by David Jester
Lizzie had sobered up a little and she didn’t smoke more, taking over the parental duties as I smoked and Matthew raided the fridge. Matthew then fell asleep on the couch while Lizzie and I retired to bed. She was feeling guilty by then, shocked at what she had allowed herself to do and appalled that she had left her child alone, albeit just for twenty minutes.
“I feel like a druggie,” she had told me when the warmth and the sedation was beginning to fade, turning into paranoia, fatigue, and worry. “Abandoning my son because of some drugs.”
“No, don’t be stupid,” I told her. “And if anything, it was me who abandoned him. I could have stayed, but instead I decided to follow you.”
“That’s right,” she said, finding her scapegoat in the same place everyone else seemed to find theirs. “It’s your fault, you should have stayed, you should—”
“But then again,” I cut her short, realizing that now wasn’t the time to make her feel better about herself. “You got high, forgot about him, and then ran away like some hippie teenager hellbent on anarchy.”
She scrunched up her face and bit the end of her finger. “You’re right,” she said, nodding. “It was my fault.”
That’s better.
I listened to her blame herself, then I turned the lights out and she fell silent. The day was over, done; no more pain, no more blame, just sleep.
“Oh no, Kieran! Kieran! Something’s wrong,” Lizzie said, the fear evident in her grating voice.
I groaned in reply. “What is it?”
“I—I—” She stuttered and I expected her to break into another profound thought, but instead she finally said, “I think I’m blind.”
I reached over and snapped on the bedside light, my eyes quickly adjusting to the flame of brightness that threatened to split my head in two. “Excuse me?”
“Oh,” she said softly. “Actually, never mind.”
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
She clearly wasn’t as sober as I thought she was.
I turned off the light again and stayed awake for a few more minutes, expecting more complaints of blindness or something equally absurd, but they didn’t come. Eventually I heard her snoring, followed by low grumblings as she argued with herself in her sleep. After she seemed to lose the argument, increasing her voice to regain the momentum, she let rip an almighty fart that threatened to blow the covers off her.
Content that things were back to normal, I rolled over, closed my eyes, and within seconds, I was asleep, happy to put a long day to rest.
13
The Last Supper
When Lizzie was happy on the phone, I was usually sad off of it. It wasn’t entirely because she was loud, or because the endless “Really? No, really?” grated somewhat after a while, but because I had no way of joining in with that happiness. One of the first times I had heard her on the phone with her friends was just before we were married. I had watched as her tone changed from smiley, to unreasonably excited. I had watched the “no, you don’t say?” suddenly become “I don’t believe it” and “that’s amazing.” I was on the edge of my seat by the end of it, eager for her to finish so I could find out what this amazing news was, expecting to hear how a friend had won the lottery, borne three triplets to Johnny Depp, or bumped into Elvis Presley down the cash-and-carry.
I was so eager to share in her excitement that I almost squealed when she hung up, but as soon as her finger hit the little red button, the smile faded. She turned her attention back to the television and said nothing. It was as if nothing had happened. She didn’t even look at me. If she had, she would have seen a wide-eyed, drooling idiot on the edge of his seat, his hands pressed to his mouth to suppress a girlish scream.
After several moments, she turned to me to ask me where the remote control was. She barely uttered a word before she cut herself short and remarked, “—what the fuck is wrong with you?”
In the excitement and the resulting embarrassment, I didn’t get a chance to tell her how I had been eagerly waiting, how I had been practically following her around, jumping like a little boy being told all his enemies had turned into Skittles. I brushed it off, but the disappointment was evident.
That was my first taste of it, but there were many more. I came to realize that as surprised and excited as she sounded on the phone, there was usually no basis for it. It was an act that she put on for her female friends and family members. They all did it, and it was creepy as fuck.
So when she did it when she was talking to her mother, I didn’t react. But this time, she did have something to tell me when she hung up. It wasn’t as exciting as her mother giving birth to Depp’s lovechild, but it was just as horrifying.
“My mother is getting all of the family together for a Christmas dinner!” she announced, the excitement still on her face. “Everyone. My granddad Herman, Sally, Edward, John, Uncle Pete, Auntie Aggie—everyone!”
“That’s nice,” I said with a smile, realizing I had no idea who any of those people were and was probably better off for it. “You’ll enjoy that.”
The smile faded somewhat and a flash of bemusement cut across her features. “We both will.”
“You want me to go, as well?”
“Of course.”
“But—but—” I was incredulous. I hated family gatherings, even when it wasn’t my own. I also wasn’t a big fan of her family. I had only met her parents so far and would struggle to find two people who hated me more in this world. “—I’m not your family.”
“You are now.”
Shit. I knew that certificate would come back to haunt me.
“But—but—”
“It’ll be okay,” she assured me as I tried and failed to find an excuse. If she had given me some warning then I might have been able to, but I wasn’t good at thinking on my feet. “They’re not as bad as you think they are.”
