Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  ‘Where you taking us?’ he had asked. He had looked too scared even to blink.

  But none of that is as bad as what is about to happen, and what happens every night. This is worse than the gambling, and the debt, and the no speaking—although in truth they are all wrapped up inside of it.

  It begins the moment that Henry sees her.

  ‘Go away. Go away, Mummy.’

  Sometimes he runs away into the playground and hides, or pushes his back against the unlockable, downsized door of a toilet cubicle. Most usually, and this is what happens tonight, he clings to Beverly, wedging his fingers between her belt and her pants, wrapping his legs around her knee. Slowly, patiently, Beverly unhooks his fingers, prises away his limbs.

  ‘Henry, Henry,’ she says. ‘It’s time to go home with Mummy now.’

  Beverly lifts him and holds him firmly to her. Although his face is red with crying and twisted with fury, her voice stays low and soft.

  ‘We’ll see each other again tomorrow, Henry. I promise.’

  ‘I . . . I . . . I . . . want you. I don’t want . . . h-h-h-her.’

  ‘Cross my heart,’ is all she says, but the invisible mark she makes with her finger is on Henry’s chest.

  Beverly puts Henry back on his feet but Nina knows by now that it’s better she doesn’t try to lift him herself. In the air he will kick. All the way back down the corridor, he will strike out with his feet at Nina, the walls, Gracie. So Nina has learned to hold him very firmly by the wrist and drag him, skidding, on his feet or on his knees. He is skinny, not at all strong, and nobody but she has to mend the jeans. She leaves her gloves on in case he bites.

  ‘Come on, Henry,’ Nina says, and she can taste the bitter stain on her words.

  Gracie knows how to hold the door wide open so Nina can get Henry through.

  ‘I don’t want you, Mummy. I want Bevelly. Bevelly. Bevelly. I don’t want you, Mummy. You’re hurting me. Ow, ow, ow. You’re hurting my arm,’ he yells.

  Nina has devised a way of closing herself down. She has built within her skull a system of airlocks to keep out the very worst of the humiliation and rage she feels as she drags her son along the corridor, past all the other parents: the ones who stare and the ones who look the other way.

  ‘Bevelly. Bevelly. Bevelly. I want Bevelly, not you. I hate you. That hurts. It hurts. I hate you.’

  At the car she has no choice but to lift him, but she has learned ways of wedging herself against the body of the car as she opens the door, and ways of keeping his legs pinned together where they can do less damage. She doesn’t know what will happen when he learns how to extricate himself from the five-point harness that restrains him tightly enough that he can’t kick the back of her seat or reach over to pull Gracie’s hair.

  During the drive home, Nina’s hears the hiss of the airlocks opening, feels her soul sigh back into the uncomfortable cage of her bones. But she is determined to remain calm. Despite the thumping of Henry’s fist on the side window, despite his frustrated cries, she will remain calm. She remains calm, she remains calm. She turns the radio back on even though she has spent all day with the same news of drownings from unseaworthy vessels, of job losses and their political fallout. She remains calm, but then misses the green arrow of a traffic light by one car’s length and now she must wait. It’s the sudden loss of momentum, the requirement that she sit, and sit, and sit, the sound of Henry’s sobs seeping through the news of death and uncertainty and fear—that’s what does it. She throws the gear lever into park, reefs on the handbrake. The heels of her boots scrape on the bitumen as she steps out of the car. She opens the back door and, to her shame, she strips off her glove before she slaps him. There is nothing muffled about the sound of her palm across the socket of his left eye, the upper margin of his cheek. She has hit him hard enough to feel the sting on the undersides of her fingers.

  ‘Now shut up,’ she screams at him. Her eyes and nose begin to stream with cold, misery. ‘Shut. Up.’

  Nina knows, of course, the senselessness of demanding that someone love you, just as she knows it is psychopathic to hurt someone because they will not. And now the arrow is green and queued up behind her car is a long line of other cars, their right-hand sides blinking in unsynchronised orange. There is a medley of car horns, but Nina—her red hand pressed against her son’s raw cheek as if it might somehow suck the smack back out of his skin—cannot leave him now.

