The Family Clause

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  * * *

  A girlfriend who is a mother runs towards the metro. She has her card ready as she approaches the barriers, making it just in time to catch a train into town. She gets off at Liljeholmen and, since the next tram isn’t for another nine minutes, decides to take the path by the lake. She overtakes dog owners wearing huge headphones and pensioners who have sat down on their walking frames to enjoy the sunshine. Will he be there? He has to be there. It’s the only place in town she can imagine him being. If, in a moment of crisis, she decided to leave her family, this is where you would find her. This was where everything began, after all. She is sure he’ll be standing on the rocks, watching her approach. He’ll wave. He’ll smile. He’ll say something like: I’m so glad to see you. But she won’t wave back. She won’t return his greeting. She’ll smack him in the face. Knee him in the balls. She’ll kick him in the shins and bring him down to the ground, and as he is lying there, whimpering, she will explain that if he ever does this to her again she’ll take the kids and leave. Disappear. For good. She cuts across the empty playground, crosses the tracks and heads up the slope towards the viewpoint. The paving stones are slippery. The signposts covered in snow. A car without winter tyres is trying in vain to pull out of a parking space. She can see from a distance that the rocks are deserted. The view is there, the bridge and the islands and the forests and the water. But not him. There is a white van parked on the pavement, a rubber tube snaking down into the ground. They’ve had a few problems with the drains, says a man wearing orange ear protectors. Are you okay? She nods and turns to leave. But this time there is no one to watch her as she disappears down the slope.

  * * *

  A grandfather who is a father is trying to understand why his grandchild can’t stop talking about her father. It was cute at first, but now it’s starting to get annoying. Every fifth minute, the daughter asks where the father is. What the father is doing. Whether the father will be home soon. Then the grandchild wants to play balloon baseball, which apparently involves taking a balloon and batting it around without it touching the floor. Do you know who made up this sport? the grandchild asks. I’m guessing it was Daddy? says the grandfather. Mmm. Except Daddy and I made it up together, says the four-year-old. Will Daddy be here tonight? Yes, I’m sure he will. How do you know? I just know, says the grandfather, walking over to the window to look down at the car park. He’s coming now. He’ll be here soon. A key turns in the lock and the four-year-old is out in the hallway before the balloon even hits the floor. She bursts into tears when she sees who it is. The mother pulls her onto her knee, says that she misses Daddy, too, but that he’ll be back soon. How do you know? the four-year-old asks. I can feel it, she says. The grandfather feels ill. The four-year-old is crying like a baby. He wonders who taught her to be so oversensitive. It must be her father. Is he still asleep? the mother asks. Like a log, says the grandfather. Thanks, says the mother. No problem, says the grandfather, reaching for his coat.

  * * *

  A girlfriend comes home to a hallway as empty of the father’s shoes as it was when she left. The four-year-old has been trying to keep it together all day, but she can’t handle any more. She melts into her arms. She cries for fifteen solid minutes. The mother comforts her. She waves goodbye to the grandfather, who finally decides to head home. Now she is alone with the people who are most important to her. The people she will never let down. The one-year-old wakes. They go into the kitchen and start making a gluten-free, sugar-free banana cake. The one-year-old stands on the tall white stool by the sink, tipping a single date in and out of a transparent baby bottle. The four-year-old peels and mashes bananas that have gone brown. The mother puts down her phone and tries to be present in what they are doing. This is more important than anything else right now.

  They are roughly halfway through the recipe when she hears the key in the lock. The door opens and the first thing she sees is the blue of a large, rustling Ikea bag. Then she sees him. He carries the Ikea bags in first. Four of them, full of shopping; she can see a large pack of toilet paper, several packs of nappies, paper plates and napkins and a box of ten cartons of oat milk. Daddy! the four-year-old shouts, running out into the hallway to hug him. Hi, honey, he says, squatting down to breathe in the scent of his daughter’s neck. Where have you been? the four-year-old asks. Shopping, says the father. But it took so long. Sometimes shopping takes a long time, says the father. There were a lot of people there.

  He takes off his shoes and hangs up his jacket. He carries the bags into the kitchen and starts unpacking the shopping. He is unshaven, red-eyed. Wearing the same clothes as yesterday. She doesn’t say a word. They eat dinner in silence. The only person to speak is the four-year-old, who talks about football, robots and how Grandpa said she is a space angel. Grandpa was here? the father asks. He stayed over, says the four-year-old. He’s really fat. He’s fatter than Malcolm’s big brother. Mooo, says the one-year-old, knocking his plate to the floor.

