Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9B

  To The Mother, people were everything. Their look alone was like a light scratch against dried itchy skin. She adored the attention. And who wouldn’t? It felt so serene to be singled out as she was, to be spoken to in such delicate address and to be waited upon, with such readied ears, even if she had absolutely nothing to say.

  They didn’t turn their heads and huff and howl and then dive back into whatever they were doing, pretending that nothing was wrong. They didn’t turn the attention to themselves and compare their hurt as if hers meant nothing at all.

  It was like being eight again, with her grazed knee. At that age, she knew it wasn’t all so bad, but being a child, as she was, she let out a cry to test how bad it could have been. And when she fell off her bike, she howled into the air, rocking back and forth and gripping her hands to her bloodied knee, desperate for her mother to wipe off the dust and gravel from her knee and coddle her as if it wasn’t just another cry for attention.

  Who knows what made that day so different from all of the others? She would never be able to explain why her mother acted as she did, why she didn’t just shout out from an open window like she had, each day before and she would, every day that followed.

  The Mother, when she was a girl, she had had few friends and lots of time to spend on her own mother who, as it seemed, had little care and even lesser attention for her only daughter. So in need was she, of a hug, or a kiss or even a firm hand across her frosted cheek, that she tried all of the avenues for garnering her mother’s attention.

  Once to paint her mother’s portrait.

  As she etched and she sketched, the little girl turned her head back and forth, scrupulously studying her mother’s choleric grace as she stewed over important and boring grown up things, things that should never be interrupted, for if they were, they would sweep up a tempest of hushing and shushing and blown about orders, swinging fingers and slamming doors. The girl drew lines with the rule of her heart, rubbing and scratching them with the tips of her fingers to make the shapes of her mother’s head and then of her hands and her feet and finally her special ‘going out’ dress that she wore all of the time, even when she had nowhere to go.

  “And mother,” she said, “look at what I did, look at me.”

  And she said it a thousand times and she said it a thousand times more. And each time, her voice sharpened more and more, until, like the ending of a pricking pin, it sounded out like a smoke alarm, the only sound her mother could hear.

  And as her mother rose from her papers after the hundred thousandth pained and exalted request to see what she had done, her daughter, giggling with pride, presented her artwork, on the living room wall.

  “You moron you, you idiot, you monster, you fool, didn’t they teach you respect in that school?”

  The girl always felt bad about what she did. Her mother would scream and shout and abuse and insult and though she wouldn’t beat her like other mothers did, other less refined and less humanized mothers, she would pull on her ears and lead her like a disobedient pup into her room and she would scream and she would shout and she would threaten to never, ever let her out. And she would slam that bedroom door so hard that when she turned, it would open back up again, just lightly, enough for the little girl to peek through without having to move from the bed. And The Mother, as a young sulking girl, would see her own mother, the object of her affection, marching up the corridor, tightening her hands into fists and shaking her head like a dog, tearing meat off a bone.

  Still, it was something.

  Once, when she was older, not much older, but old enough to know better, The Mother, as a young girl, was playing in the backyard with one of her baby dolls, pretending that she had done an oopsie and needed to change her nappy. She was so careful with her little baby, the way little girls always were, until her attention waned and she dragged that little doll across the dirt and bitumen by its swinging feet. That was always at the end of play, somewhere between a shrieking tantrum and passing out cold and angelic on the living room floor.

  That day, when she was eight, The Mother took her baby doll out of its little sling. She always used her little sling so as to keep her baby close to her heart and of course so that her hands were free to do important girl things like, making a pirouette or pulling on the ends of her mother’s ‘going out’ dress.

  When she rested her baby on the ground, placing of course, a fine cloth under the baby’s back so that she didn’t get any dirt or sand on her new clothes, The Mother caught, by pure chance, sight of the side gate, swinging lightly back and forth on its broken hinge, its hinge that had broken that very second.

  Funny that.

  Maybe she wasn’t being a good pretend mother because she kissed her baby doll on the cheek and said “Mummy will be back in a second. Don’t be silly and move around or I’ll put you in time out. Love you now. Bye”

  And she followed the lure of the creaking and turning gate and she stopped, just long enough to see that it was the right thing to do, to tell no one and to walk on through.

  And that she did.

  The squeaking and screeching brakes were nowhere near as loud as her scream. She didn’t even see the car coming. One second there was a butterfly just about to fly into her hand and then everything was around and around and upside down.

  And the scream, it wasn’t even hers.

  Someone else shouted “Oh my god” and it must have been really different to how little girls screamed to get their mums to look at their pictures or to read them a story or to help them to go to the toilet or to prepare their bath or to make them a juice or to make them feel special for a change, because, by the time she opened her eyes and before she even felt the bruising and twisting of her bones in her arms and the cut above her lip, her mother was already there, nursing her across her legs and pulling her fringe from bothering her eyes.

  And she hadn’t felt pain like that ever. It hurt in every kind of way and it hurt in every place on her body. When she moved it hurt and when she didn’t, it hurt even more. And the only thing she could see was her grazed knee. It was bent and it was twisted, but she didn’t know that. It was just that, lying down, across her mother’s legs, she could see her knee and it looked red and razed and covered in dirt and little clumps of gravel. And she thought that that was what had happened.

