The Last Thread

by Michael Sala

  Years later—after she broke up with Simon, and after Con and I both moved out and started on our separate lives—my mother moved closer to Jonno, not to Brisbane but to the Gold Coast, which perhaps offered both proximity to Jonno and distance from Dirk. Jonno would come to visit her then on weekends, and Con and I would catch up with him once or twice a year.

  My mother fell into a relationship with an older man. He would provide unwanted fatherly advice to the three of us whenever we came near. There was something obvious and absurd in his advice. To Jonno, it was about losing weight, about getting a grip on his life and showing some ambition. Brian was the former principal of a religious high school.

  To my mother, Brian said once, ‘I really admire the fact that you can walk down the street with that boy without feeling ashamed.’

  I never liked Brian, felt amazed that my mother could stay with him for so long and put up with his endless lecturing and demands. To Jonno, he was nothing, a drop of water off his back.

  ‘I don’t listen to him,’ Jonno said. ‘It’s easy. You smile and nod and you say as little as possible, and then he’s happy.’

  When he said that, it made me realise something. ‘Do you do that with everyone?’

  Jonno laughed.

  I sometimes imagine antidepressants stored in his fat. I have not seen him angry or sad, not since he was a boy. I have never seen him ecstatic, either. I have never seen him shout in rage or curse or break into a run or hammer his fist against a table. Even as a man, he sounds, with that soft, high-pitched voice, like a boy.

  ‘I don’t want my children to die before me,’ my mother would say when the pressure Jonno’s heart was sustaining became clear: the vast, useless distances his blood had to be pushed—through hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of capillaries—to maintain his bulk.

  A heart can be moved from one body to another and it will carry on as if it doesn’t know the difference. At the thinnest point, its walls are only a few millimetres thick, yet it can beat for over a hundred years. For all of its size, Jonno’s heart will probably not beat for anywhere near that time; it will likely just stop, the way a storm drops off in an instant, and the last laboured breath will leave my brother’s chest. But that won’t be the whole story.

  We hardly talk now. Each phone conversation is like a troubled engine threatening to stall on the slightest incline. I speak more to my memories of Jonno than I do to him.

  I do see him sometimes, though—or perhaps see is not the right word. Rather I find myself daydreaming, lost in the past, trying to imagine all the parts I don’t know. Because when Jonno was out of sight for me as a boy, he didn’t exist. But right now I am looking through his eyes as he walks with the other passengers towards a waiting plane.

  He has just spent a holiday with us. Departures is left behind, and it is ahead of him too. He is six and used to travel already, like his brothers. Although he is slim, the tangle of weight and distance is beginning to form inside him. Our mother’s smile is on his lips. He moves between worlds that change when he is not there. He is walking towards the plane that will carry him away again, from the life of our family to the quiet of his father’s house.

  9

  Dutch is an awkward language. It sounds humorous to me even now, except when someone uses it in anger. When my stepfather cursed, I imagined dirt in his lungs, old black farming earth from the north of Holland, clotted with blood and bone.

  Godverdomme.

  Upstairs, in my room, Con is laying into me, and usually when he does this I keep quiet, play dead, wait for it to finish. But today I scream. My brother keeps going, one blow after the other, although bitter resignation kinks his closed mouth. He sees this as a betrayal. Through my screaming, I hear the creak of the stairs, our stepfather’s heavy breath and his deep, guttural curses.

  The door swings open. Dirk fills the doorway and my brother backs away. My brother is particularly handsome at times like this, upright, very alert. He doesn’t show fear, not like I do.

  Dirk moves between us, and his head swings from Con to me and back again. ‘What did I tell you? Idioot!’

  From where I sit on the floor, I can see the crack of his arse, huge and pale, with a swirl of black hair plunging into his corduroy pants. He wrenches off a paint-stained workboot and lifts it over his head. My brother throws a hateful glance my way before Dirk’s back obscures him.

