The Family Clause

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  They part ways with separate night-time routines, one changing a nappy and putting on pyjamas, preparing oatmeal and brushing the one-year-old’s teeth. The other does roughly the same with the four-year-old. Good luck, they say. See you on the other side. One of them heads for the cot next to their bed, the other for the children’s room and the bunk bed where the four-year-old sleeps on the bottom and the top is used as storage for broken race tracks, a rickety plastic plane, a classic wooden rocking horse that is beautifully carved but easy to trap a toe beneath, and all kinds of other things there isn’t room for anywhere else: a broken pair of binoculars, three children’s backpacks, outgrown Santa costumes, outgrown ordinary clothes, drawings from playschool that should be put into frames before they get ruined, paper crowns marked with the numbers 3 and 4, which the four-year-old got from playschool on her birthday. Bedtime generally takes between half an hour and ninety minutes. They read stories. They tuck in. They cuddle. They say goodnight. They give goodnight kisses. They try to sneak out. They get called back. They fetch water. They fetch the potty. Eventually, one of them falls asleep. Then the other. The one-year-old sits impatiently in his cot while his mother dozes on the rug below. The four-year-old creeps out into the hallway the minute her father falls asleep in bed next to her. But eventually, at some point between seven and eight, both children will fall asleep. That’s when the parents’ own time begins. Time to drink tea and relax, they say, going out into the kitchen where they start arguing. They argue about the fact that one of them slept longer yesterday. They argue about the fact that the mother feels like she is constantly being criticised for thinking that it’s important to eat organic and reduce the children’s consumption of meat and milk and sugar and gluten. They argue about the fact that the father is responsible for paying the family’s bills. But I’m the one who’s responsible for earning all the money? says the mother. Not all of it, says the father. Plus I am on paternity leave. And I work full-time, says the mother. Or try to. But it’s hard when I also have to scrub the bathroom and wash, dry, sort and fold the washing. I cook at the weekends, I cut the kids’ nails, I . . . But it’s me who does the vacuuming, says the father. And I’m planning the birthday party. And updating the wireless network. How hard can it be to update a wireless network? she asks. I clean the plug in the bath, too, he says. And do more nights than you. What do you want me to say? she asks, glancing at her phone to see how much of their own cosy time they have left. Thanks? If so: thanks. Thanks so bloody much for updating the wireless network. Thanks for cleaning the plughole. I just really don’t understand why you’re so fucking dependent on applause. We’re both responsible for this family, we’re meant to work together, but you can’t even empty the dishwasher without telling me about it. And? he says. I don’t know what you want me to do, she says. Say thanks, he says. I don’t do anything else, she says. Thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks THANKS! The one-year-old wakes up. They look at one another. It’s like a duel, only in reverse. I’ll do it, he says. No, I’ll go, she says. No, because if you go he’ll never get back to sleep, he says, tiptoeing towards the bedroom. He hushes the one-year-old. He strokes his forehead with a finger. He folds back the covers and whispers that it’s still night. The one-year-old struggles onto his feet. He screams until he is blue in the face. He squirms as if the mattress is made of lava every time the father tries to make him lie down. Eventually, it works. After fifteen minutes of screaming. The father is thinking about the neighbours the whole time. Can they hear the screaming? Do they think we’re doing something wrong? That we’re bad parents? Do they each sit with a glass to the wall, listening to the children wake up and scream all night long? Are they thinking about calling social services? He leaves the bedroom. He moves more quietly than a ninja. He steps on pieces of Lego without making a sound. He sneezes silently and knows exactly which of the floorboards creak.

  By half nine, the one-year-old has woken up four times. At ten, the mother and father go to bed. At eleven, the one-year-old wakes and is given some oatmeal. At one, the four-year-old wakes and mumbles that she wants water and a banana without a spoon. At two, the one-year-old wakes and hits himself in the mouth as though he has toothache. At half two, the painkiller kicks in and the one-year-old nods off again. At three, the four-year-old wakes, terrified of the snakes behind the curtain. At four fifteen, the one-year-old wakes wanting breakfast, a story, to do his morning poo and to run around the flat with his walker. At half four, the four-year-old wakes up because the one-year-old is awake. A new day begins. Again and again.

