The Last Thread

by Michael Sala

  ‘All you have to do is tell me,’ I say softly, the conviction, the rage, draining out of me.

  She nods. I stand over her and think suddenly of how small she is—her nose the size of my thumbnail—and how tall I must seem, the fury written on my face, my hands hanging by my sides. My hands are very different from how I remember my stepfather’s, but suddenly they feel just as heavy. I walk out of the bedroom and stand in the middle of the living room, staring out the window at the cliffs overlooking the ocean in the distance.

  When I return to her bedroom, my daughter doesn’t notice at first, or pretends not to. She lies on her side looking up at the ceiling, her small jaw still working away. Then her gaze slides towards me.

  I stare down at her. ‘Want a hug?’

  She nods and I pick her up, hold her body against mine, and I shudder with love and self-loathing. My daughter frees an arm from my embrace and points down at the floor.

  ‘No poo,’ she declares with a solemn sweep of her arm. ‘No poo anywhere.’

  ‘Yes,’ I concede, ‘wonderful. You want some lunch?’

  My daughter wants rice bubbles and I feed her two bowls, although she knows very well how to do it herself. After that she goes to sleep without a sound. I lie on my bed and doze, only snapping out of it when the door to the apartment opens and shuts.

  When I walk into the living room, my wife throws me a smile. My wife and I are always throwing each other smiles and expressions. They are barely caught, as if we are keeping something up in the air doomed to give in to gravity sooner or later.

  ‘How was your morning?’

  I tell her that it was okay. I look away. I get my stuff together, kiss her on the cheek and leave the house. I tell her that I’ll be back soon, but as I close the front door, I imagine myself leaving her for good.

  ~

  When my older brother and I get together for a drink, he talks sometimes about the past and the way he used to beat me. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know why he did it; he feels like it wasn’t him.

  Who was it, then?

  I tell him that it’s fine, that I understand. He still doesn’t know where his anger comes from, when he gets drunk, for example, and something happens to make it boil up.

  ‘Do you know what your father did with our money?’ my mother asked me one day. ‘He spent it on boys, when we were living in London. Prostitutes. That’s where your father spent his nights in London and then in Holland. And that’s where he was when you were born. That’s why we were so poor.’

  I wish this was the most unpleasant thing that I knew of him.

  And my stepfather—who immigrated to Australia with us, bringing with him his rich soil of curses—has also become no more than stories and memories, the sort that uncoil inside your head even when you don’t want them to. I have an image of him tamping down his pipe, lifting it to his mouth, hidden in the dense mass of his beard, cupping the lighter close with his other hand and making the tight knot of tobacco at the centre flare into life. That sense I have of his heavy calmness and how quickly it could change.

  I have never hit my daughter. I never would. But when you have such a past, there is an awareness of the possibilities, a question that stays with you, that aches whenever you stray near.

  When my daughter spent the night with me, after my divorce, she slept more soundly. I would stand at the doorway of her room and think of the men who stood at the threshold of mine—who stand there still—and what they have left in me.

  No further than this, I warn them. No further. I watch her sleeping, the peacefulness of her expression, and feel better about the world. She sleeps through the nights, although sometimes she still wakes when she is sick or restless. I don’t make her go back to sleep but let her sit beside me on the couch while I read a book. She is happy to be there, to eat a sandwich, to watch a cartoon and glance over occasionally with a knowing smile, as if we are both visiting someone else.

  10

  Con wants to know what I’m writing about. I tell him that I’m writing about him and me, when we were young.

  Con has a quality that women find fascinating. It’s based around a boyish glint in his eyes, the way it plays against his smile. Our father had that same expression, even when his hair was dead white and years of smoking had pulled his skin into an ashen mask. I have many of my father’s features: the same angular cheeks, his nose, even his forehead with its egg-like fragility at the temples. But the likeness goes when I show my teeth. Somehow I have inherited the features and Con has inherited the pose that brings my father to life, the grin that flashes across his face like sunlight on a mirror.