  I wish that I could take satisfaction in what happens next, enjoy my brother’s punishment. But I am waiting for my turn with Dirk. I am always second in line. With each lift of that boot, I glimpse my future.

  Now, thirty years later, whenever I hear the word ‘anticipation’, or try to imagine what will happen next in my life, that feeling laps up against me, although my stepfather is nowhere in sight.

  ~

  Metal chains squeal in protest with each thrust of my arms. My daughter is two, and she has learned to say ‘more’ and ‘push’ and ‘harder’. With these three words, she keeps me busy. I push her on the swing and she keeps returning to me, hair floating on the air like an afterthought, a determined line in her jaw when she casts me a quick glance to make sure I won’t give up.

  This is one of the things we do together, this going to the park. Half of every week I take care of my daughter and we wander around the city looking for things to do. The other half of my daughter’s week belongs to my wife. We are not divorced, we live in the same house, but our lives are neatly separated all the same. There are times when we do things together as a family, visits to the beach or the park or some other outing, and my wife always says, ‘This is good, isn’t it?’ and I agree although my eyes don’t. My eyes have always betrayed me, my emotions thrown up like moths trapped inside a lantern. But I have learned to look away at the crucial moments. I have learned that it is possible to do this with an entire life.

  The time that my wife and I spend alone together happens after May is asleep, when we sit in front of the television. We massage each other’s shoulders with oil for lovers and exchange conversation in the advertising spaces that dismember the usual television programs about crime and death. I don’t mind talking then, because we are staring in the same direction. I have come to see television as one of the sacrifices you make for love.

  After the park, I take May to the library. We walk in through the large, open doors just as a young woman walks out. She is wearing those tight pants that look like painted-on jeans. My gaze snags on her and I glance over my shoulder as she walks off.

  Whenever such longing comes, I think of my real father, who was known for his wandering eye, and how he was generally forgiven for it because of his charming nature. I know more of my father through what my mother has given me than through my own interactions with him. He still lives in another country, on the other side of the world, and the last that I heard, he was caring for his other ex-wife, the religious one, who was dying of lung cancer. We haven’t spoken in twenty years, but information trickles through.

  ‘It’s strange,’ my mother will tell me, ‘how you hardly saw him, but then you laugh or move your hand, just like that, and I can see him there, just like when I fell in love with him.’

  This is the story I have of how my parents fell in love: my father was dating my mother’s best friend. He was always talking to my mother whenever her friend was out of the room—a brush of his hand, a smile, playful and light, as if they were brother and sister. One day, he hugged his girlfriend, stared lingeringly at my mother and winked, like they were sharing a joke.

  A year later, my brother was born, and three years after that I came along, a home birth on the thirteenth floor of an apartment block in a town near the southern border of Holland. My first words were Dutch, but I can’t remember them.

  I arrived early by kicking a hole in my mother’s stomach; so I believed as a boy. I was always accused of a terrible clumsiness, and this version of events made sense to me. The midwife coughed and smoked through the whole labour and had to wipe the ash fro
m my face before she announced, in a voice dry as paper, that I was the handsomest baby she’d ever laid eyes on. When my father returned from whatever errands had been absorbing him, he borrowed money from my grandfather for a bunch of flowers, came into the bedroom with the flowers in one fist, the other in his pocket, and stared at me long and hard.

  ‘Are you sure that I’m the father?’ he asked.

  We moved on from Holland to England and rented an apartment where everything was coin-operated: the heating, the stove, the shower, the phone. We didn’t have a lot of coins. My father was struggling to find work. He had borrowed five thousand guilders from my grandparents, but most of that money had vanished. There was a mystery to this money that I would hear of years later, yet what I grew up knowing was that we didn’t have anything; that it caused the inevitable conflicts; that I would often turn blue with cold; that the walls ran with condensation; that my father was not often around; that I was not a good sleeper. My mother would walk the streets of London by herself, driven by loneliness and the crying that leaked out of me as if I were connected to some limitless reservoir beneath the city. ‘The moment that I saw you,’ my mother said, ‘I knew that you had been here before, that you were an old soul.’

