Slights

by Kaaron Warren

  Daughters helped, sons and sons-in-law discussed the way the house was looking structurally. Daughters-in-law sat in the lounge room and talked in whispers. I listened.

  "Honestly, you'd think it was Jesus and Mary, not Peter and Maria. Way they bullshit on."

  "I know, can you believe it? If I hear one more time how many devotees they've got to their fucking cause, I'll scream."

  Just a few years younger and I would have set up a video to catch them at it. It was good to hear, though. My brother wasn't adored by everyone.

  "No offence," someone said every now and then, when they were particularly cruel.

  "All just idle talk," I said.

  "You're not part of this family, you know," someone said to me, and they nodded. The bitches nodded. None of their husbands were like Peter. Their men were strong, dependable, didn't like women as friends. Their men left them to it, didn't mess about in the kitchen, whatever. Their men had big cocks and liked to use them. I realised as I heard them talk that all three were jealous. They had married brothers who had grown into triplets; Maria, having known those brothers all her life, found someone different. It made them sick.

  It made me sick, too, once I realised.

  They wanted Peter for themselves. Does that mean I have to marry the opposite of Peter? Someone like one of Maria's brothers? I went outside to play with the kids.

  I brought along a magic ball. If you dropped it it would squash flat for a moment, then bounce back into your hands. If you threw it into someone's hands, it would squish between their fingers and they would squeeze their fingers closed. It always felt cool and never looked grubby. The kids loved it. Maria's parents had a large front yard, rarely used by the adults because it was too far from the back door and the front door had been blocked by boxes many years earlier.

  Inside the boxes were some astonishing things and some very dull ones. All of them a story, a memory, an excuse or a crime. I visited once when Peter first met Maria, because he took me along on a lot of trips then. While they were in the kitchen being nice, telling lies, I discovered the boxes, and I pulled them out and emptied them.

  "You are a child," Maria's mother said. I shrugged. Sticking my tongue out is what I should have done, what I did do is ask her about the things. Or is it the other way round? I seem to remember the taste of dust on my outstretched tongue and none of the stories.

  There was a plastic mask and a penis candle, an orange bikini top, a cook book which featured "Eggs, Nature's greatest gift." There were fifteen pens which didn't work; each had a tiny blue knob of ink. There were three small plastic bowls, pink, blue and green, each stained yellow at their base. A wooden stick, the remains of a flag, a flat china plate with a cow painted on it, a green belt. Books with the titles worn off, yellowed, smelly. A pink apron. Various medals, some for school sport. A packet of tobacco papers. Each thing important to somebody; each thing somebody's life.

  There seemed to be a hundred kids playing with a ball as I watched. The garden was a wonderful place. Daphne everywhere, and early daffodils and jonquils, and the most astonishing violets. Magical flowers; you suck in their scent until you can't smell them anymore, then you rest, and the smell attacks you again. I'd love to wear a violet perfume, but all commercial scent turns to cat's piss on my skin. Some people find the smell of violets makes them sick. Weaklings.

  There were winter roses, too, pale blue ones looking nothing like a rose. Maria's sister Elise came out for a while to watch the kids.

  "Isn't the garden lovely?" she said.

  "It takes a lot of work," I said. I didn't mind her; she always made an effort to speak to me. I bent to sniff a winter rose.

  "I think this one's my favourite." She sniffed too.

  "I can't smell anything. I don't think these ones have a scent."

  "Of course they do." I sniffed again, smelling nothing. "Beautiful. Heady. Smell it."

  She sniffed again. "God, you're right. When you know it's there, it's like a blast in the face." She stayed and watched me play with the kids for a while, then she went inside. The smell was so sweet out there the kids became delirious. They squealed as the ball came to them, they rolled for it, fought for it. When I didn't tell them to calm down, they squealed louder, and I threw myself into a cartwheel between them, yip yip yip. I landed on my arse with the ball enclosed in my hands. I held the ball under my chin and opened my fingers. I knew it would glow; I didn't know the sun would go behind a cloud at that perfect moment. The kids were quiet, watching me. They could sense magic.

  "Did I ever tell about the worst man who ever lived?" I said. I looked to each one, a dare straight in the face. Stop me. "The worst man who ever lived called himself Dominic. He also called himself my uncle."

  Kelly gasped. "It's true," she told the others. She had met Dom.

  "Once upon a time he wasn't evil. He was a nice little boy, like you, or you. But there was something inside him which made him frown instead of smile, shout instead of whisper. That made the other kids hate him.

  "'Why don't you just smile?' they said. 'We hate him,' they told the teacher, and because she hated him too she told him he had nothing more to learn. He had to leave the school immediately." I pointed my finger to some distant place and the kids focussed there; Dom, stumbling away from school.

  "No school. Cool," said one of the cousins.

  "Shut up," the others told him.

