by Carl Nixon
‘No. Here it is.’
She began to apologise even before she was in the door and flicking on the light. ‘Sorry, I told you it wasn’t much.’
The doorway opened directly into the lounge which also contained the tiny kitchen. The house, like the land, had been divided into more economical units and this had once been the dining room. The carpet by the door was faded and worn to the thread, and the musty smell of trapped damp and mouse piss mixed with the wax fumes from the Christadelphians.
‘This is great. You’re a real princess. Don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t helped me out tonight.’
She was a princess. She waited for him to close the gap between them, to squeeze his puffy lower lip against her mouth, to cup one buttock in his hot hand.
‘So is this where I’ll be sleeping?’ He sat and bounced experimentally on the couch. Bouncing was good. Bouncing was promising.
‘I guess.’ She moved to join him.
‘Have you got any blankets?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She went to the cupboard by the hot-water cylinder. ‘Here. These should be warm enough.’ She stood close.
‘That’s great. The bathroom …?’
‘Oh, it’s through there.’ She paused. ‘That’s my bedroom in there. Through that door. That one.’
‘Okay. I’ll try not to disturb you.’
‘Okay. Though I’ll probably be awake for a while.’ She waited. ‘If you need anything just call out.’
‘Great. Right. Good night then.’
‘Do you want a drink?’ she asked quickly. ‘I’ve got some red wine.’ Karen imagined them sitting and talking about his family, the time he cut his knee playing (down by the river? on a family picnic? during a spirited game of bull-rush with the older brother/sister/cousin he always secretly envied?). They would discover a common love for Thai/Greek/seafood before she subtly brought the conversation round to old dalliances, sexual preferences.
‘No thanks. I’m buggered. Titus is a really draining part.’
‘Okay … Good night then.’
‘Good night.’
Karen went to the bathroom and then to her room where she reluctantly closed the door. Behind her she could hear Alastair making up the couch and the creak of his leather jacket as it was thrown over a chair. He obviously didn’t want to rush her. But she knew it was only a matter of time before he came to her. She had to be ready. She pulled a stick of incense from its packet — Nubian Nights — and lit it. The smoke drifted in circles towards the high ceiling where the light from the shaded bulb did not quite reach. The room was cold so she turned on a small bar heater by the bed.
She imagined Alastair flinging open the door, striding purposefully into the room, his blue eyes fixed on her. What to wear? In winter she usually wore an old T-shirt, pink from being in the washing machine with the colours, and serviceable knickers. On cold nights like this she also tended to pull on thick woollen socks. From the back of her bottom drawer she dragged out a black teddy, satin with white possum fur around the cleavage and the hem. It had been a twenty-first gift. Her friends had pooled their money to buy it from the Cupid’s Lounge Adult Boutique. Karen slipped it on. It was now too tight around the shoulders and bust and the straps dug into her skin. She felt that if she leaned forward with any suddenness the flimsy material would rip. Still, better than nothing (to begin with anyway).
The room still smelt musty and wax fumes seeped down through the sagging ceiling. She could hear the Christadelphians moving above her. It bothered her. There was nothing as unsexy as a Christadelphian. She lit another four incense sticks, poking them into the dry dirt at the base of a dying peace plant, and slid a tape into the tape deck by her bed. Everything But The Girl started to sing quietly about two lovers who had known each other since they were children. The rumblings of the Christadelphians faded into the distance.
At first Karen lay on top of the sheets as she listened for Alastair’s footsteps outside the door and the rattle of the doorknob. Because of the tight teddy she was forced to lie slightly rigid, like someone stiff with the early symptoms of meningitis. Were the curtains better drawn or open? Karen got up awkwardly and closed them. She lay down. And then got up and opened them again. In the end she opted for a compromise — one drawn, the other slightly open. The warmth from the bar heater did not reach her. It rose up to the high ceiling where it gathered like water filling an empty swimming pool on the other side of the world.
At last the cold drove her under the covers where she experimented with the position of the quilt. First up by her chin — ‘mock surprise and innocence’ — to mostly off her body — ‘ready and willing’. In the end, she pulled it around her shoulders — ‘warm’. She could always yank it alluringly lower when she heard the door begin to open. It was only a matter of time before Alastair came to her. Karen concentrated on the sound of Tracy Thorn spreading her tears all over town and imagined how it would be. She could feel Alastair’s hand on the back of her neck. His manly weight pressing down on her. She smiled and, closing her eyes, surrendered.
In the morning the light coming past the half-open curtain fell across her face. The heater had been on all night and the room was stinking hot and muggy. The air was thick with incense, and the straps of the teddy had cut off the circulation to the tops of her arms which had turned a motley blue. In the lounge the couch was empty. She stared down at the blankets which lay on the floor like a discarded skin. Karen pulled her dressing gown closer across her chest. Her last two eggs had been taken from the fridge. She saw no evidence that they had been cooked and eaten for breakfast. He had simply taken them to eat later. A carton of milk stood empty on the stained bench.
Lying on the green Formica table was a note. It had been written on a page torn from her new Woman’s Weekly. The headline announced the 10 BIGGEST TURNOFFS OF ALL TIME! and next to it in the margin:
Eternally grateful. You’re a princess.