  I think that my mother sometimes confuses unhappiness with experience.

  ~

  May is in front of me, singing a song, completely lost in the moment. Sometimes she wakes me up like that, at five in the morning, singing in her bed, clapping her hands to mark the rhythm. I lift a finger to my mouth and catch her eye, and she smiles until she gets my meaning, then frowns and falls silent before running ahead into the open, quiet spaces of the library. I wonder suddenly if I am discouraging her zest for life. I imagine sometimes that I am moving through life like some kind of blundering surgeon, pinching off possibilities like they’re arteries.

  May wanders into the children’s section and fondles the spines of books. She pulls the books out and leaves them splayed in her wake. Someone ought to pull her into line. I take a book about the decline of the Roman Empire from a shelf and sink into a chair. My daughter comes up to me and touches my knee.

  ‘Done poo poo,’ she tells me.

  We collect our things and go to the toilet. I use up half a packet of wipes. Her underwear goes into the bin. My daughter stands on the counter next to the sink, sees herself in the mirror and starts swaying her hips from side to side, humming under her breath. I tell her to stop, and she puts more sideways thrust into her hips.

  ‘Just cut it out,’ I tell her in a sharper tone. She stops.

  I regret it immediately. My daughter is not afraid of my wife’s anger, only of mine. I get irritable when I am tired, and these days I am tired all the time. I have lost control of what I had always assumed would be mine: sleep. I knew that it was coming—plenty of people warned me—I just didn’t know how bad that lack would be. My daughter wakes sometimes in the middle of the night crying so fiercely that her face develops a rash, and in that hysteria, she is impossible to communicate with. She looks enraged, as if she does not recognise a thing in this world. My wife, who gets up exactly half the time with her, holds her and rocks her and pleads and eventually starts crying herself. Please go back to sleep, she tells our daughter. Please, please, please go back to sleep. This can go on for hours. I just listen. The muscles in my arse are like the workings of a clock, marking the passage of this time by winding more tightly into themselves.

  When it is my turn, I pick my daughter up and I also tell her to stop. If this doesn’t work, I take her to the shower and hold her head near a stream of cold water and threaten to put her under. Twice I have put her head under. When I make this threat, she bites at her own sobs until they retreat back into her chest. Sometimes I imagine my daughter, twenty years from now, shrugging when someone asks about her overwhelming fear of water. I hold her after she has calmed down, until she goes to sleep, and feel tender at her peacefulness, her vulnerability. But I am ashamed rather than satisfied, and my wife treats me with a wounded contempt that transmits itself in the angle of her body, turned away from me in the bed.

  With my daughter asleep, I lie down beside my wife, separated from the comfort layer of the mattress by the knots in my muscles. I lie there, listening to my wife breathe, and wait to fall asleep myself. Something clicks in the back of my wife’s throat when she sleeps. I imagine it is the last sound someone might make before they die. I know that my daughter could start up again at any moment. Her distress stays with me like the pain of a burn long after she has drifted off. Falling asleep is like putting my head between the jaws of a lion.

  Keep it open, I think to myself, keep it open, but I am no longer talking about a lion and instead thinking of a door that connected me to the outside world when I lay in bed at night as a boy.

  I was terrified of the dark. ‘You’ll never learn,’ my stepfather would say, ‘if I don’t teach you.’

  Then the door shuts.

  May and I have left the toilet and returned to the library. I sink into a chair with my book of ancient history. I start flicking through the pages, reading summaries of the lives of late Roman emperors, and how they spent their time going mad or patching up ruptured borders, chasing barbarians out of the disintegrating limbs of the empire, quelling mutinies of their own armies. The decline of civilisation, onset of the dark ages, all of that.