If I wasn’t so grief-stricken then I would have laughed at that one. It wasn’t the first time Lizzie had tried to convince me that her parents didn’t really hate me. She often told me that that was just “their way,” but unless their way was the way of two stuck-up, pompous bigots who didn’t think that anyone was right for their daughter, let alone a hopeless ingrate, then I was justified in my assumptions.
I’d once tried to get her dad drunk and loosened up. But although the night began well, with some friendly sporting banter and a few jokes, it ended with him calling me a loser and trying to drown me in a urinal. It was like high school all over again.
If I couldn’t befriend the parents then what hope did I have with the rest of them?
In an effort to ease my fears, she tried to tell me all about her family, but that didn’t help. She told me about her Uncle Pete, who she described as one of the nicest and most genuine people she’d ever known, and her twin cousins Adam and Arnold, who she used to play with when she was younger.
“Oh, I so hope they’ll be there,” she added fondly, as I somewhat relaxed into the idea of meeting her family.
Then she told me about her grandfather, who would be the oldest man there. “He is a lovely man,” she began with a warm smile. “He always dotes on me, always buys me presents and has nice things to say. He’s so sweet and gentle.”
“Sounds nice.”
“I mean, he’s incredibly racist and he’s as homophobic as they come, but aside from that, he’s fine.”
“Oh,” I said, immediately taking back all of the nice thoughts I’d just had about her grandfather. “Well, aside from that, sure, I mean as long as I’m not gay or black.”
“Exactly!”
“You are joking, right?”
She grinned. “Look, I know it’s awful and I know there’s nothing I can say to justify it. But he’s really sweet, trust me.”
“Okay.” I shrugged. “I guess all families have a few racist homophobes in their closet. Anything else I should worry about? Any cousins in the KKK, any Nazi uncles, any suicide bombers?”
“No, no, of course no
t,” she said unconvincingly.
“You’re lying to me. I can tell, because you’re not very good at it. What is it? Your Uncle Pete isn’t really Osama Bin Laden, is he?”
“He’s dead.”
“Really? I’m sorry to hear that. So then why is he going—”
“Osama Bin Laden, I mean.”
“Oh,” I said, adding, “I knew that,” even though I had no idea. The news had a way of passing me by, on account of my aversion to newspapers and any TV program that wasn’t animated.
“So what is it then?” I wanted to know. “What are you hiding from me?”
Lizzie let out a long sigh. She looked at me, looked away, and then looked at me again. “It’s my cousin.”
“Is he—”
“No, Kieran!” she interjected. “And it’s a she.”
“Okay. So what’s wrong with her?”
Lizzie pondered this for a while and then said, “She’s a little—how can I put this—overly friendly with the male population.”
“She’s a whore?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, well, I’m fine with that.” The smile I finished with was probably a bad idea.
Lizzie glared at me.
Definitely a bad idea.
“I mean, as opposed to her being a bigot like your grandfather.”
“My grandfather is not a bigot,” she snapped, changing the subject so I didn’t have to. “He’s a lovely man, honestly. You’ll see that for yourself when you meet him in a couple of weeks.”
The get-together came quicker than I would have liked, but that always seemed to be the case. It might have something to do with the fact that I tried to ignore it, to erase my mind of the upcoming event and thus make life easier to live until then, but that only makes the surprise and the dread even greater when it finally arrives.
We arranged to drop Ben off at my parents. The issues we had with letting the grandparents babysit seemed like a distant memory, and they weren’t as relevant now that we had sampled the alternative. My mother was so excited about the prospect that she arrived first thing in the morning to pick him up, negating the plan to take him to her later in the day. The sound of her eagerly pressing the doorbell gave me flashbacks of the inbred delinquent neighbor-child, and I thought he had returned for his revenge. When I let her in and was subjected to an assault of fast-paced conversation, fueled by a morning spent drinking coffee and getting excited, I began to wish it had been the little shit.
In ten minutes she told me everything that had happened to her over the last few weeks. She told me of all of her and my father’s medical problems, and she also ensured I was caught up on all of the illnesses and deaths that her friends and family members had been subjected to. I began to worry that she’d drive Ben around the bend, but remembered that this crazy person had raised me, and I’d turned out fine. Well, for the most part.
I said my goodbyes to Ben—waking him up to do so—and reminded him that as difficult as his night with my parents would be, my night with his mother’s parents would be worse. I had actually entertained the idea of taking him with us and using him to deflect the attention away from me. But it would be a huge family gathering, and I couldn’t put him through that amount of cheek-pinching.
I dressed up in my most uncomfortable clothes, gelled and styled my hair so I looked sufficiently like the sort of cock that her parents and the rest of her family would appreciate, and then plastered on my best smile. We bought them a bottle of wine on the way over, and although Lizzie rejected my idea of pissing in it, she did insist that I be the one to give it to them when we arrived.
“Do we really want to be getting your dad drunk after what happened last time?”
“You mean with my mum? No, that was a one-off.” She seemed confused for a moment. “I didn’t know I told you about that.”
I nearly threw a fit in the taxi. “No, you did not tell me. I was referring to the time he tried to drown me in three inches of stale piss, actually. But perhaps there something else I should know about?”
