Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9B

  The first guests started to arrive around seven. The Father stayed on the computer, pretending to be too engaged in whatever he was doing to be able to attend to the pretentious air kissing and consolidating smiles. He wondered how long he could stay there; away from all that social kafuffle, before he would be forced to a least make a brief appearance.

  “Make yourselves comfortable,” said The Mother, taking her guests’ coats and pointing them in the direction of the bottle of red wine in the living room.

  “Your apartment is wonderful” Fiona said, almost floating into the room in heavenly intrigue, her eyes drifting like a lily in an open stream, swaying from the polished candle brass that aligned the walls, flickering dimly lit shadows across the polished hardwood floors, to the open balcony, where a light breeze swept about a scattering of colored petals.

  The Mother smiled at first until she herself caught sight of the white net unfurling from its tight bind beside a heap of silver hooks, in the corner beside the rocking chair. And in a second she felt exposed as if there were some bubbling sore on her lip or some pulling run in her tights that she was sure was plain and obvious and was bound to be the topic of quiet, pensive discourse.

  “Let me show you around,” she said, curling her arm like a bend in the stream, around Fiona’s back, and, as if illusion were her occupation, her sleight of hand fed the curiosity of her starving guests before that interest fed upon her soiled and secretive treasures.

  As she took her guests away from the balcony and towards her bedroom, she cast a galling stare towards her husband who, wearing a studious and soaking expression, ignored the passing curiosity of these unwelcomed intruders and continued to allude to the utmost importance of what it was that he was watching in apparent assiduousness, that which meant that everything else could wait.

  And the guests, the intruders and the passers-by, they all nodded and smiled as they intrusively passed on by, taking The Father’s ire and learned visage as a reason not to disturb, oblivious, as to the air of fatigue and ill-feeling that was readily erupting from the pit of his stomach and blowing a gale in his uninhabitable mind.

  And as the procession of strangers tip toed past the door, apologizing and begging for excuse, The Father offered little more than a faint nod of his head, no more pressing than a worn driver, falling asleep at the wheel, as little children stuck out their cheeky tongues between their mothers legs who made hasty conclusions about his pale complexion and their husbands, hoping somewhat that they could debate over dinner, whatever it was that kept his attention so captive.

  And as they passed, conducted by his wide eyed wife, he continued to flick, detachedly, as he waited for the news and weather to load, through a thousand images of satiric and orgiastic sex, scouring the internet’s endless chasm of lascivious pornography, circling his mouse over the rolling eyes, the salivating orifices and stiffened members of young women and men, enthralled in consummate purge and helotry.

  And beside the images, in streaming windows, there played videos of improvised bombs, detonating near American tanks, groups of tattooed skateboarders kicking one another in the crotch, Russian trucks, merging tranquilly into the path of oncoming traffic on picturesque, country roads and finally, little black cats, tapping their little white paws on grand pianos, playing Grieg’s Morning Mood and reminding The Father that they hadn’t bought any toilet paper.

  And it seemed that no amount of sex or violence could bring him to thrill or to offense. It seemed that nothing could rattle him. And it was just that of which he felt, nothing; unsure if he was straight or gay, or if he was just bored and uninspired.

  And he wondered, the whole time, if the numbness that he felt inside was permeant or if there was anything at all that could innerve his senses before the morning came.

  But as much as his distractions offered him respite from his thoughts, he couldn’t ignore his wife’s sour expression, not any longer, which urged him away from the computer and out onto the balcony. And he knew exactly what she was hinting at. So while the whispering adults hushed their snickering children, The Father snuck past and stepped quietly onto the balcony and retrieved the uncoiling, nylon net and the collection of shiny silver hooks, taking them to the only room with a lock on it.

  As he reached for his key which he kept on a string around his neck, a young boy pulled on the leg of his jeans and stared at him. The boy said nothing. He just looked at the net and then looked at The Father and then walked away, his attention captured by the shimmering shine of a pair of sharpened scissors, tucked between a folded newspaper and a box that said ‘Do Not Open’.