  * * *

  A sister who is a mother has made a list on her phone of everything she needs to do before the weekend. She needs to contact the press person at Unilever to tick off a final few things before the Knorr campaign launches next week. She needs to call her father, who is leaving tomorrow, to say goodbye. She needs to reply to four important emails, RSVP yes to a friend’s wedding, and return a pair of shoes that she bought online. And tomorrow, she needs to meet the man who is her boyfriend but who isn’t ready to be a father at the abortion clinic, so that together, they can end the life that is growing in her belly. Except it isn’t a life. It only becomes a life after week twenty-two, when you can no longer have an abortion, when the foetus can survive outside the body. Until then, the foetus is a foetus. It’s a part of her, and what is happening tomorrow is no big deal. It’s just a procedure to remove something she doesn’t want. It’s like squeezing a blackhead or removing an inflamed appendix. In the lift on the way up to her flat, she sends a message to her son. A song about how the world is full of love. She still gets in touch with him at least every other day. Either by email or by text message. He never replies.

  She arrives home to a flat that is just as quiet as when she left it. She remembers how angry she used to be when she came home and discovered that her son had been going through her things, taking out her iPad and playing on it without asking permission or going through her gym bag in search of money. Now it feels inconceivable that she could have been annoyed at that kind of thing. She is ashamed at the very thought of ever having snapped at him, all because he wouldn’t give in when she said no to having crisps for breakfast. Now, she would do anything to come home and see traces of her son in the hallway; his crumpled, unwashed socks on the radiator, his dirty cap on the floor, his school books in a messy pile on the kitchen table. A forgotten glass of chocolate milk, all smeared from his sticky fingers and with a thick brown layer at the bottom. Breadcrumbs. Hardened, sweating cheese.

  Now she is the only one who leaves any kind of trace in the apartment. She is the one who keeps her shoes on to fetch her headphones, leaving footprints on the floor. They are her sad, lonely breakfasts that are left behind on the kitchen table. And it makes no difference how many juice glasses she uses, how many friends she invites over for dinner, how long her boyfriend stays over. It’s still clear that there is just one person living here, and the traces she leaves behind don’t have the same life to them as her son’s. She misses his smell: grass and sweat and the deodorant that actually belonged to her but which he thought smelled so good that he borrowed it.

  She drapes her coat over a hanger, takes off her shoes and goes into the kitchen. She knows she should make something to eat, but there is nothing more boring than cooking for one. She opens the fridge to take out some leftovers. She misses the things she used to buy just because he liked them. Ketchup. Jam. Hotdogs. Hotdog buns. Pickled beetroot. Her phone rings. She automatically assumes that it will be work-related, reaches for the phone and answe
rs with her work voice. It’s terse and signals from the outset that, yes, she can talk, but she doesn’t have all day.

  It’s him. It’s her son. She can tell from his breathing. She can tell from his snuffly nose. She can tell from the background noise. They stand in shared silence for ten seconds, just listening to one another breathe. She knows it’s him. She just knows. She always will. Mum? he says. Yes, honey, she says. Yes, my darling, darling, darling. What is it? Where are you? Are you okay? What can I do for you? Where are you? He composes himself. He tries to say something. She hasn’t heard his voice in over a year, but he still sounds so small. His voice is deeper, but also brighter. Mum, did you send someone to my school? What? Who? What do you mean? What are you talking about? Your brother came to my school today, says the son. Did you ask him to come and see me? She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t know what to think. A fleeting thought: is he recording this? Is this something that could be used against her in a future trial? Is his father lurking in the background, ready to give him direction? No. Because whenever the father is in the background, walls appear around the son’s voice. What are you talking about, love? she asks. Of course not. My brother was there? At your school? When was this?

  At lunch, says the son. He drove right up into the school yard. Oh, for God’s sake, says the sister. What was he doing there? He said he wanted to talk to me, says the son. He asked me to get into the passenger seat and then he locked the doors and talked for, like, quarter of an hour. He seemed a bit . . . The son searches for the right words. Emotionally unstable.