  "When he got home he snuck up to his room, because he didn't want his mother to know what had happened. He did not want her or his father to find out, and he knew it wouldn't be long before the teacher told them. So, that night after dinner, Dom said he would make coffee for his mother and father. In it he stirred some terrible poison, which couldn't be tasted because coffee is so bitter. He collected the suitcase he had already packed and he stood in the doorway and watched his own parents die a terrible, painful death."

  One of the younger ones began to cry; his sister put her arm around him. The tiny sobs helped my story.

  "For the next ten years Dom wandered. He was only a child and people took pity on him. You can only pity those people. Each of them died a terrible death. And so did their children. And then he decided he wanted to be part of my family. We knew nothing of his past. He was only a lonely man who needed a family. So we took him in."

  The kids sucked their breath in. How could we have not known he was a monster?

  "Things were okay for quite a while. Then my Dad started to think maybe it was time for Dom to find a place of his own. It was very crowded at our house. Dad told him at the dinner table.

  "Dom said, 'Fair enough,' and your Uncle Peter and I kicked each other under the table. You see, we were starting to suspect there might be something wrong with Dom, because kids always know first. We heard him creeping around at night, digging up the backyard, and we knew he wasn't planting flowers."

  The kids weren't breathing. Neither was I. For the moment this story was true, it had happened.

  "That night, we heard a terrible sound coming from the tool shed. Do you know what it was?"

  No one had a guess.

  "It was an axe being sharpened. Peter and I ran into Mum and Dad's room to warn them, but they told us it was a bad dream.

  "'But we both heard it,' we said.

  "'Off to sleep,' they said. We knew we had to get help. We crept downstairs and out the front door, and we ran as fast as we could from house to house, looking for somewhere with a light on. We knew that if we woke someone up we'd have trouble making them believe us.

  "We ran so far we reached the police station. So we ran inside.

  "'Uncle Dom is sharpening his axe and we think he's going to kill Mum and Dad!' I shouted to the policeman at the desk. We thought he was going to laugh his head off. But he didn't. He said, 'What's Uncle Dom's whole name?' and Peter told him. He said, 'Oh, my God,' just like that, and he started pressing buttons and talking into a microphone.

  "'Now, kids, I want you to be calm, and very carefully tell
me your address.' He sent cars around there, one of them picked us up on the way.

  "'Stay in the car, kids,' they said, but as if we would. We wanted to see Mum and Dad, we wanted them to tell us how clever we'd been.

  "But it was too late. Far, far too late. There was blood on the footpath. In the hallway. On the stairs. And in the bedroom were Mum and Dad. IN FIFTEEN BITS EACH!"

  The kids screamed. They stared, they cried.

  "And what happened to Uncle Dom? I don't know. He disappeared that night and had never been seen since. People say if you talk about him, or even dream about him, he will appear."

  I looked over the kids' shoulders. I widened my eyes until tears formed. I opened my mouth.

  "Uncle Dom," I whispered, and the kids screamed and ran away.

  Maria insisted I answer all the calls that night, and every one of her relatives rang to abuse me.

  "The kids can't sleep. They keep waking up with nightmares." This went on till three in the morning. All the kids were having nightmares. I had a different answer for them all.

  "At least that proves your kids have got a brain," I said. "Get them to write it down. You might be able to make a movie out of it." I looked forward to the phone ringing again. It rang for a week. Maria's oldest brother was furious because his son kept tipping coffee down the sink.

  "'It's bitter, Daddy,' he says. What sort of shit is that? He never even knew coffee existed until you told him the story. Now, every time we make a cup he tips it down the bath. I thought Sharon was going mad at first.

  'Your coffee's on the bench,' she says, and it's not there. So she makes me another, and I go for the paper and it's gone. I had seen it sitting there. So I make it this time and hide around the corner, and here's the bloody kid tipping it down the bath plug hole!"

  "Kid's smarter than you, then," I said, and hung up. Adrian, the youngest brother, rang me too. We talked for an hour. I realised later he didn't even have a kid old enough to be scared by me.

  I still visited Maria's parents after that, but usually when the others weren't there.

  Lucky for me Peter's a victim of guilt and a practitioner of denial. He called me a week or so later to talk, as if nothing had happened at all.

  I practised my scream in the backyard. It always made me feel better and eventually the Rat Trap neighbours stopped investigating.

  The nightmare-giving eclipsed the fact I taught the girls to scream. No mention was made of the day of the screams. Peter didn't want to hear more, or for me to apologise for killing our mother. He wanted to pretend it had never happened, that I was just a naughty aunty who taught his children naughty words. Nothing more. I didn't exist apart from that.