“He’s under a lot of stress, that’s all.”
“Your family is a regular bunch of fucking saints, aren’t they? Remind me again why I married you?”
“Because you didn’t meet them first.”
That was true. But even after I had met them, I knew they were nothing like her. I still had my suspicions, of course. Every time she drank, I expected her to turn into a violent psychopath like her dad. And I knew there was still a chance she could mature into being a pompous bitch like her mother.
When we arrived, we let ourselves in. Lizzie practically jogged into the kitchen to follow the noise and the smell of cooking. I dragged my feet behind her, already watching the clock and counting the minutes until the night was over.
I gave her parents my fake smile and the bottle of wine. I hugged her mum and shook her dad’s hand, knowing that regardless of how disgusted it made me feel, it would get me brownie points later. Lizzie’s parents were both very friendly to me, though it was clear they were just being hospitable for Lizzie’s sake and would probably sprinkle anthrax on my chips.
Her grandfather, Herman, was standing at the back of the kitchen during the introductions, and as Lizzie reacquainted herself with the parents from hell, he approached me. His face held no emotion at first, and if not for the fact that I was in my in-laws’ kitchen, I might have been worried. In hindsight, that probably should have given me more reason to worry. For all I knew, he could have been an assassin they hired to kill me, talking about the “good old days” to lure me into a false sense of security before beating me to a pulp with his cane.
“And you must be the famous Kieran,” he said, extending a hand.
“I don’t know about famous, but yes.” I shook his hand and he stared into my eyes. His hand felt frail and weak, but the handshake was strong. It went on for longer than was necessary or comfortable, but when I tried to break it, I realized that as weak as his hand felt, it was still stronger than mine.
After finally releasing his hand and his stare, he gave Lizzie a warmer greeting and then turned back to me. He put an arm on my shoulder and guided me into the living room. I tried to catch Lizzie’s eye, to ask for her help or to at least to let her know my last whereabouts in case anything happened, but she was too busy attending to a boiled potato and a beer-battered chicken, or Mum and Dad, as she preferred to call them.
Herman immediately took me to the living room where I waited as he poured me a significant measure of scotch and sat me down in the corner, tucked away in a section of the living room that I had only ever seen Lizzie’s father in—reading his paper and drinking his whiskey. It pleased me to know that not only was I in his spot, but I was also probably drinking his whiskey, which made it taste infinitely better.
I was worried that Herman would begin to ask me awkward questions, or even that he would follow his son’s lead and turn inexplicably violent, but he didn’t. He started by telling me war stories, and although I had no interest in them, they were notably better than being forced to drink someone else’s urine.
I was relaxed, and I actually began to think that the night wouldn’t be so bad after all, that I might actually enjoy myself. Lizzie was right; her grandfather was sweet. He was a humble, quiet, and respectable man, and upon meeting him and talking to him, I completely forgot all the bad things that Lizzie had said about him. But then things took an ugly turn, and they did so very quickly.
It began with some travel stories, and then, like a bout of gastroenteritis diarrhea, once things turned ugly, there was no way of stopping it. They say that travel broadens the mind, but for Lizzie’s grandfather, it had just broadened his lexicon of racist terms. The world is a big place with a lot of people, cultures, and traditions, but the only thing he’d learned from his experiences was that the world was full of people who weren’t white.
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief but looking content noneth
eless, seemingly enthusiastic about his racism.
Then please don’t.
“Everywhere they were.”
Oh God no.
“I mean, how do they spread so quickly?”
He paused to stare at me, as if waiting for an answer. I had no idea how to respond to any of what he was saying, and every word sent me further and further into myself as I waited for the ground to open up and swallow us both.
Or him, yes, just him, that’ll do.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. My face was red with embarrassment and I knew he noticed it. I could see him eyeing me up, wondering what kind of race I was turning into and judging just how much he should hate me.
“So, you had fun on your travels then?” I said, hoping to change the subject.
“It was war, son, war is never fun.”
“Clearly you’ve never played Call of Duty.”
The stare he gave me suggested that he didn’t get the joke, or that he was about to kill me. Or both.
“War isn’t very funny either, son.”
He had the demeanor of a principal, the sort of person who took things too seriously and was impossible to break down. Once you crossed the line, there was no way of stepping back, no way to bring them to your side. You just had to wait for the stern lectures to pass and try your best to avoid that line in the future.
I gave him a meek and apologetic smile, wondering just when the sweet old racist had turned into an intimidating one. He was a ninety-year-old man who had seen the world, hated every bit of it, and tried to kill most of it. He had served in both World War II and the Korean War, which was something I was eager to learn about but scared to ask about. At that moment, Lizzie, who had been setting the table and gossiping about promiscuous neighbors, came over to see how we were getting on, and the insane old racist reverted back to a cute grandfather. He gave her a kiss on the forehead, pinched her cheek, and told her that she was getting prettier every day. When she went away, I hoped that the friendliness would remain. When he turned back to me, I had a smile waiting for him, but that smile soon faded.