  She didn’t see the car.

  Not when it hit her.

  And not after it had driven away.

  But she saw her knee and she saw all of the people orbiting around her like she was their sun and she was giving them something; love and warmth or maybe a sense of mortality, the love and warmth they could take home to their own children, those that the doldrums and monotony of life had them treat like something they could delay, something they could put off for another day, something that would always be there and something that would never grow old, expire or ever go away.

  They warmed themselves on her hurt, on her tragedy.

  And they thought about the people they loved.

  And it warmed them too.

  And some of that warmth, it spilled onto The Mother.

  And it felt wonderful.

  And she could never explain it. Even in therapy, she always came back to this, and she could never plainly understand why. Why was this time so different? Why couldn’t she feel this considered again?

  She tried, though, after that day, she tried the rest of her life, to feel as special and as warm as she had that day. It didn’t matter how badly she had to hurt herself, she just wanted for her mother, or anyone for that matter, to look at her in the same benevolent solicitude as they had, that time when she was eight when she grazed her knee.

  She started by cutting herself, along her arms and on the side of her neck. Not obvious. Just so it was visible to a concerning eye. Those types of people, they weren’t everyone or everywhere, but they did exist and they could hone in on suffering and disparity even when, to the apparently trained eye, everything was normal, nothing was out of
the ordinary and no sign of trouble ever seemed to be there.

  Other people were found all the time. The Mother, though, as a young woman, she wasn’t. She had her mother and her mother; well she had her ‘going out’ dress and a great deal of many other more important things to worry about.

  So then she found the wrong type of boys and she grew fascinated by the hurt that they could cause. And from them she found drugs and she tried them all and she found, finally, the hurt that was so much like a child. It was the kind of hurt that at one second, could warm your entire body and take away all of the needling thoughts that chipped away at your self-esteem or your will, to wake into another day. But just as it could make you feel so belonged and necessitous, it could also take from you, three times what had been given unto you. And it could make you wish that you could walk away whilst knowing full well, that you can’t and you never will.

  And through heroin she had found a kind of love that no man, and not even her aging and abandoning mother, could provide. It was a companion, whom entered her and spilled its sex inside her veins so that her lover coursed through every inkling of her body. And she felt him first, warming her thoughts and painting the back of her throat with his familiar scent. And she felt him then, running his generous hands through her veins and filling the pockets in her skin left sunken and deflated by her ever shrinking soul.

  And though visible was her hurt with her blotched and scabbing skin and so obvious was her condition, as the company she kept was the teeny tiny bugs that crawled and crept beneath the black and purple bruises on her skin and like ants, swarming from their colony, they poured out in invisible droves from the open sores on the folds in her arms, where her lover came inside of her. And still, as she attended to the constant itch, her mother still could not look at her, not as she needed her to. Not as if she had just grazed her knee. For no great feat was it, apparently, for this little girl, to graze and grate her soul.

  And just like that, she stopped using heroin. As if she were learning another language and got bored one day, run down by all the grammar, knowing that the present perfect was anything but. She put aside her syringe and decided that she had had enough.

  Just like that.

  Tired of painting on walls, she looked for another way to graze her knee. And she found a man and he was a good man - or so it seemed. And they were in love.

  And he was young. And she was young, still. Even after all the hurt, after burying such a tremendous weight on her soul, she still remembered how to feel and how to dance and how to speak and how to love and how to laugh out loud, just like her age.

  And they were young.

  And they were stupid.

  And they thought they had everything so sure.

  And then they had Korine.

  And they couldn’t take that back.

  In therapy, The Mother sat in the middle of the circle. She was the yellowy bud to their stretching white petals. Their heads moved about in fanning attention as if a wind of care were constantly turning the people’s considerate eyes in her direction, even when she had nothing to say and even still when it was others who were telling their stories. Even when another’s sadness was being lamented and canted into the air of the room, eyes would turn and drift under the light gust of considerate air and they would fall upon The Mother for they were drawn to her hurt, that which had not been spoken of.

  Maybe The Mother knew this.

  Maybe this was why she never spoke.

  Maybe it wasn’t.

  Maybe it was just a coincidence.

  Or a writer’s cynical point of view.

  They turned regardless, one after the other. And they took the hurt from one another and they melted in their hearts and they turned back to The Mother and looked upon her as if she had just grazed her knee.

  The Father would never understand. He wouldn’t know what it felt like. He wouldn’t even listen. He would pretend. But how could even know how she felt, how she had always felt? How could he possibly sympathize with this loss, as a mother?

  If he did, he would feel as she felt know, being surrounded by a stranger’s adoration. And in feeling this, finally, after all these years of causing so much hurt, after everything she had been through and beneath all the scars that she wore like the lines of age and wisdom, in feeling this, if he could, he would want nothing more and he would never have enough.

  He would be here every day if he could. He would go without food and without sleep. And if it wrinkled and scabbed and blotched and blistered his skin, if it took away all of his weight and left him gaunt and skeletal, if it sank his veins and turned his blood thin, it wouldn’t matter, he would always want more.

  This was what she had longed for the whole of her life.

  She felt surrounded and warm.

  She felt coveted and cared for.

  As if her knee, had just been slightly grazed.