  I reflect on how daunting it must have been for an emperor to wake up every morning to one problem after another, making decisions that could wipe out cities or nations, just to keep something going for a few decades more. It fascinates me how all the intricate and bloody struggles of countless human beings over several decades can be shoehorned into a couple of paragraphs on a piece of paper. So many people can disappear between those words.

  A familiar-looking mother walks past, glances at my daughter and then at me.

  ‘Gosh, she’s grown. It goes so fast, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘It does.’

  ‘Make the most of it.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, fighting the urge to salute. ‘I will.’

  I don’t say anything else and the woman walks off. My daughter has come to sit in the chair beside me. She has collected a pile of books and makes a show of reading one. We read together for a little while in silence. May lifts one sandalled foot onto the chair cushion and hums softly as she pushes it back and forth in a dreamy way. I note this from the corner of my eye and then turn to look at her more directly. She is pushing something with that foot, and when I look closely I realise that it is shit. It’s vital stuff, shit, a sure sign of life, as compelling as any book. I pick her up and put her on the floor.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  The shit is all over the chair. I glance from this to her legs and see streaks of it along her thighs, a clump hanging like a pendulum on the inside of her shorts. It is all over the floor, too. She’s just been to the toilet. Where did this all come from? I feel like I have just woken up, like I’m still groggy, trying to disentangle myself from my own thoughts.

  ‘Don’t you dare move!’

  I take out a wipe and run it across the chair. I succeed in spreading the shit over the cushion, turning it into the kind of economical yet expressive flourish you might see in a Japanese symbol. I back away, feel myself flush with despair, pick up several clumps from the carpet, fold them in a wipe, drop them into my pocket and look towards the service desk, where a young woman runs a stack of books under the scanner.

  ‘Look, Daddy!’ My daughter’s voice rings through the quiet. ‘More poo, there on the carpet. And there!’

  I have some on my fingers. Everyone will turn around soon to see me and my poo-stained hands standing in the middle of this mess. My daughter will be happy to point out the sights. She is giggling with delight. I grab her hand and pull her small, light body along.

  As we pass the woman at the service desk I loudly declare, ‘We don’t have any books!’

  Several people glance across. I
feel like I’m smuggling drugs through customs.

  In the toilet, I clean my daughter up the best I can. I am infuriated at her betrayal. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why?’

  I throw her pants in a plastic bag, put another bag against her bare arse—it sticks there without a problem and flutters sadly as I put her in the pram. She’s finally realised how upset I am and doesn’t even attempt to sing. We begin walking home at a brisk pace. She quietly asks for her wrap. She likes to put the corner in her mouth and suck on it for comfort.

  ‘No,’ I snarl at her. ‘Not your wrap. You’re not getting your damn wrap! Don’t even ask for it again!’

  There’s shit everywhere: in the pram, on her belly, on the plastic bag flapping up between her legs, tar-like and sticky. I don’t want it getting into her mouth. It’s not as bad as I think, I tell myself. I’ll probably look back on this and laugh. There are other libraries I can go to around the city. Maybe there’s a witness protection program for people who leave shit in chairs for other people to sit in.

  My daughter begins sobbing.

  ‘Not a sound out of you!’ My voice is getting louder. Some people across the road look over at me. This makes me more ashamed and angry at May all at once. I know that I’m being an arsehole, but I know it only from a distance. ‘All you have to do is tell me when you need to do a poo, or afterwards. You don’t sit in it and play with it! Not at the library! Daddy’s not happy at all. When we get home, you’re getting a bath and going to bed. I don’t even want to talk to you anymore.’

  We walk on in silence. My daughter chokes back her tears. When we get home, I put her under the shower. I wash her without any tenderness and even stick her head under the shower, which makes her finally break into sobs. Then I put her pyjamas on and put her into her bed. Only then do I stop moving and look down at her. My daughter has put her wrap in her mouth. She feeds the corner between her lips and works it with a slight, repetitive motion of her jaw. Her sad blue eyes are turned up at me.