Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9B

  It wouldn’t be long now until they arrived, until The Mother finally had to look at her daughter and her daughter, right back. She wouldn’t be able to just change the subject; pretend she didn’t hear or let the phone ring out, not anymore. There would be no more rolling over onto her side and pretending she was asleep. Her little girl would be walking through that door any second and though she might be able to lose herself in the balloons and streamers and all the wonderful colors, it wouldn’t be long until her daughter found her, cringing and unable to cope.

  “On the way,” said a message on her phone.

  She sat on the edge of a stool, rocking back and forth on its wobbly legs, the sound of each little leg clunking helping to keep her in some kind of absent minded trance; not exactly miles away in her thoughts but more like a foot or two, scrunching behind a leafless shrub, pretending that she was not there.

  Staring at the message on the phone, she didn’t think about Korine and what she must be thinking or how she must be feeling whether her shoes still fit, she thought about her own mother, and how, when she finally saw the drawings she had done all over the wall with her favorite colored pencils, her mother shrieked and wailed, as if she had just woken to find the plane she was travelling, in a cyclonic death spin, hurtling towards a slab of unchartered ocean, somewhere in the Pacific.

  She remembered how loud and sirened her mother’s voice was, how it was louder than she had expected and how not a real word had been said as much as had been, the stringing together of vowels around the curling of a cursing tongue.

  She remembered how quick it was, the turn of her mother’s hands, leaping from behind her newspaper to wrench the colored pencils from her fickle clench, peeling back her little fingers with the thirsted and desperate awe of a young child, tearing blindly at the neatly pressed and folded wrapping paper or a junky, in that same thirsted and desperate awe, with their same scratching nails, digging at the beige and blotchy wrapping on their bones, to get at the tiny little bugs that crawled about just beneath.

  She remembered how her mother tore out those colored pencils from her grasp and scolded her with an angry stare before she threw them down the end of the corridor and made it seem like they were gone for good and that they’d never come back.

  And she remembered too how gently her mother cradled her in her two hands, but not to pull her close to her breast and console her rebellion, no. She lifted her up and then laid her on her side, so that her buttocks were easier for her disciplining hand to whack at, over and over again.

  She remembered staring at first along the length of the corridor and seeing two of the pencils, the red and the grey one, rolling off the edge of the staircase and at that second, they looked like they were falling off the edge of the earth and she remembered, staring at the message on her phone, how she wished that she could too.

  She remembered staring then, at the colored circles and squiggles on the wall, as her mother’s hand beat against her buttocks as if her foul behavior were caused by a dent or a flicker that she could reset with a pounding stern vigor, like a wayward and fuzzy television set.

  She had used every color there was in the rainbow, every color except for blue, because blue was for boys and even though blue was the color of things that she loved, like the sky and the sea and bright blue butterflies, her mother said blue was only for boys to color with and it was only for boys to wear and unless she wanted to grow up to be a boy, she couldn’t draw with it, paint with it, wear it or even imagine with it, in case it made her stop being a little girl, like her mummy wanted her to never stop being.

  And she remembered how her mother spoke with every smacking of her hand and how every smack got harder and left a redder mark and a more stinging sting. She spoke only in syllables, sounding out each one every time her palm slapped against the young girl’s clenching buttocks. And it didn’t at all make it easier to follow what she had to say. If anything, it just sounded like she was trying to distract herself from the sound her hand made, as it slapped against her daughter’s bum, kind of like how the cuts on The Mother’s arms and on the inside of her thighs when she was in high school, they helped to distract her from the feeling she got in her skin and in her bones that were spurred on by the thoughts that spun around in her head all the time; seeing all of the other kids with their friends and their groups and all running and smiling and playing and kissing boys and everyone looking like all the colors of the rainbow and she, feeling transparent, invisible and alone.

  And after her mother finally stopped slapping her buttocks and pulled her close to her chest and started to rock her back and forth, like she probably did when she was just a baby, she remembered that this was what it took, to pull her from her paper.