  Eve gave me a pair of drop pearl earrings for my birthday. I was beginning to tire of her attentions; she wanted to talk about life when I was a child, foolish woman, as if I would remember that time fondly. I had taken to collecting her sleeping pill scripts from the chemist, and had decided it would be better for her not to take them for a month or so. "You'll feel better," I told her, and she believed me. I went to visit her; she was bounding about the place, dusting things left dirty for years.

  "Stevie stevie stevie!" she said. "Never felt better, never felt better, ooh, my old bones feel new again. I remembered I hadn't given you your pressie."

  I said, "You go get the pressie, I'll make us a cocktail."

  She gave me the jewellery box. "You choose, dear."

  "I will later. Let's have a drink, first. To celebrate your new lease on life."

  Her eyes were bright and clear. We drank. Her nose wrinkled. "It's a bit nasty, darling."

  I turned down the corners of my mouth, said nothing.

  "Oh, but very nice, too," she said. She swallowed the lot, pills and all.

  I stared into her eyes, wanting to see the movie there. Nothing.

  "Eve?" I couldn't revive her, and I cursed myself for carelessness. I felt a great chill, an iciness in my bones.

  I sat her comfortably in an armchair, put a book on her lap, surrounded her with her pictures and knick knacks. I took my birthday present and went home. The press reported LOCAL WOMAN SUICIDE. I never heard about my inheritance. "And Lady Eve

  Has passed away Straight to Hell, or So I pray."

  Stalin said: "The main thing is to have the courage to admit one's errors and to have the strength to correct them in the shortest possible time."

  That's the thing. Fixing the past without ignoring it. The Granny card arrived. "Come see us and tell us all the news!" it said. And:

  "We know a girl

  Her name is Stevie

  And we think

  She's really greevie!"

  I have no idea when their birthdays are.

  Ced came to me and said he had some friends who were keen to move in. He has so many friends. The noises of the house have been disturbing me lately. Even when Ced's not around, I hear footsteps and bangs. Door slams. Whimpers. It would be good to fill the house, have real movement. Ced's sister Pauline and her boyfriend Barry moved into one room. She looked exactly like Ced, and talked like him, too. If I was in bed and heard people talking downstairs, I could barely tell who was who. Another friend of Ced's, Russell, took the last room. I could never figure out how the two of them were friends. Russell was a root rat, nothing but. He had women in every night, or he spent the night out.

  It was a really pleasant time. I didn't think of dying while they were there. I didn't hear so many noises, and they included me in things, because Ced knew me. Thought he knew me. Sometimes I'd look out my bedroom window onto the sea of jasmine and think about Lacey underneath. I wondered how her room was going.

  We had good times, hardly any fights. Pauline made pretty good golden syrup dumplings. One night Ced and I brought Chinese for us all, cos they couldn't afford food all the time. Russell brought out a bottle of whisky he found in the cupboard and we drank heaps. Pauline kept tripping over and I said, "Watch out for the ghost."

  "What ghost?"

  "Haven't you guys heard it? It's really noisy." As long as I can remember I've heard noises in the night, things being dragged and dropped, voices.

  None of them had. Barry said, "Let's have a séance, see what it has to say."

  I had wanted to do something like it but must confess to a certain fear. Not of the ghosts, but of who they might be. Mum, or Dad, watching me, seeing what I was doing. Lacey. Some of Dad's people.

  "Why not?" I said.

  We cleared away the kitchen table and Russell found another bottle. They were all laughing, joking, pretending they weren't scared. Russell lost some of his smoothness, began to slur his words and I wondered if he wanted to back out.

  Pauline wrote the alphabet on bits of card and laid them neatly in a circle. She wrote "YES" and "NO". Barry brought in a glass, and I didn't realise, until it smashed on the floor beneath my feet, that it was my father's special glass, the one none of us were allowed to touch. I kept it in a box, in my bedroom cupboard, and it worried me that Barry had found it there.

  We sat and rested our fingers on the glass. We kept giggling; do people ever lose that desire to giggle when they're supposed to be quiet? We had no music; we wanted silence. Ced wouldn't speak, but he sat with the rest of us, waiting. Then Russell's root from the night before appeared. She was dressed in white; we stared.

  "I… came in the back door. It was open," she said.

  "It's always open," I said, "But there's an invisible sign there. It says, 'Intelligence line. Do not cross.'"

  Russell laughed. "See ya, anyway," and she left.

  It became very cold and our throats were dry. We got a mess of letters, senseless, until Pauline, said, "Are you trying to tell us something?"

  The glass moved to YES.

  Then, EVE.

  "Steve?"

  Nothing.

  "Who are you?"

  VICTIM.

  "Whose victim?"

  Nothing.

  "Whose victim?"

  Nothing.<
br />
  "Victim of what?"

  MURDER.

  Pauline sucked in her breath, threw the glass at me. "I hate this," she said. Then she gasped, touched her stomach. "I've got a pain," and she touched her arm, her head, her back. She began to cry.