  In the gap between two wake-ups, the father lies in bed listening to the wind whistle through the railings around the balcony. He wants to sleep, but he can’t. His girlfriend is asleep on the sofa. The father can’t remember the last time they slept in the same bed. He feels an anger that he can’t quite place. When the children aren’t sleeping, he can be patient for half an hour. Maybe even an hour. But then he feels an urge to hold a cushion over the four-year-old’s face. He wants to throw the one-year-old against a wall. But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. That would be bad parenting. Instead, he takes a firm grip of the one-year-old’s chubby thigh and holds him down against the mattress. He cuddles him and bounces up and down on both feet to try to stop the crying. He sings that goddamn song about the troll’s mother once, ten times, thirty times. He sings it in a calm voice, he sings it in a whispered voice, he tries rapping it, he shouts it as loudly as he can to overpower the howling. The one-year-old leans back and screams in panic, he pushes away from the father, his neck damp with sweat, he screams himself hoarse, he screams as though his life depended on it, and the father feels an urge to take him out into the kitchen, turn on the light, make some tea, grab some biscuits and set a thing or two straight: okay. Hello? Are you listening? It’s time to stop this nonsense. This isn’t cool. Seriously. You need to realise that we’re doing our best here. We’re following all the advice they gave us at the children’s clinic. We’ve got night-time routines. We avoid having beans for dinner. We give you the same dairy-free, organic oatmeal every night. We wave goodbye to the lights and the cars. We brush your teeth. We read goodnight stories and wind down. We have nightlights and meditation music. We pick you up when you cry and set you down once you’re calm. But this whole family thing actually hinges on you pulling your weight, too. You can’t just keep on waking up ten times a night when we’re doing our very best as parents. Will you promise that you’ll try a bit harder? That you’ll do your best to make sure we don’t end up here again? But rather than leaving the bedroom, the father tries hushing the baby with wave sounds, then a low hum, then back to the wave sounds, but when his son refuses to calm down the waves begin to sound more like a tsunami, anyone would be terrified of that, but sometimes it works to jolt the one-year-old out of his scream-himself-hoarse-and-arch-his-back bubble. Quite often it doesn’t work at all and the one-year-old panics because the father sounds like an airboat, and then it takes another twenty minutes for him to calm down. By the time he finally falls asleep, it’s the father who is sweaty. He stands perfectly still for a few minutes, then he crawls back into bed and tries to get some sleep.

  Lately, his dreams have revolved around various playgrounds. He will be pushing the one-year-old on a swing, and then the one-year-old throws up. The father doesn’t have any wet wipes with him and has to use the one-year-old’s bib. That’s the entire dream. In another, they are in a sand pit. Just sitting there. Time passes. The one-year-old grabs fistfuls of sand and drops it into a bucket. Then he pours the sand out. Then he grabs more sand and drops it into the bucket. A bird lands and looks at them. It cocks its head with what the father interprets as empathy, but which could just as easily be indifference. The one-year-old takes no notice of the bird. He’s too busy filling his bucket with sand. And then pouring it back out. Suddenly, his face turns scarlet and he starts huffing and puffing. The father spends the
rest of the dream wandering around a warehouse or down long, university-like corridors, searching for a toilet with a changing table. Lately, he has even reached the point where he has started making comments about the dullness of his dreams while he is still in them. Oh, come on, pack it in, he says to himself in the dream. We need to introduce a threesome here. Get out of the sand pit, walk over to the road, carjack a vehicle waiting at a red light and drive straight to the nearest twenty-four-hour sex club. Do sex clubs even exist in Sweden? You’re dreaming, you bloody idiot, everything’s possible here! he answers his own question. Right, he says, staying put in the sand pit. The one-year-old eats some sand. The father gets the sand out of his mouth and says: don’t eat sand. The one-year-old puts more sand into his mouth. The father gets it out and says: don’t eat sand. The father is so tired, but for some reason he can’t sleep. Then he falls asleep. Ten minutes later, the one-year-old wakes up.