Love and kisses. A.
Karen felt suddenly and overwhelmingly used.
During the rest of the season of Titus Andronicus, Alastair was friendly to her but never seemed able to stay for long and chat. He began an affair with the woman playing Tamora. Tamora was married to the Emperor Saturnicus — both in the play and in real life. She had flaming red hair, legs like sticks and skin the colour of chalk.
Night after night, Karen remained in her lighting box behind the tinted glass. In some performances, discerning audience members noted a dimness around the area of the stage where the actor playing Titus was standing. Wasn’t there a noticeable murkiness during his big speech in Act 3 Scene 2? Sometimes, when he was not the focus of attention, the actor could be seen frowning up at the lights as though looking for a blown bulb. But overall everyone agreed the production was excellent. One respected critic even wrote that it ‘would not be out of place in the West End’. The review was blown up on to A3 paper and taped to the door of the actors’ dressing room with the most glowing phrases highlighted in yellow marker.
Nothing was said by the other actors about Karen’s slight lapses with the lighting. After all, their lighting was just fine.
Like Wallpaper
You can picture it all.
You will meet your father, for the first time in twenty-seven years, at the supermarket. The bright fluorescent lights, the stark canyons of tinned and bottled food. It is the perfect place for an emotional ambush.
Your father will be reaching for a tin of Watties spaghetti with meatballs. You, his cast-aside son, will be holding a jar of artichoke hearts. It will be a small victory. You will have the culinary as well as the moral high ground. You will both stare for a moment, your blue-grey eyes meeting his. With a slightly melodramatic touch, you imagine that time will seem to stop, to freeze solid like the block of ice cream at the bottom of your trolley. Maybe it will.
And then he will turn away. Perhaps it will be to place his spaghetti in the basket he is carrying before turning back to you. Perhaps he will j
ust be turning away, not knowing who he has just met.
‘Excuse me,’ you will say calmly. (You have, after all, practised saying it a thousand times in front of the mirror.) ‘I believe that you are my father.’
Maybe it is then that time will freeze. Solid as ice cream. Hard and silver as the metal bars of the trolley. Still as a photograph.
Your mother is a methodical woman, neat and exact in her movements. On the day she discovers that your father’s side of the wardrobe is empty, that his tools are gone from the garage, she takes a sharp knife with a thin blade and eases it between the backs of photographs and the heavy black paper of the family album. You rest your elbows on the edge of the Formica table and cup your chin as she works. Each photograph comes free with a sound like water dripping from a tap. A faint plopping. You are only six but you sit still, fascinated. There is the same tightness in the air that you have noticed before it rains.
When she has done all four corners, your mother places the selected photograph on the neat pile by your elbow. You watch her choose some, leave others, until the pattern becomes clear. Your mother is removing, slicing out, all the photographs that have your father in them. Even if he was just one of many people in a group. There is a picture at a barbecue where he is grinning, holding a brown bottle of beer by the neck at the edge of a crowd. His face is tanned, his hair is blonder than you have ever seen it. This one too is cut free and joins the pile. They all go. Even if your mother is in the photograph with him. All but one of the wedding photographs are surgically removed. Your mother alone in a white dress. Shipwrecked on the empty black page.
The pile by your elbow grows. Your father as a baby. As a boy. Your father on the boat to England, crossing the equator dressed as a cannibal with a bone in his hair. Dancing, working, frowning in a white fisherman’s jersey, holding you as a baby. On some pages of the album there are no photographs left. Only the empty spaces marked out like barren sections by the waxy smudges where the corners have been.
Sitting there at the table with the knife in her hand, your mother looks as fragile as the paper people holding hands in a chain over your bed. If you were to blow on her she would flutter and fly away.
Nothing is left to chance in your imagination. Even the setting across from the tinned fruit and vegetables is carefully thought out. The black-eyed peas will stare your father down. The asparagus spears will prick his conscience. Even the photographs of the two plums in light syrup will remind him of the balls he didn’t have when it came to sticking with his wife and son. And if he tries to ignore you, tries to brush past and feign ignorance of who you really are, then … then the supermarket is perfect.
He will be boxed in by the bulk-buy bins. Cornered by the pyramid of cut-price cat food. In the deli his dark hair will stand out among the hard cheeses and rows of pale, wrinkled uncooked chickens. There will be no hiding among the bags of potato chips or the bottles of Coke in red uniforms standing in military rows almost up to the ceiling. No warm sanctuary among the bags of frozen vegetables.
Finally, he will be trapped by the blue-coated checkout women who will glare at him darkly. Checkout women know what it is like to be a deserted mother. They have got up in the night to check a sick child and returned to a cold bed. They know about men who have taken themselves out of the picture. Know what it feels like not to have the father of their child around.
It is only when your mother carries the pile of photographs out to the yellowed lawn at the back of the council house that you understand what she intends to do. Unconcerned by neatness now, she throws them in a pile and they slip and slide across each other. Then she takes a box of matches from her apron and sets them on fire. A hundred father-faces curl, blacken and burn.