  ‘I’m sorry, Henry. Mummy didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Oh, Henry.’

  But all he says, through his sobs, is ‘Bevelly’.

  Nina rocks back onto her heels, leans her head against the armrest of the opened door. The arrow is red again. Transmitting through the ether, conducting through the metal bodies of the cars is a current of banked-up anger from the drivers behind her. In her weepy eyes are the stripes and blurs of light that remain on the darkness as cars speed on, turn corners, convey their passengers homeward, while she remains lost. To be lost, to have lost; she has learned that the effect is much the same.

  At home, Nina turns the key in the lock and the house breathes out breakfast-time air gone stale and cold over the length of the day. The first thing Nina does is to switch on the too-bright fluorescent in the hallway and twist Henry’s small face up into the light. She doesn’t think he will have a black eye. She hopes the finger-shaped marks across his temple and cheekbone will have faded by the morning, although she knows his memory will not have done.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Henry. But you make me so . . .’ She stops. There is no excuse. And he is not listening.

  Nina turns on the television and Henry drifts towards the couch opposite. He is in his coat still, his dilated pupils catching the bright colours of the cartoon network even before she has found the button to give him some volume. He will not stir now. Not for half an hour at least, until he hears the Valiant sputtering down to stillness in the street. Then he will run for the door, calling ‘Daddy!’. These days it’s Lucas who helps Henry to brush his teeth and to find his pyjamas and Lucas who reads the bedtime story and tucks the covers down tight. After lights out, Nina hovers in the hallway, but only on her bravest days, and certainly not on this day, will she venture in to kiss her son goodnight.

  She still has Gracie, though—little Gracie who is following after her mother into the kitchen. Lately, Nina has been teaching her to cook. Now Gracie reaches down her own small apron with ric-rac around the pockets. She slides on the tiny pair of padded oven gloves from the hook which also holds Nina’s. Two-year-old Gracie has learned which knobs will switch the oven on, and how to watch for the light that will tell her it’s hot enough, and how to open the door and reach in without hurting herself. Nina and Gracie haven’t bothered much with cupcakes or gingerbread cookies or puddings. It’s flesh Nina wants to smell roasting.

  On weekends, Nina and Gracie cook whole birds: chicken, spatchcock, quail, even a duck if there’s one on special, but tonight it’s only chicken pie to be warmed through.

  ‘I do it,’ Gracie says, and Nina smiles.

  Carefully, Gracie hinges open the oven door. With two hands and a concentrating tongue between her teeth, she slides the pie in its foil bed into the still-cold heart of the oven, shuts it in. When it is done, Nina puts up her hand, the same one she used to hit Henry—and the skin of it still tingles—for a high five.

  ‘Can we do one tonight, Mummy?’ Gracie asks, looking up at the windowsill. ‘Can we? Can we please?’

  ‘Why not?’ Nina says, lifting her up to sit on the bench. ‘You go ahead and choose.’

  On the sill, beside the dishwashing liquid and a potted cactus, is a parade of wishbones. They have been picked clean of every last little thread of meat and left to dry in the sun. Gracie has arranged them from largest to smallest, placing them on their curving backs so that she can make them rock as she names each one.

  ‘This is the daddy, this is the mummy, this is the big brother, and this is me,’ Gracie says, setting the quail�
�s bone in motion.

  ‘Which one tonight, darling?’

  ‘That one,’ she giggles, then leans over the lip of the kitchen servery to look down at Henry where he sits on the couch, knees drawn up to his chin.

  But Nina, heartsick with the aftermath of the day’s end, says, ‘Maybe a different one?’

  ‘This one?’ Gracie says, pointing to the biggest of the chicken bones.

  That’s my girl, thinks Nina.

  Together she and Gracie link their little fingers through the wishbone’s delicate arch.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Nina asks.

  Gracie nods, puts out her concentrating tongue.

  ‘One, two . . . three!’

  But Nina will pull only softly, if at all. Although she will enjoy the splintering crack, she wants the bigger side to fall to Gracie. It’s been quite some time now since Nina has trusted herself with anything so precious as a wish.

  sleep

  You reach womanhood and although there may not be a spindle, there will still be blood, a curse, and some little prick.