  The Father quickly tucked the netting into the room and locked the door once more, turning his attention to the young boy with a set of scissors in his hand, swinging them around his head like the locks of a plastic doll, his threat seemingly invisible to the guests who sat at the table, drinking wine and sharing their thoughts on trending polemics like the war and the famine and Aids and the flu, and celebrities, whose infants had not lived to full term. And each gave the other time enough to say what they had to say before they repeated the same thing themselves and they all, wearily and longingly, basted their attention in a dark and musky woeful depression.

  “Come and join us,” said The Mother, pulling a seat.

  The table looked at The Father for a second and then returned to their heated debate.

  “I’m just saying is all… If it were me, I would have had an ambulance on standby. You can believe what you want but at the end of the day, if your baby gets hurt, how could you live with yourself?”

  The Father had no idea what they were talking about but at a guess, it was surely about death for it was all anyone ever spoke of anymore. Around the table, the women clutched photos of children whose faces had been littered all over the news after an accident with their bus. They all had one and they spoke of the pain and suffering and senseless tragedy as if their spoken breath were most certainly gently caressing in the afterlife, the spirits of lives that were cut so short.

  “Do you know how many dead there were?” asked one of the women.

  “I don’t know,” Fiona said as if she were the responding officer. “At the moment there are three dead,” she said to gasps of disbelief, “but there could be a lot more. That’s what we’re looking out for at the moment. Were you looking” she said, staring at The Father.

  “What? Sorry?” he said, pulled out of his delusion.

  “On the computer, were you looking at the updates? Did you see how many have died so far? On the news, on your computer? Were you looking?”

  The Father thought of vaginas and Kinder Surprises and that little cat.

  “I don’t. I don’t watch the news” he said.

  The table stared at him oddly as if he had broken wind or had rambled in a foreign tongue. Then they turned back to Fiona who was on her cell phone, flicking through catalogues of headlines. And the table, hardly satisfied with what they had heard, fanned her verse, hungry for more.

  “So,” said one of the women.

  “Three dead, as I said. And, oh god, there were forty children on board.”

  The women all gasped once more, their hands tied to their mouths.

  “And there were apparently five special needs children. Oh, that’s horrible. Those poor things. As if life hadn’t been cruel enough. I mean can you imagine…” she said, pausing and looking around the table, making sure every set of eyes was upon hers. “Can you imagine if it was one of your children?”

  The women all stopped. With the pictures of the killed and critically injured children in their hands, they all seemed to drift for a moment, as if they were imagining the faces of their own children on the photos in their hands.

  “It says here that two children are fine. They were unscathed apparently. Not a scratch” Fiona said.

  “But what about the others, the injured?” a woman said, passing on a shot of relief and laying her hand upon another pint of disparity.

&nbs
p; “Well, they’re saying there are seventeen children who are critical and are in ICU at the moment. There’s another eighteen or so with serious injuries, but not life threatening.”

  “Will they make it?” a woman asked, in the same manner that The Father had heard his wife years before asking if he thought it would rain, on the day they planned to go to the beach. “The seventeen? Do you think more will die? God! that would be terrible.”

  “I’m not sure,” Fiona said. “But it doesn’t look good. The parents are all at the scene. None of them are giving interviews. You can imagine” she said.

  “Those poor mothers. It must be so horrible.”

  “Can you imagine if all seventeen died?” Fiona asked.

  The women all dropped their stares and imagined. Those who had their children nearby, they reached for them and pulled them close. They nursed them with their hands while their little angels fidgeted and squirmed and tried to break away to continue playing with some toys they had found in a box that had been marked ‘Do Not Open’.

  They ran their fingers through their children’s hair and curled the ends that could, twisting their fingers round and around, just like The Mother who, under the table, curled and platted a single thread on a small colored butterfly, her hands as invisible and as hard to read as her vacant stare.

  “You know, we forget, but they really are miracles, our children, they are all miracles,” Fiona said, rubbing the top of her son’s head.

  The women all agreed.

  “They are miracles,” they all said in concurrent harmony.

  “My little miracle” Fiona said, nudging against her son’s cheek.