The chemicals in the photographs make the flames flare red and purple, blue and green. There is no wind but the grass is dry and the flames creep out from the central pyre, scorching the ground until you stamp them down. Your mother does not move. Does not even step back from the flames when they threaten to catch her dressing gown on fire. She stares as your father crinkles into nothing.
It is only now that you see the necessity of memory. With no photographs the images in your head are all that you have left of your father, and already you can feel them fading like a coloured shirt soaking in bleach.
You watch as a piece of photograph no thicker than a layer of skin lifts off. The hot air carries it up high, higher than the lemon tree and then up even higher. For a long time you imagine that your father’s face can still be seen smiling off into the blue sky.
Your father always said that you had a good imagination.
The question of how you will know him is problematic. You think that you will just know. In the same way that you know a blatant lie. But on other, more pragmatic days you imagine a certain way of walking, a tilt of the head that you will instantly recognise as he listens to Tom Jones sing about the green green grass of home through the supermarket speakers. Your home, you will inform him, had a barren patch in the middle of the back lawn where the grass never grew back.
You study yourself in the mirror. You are looking for facial features that are not your mother’s. Your mother’s maiden name was Bartle. Your father is a Ricketts. You try to ignore Bartle, isolate by elimination everything that is Ricketts. Your eyes are rounder than your mother’s, although they are the exact same shade of blue-grey. Your chin is, you see, more prominent. Does your mother have that slight gap between her teeth? Your hair is dark. Hers is light.
It is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in reverse. You are taking pieces away, hoping that you will be left with something significant. The picture on the front of the box. Not a Provence garden scene or spotted puppies playing from 101 Dalmatians. Your father’s face.
You play this game for hours. For days and weeks and months. For years.
Your mother never talks about your father. Never mentions him, not even in passing. She never replies or even looks at you when you ask about him. It is as though she never married him. As though he was never here. Never left shaving foam peppered with whiskers around the bottom of the sink. It is as though your memories are just imagination.
Back in front of the mirror you see that your face is becoming squarer, losing its baby roundness. You have begun to shave. You like shaving. It shows that your face is becoming more like his. That the pieces of the jigsaw are shifting in your favour.
With foam on your face, you locate the almost invisible scar under your left eye where you were bitten by the neighbour’s dog when you were nine. When you meet again you will tell your father that you cried for him to come and make it stop hurting. You don’t remember if you did or not. You might have.
You will stand directly behind him in the checkout line. You will look around, wondering if people are taking it for granted that you are father and son. The resemblance will now be obvious. (Your diligence in front of the mirror will have been rewarded.) They will think you are a father and son out shopping together. They will think that you are both going back to your house for dinner with your wife and children, or out to a movie. Just a man and his father. After all, the family that plays together stays together.
He will be shopping for one. A basket, not a trolley. Nestled in the bottom will be some cheap bacon or maybe chops, half a dozen large eggs, frozen peas, white bread and instant coffee. You watch as his shopping passes over the red eye of the machine, which beeps in surprise at the 1950s fare.
You half expect him to run but he waits patiently by the SPCA food bin as your shopping is loaded into plastic bags. He will look old.
You have a paper round after school and work for Mr Lee the milkman on Saturday and Sunday and save enough money to buy your first camera when you are twelve. It is a Pentax ME Super, slightly old even then. You have only the one subject. Men between the ages of thirty-five and fifty.
You photograph them wherever you can find them. On the streets, in parks, standing in groups outside pubs and rugby games, leaving office b
uildings. You do not ask permission. Suddenly the boy with the camera is there and then he is gone. The photographs have a raw, instant look. Men laughing, arguing, staring blankly, half turning as they see you out the corner of their eyes. Men in hats and suits. Bald men and men with hair. Men with lined faces and smooth-faced men.
You have never really known your father’s first name and your mother will not tell you. Will go silent for days when you ask. She has not remarried. Will not even speak to a man unless she has to, and then only ‘yes’ and ‘no’. As you grow older her distrust seems to spread to you like a stain. She avoids your room.
You spend most of your money on getting the photographs developed and, later, on the chemicals and equipment you need to develop them yourself. When you are sixteen you turn your bedroom into a darkroom. The black-and-white photos you pin to the walls. They spread out like a living thing, growing bigger and bigger. Some overlap, but always the man’s face is visible. You stare at them before you go to sleep at night. The eyes and the ears and the mouths and chins. Are they like your own? Which one is he?
As more and more photographs are added they entirely cover first one wall and then the others. Like wallpaper.
Outside it will be raining. Perhaps just getting dark. And there will only be a few cars left in the vast car park. Very film noir. You imagine that you are Humphrey Bogart and your father is Claude Rains walking across the tarmac at the end of Casablanca. Will this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?
The rain will smear the reflection of you and your father in the window of your car. He will notice that it is late model and expensive although he will say nothing.
Inside you will both sit in silence. It is a silence that you have imposed. It is not up to him to speak. The rain will beat on the roof and run down the windows. Sitting that close you will smell him and remember riding down the hallway on the tops of his shoes. Wrapping your arms around his legs while he walked stiff-legged with monster strides. You will remember laughing until you had to go and pee.