  * * *

  A grandfather who is a father is still lying on the sofa. His muscles have wasted away. His spine can’t support him. The pain in his feet gets worse and worse the less he walks, and will never disappear completely because it is linked to his incurable diabetes. His poorly oxygenated blood has damaged the nerves in his feet. His body is rotting from the inside out, and he will soon be dead. But the worst part is his vision. At first, his eyes work like normal. Watching TV4, he can see the individual strands of the presenter’s beard as he announces that Without a Trace will soon be on, followed by Die Hard 1 and Die Hard 2. The father smiles, because Die Hard 1 and 2 are two of the best films. Especially the second one. Then Without a Trace starts, and one eye goes blurry, he has to squint to focus, he struggles to see whether it’s a man or a woman or an elk wandering around the graveyard in the snow. He hears voices, police officers speaking to one another in English, a car starting, two others driving by, the sound of children laughing, the creaking of a swing or possibly an unoiled bicycle, a shot, two more, quick footsteps, tense music. His ex-wife says it’s a blessing that these episodes of his are only temporary, his children say he’s imagining things, the man by the harbour tells him where he last saw his daughter but refuses to take the money, his daughter doesn’t recognise him at first, but then she does, she starts running, her mother says: You’ve got no right to be following my daughter. He needs to get his eyes checked. His children will have to help him. They can go online and book an MRI scan of his body so that he can finally get to the bottom of whatever is wrong. Because something is definitely wrong. He can feel it. He just doesn’t know what. Halfway through the first ad break, his vision returns. The grey blurs gain outlines and colour. Then Die Hard 1 begins. The father falls asleep with a smile on his lips.

  III. FRIDAY

  It’s dawn on Friday and a girlfriend who is a mother who works as a lawyer for a union-owned legal firm has been in the office since twenty past seven. By the time the secretaries turn up at nine, she has sent twenty emails, prepared a case for the court of appeal and readied herself for the first meeting of the morning. When her client fails to show up, she asks the secretary to give them a call. The client’s father answers. We’re here, he says. Outside. She’s changed her mind. I’ll come down, says the lawyer who is a mother. She finds the girl hunched over on a park bench, her hair covering her face. Who are you? the father asks. Your legal representative, the lawyer says. You sounded different on the phone, says the father. The lawyer sits down on the bench. She clears her throat. She says that she understands this feels horrible. It’s entirely natural to be anxious. She leans forward and whispers: but if we don’t report these bastards, they’ll just keep doing it. And we can’t let that happen. We’re going to stop these fucking idiots. We’re going to massacre them, do you hear me? There’ll be a slaughter in the courtroom. A bloodbath. I swear. You can trust me. The girl looks confused. You don’t talk like a lawyer, she says. The lawyer smiles. I’m a union lawyer, she says. But I’m no ordinary union lawyer.

  On the way up in the lift, the lawyer who is a mother talks about her background, the postcode she used to rep when she was younger, how her parents fought for her to get an education and a job in this flashy office. When I first graduated, I was worried people might work out who I was, she says. But not any more. Tell me again what you’re going to do to them, the girl says. Mass murder, says the lawyer. No mercy. All dead. The girl smiles. The father looks concerned.