  Emotionally unstable, the sister thinks with a smile. My son uses words like emotionally unstable. He was just wandering around in a nappy, kissing his own reflection in the hallway mirror, and now he lives with his father and has his own mobile phone and uses words like emotionally unstable. What do you mean, unstable? she asks, because she feels like as long as they are talking about anything else, they won’t have to talk about their relationship, and for that reason she is ready to talk until the world goes under.

  I don’t know, says the son. He stunk of sweat. He hadn’t shaved and he was talking at a hundred miles an hour about sleeping badly and losing his phone and driving around all night and . . . It was kind of hard to work out what he wanted. I can understand that, she says. But it’s good that you called to tell me this. You really don’t need to worry about him, I’ll take care of everything. Did he say anything else? He said several times that it’s important to have a good relationship with both parents because you never know which of your parents you can trust. He said that? the sister asks. Mmm, says the son. Do you agree with him? she asks. I guess it depends, he says. On whether the parents are nice or stupid. Then Selma and Nicky came by, they saw me in his car and knocked on the window to check everything was okay. Who are Selma and Nicky? They’re in my class. Selma’s a year older, she’s retaking the year because her dad’s from Australia. The mother isn’t entirely sure of the logical link between having a father from Australia and retaking a year, but she doesn’t say anything, she just enjoys hearing his jumpy breaking voice that sounds at once so adult and so childish.

  I just wanted to see whether you’d sent him, he says. Absolutely not, the sister says. But I’m glad you called, I’ll have a chat with him. He’s got no right to come to your school without talking to me first. He really did seem emotionally unstable, says the son, and the sister smiles as she hears his inexperienced mouth formulate the syllables of two words he must have heard at school, on TV or possibly from his father.

  Have you told your dad about this? she asks, regretting it as her son changes, his voice closes off and the blunt tone he used before he moved out reappears.

  Not yet, he says. Neither of them speaks. Shouldn’t I? he asks. It’s up to you, she says. You’re old enough to decide that kind of thing yourself. Okay. Bye. Bye. I love you, she says, but he has already hung up. She stands there for some time with the phone to her ear.

  X. FRIDAY

  A boyfriend who will never be a father isn’t living his real life. This is a repeat episode. A terrible remake. A follow-up that should never have been made. Tomorrow morning, he’ll be teaching 9B, but right now he is standing unsteadily in the middle of Skeppsbron. One of his friends is peeing behind a bus shelter. The other is trying to convince two girls to have an after-party. The first of the girls is a bouncer. The other is a statue. It’s up to the boyfriend to take charge of the situation; he is the most sober, he has a job to go to tomorrow, he’s taken far too many modules in film studies, he knows that the best night bus is in this direction. Come on. His friends reluctantly follow him. One of them supports himself against a wall. The other gets into a long, pointless discussion with an unregistered cab driver. He hasn’t seen his friends in months and they should have an endless number of topics to cover, but the one thing he really wants to talk about is the one thing he can’t mention. He wants to say that his girlfriend is pregnant. That she has decided to have an abortion. That they were meant to meet and talk things over that evening, but she didn’t answer her phone and that can only mean one thing. She’s sticking with her decision. The person in her belly will never be born. They’ve been fighting all week and she has repeatedly hinted that he is a loser. That his genes aren’t worth carrying on. She wants to rid herself of what is half him as soon as possible, and once that’s done she can end this experiment and move on, he’ll become a footnote in her life, a temporary sidekick she will look back on and wonder what on earth she was doing. Who was that strange tattooed guy who could namedrop Eisenstein, Renoir and Truffaut? she’ll think. The man who, in preparation for his dissertation on temporality, had voluntarily watched Marclay’s twenty-four-hour film The Clock. Is that true? she asked when he told her. Does it really last twenty-four hours? He nodded. But I watched it in five sittings, he says. And it felt short compared to Andy Warhol’s Empire. How long is that one? she asked. Eight, or something like that, he said. Hours? she asked. He nodded. How was it? Well, it had a certain something, he said. You get drawn in, even though it’s just a camera fixed on the Empire State Building. There was something hypnotic about being so bored. It was like The Clock, only the other way around.