  “No they’re not,” said The Father, breaking his peace.

  The women looked at him oddly once more.

  “Sorry?” Fiona said, leading the rebuttal.

  “They’re not miracles. Your children, anyone else’s, they’re not miracles. You can’t just say that. Life is not miraculous. It happens all the bloody time. Plants, animals, humans, there’s a lot of it going on and it’s been going on for a quite a long fucking time if you ask me. You can’t just take a word and use it out of context. That’s how languages become irrelevant. It’s how shit becomes ambiguous and the truth becomes impossible to fucking say. You can’t just do that. You can’t do that. You can’t. You really think your son is a miracle?” shouted The Father.

  Fiona looked at The Mother and gave her a particular look as if her child were being loud and rambunctious in church and disrupting the pastor. But the Mother, though her eyes were open, her thoughts were a million miles away and she had heard nothing. And The Father, he stood up. He leaned over the table. And he continued.

  “To propose all life as a miracle is to assume that the concept of conception through to carrying, developing and birthing a child is inherently dangerous, more so perilous to the life of the infant and the life of its mother. If you think all children are miraculous then that means that every pregnancy is expected to fail and every birth is a rare undiagnosed condition, quite rightly worthy of more than brief light celebration. Each and every successful birth would be worthy of a national fucking holiday. Each baby born would be regarded as a medical fucking marvel. A fucking breakthrough. This type of event would be in print. It wouldn’t be whispered but yelled in awe, painted in the eardrums of anyone who would listen, for everyone needs to hear, ‘we defied nature once again, another child was born’.”

  Fiona smiled much like The Mother had, her nerves entwined.

  “I’m not done,” said The Father. “Now, with this in mind; that all children are miracles as you said, if some poor lady was to lose her infant during carriage or during labor, like some of you have,” he said, staring across the table. “And according to what you believe, the death of that child, being expected, of course, would not be a tragedy, not at all. But instead, it would just be a repeated insignificant event, like an anniversary of some aunt you can’t remember. In fact, in many cases, the mother might even in fact feel relieved that the outcome she had planned came true, that the infant didn’t live full term or in the case of death during labor, that the thrill was kept until the final moment. To say that all children are miracles is to say that the death of your child is not a tragedy. That it’s normal. You really want that?”

  “Babe, please,” said The Mother, pulling on his arm. “Not now, for fuck’s sake.”

  “No, it’s ok,” Fiona said. “We’ve all been there before. He’s just grieving. Isn’t he hunny” she said, looking at her husband. “He’s just venting. It’s natural. He doesn’t mean it.”

  “And your killing another perfectly good language,” said The Father.

  “Babe” pressured The Mother.

  “Fuck it,” said The Father. “Whatever.”

  There was more awkward silence that was broken only by the sound of Fiona’s cell phone beeping. The women all looked to her, unhooking themselves from The Father’s virulent bait.

  “What is it?” one of the women asked, forgetting The Father’s rant and thinking about those poor seventeen children again and if their conditions had worsened.

  “There’s going to be a vigil tomorrow, in the afternoon,” Fiona said. “I think we should go and support the mothers. They need people like us at this time, mothers of sympathy, mothers who have lost their own children, mothers who know and mothers who care. We could write sympathy cards.”

  “And talk about our own experience.”

  “Exactly,” Fiona said. “So they know they’re not alone. I know they say they want distance and to be left alone, but that’s just shock and grief talking. I know. I’ve been there. We’ve all been there. What they want is to be around love and to not feel isolated and unfamiliar. We have to go.”

  The women all nodded their heads, squeezing their children tight against their stomachs, scared to let them go, no matter how hard they tried to wriggle themselves free.

  “We could car pool,” Fiona said. “What do you think?”

  They all nodded once more, their faces turning from sullen to zoetic, no longer looking like half filled balloons.

  “You could drive,” Fiona said, looking at The Mother. “Your car is big isn’t it? It would be great for fitting most of the mothers and…”

  “Korine comes home tomorrow,” said The Father, hammering a nail in her balloon.