  In her office, behind closed doors, the girl starts to speak. It was her father who told her about the job. The restaurant had done some catering for his company and he had seen on their website that they were looking for people. She started when she was fifteen, spent the first summer washing dishes, and by the autumn she was helping out with the cold buffet. Two brothers owned the place. One of them was nice in a good way and the other was nice in a creepy way. He started paying her compliments, he said that she was as sweet as a sun, as pretty as a summer meadow, that he always felt extra happy when he saw her, that kind of thing. But that’s all true, isn’t it? said the father. Surely there’s no need to get worked up over someone being nice? One evening, the boss stepped in front of her, he asked if she wanted to join him in his office and when she said no he laughed and asked whether she couldn’t take a joke. Maybe it was a joke, says the father. He is over fifty, isn’t he? Another time, the boss held out a thumb, glistening with his own saliva, to wipe away what he claimed was a fleck of chocolate from the corner of her mouth. And? says the father. That was nice, wasn’t it? He probably didn’t want anyone to laugh at you? I’d only just started my shift, says the daughter. And I hadn’t eaten any chocolate. When she started serving customers, she heard all about the boss’s points system; he ranked all of the employees, men and women, waiting staff and bouncers, in order of fuckability. Ah, there are some things you just have to put up with, says the father, not sounding entirely convinced. One Saturday night, the boss asked if she wanted to go home with him. Later that week, he beckoned her into his office and bluntly announced that he had given her the job because he wanted to have sex with her, he was in love with her, he promised her a pay rise and benefits, said he had never felt this way about anyone before, locked the door and lowered the blinds. The father gets up from his chair and moves over to the window, though he doesn’t open it. Afterwards, the boss began to spread rumours about her, he shared intimate details, he claimed she had thrown herself at him and begged to have sex with him. The father returns to his seat. He looks down at the floor. He grips the arms of his chair. When she kicked up a fuss, he fired her, and it was only ten months later, when she heard rumours of other girls having gone through much worse, that she decided to get in touch with the union.

  When the girl finishes, the union lawyer offers her a tissue. The daughter shakes her head. The father takes it instead. Do you think we can win? the daughter asks. We’re going to own them, the union lawyer says with a smile. Why haven’t you asked whether they’re immigrants? the father asks. Because it isn’t relevant, says the lawyer. It’s relevant to me, says the father. It’s relevant to us. Right, honey? The girl doesn’t reply. They’re immigrants, says the father. Aren’t they? The girl says nothing. The father sighs. Seriously, this bloody country. When are we going to wake up and realise that we’ve ruined our own country? The union lawyer swallows and holds her tongue. She hugs the girl and tells her everything will be fine. You’re fantastic, you’re a queen, you’re going to own this, it’s us against the world now, do you understand? We’re the suns and they’re the clouds, but clouds come and go, don’t they? We shine on. Promise me that? The girl nods. The father and daughter leave the office.

  The union lawyer who is a mother eats an early lunch with Sebastian. They always arrive first in the mornings, her because of her young children, him because he gets up at five and cycles in from Danderyd. The waiter guesses that Sebastian wants the fish and she wants the vegetarian option. Both nod. They talk about the gladioli in the window, about the terrier Sebastian’s t
eenage daughter has at home as a trial and which will probably be named Ugolino, about hair balsam, about the fact that all sauces, every single one, taste slightly better with a dash of chilli. Sebastian pays the bill. In the beginning, she tried to pay every other time, or at least every third time, but Sebastian had looked so offended that she has stopped even offering. His hair flutters as the waiter opens the door out onto the street. Sebastian lets her go first. Like always. It’s lucky that he’s old and happily married, that he’s thin-haired and no longer as tanned, because once, when he got back to the office after being away on holiday, with that smile and those hands of his, she had been alarmed at how happy she was to see him.

  Back at the office, she turns on her phone and finds five messages from her boyfriend. Five pictures. No text. The one-year-old and the four-year-old on an escalator, holding hands and looking expectant. Balancing on a crash mat in an ugly indoor play area. Pulling faces in a funhouse mirror. The children and their father, each holding up a squashed plastic ball and laughing hysterically. They love being together. They have such a good time without her. She shakes off the feeling of unease. In the last image, the four of them are standing together in a red cloakroom. The children’s grandfather to the left. The four-year-old in the middle. Her boyfriend with the one-year-old in his arms to the right. All smiling. Or, rather, the four-year-old is pulling a face. The one-year-old is looking away. The grandfather is frowning. But the boyfriend is smiling. Or trying to smile. The person tasked with taking the picture is standing slightly too far away; there are two long slithers of metal cabinet visible to the right, and the backs of two people who shouldn’t be there to the left.

  * * *