  The night bus they had been hoping to catch sails by. One of the friends slumps onto the pavement. The other lights a cigarette and holds up a middle finger to the driver. At this speed, they’ll be home sometime around Christmas. The boyfriend who will never be a father sinks into a squat. My dad drove a bus, he tells his friends. Once, when we were coming home from the amusement park, Mum said hello to the driver. Did you know him? I asked. That was your father, she said. His friends are listening. My bro and I sneaked over and had a look. He was sitting there behind the wheel, and I felt so fucking proud when I saw him, even though we hadn’t spoken in years. Even though he beat the shit out of us when we were kids. He was just sitting there, accelerating and braking and opening the doors for tourists. He trails off. His friends glance at one another. They start laughing. You’ve dreamed that up, says one of them. Straight out of a film, says the other. No, you idiots, says the man who will never be a father. It’s true. It was just like that.

  They reach the bus stop. They travel home in silence. Once they have said their goodbyes, the boyfriend thinks back to what his friends called a film scene. It was the very opposite of a film scene. It’s a scene that would never work in a film precisely because it’s so overexplicit, so romantic, so random. The father vanishes into thin air and becomes nothing but a black-and-white photograph in the display cabinet. A shadow in the hallway. He becomes a superhero to boast about at school. A near-extinct creature to show off in the park on those rare weekends he comes to visit, always hand in hand, his arm like a lead so that no one who saw him could think he was anyone else’s father. After the divorce, they see one another maybe every third month. Then even less often. The father stays in the same city but gets himself a new family and a job driving buses, and one day
he drives his old family from the amusement park to the centre of town. The red of the bus is like a symbol of the undying love between parent and child, but also of the blood that binds them, the red hate that drives them apart, the red anger that makes it so difficult to forgive, the red passion which brought the mother and father together. The black rubber tyres are the material that encases their feelings, evens out bumps, and protects against any flashes of lightning. The father has to follow a timetable, life goes on, the children have to press the button to make the doors open, leaving behind the safe embrace of the family, stepping out into the cold, accompanied only by their mother. The sons finally take charge of their fate. The mother will soon be dead, and the father thinks he is free but still has to follow his predetermined route, he can’t even stop to go to the toilet when he likes, he has to keep driving on and on and on.

  A PE teacher who is actually a film expert checks his mobile phone. His first class begins in five hours. In eight hours, they are due to meet at the clinic. But none of that matters. He’s going to get started now. He’s going to finish his dissertation tonight. He won’t give up. If he can just get this paper out of him, his doctoral thesis will run out of him like milk from a teat, like lava from a volcano, like wine from one of those touristy bags of wine he bought for his friends when he went interrailing in Spain, the kind that were fun to drink out of until you realised that any wine that had been inside for more than a few seconds developed a strong aroma of rubber and an aftertaste of plastic. He can see his door, he picks up the pace, he feels the buzz, he isn’t the least bit tired, it’s all there within him, there is no subject he knows more about, he’s seen all the films, he’s read all the literature, he just needs to make some tea and sit down at the computer and force it out, he’ll be done by tomorrow, and in a few weeks from now his application for a doctoral position will be approved, Professor Koskinen herself will call and ask him to start right away. It’s been years since we’ve had such an amazingly fascinating topic, the professor will say. The department needs you. I need you. Please, please, come right away. I’m at work, says the boyfriend. What kind of work? asks Professor Koskinen. I work as a PE teacher. He works as a PE teacher! Professor Koskinen shouts to the others, who are waiting breathlessly in the same room. We’ll call a cab, says the professor. We need to talk about how you can organise your work into a thesis in film science, but one which, considering your interesting reasoning around time travel, parallel worlds and stretched temporality, may also have the potential to be a multidisciplinary masterpiece. In the lift on the way up to his flat, he has quit his job and begun his thesis. He is finished by the time the lift arrives, the department is deathly silent as he submits, people can’t believe it’s really happening, rivals grind their teeth, Professor Koskinen applauds, the three professors invited to his viva praise him, one bursts into tears, the other says she has never read such a thought-provoking piece of work, the third just sits quietly with a strange smile on his lips, then he gets up, squeezes the boyfriend’s hand and says: thank you. He is invited to give lectures in the USA, Berkeley and Harvard fight to award him a guest professorship, the Cannes film festival is honoured when he accepts the position of head juror, and none of this would have happened if he hadn’t, some years before, been betrayed by the woman who claimed she was his girlfriend and then decided to kill his child. He turns on his computer. He puts the kettle on. He brings up the latest version of his dissertation and dozes off with his head on the kitchen table before the water has even boiled.