  “Oh,” Fiona said, unsure really where to go next.

  “It’s her birthday. And we’re having a party” said The Father. “You’re all invited,” he said, knowing the answer would be no.

  Fiona looked at The Mother, who was smiling uncouthly as if her mouth had been stuffed with a mound of wet shit and tiny burning peppers, and under the table, her fingers pulled frenziedly on both colored wings, threatening to tear them apart.

  “Well I’d have to check my agenda,” Fiona said, and the other mothers all nodded, looking at The Father as if he were some cold and maniacal doctor whose maddened experiment meant more to him than the hurt that it caused.

  There was an awkward silence. The mothers all ducked their chins into their children’s scalps, burying their faces into their messy hair and wishing away this moment. The only one who spoke was Fiona’s husband, the only other father at the table.

  “Do you like football?” he asked in a manner that showed he knew nothing about football. He may as well have asked about the innersole of women’s pumps. But it wasn’t his fault; it was the cavalier in him, gripping like a drowning man, at thin hair, something to stop the whole evening from going under.

  “I hate sport,” said The Father.

  “Me too. I hate the fanatics as well. I just… well…” he said nervously. “What do you like?”

  “I don’t know,” said The Father, his eyes locked on The Mother, and his words absolutely honest, for he didn’t know.

  “Neither do I, to tell you the truth,” Fiona’s husband said.

  And he was telling the truth also. He had no idea what he liked or what made him f
eel kind and appreciated. Nobody ever did.

  “I’m gonna go,” said The Father. “I gotta… uh… put something up in the... uh… yeah” he said, pointing blindly over his shoulder and walking away from the table before anyone could offer him their adieu.

  The Father turned and headed up the hall. His mind was adrift in a moment of calm. For the first time in days, he found himself absconded from the thought of his daughter standing, on the steps of a clinic in the pouring rain. He could breathe again, as if his lungs had been scraped clean of the black soot that had left him choking throughout his days, desperate to think about anything other than her and her sad little face and the fact that his dreams and his thoughts, they always had him standing on the other side of the road, ignoring her whimpering and unable to reach out to her or to coldly look away.

  Venting at those mothers had relieved him in a way that masturbation never could.

  Later that evening, as The Mother said goodbye to her guests, apologizing for her husband’s outburst and apologizing too, for not being able to attend the vigil, The Father sat in the children’s bedroom, the only room with a lock on the door. And as The Mother’s heels clicked and clacked up the hall towards the door, The Father felt a sickly shiver in his stomach and across his back, expecting some uncomfortable outbreak to occur.

  The Mother opened the door gently and watched as her lover leaned precariously out of the window, leaning up towards the top of the window frame, screwing large silver hooks into the wood and showing the part of his stomach that she loved to sexualize, the path to happiness she called it.

  “Are you coming to bed?” she asked.

  “I wanna finish this,” he said.

  The Father was inside the room now, stretching the nylon net around each silver hook and trying to cover the whole frame. He’d never done it before but assumed that it couldn’t be that hard. He’d seen the guy going around the building at the moment, charging a fortune for putting them up. He didn’t look like a genius. It’s a net and fucking string. And they didn’t have the money, not right now.

  “You didn’t have to say what you said you know.”

  The Father huffed and puffed like a stormy dragon and he continued with the net.

  “You could talk to me.”

  “Whatta you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Look at me. Ask me how the fuck I’m doing. Anything.”

  “Well,” he said, turning with an ailing look. “How the fuck are you doing?”

  “You’re a cunt,” she said. “And I saw that shit you’ve been looking at. Fucking sluts and whores. It’s sick. It’s degrading and disgusting. Is that what you need to get off now?”

  “It’s what I need to forget,” he said to himself.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Fucking nothing. It’s just porn alright? Fuck.”

  The Mother took a deep breath but she wouldn’t let it go and she tried to hold onto it for as long as she could. She tried to hold onto it forever. But it escaped and it left her gasping and abraded.

  “You’re doing it all wrong,” she said. “You know that don’t you?”

  acceptance