  My brother is standing in front of me, with his girlfriend, in the pub. He hooks one arm around her waist, holds a drink loosely in front of him and flashes that smile towards me.

  ‘I hope you haven’t portrayed me as some sort of monster,’ he says.

  A girl with a restless gaze and silky bob of dark hair shifts on her seat beside me. She is one of several women my brother has introduced me to in the year since my divorce. He says that I need the practice, that I need to get back in the game.

  ‘I get the feeling that we’re being watched,’ the girl murmurs with the straw of her drink angled against her lips.

  I try an offhand shrug. ‘We are, but who cares?’

  Her glance stabs my way. I don’t know how to read it. I don’t know what to do with my body, where to put it.

  My brother suddenly steps close. ‘Mate, you need to loosen up.’

  He says it loud, with that relaxed grin on his face. He undoes the top button of my shirt, and then the next one.

  ‘We have to bring out the Greek in you.’

  I’m here only because of him. A song comes on. My brother steps back and begins dancing. He’s in his mid-thirties, his prime. In the last few years, his features have shifted, as if an invisible river is wearing down the angles of his nose and cheeks, though his body is still trim and well-built. Black hair glistens at the opening of his shirt. His broad shoulders roll through the music.

  His girlfriend is giggling. She breaks into laughter easily, though there is something brittle in her voice. This is the first time that I’ve met his girlfriend. I’ve already noticed that she looks at him a lot more than he does at her. My brother grins as he dances, but it seems to me that something is missing. I see not so much a boy as a man pretending to be a boy. That, too, is my father, or at least how I remember him.

  ~

  The image is an old one. The last time I saw our father, I was thirteen. My mother had succeeded in getting him to pay for my plane ticket back to Holland, the country she had taken us from some three years earlier, the place where he still lived. My father had pleaded to see my brother rather than me. He claimed that it was because my brother was oldest and that this meant a great deal to him as a Greek. It was a matter of tradition.

  My mother insisted that he had to see me first. If things went well—and this was a thinly veiled threat—she would return with my older brother next time. It seemed ordinary at the time, but I’m amazed now that this negotiation ever took place. Neither of them should have been considering a reunion—not between themselves, and not between him and us. He was, after all, the main reason that we had abandoned Holland.

  My mother and I disembarked at the airport in the middle of winter. My father picked me up while my mother went to stay with my grandmother, whom she had missed intensely, despite their troubled relationship. The plan was that my mother and I would meet again in a few weeks at my aunt’s house in the north of Holland. Apart from one dinner at the house of my grandmother, my mother and I would spend no time together in the intervening period. It was to be the first time in my life that I would have my father to myself.

  My father had shrunk and looked skinnier than I remembered. The colour had leached from his olive skin while his hair, black in my memory, now loomed above his forehead like an enormous drift of snow. Something else had changed. As a boy I’d cal
led him Dad—not because I thought of him as my father, but because I thought that was his name. But now I could only call him by his real name, the name that my mother had always used when she spoke of him in a tone that carried both caution and regret.

  I called him Andreas.

  On the drive to his house I sat in the front seat, staring out at the flat landscape drenched in grey, and it occurred to me that, in the time before my brother and I had gone to Australia, when we used to do things with Andreas, I had never been in the front seat. I was sitting in my brother’s place. After a long silence, Andreas glanced at me, then glanced at me again, more searchingly, as if he recognised something, before his eyes fixed back on the road.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you look just like her.’

  My brother and I had been born out of love; that is what my mother always said. But the love went bad and I wonder now if the love might not have come mainly from my mother.

  Andreas drove with his window wound down, despite the cold air. The smile never entirely disappeared from his face—it was always there, at the edges of his mouth, the tug of an irresistible current. A cigarette dangled from his lips. Smoke trailed from the wide, high arches of his nostrils. His eyes cut back to me one more time.