  Now, looking up from her phone for a second, The Mother could see hundreds of balloons in the room, all bouncing around the floor. And they were all sorts of colors and all sorts of sizes and shapes and though balloons were every child’s favorite thing in the whole world and how just the sight of them made every child’s eyes alight, when The Mother looked at them, she saw only her expelled breath and she wondered to herself, as she had no other company, whether the children would still be happy if they had seen the thoughts The Mother kept in her mind as she filled each and every one, the thoughts she had of her little boy, the quietest she had ever seen him, in an itsy bitsy coffin, neath a choir of muffled sobbing.

  She wondered, looking around the room and unable to see even an inch of the floor, whether there were enough balloons and whether she should rush out and buy more. She had barely the breath to keep herself living, but she wondered if one or two more balloons might help, like the scores of cuts on her inner thigh as a girl, to rid her body of this foul suffocating air in her lungs.

  Staring at the message, she wished there was someone here to spank her now.

  The phone rang.

  “Hello,” The Mother said, still stupid, wiping an escaping tear and wearing a plastic smile.

  “Hey hun, it’s me.”

  It was Tracy. She was so god damned persistent. She didn’t get the hint, not like the others. She just kept ringing and ringing and she wouldn’t stop, not unless The Mother picked up or until she came over for herself, to make sure that everything was ok. But she didn’t get it.

  “Hey,” said The Mother flatly, the sound of her voice and her enthusiasm, like the flapping of a flat tire, echoing through a half open window.

  “Just checking if you got my messages or not. You’ve been pretty hard to get hold of you know. How are things? Are you ok?”

  “I’m fine,” said The Mother.

  She wasn’t at all. That was obvious to anyone. And she didn’t at all sound convincing. It was just one of the convenient things about being a person. Even though you thought or felt something so strongly that everyone else was thinking it or feeling it too, you were able to say the absolute opposite and because it was your word, people had to take it as being true, just because it would be rude and probably come across as being prying, not to.

  “So I was thinking maybe I could come a bit earlier, help you set up and all.”

  “To what?” said The Mother.

  “The party of course. Well, you know. The welcome home…. For Korine. Your mum called me last week. She’s really concerned you know.”

  “I’m fine,” said The Mother, adamantly.

  “No, about Korine,” said Tracy. “Uh, and you too, of course, I mean. She is.. I mean we all are… We’re concerned is all I’m saying” she uttered, absolutely back stepping and well, not at all sounding convincing. “And I haven’t heard from you in ages.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Your mum said, you know, you were doing therapy and group and that. Said you were making friends, other mums going through the same kind of thing. They nice people are they?”

  “Same kind of thing? A thing? My son is dead. You get that right? It’s not a fucking thing.”

  “Hun, I’m sorry. I didn’t
mean to say that…” she said pausing as if she had stopped her stride to tie a shoe. “I can’t get the fucking words” she spluttered.

  The Mother didn’t respond. She stared out at the balloons thinking how stupid she was, putting the heavy sediment of her soul inside such fragile little things that children loved to stretch and squeeze with their hands and to jump on with their feet ad that all of them were bound to pop before the even the cake had been brought out. And what would the atmosphere be like then?

  “I miss you,” Tracy said. “We all do, all the other mothers in the group.”

  There it was.

  The group.

  But she didn’t belong anymore.

  “There’s been a lot to do. The funeral and all that. And, look, I honestly haven’t had time. Everything is out of place. Everything is just… not right. I don’t expect you to understand. You wouldn’t get it.”

  “Well, I haven’t lost a child, no. But I can imagine.”

  “You can, really?” said The Mother aghast yet strangely welcoming, as if she had found a cause to spit and curse for no good reason, than to spit and curse. “You can imagine? Just like that. You can think it up in your head. You know what it’s like. You can just imagine. Why the fuck would you want to do that?”

  “No I didn’t mean that, I just… I lost my grandmother years ago and I know…”

  “You don’t know anything Tracy. You - don’t - know – anything” The Mother said, sounding out each word as if it were a spanking palm against Tracy’s petulant buttocks.

  As she screamed into the phone, she could see the shadow of someone in the doorway and for a second she thought it was Korine, that in the time she had been gone, she had all grown up.

  “I know you’re angry and you’re saying things you don’t mean,” said Tracy, half believing herself. “But I think you need good friends around you, people who know you, who knew you before, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. Tell me. Tell me what I don’t know. Tell me how I am supposed to feel. Tell me what the fuck I’m supposed to do. C’mon, tell me. You know me so well, then go on, tell me. I’ve changed alright? Everything has fucking changed. It is chang-ing” she shouted.

