaned too far forward, they’d spot me and I’d be banished upstairs, told off for spying. I was rooted to the spot, listening to my mother’s laughter. I rarely heard it sound that way. It was softer, breathy, more feminine somehow. She sat on the man’s thighs, her upper body naked, a silky red camisole pooled at her waist. Her breasts jutted forward. She cooed as the man’s large hand stroked her thigh before disappearing between her legs. Aware I was watching something I wasn’t supposed to be seeing, I bit my lip anxiously, careful not to move and make the floorboards creak. I knew adults sometimes did those things to each other, I’d seen snippets on TV before my mother flicked the channel over.
She began to move into his hand, gyrating, head thrown back. Her mouth was slack and distorted as if would overheat and fall into the ashtray on the table, orange embers flickering in the glass. The man chuckled, a low rumbling sound. He moved down her body like some large, brown skinned python. He placed his head between her legs, obscured under the camisole. He unbuckled his leather belt.
I turned away then, weighing the secrets of the door. I slunk up the stairs carefully; head filled with this new knowledge that seemed adult and mysterious somehow. Back in my room, I peeled back the rumpled duvet, crawled into bed listening to the fan blades turning. I stayed awake for a bit, thinking of brown torsos in slim cracks waiting to be identified.
The fan blades sliced through scenes I imagined belonged to the man downstairs, who was making my mother groan like some foreign entity, exposing a side of herself mothers kept hidden from their daughters, tucked beneath their darting, moist tongues. On the dresser beside me, a paper plane I’d made from old comic book pages was half off the wooden surface, with only the sound of the blades and my breathing to propel it skywards. I pretended me and the man downstairs were co-pilots on foot. Wherever we went, the plane followed; dented by a fox’s paw from a night time rummage, damp from skimming its reflection in the pond at the local park, marked by frustrated fingers trying to fly it in the trails of real planes, whose destinations we chased till they vanished from sight.
I conjured up bits of a life for this man. Maybe he got lonely sometimes and he and my mother entangled their half-naked bodies till they rediscovered themselves in each other’s eyes. Maybe he was a butcher who gutted animals that dangled off ceiling hooks and pleaded for the insides they’d lost. Who couldn’t get the blood off his hands no matter how many times he washed them in scalding hot water or sat in public fountains.
I saw him pushing me on my yellow BMX bike, comic book plane caught in the wheel, its tip damp from saliva and all the things he couldn’t say to me yet. I rode the bike to school, ringing its silver bell to announce the arrival of something waiting in the wings, misshapen from being in the dark too long. Eventually, I waved goodbye to the bike trail disappearing on the concrete. I looked over my shoulder. The man from the dark pressed his face between the gates. In the distance of the school hall, I continued ringing the bell. I couldn’t see his face but I could hear him, crying the tears I’d lent him. Prompted by the cold, the lines of the grey bicycle disappeared into the hole in my chest. The paper plane stumbled, attempting to take off from one last, large male footprint.
The next morning, a package arrived for my mother in a thick, brown envelope lined with bubble wrap. I watched her from the balcony upstairs, flanked by secrets from the previous night, knocking one foot lightly against the over-filled laundry basket. She ran her fingers over the package at first, appearing hesitant to discover it’s contents. Then she tore it open slowly, a sad expression on her face. A slash of midnight blue appeared. She smiled wistfully, maybe recalling a memory, clutched it to her chest, staring at the letterbox as it noisily swung closed. The dress looked expertly cut. Held up to the light spilling from the glass on the door, it shimmered like a silken sea, whispering against her fingers.
“Mummy who got you a gift?” I bounded down the stairs a couple at a time, a habit I had whenever I got excited. “Can I see?”
“It’s nothing,” she said dismissively, folding the dress, her happy expression fading into the silken sea. “Just something I ordered from the catalogue. I’m going to order those dungarees you liked soon. Change that t-shirt, it has hair oil on it.”
“Can I see your dress on?” I asked. “It looks nice.”
“Later baby, I have to take care of a few things first. Please change that shirt!” she hollered before disappearing into the sitting room, the package tucked under her arm.
Later, I watched her try on the dress in her bedroom. It fit perfectly. We both stood inside our reflections before the finger printed mirror. Then I left her perched on the edge of the bed, unzipping. Her fingers skimmed the pulse on her neck as if contemplating throwing it to her mirror image. We didn’t talk about the half naked man whose deep laughter rumbled in the cracks of our house. I didn’t confide I’d told my teacher God was my father. And that he left ink footprints on creaky wooden floors and pale paper skies and could fly a model plane left-handed while the engine noise sputtered in his chest. We didn’t talk about the silence at our backs rising, catching secrets in its colourless, shapeless trap. We avoided discussing the white pills she took at night sometimes. To help make mummy sleep she’d said. We skirted around the debris in our beds, shoes, and the most random of places and the signs of her secret life; ticket stubs to a show, lace underwear, wine corks rolling off the glass table into the echoes of something passing.
The week Mrs Phillips sent a concerned letter about me home; I bought an orange yoyo using money I’d won from a dare. It had a long white string, flashed bits of
red light unexpectedly, like a torch. A quirk I liked. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit at the top of the stairs flicking my yoyo, watching God creep into our photographs on the hallway walls, telling my mother lies, draping his arm around us lovingly, illuminated by the silent yoyo light.
Fallow
In the following weeks, the gulls from Chesapeake made random appearances. One repeatedly smacked its beak against the jar of stones on the kitchen countertop till a crack like a small scar appeared in the glass. Another having lost its head in the doorways of the flat continued scuttling headless through rooms, in search of rising ripples. One more dangled from the living room ceiling, its white convex chest swelling and sinking as the sounds of traffic spilled from its beak; tires screeching, the bleep of lights turning green, the low grumble of an engine overheating. I knew it was Anon behind it all. She was building an army, showing me she could command whatever she wanted. She was preparing them for something, laughing mockingly as panic rose inside me. I knew something dark and sinister was breathing in the flat, her hands embedded inside it, her ventriloquist doll.
Sometimes, I stuck my head out of the bedroom window to breathe another air, escape the din, or I’d turned the radio up loudly to have the false company of others, hoping to lose her in some frequency I’d attracted turning the knobs or that she’d be sucked into the static, reduced to tiny grains sparking malevolently in an electric blue kingdom somewhere. But she began to talk through the radio, interrupting heated debates and news items: You are nothing. Nothing good will ever happen in your life. You ruin everything. Why do you even exist? The gulls became more twisted. One sported a mangled neck. The gull from the ceiling came down, the left side of its breast gone, only darkness spun there when they gathered at my feet. They listened to her talking on the radio, growing in stature from my misery.
Butterfly Fish Page 26