  ‘I have a surprise for you, Michaelis. You’ll like it.’

  What I didn’t like was the Greek use of my name. I especially hated the way that he said it, with its strained lilt in the middle.

  When we got to his house, it turned out that the surprise was an old friend of mine, someone I had been in Cub Scouts with as a boy, before I’d left for Australia. The two of us had been kicked out of Cubs after we’d gone out of bounds and climbed into the attic of the building where we were staying during a camp. We’d been caught because I had fallen through the roof. I hadn’t seen him again after that.

  Max was fourteen, only a year ahead of me, but he seemed much older to me now. I had no idea how he had come to befriend my father. He had the same lank blond hair that I remembered, and a thin, corded neck. He pulled a cigarette from the packet that Andreas offered, lit it and showed me a trick. He drew deep and exhaled into a tissue. Revealing the yellowish-brown nicotine stain on the inside of the tissue, he told me with a cynical grin that this was why you shouldn’t smoke. He and my father chuckled like war veterans, glanced at one another and pulled on their cigarettes.

  Max did karate and he was eager to demonstrate his training regimen. While Andreas looked on, he jerked his body through a series of moves, and he showed me how to do short, sharp push-ups against a wall. Lots of repetitions, Max told me, that was how you got speed and strength in your punches. He did a hundred of those push-ups every day. His arms were milky, lean pillars of muscle. After this, we all sat around a table and had arm wrestles. He could beat Andreas easily with all of that karate conditioning. So could I.

  ‘You’re growing up, Michaelis,’ Andreas told me in his oddly pitched tone, still saturated with Greek. ‘Turning into a real man, yes, an animaaale!’

  Memories came to me then of being chased around by him in his pyjamas, him on all fours, my brother and I on our feet, running and dodging and laughing. But he always caught us. I had the impulse to look over my shoulder, like Con might be standing in the hallway behind me now. I smiled at my father and felt a mixture of pride and disappointment. I didn’t say how startled I was at his physical smallness, the weakness in his arm, the way I had been able to wrestle it to the table. I wonder now if he had been letting me win. He could be very convincing in his deceptions.

  Still breathing hard from his karate moves, Max lit up another cigarette and turned to Andreas. ‘You should show Mike your videos.’

  Andreas raised his eyebrows. ‘I think he’s a bit young for that sort of thing, aren’t you, Michaelis?’

  ‘I’m not too young at all,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Come on,’ Max urged. ‘He can look away if he doesn’t like it.’

  ‘What would your mother think?’ Andreas stared at me, but flicked his eyes over my shoulder at Max, his mouth hooked at one end as if they were sharing a private joke. His voice was crooning and persuasive when he lowered it.

  I told him that I didn’t care what my mother thought. She was far away, and I was a man now.

  ‘Just remember, Michaelis, that a man doesn’t have to tell his mother everything,’ he said as he put on the video.

  He didn’t need to convince me of that. I had long since started keeping secrets from my mother. I sat on the couch beside Max. There was a flicker of static on the screen, a rush of indistinct noise before the image kicked in. It was a foreign movie, German. We watched a woman in a nurse’s uniform force her hand inside another woman’s vagina.

  ‘Look at that.’ Max leaned into his crossed arms and tensed his fists so that veins rose into the pale skin. ‘Yeah, give it to her. Give it to her.’

  ‘Don’t get ash on my couch,’ Andreas said, ruffling his hair.

  He put an ashtray beside Max and kept on tidying the house, making sure that it was as clean and carefully ordered as the moment I had walked in. The ceiling was low and pale. All of the walls were white. A couple of generic photography prints were hung on the walls in simple glass frames: a waterfall, a lighthouse. The neatness of the place was disrupted only by a plant that had outgrown its pot. Its tendrils, thick as femoral arteries, shot along the window frame and up to the ceiling; its fleshy leaves dangled along the architraves. Glancing at it from where I sat on the couch, I imagined that the plant would keep growing forever, that it would find its way into every room of the house.

