Читать книгу Real Life - Adeline Dieudonné - Страница 16

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THE FOLLOWING SUMMER arrived. Sam’s state hadn’t improved. The emptiness in his eyes had gradually filled with something incandescent, pointed, and sharp-edged. Whatever was living inside the hyena had slowly migrated into my little brother’s head. A colony of wild beasts had set up residence there, feeding off slivers of his brain. This teeming army proliferated, burning the primeval forests and turning them into dark, swampy landscapes.

I loved him. And I was going to fix it all. Nothing could stop me, even if he no longer played with me, even if his laughter became as ghastly as acid rain on a field of poppies. I loved him like a mother loves a sick child. His birthday was September 26. I decided that everything should be ready by that day.

* * *

My father had just returned from a hunting trip in the Himalayas. He had brought back the head of a brown bear, which he hung on his wall of trophies—having taken down several stag antlers to make room. The bear’s pelt, he had draped over his couch and he slumped on it every night to watch TV. He had been gone three weeks and we experienced his absence as a relief.

In the weeks before he left, he had been edgy like never before. We were having dinner one evening and I knew that he was going to fly into a rage. All four of us knew it. For days he had been coming home from work and sniffing around, in every nook, as tense as a coiled spring. Sam and I hid away in our rooms, convinced he was going to explode. But he didn’t. And his edginess mounted, like pressurized propane.

So we were having dinner that evening. Everyone was eating in silence, with precise, measured movements. Nobody wanted to be responsible for the spark that would cause the explosion. The only sounds (which filled the room) came from my father: from his jaws as they chewed huge chunks of meat; and from his short, husky breaths. The beans and mash on his plate looked like two atolls lost in a bloody sea. I forced myself to eat so as not to stand out, but my stomach was all in knots. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, alert to the coming cataclysm.

He put his cutlery down. In a barely audible whisper, he said, “Is that what you call ‘bloody’?” My mother turned so pale you’d have thought all her blood had poured onto my father’s plate. She said nothing. There was no good answer to that question.

My father was insistent: “Well?”

“There’s a lot of blood on your plate,” she murmured.

“So, you’re happy with yourself?” he snarled between his teeth.

My mother closed her eyes. This was it. He picked up his plate in his two monstrous fists and smashed it against the table.

“WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!”

He grabbed my mother by her hair and squashed her face into the mashed potato and broken china.

“WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? YOU THINK YOU’RE SOMETHING? YOU’RE NOTHING! NOTHING!”

My mother whined in pain. She didn’t beg, she didn’t struggle, she knew there was no point. All I could see of her deformed face, squashed by my father’s hand, was her mouth twisted in terror. All three of us knew that this time would be worse than all the others. Sam and I remained frozen. We didn’t think to go upstairs: our father’s rages usually exploded after dinner, rather than during, so we were rarely spectators.

He pulled my mother’s head up by her hair, then slammed it several times onto the same spot on the table, into the remains of the plate. I could no longer tell if the blood was from the steak or from my mother. Then I reminded myself that none of this mattered because I was going to travel back in time and delete it all. None of this would exist anymore in my new life.

When my father had calmed down, I took Sam’s hand and we went up to my room. We hid beneath my quilt. I told him we were inside an ostrich’s egg and that we were playing hide-and-go-seek with Monica. That this was all just a game, only a game. A game.

Two days later my father left to go hunting in the Himalayas and we could breathe freely again.