  IN THE STATELY home next door lived old Mrs Bunting and her unmarried daughter, Rita. The ground floor and the first floor were Mrs Bunting’s exclusive domain, while the top floor had been converted into a flat for Rita. That was about forty years ago when Mrs Bunting realised Rita would never be normal.

  Rita dressed like a bag lady, which is what she would almost certainly have become if her mother hadn’t given her an allowance and a place to live on the top floor of a riverside mansion. Rita had a separate entrance at the top of a staircase at the back of the house, and there was a view of it from the bay window in Liv’s room.

  Liv had never heard anyone label Rita Bunting or her particular problem, the symptoms of which included a slack jaw, bad teeth, layered rolls of fat around her middle and a sly, obstreperous manner. Although conversation was possible, Rita’s half of it came back to you as if refracted through a prism, one that seemed to tilt, or spin. The same thing that delighted her today would tomorrow make her scowl darkly and start cussing like a sailor. Even in the dialogue Rita held with herself, she covered the full spectrum. Sometimes Liv would hear her crooning in a high, wheedling tone; other times she would berate herself in a fluctuating growl that made Liv think of someone twiddling a volume switch.

  Lauren didn’t get a view of Rita’s door. Her bedroom was across the hall from Liv’s and faced the wrong way. It had no bay window either. Being the younger sister, Lauren thought, was a bit like turning up in the afternoon to a garage sale once all the good stuff was gone. A year and a half older than Lauren, Liv had got the pick of the family’s heirloom books and toys and crockery, and exercised her first-born right to name the grandparents. By the time Lauren started music lessons, Liv had already been playing the violin for a year and a half. Lauren quickly learned that ‘viola’ was just another way of saying ‘second fiddle’.

  Even Rita paid more attention to Liv than she did to Lauren. Sometimes Rita accosted the girls at their front gate, or in the driveway, or right down at the bottom of the garden where the fence between the properties petered out into lawn. She addressed her strange directives to both girls, but it was Liv she would beckon in most closely. Sometimes she would even grab hold of Liv’s arm as she spoke.

  ‘You must not flush toilets at night,’ she had warned them, once. ‘The sound of the pipes attracts . . . men.’

  Occasionally she was confrontational. One time she accused Liv and Lauren of having orgies in their bedrooms. ‘I’ve heard you,’ she said.

  There was a story that Rita wasn’t always this way. People who were old enough to remember, including Liv and Lauren’s grandmother, said Rita had once been quite ordinary, even somewhat pretty, right up until the night of her twenty-first birthday party. This party had been described to Liv and Lauren as a ‘society event’. Liv pictured it with gilt-edged invitation cards, a tower of coupe champagne glasses, women in fox fur stoles and waiters with white gloves. When it was said that Rita sat down at the end of that night in her ballgown and said, ‘That’s it, my life is over now’, Liv liked to imagine that this took place on the big formal staircase with curving banisters of dark polished wood that she had seen leading up into a gallery from Mrs Bunting’s entrance hall, but that Liv had never herself ascended. Liv envisioned Rita seated about halfway up those stairs, sitting in her foaming skirts of pale pink tulle, a tiara in her hair.

  Lauren and Liv’s house had no grand central staircase. Their place was just as big as the Buntings’, but newer, more airy, less Miss Havishamish. Theirs had been built for Liv and Lauren’s grandfather, the second in the political Wishart dynasty, and when he died he had handed the house on to his son—Liv and Lauren’s father—who also ended up taking over the family seat in parliament. It so happened that about the time Liv’s eighteenth birthday was approaching, their father caught the sniff of an election on the breeze. He suggested a party. Their mother began making lists.

  In the small city in which they grew up, Liv—more than Lauren—was known to people. This was in part because she was talented and had played her violin in public since she was very young, and in part because the city was small and she conspicuous. Liv was slender (Lauren slightly less so) and gave the impression of being tall, although she was not especially, and she had the kind of posture that spoke quite accurately of family money. Liv never intended to appear imperious, but with her ballerina neck and the way she pulled her long hair back over her neatly moulded skull, she did.