  ‘You have the best fucking dad,’ Max said suddenly.

  I watched him briefly, swallowing and drawing at the cigarette between his wet lips, exhaling smoke through his nose exactly the way my father did. My eyes pulled back towards the television, where a man had joined the two women. I had a hard-on. I was grinning; the muscles of my cheeks strained at my jaw. My heart shuddered against the bottom of my throat. But I kept on watching. Most of all, I felt a shameful relief that my brother couldn’t see me.

  Usually the things that I kept hidden from my mother were secrets that I shared with Con. He did the bulk of the lying. It was my job to stay quiet. When we still lived in Holland, he took me once to a place shut off from the world by a tall barbed-wire fence. Signs on the fence said ‘Keep Out’ and ‘Danger’. Con had found a slit cut into the wire and he held it open as he stared back at me. He was eleven and I was eight.

  ‘You’re too young for this,’ he said. ‘You’ll only get us into trouble. You should wait here.’

  I told him that I wasn’t too young, that I could look after myself.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But do exactly what I tell you.’

  I did not want to go through the fence at all, but I was determined to follow him. It was the only way that I could feel close to him. We passed a shooting range, and long chains that looked like they were used to tie up dogs. Paths ran between oaks and pines and past concrete structures with locked metal doors. We came to a place where a huge tree spread its branches beside a narrow road.

  Nearby I could see a building punctured by lights, and people moving around inside. I wanted to stay out of sight and take no chances. The tree facing us had released a sea of tiny nuts. My brother strolled forward, squatted among the nuts in plain view and began eating them. He turned and looked at where I was cowering in the bushes.

  He flashed me his grin. ‘They taste good, Michaelis.’

  There was never a hint of fear in him at these moments. As I started walking, a man in an army uniform came riding past on a bike. When he saw us, everything changed. The world snapped into sharp lines of tension and adrenalin. The man grunted, stumbled off his bike and ran towards us with a tight, focused expression. It was the kind of look that I’d seen on my stepfather’s face a hundred times and I knew what it meant. My brother was off. He yelled at me to run too, and I did, but the distance between us grew with each panting step, and
my brother was out of reach, silent and fluid-limbed, not even looking back. I ran as fast as I could. My ankle jarred against a hole in the ground. I stumbled, then kept running. The man behind me was surprisingly quick on his feet. When I felt his breath right on my neck, I turned around.

  ‘Stay away from me!’ I warned in a shrill voice.

  He seized me by the back of my shirt, lifted me as if I weighed nothing and carried me towards the building with the lights on inside.

  By the time my brother came home, hours later, darkness pressed against the windows of our house. I sat at the dinner table with my mother and stepfather.

  Dirk shoved back his chair and glared at my brother. ‘Where have you been? Don’t you know it’s dinnertime? What have you been up to?’

  Dirk had a way of standing right over us when he asked questions, his shoulders bunched around his neck. My brother glanced across at me, sitting there beside our mother. He had straight, dark hair and my father’s brilliant hazel eyes like polished wood. They were eyes that turned hard in anger, though now they were full of curiosity. With the air of someone repeating a well-worn story, he said that he’d lost me while we were out playing. My stepfather turned and I felt his gaze on me like a dead weight. We were eating sandwiches for dinner. I chewed on my sandwich and shrugged.

  Later, as we lay on the separate levels of our bunk bed, I whispered to my brother about how I’d been made to sit in a room with fluorescent lights, a bunch of men in uniforms around me. They had looked at me until I had started crying. Then they had given me a glass of orange juice and a biscuit and walked me to the front gate and told me never to come back.

  ‘I waited at the fence for hours,’ my brother said softly.

  I thought that he’d pile abuse on me then for not having run quick enough, but he remained silent. It occurred to me suddenly that he was ashamed of having abandoned me. I liked that thought. I had done the right thing, though, by staying silent. These were the important things: to not ask, to not tell.