  “Excuse me,” said the person at the door.

  “Not now,” thought The Mother, paying neither an acknowledging look nor a stalling hand. “Listen, fuck the group, ok? Fuck every group. Fuck, everyone. I have nothing in common with any of those women anymore and none of them, nobody - you get that right? - Nobody, not even you, absolutely nobody knows what I’m going through. I don’t even fucking know.”

  “I just want to help.”

  “You can’t help. Nobody can.”

  The two women were silent. Even their breaths were without sound. For The Mother, most of hers was filled in colored balloons on the floor, threatening to burst and flood back into her lungs and fill her cells and her skin with dread.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me” shouted the person at the door.

  Whoever the hell they were, they would find a polite response.

  The Mother gripped at a streamer that was hanging from the wall beside her. She dug her nails in, clawing through the silence on the other end of the phone.

  “You shouldn’t do that” shouted the person at the door.

  “Your mum said you’re acting strangely. She thinks it might be the new group that they’re not helping. She said you’ve been obsessing yourself, you know, things that are out of your control. She said you’ve been going to other funerals, of other babies. Is that right?”

  “You wouldn’t understand. I’m helping them, other mothers, to grieve. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “But who is helping you grieve? You need to surround yourself in people who are embracing life, not those who have made their camp in tragedy and death. You’re not grieving; you’re just bargaining the guilt that you feel.”

  “Fuck you. What would you know?” said The Mother, her hand pulling on the streamer, wishing it was attached to the sky and that she could just pull heaven down so that it flattened and suffocated the whole world.

  “You’re gonna rip it. And you’re gonna ruin everything. It’s supposed to be a colored bridge” shouted the person at the door.

  The Mother turned.

  It was the lady from 9A, the one everyone picked on.

  “Wait” shouted The Mother.

  The lady from 9A ran away and as she did, a group of young boys heckled her and called her insulting names.

  “I gotta go,” said The Mother.

  “Well, what time does the party start?” Tracy asked as if she had just rang and had only a second to speak and the words they had just exchanged, had not been so.

  The Mother shook her head delirious.

  “Six,” she said. “Six thirty. I don’t know.”

  “Ok hun, I’ll see you around seven then. I’ll bring Jeffrey and the kids. Oh, they haven’t seen Korine in….”

  The Mother left the phone on the stool and ran out of the party room and into the corridor outside. The lady from 9A was gone, but the boys were still there, pretending to talk with slurred speech and crippled demeanor, so as to sound like her though she sounded nothing like.

  “Hey” shouted The Mother. “Ya little shits. What the hell is wrong with you? Are you fucking stupid? You think it’s funny to make fun of people? Is that it? What, because she’s different somehow, that gives you the right to berate her? I know you. I fucking know you” she said, pointing at one of the boys. “I know your mother. Brunette, right? 5/6? Face like an uneven grape? Husband a philandering ass?” she said, pushing her index finger into the boy’s chest like a small rounded button as if his fright and apology was an elevator that she was trying to call.

  “Don’t tell my mum” pleaded the boy, his veneer of cool, sweating from his nervous pores, his friends as skittish as he, yet sniggering behind his back.

  “Whatta you reckon she’s gonna say when I tell her that aside from her husband blowing the porter in the back of his Honda, her little fuck up of a son is also out stalking women with his perverted friends?”

  “What?”

  “Get the fuck out of here” she screamed, kicking the boy in his rear and sending them all running like grains of sand, scattered by a sudden gale.

  The boy hanged his head and ran between his friends who all laughed and mocked him, slapping his bottom and calling him queer.

  The Mother looked back towards the stairs, but the lady from 9B was gone or had been gone, the entire time. She felt like she had something to ask her though she didn’t know what that was. It didn’t matter, though. This thing she was feeling, it made her forget about Korine for a second. And if she could forget about Korine then she could forget about Callum. And if for a second she didn’t have to think about either one, then she could pretend to be bored or indifferent as if none of this had ever happened; as if today as just a day and not necessarily ‘the day’.