  Lauren and Liv were quite obviously sisters, but when Lauren looked in the mirror she saw the results of a follow-up experiment that had failed to replicate the spectacular results of the first. Still, she would not have wanted to be Liv. She knew, even at the age of sixteen and a half, there was something about her own thicker bones and coarser features that kept her just this side of a particular kind of danger. She also knew that if Liv had so far got more than her fair share, well, that was just Liv. She was the last person in the world with whom you would want to be trapped within a disabled submarine: somehow she would even manage to breathe two-thirds of the air.

  Invitations to the party went out to everyone the Wisharts knew.

  ‘That’s it, my life is over now,’ Liv started to say, each time she descended the stair between the top floor and the first floor of their home. She tried out various attitudes—woeful, dramatic, bitter, pathetic—but Lauren didn’t like it any which way.

  ‘Don’t,’ Lauren said. ‘Just, please, don’t.’

  In Liv’s room, everything hard was painted white and everything soft was ruffled around the edges. The curtains were blue gingham, there was a pile of artfully mismatched blue and white cushions on the window seat, and a wicker chair full of antique rag dolls that had only ever been for show. Liv liked to get away from all this. She wasn’t sure how deeply her parents believed her when she said was staying over with Claudia, or Annabel, or Freya: girls whose parents were known to her own, but not too well.

  Liv could sleep anywhere: on beer-sloshed after-party couches and beanbags, on car seats, in the backs of campervans, and in the warm nicotine grime of any number of beds that were available to her should she be prepared to share. Lately, since she had got in with a crowd of musicians who hung out around the waterfront and busked their filthy sea-shanties for hats-full of coin, her bed of choice was a bunk on a small boat. When it was in port, she would lie with her lover in the coffin space beneath the vessel’s prow and hold him tight to her chest, fingering silent tunes on the nodules of his vertebrae, just as his own fingers flurried over the black buttons of his piano accordion. She slept well there, even though there was nothing but a thin shell of paint and planking to separate her from the harbour and the slapping of its waves.

  But she woke on the morning of her eighteenth birthday party in her own bed in the blue room with the view over the garden, the river, and Rita Bunting’s front door. Through bleary eyes and dewy glass, she could see her mother,
queenly in her quilted dressing gown, plucking bruised petals from the late blooming camellias as she criss-crossed the lawn. June Wishart was—to Liv—a kind of first position, the default against which mothers of all other sorts were defined. If Liv sometimes looked hungrily at the mothers with long, messy curls and jeans—the ones who kissed and hugged their grown daughters and made easy, stupid jokes with them, borrowed their earrings and shoes—it was only within an understanding of how far they deviated from June Wishart with her ash blonde hair that rolled under, quite naturally, at her jaw, who always wore skirts and never went out without pantyhose, whose public manner towards her daughters was just one or two notches more intimate than the cheerful, well-brought-up formality with which she treated everyone else.

  Liv watched June as she walked down past the bungalow at the bottom of the garden, all the way to the water’s edge, to the place where the grassy bank rolled neatly into the river like a swimmer at the end of a lap. And even from where she sat at the second-storey window, Liv could feel her mother’s absolute riverfront satisfaction.

  On the back of Liv’s door had appeared, while she slept, her dress for the party. Handmade for the occasion by her mother, it was beautifully pressed and hanging on a padded coathanger. The matching shoes waited obediently, heels together, against the battered black of her violin case. She knew that it would be the same in Lauren’s room, although the fabric of the button-through frock would be a different dainty floral print and the shoes—in a different but equally insipid pastel shade—would be set out beside Lauren’s viola case.

  June had budgeted for twelve of Liv’s own friends at the party, but Liv had chosen not to invite a single one. She wouldn’t have known how to manage her own friends while at the same time being buttoned into a dress like that and handing around hors d’oeuvres. So long as her friends were not there, she was fairly sure she would be able to pack one of her selves down flat, slide it into a narrow space, unseen.