Читать книгу Things Even González Can't Fix - Christy Chilimigras - Страница 10

CHAPTER 4

Scoring with my Father

I suppose My Father, in his drug-induced insanity, always believed he was doing the best he could for us. On second weekends, in the early hours of the morning when he would put us, ripped from sleep and dreams, into the back seat of his car for a crack excursion to Hillbrow, we would ask him to leave us at home. Our YiaYia was, after all, right there, asleep in her bed.

He would always say no. That we weren’t safe with our grandmother, that we were safest with him. In the way that children absorb words as pearls and declarations as gold, we’d be both petrified and relieved to visit street corners at 3 am.

Men would casually approach My Father’s car, expecting him. Expecting us. I giggle sickly now thinking of those shadowed dealers who must have revelled in the idiocy of this drug-addled white man. Motivated so by crack that he’d bring his young children along for the ride. We were badges of his stupidity. Badges of desperation. Perhaps we were armour. Please, Mr Drug Dealer, be kinder to me. Give me credit. Don’t you see my children pretending to sleep in the back seat of my car?

When these Hillbrow visits first began, My Father would take us during the day. Daylight hours. Explorers of the city. Look left, look right, tales of what Hillbrow used to be. The clubs, the coffee shops, a time before the Nigerians arrived. With tourist eyes, we’d drink it all in before distorting our faces into grotesque masks and sticking out our tongues, chins raised, at Ponte Tower. ‘All the baddies in Johannesburg live in Ponte Tower,’ My Father tells us. ‘You have to pull faces at them to show them you’re not scared of them.’ But the daylight visits ended, My Father sinking gloriously into the anonymity and darkness of the night.

Reversing out the driveway, leaving the cruel YiaYia at home at 3 am, I’d think of her failures, her shortfalls so delicately illustrated, painted with care, by My Father. And we’d head out to town. You know … because it was safer.

Away from the clutches of the villainous grandmother, stinking of mothballs, storing chocolates in her hoarder’s paradise to give us for our birthdays. I remember swearing, as a child, that My Father’s assertion that his mother was cruel must have been true. After all, she seemed to buy chocolates in 1998 to give to us in 2004. In 2004, she’d stock up for 2009 celebrations. What kind of sicko insists on gifting expired chocolate? The white age that creeps up the side of a once-perfect Ferrero Rocher would drive me into a silent rage. I would stare at the locked cupboards in that house, and fresh confectionaries would yell back at me. ‘Eat me while I’m fresh – the old bat has taken us hostage. We’ve seen what’s headed your way this Christmas, Mouse. And it ain’t fucking pretty.’ I never did dare find the keys and release those deliciously fresh captives. I was too busy running through the halls to be mischievous, sweet dreams yelling at me as I flew past.

Leaving Hillbrow each time, my dad would plan his exit strategy around one specific stretch of road. This strip of tar, abruptly dipping and then gently rising a few metres later, would send the car into a state of suspension if driven fast enough. There we would sit, Tiger in the front, Mouse in the back. Our organs free floated, our hearts spilled from our asses and our mouths in the same instant, our toes hovering above car mats. Screeches of delight accompanying us on the way down. We’d beg him to turn around and do it again. Sometimes he would. Sometimes he wouldn’t. That hill became ‘Christy’s Hill’. From the beginning, when he and his crazed, contour-lined eyes would approach our beds, when his bony knees would kneel next to our little heads to wake us up – Tiger first, then Mouse, still half crusted in dream – we’d tell him we just wanted to sleep. And he would say, ‘We’re going to Christy’s Hill, don’t you want to fly?’

In those early years, as with every child, my parents held our lives in their hands. Old Lass, our comfort, working her fingers to the bone. Sandpaper caressing furniture. Palms floating recreational drugs to her lips every other weekend. Fingers stirring the bechamel that covered and crisped our pastitio, fingers curling duvet covers under our necks as she’d tuck us in. Fingers combing back our hair and buttoning our shirts. My Father, palms held out of car windows, hands clasped around a crack pipe, exposed our sanity and childhood to the chill of night air and reality and nightmare. My Father’s limbs limp, as he’d die in his sleep for two days at a time when his upturned palms would fail him. His thumb grating away at his index finger, fidgeting. Fidget. Fidget. Wearing down what little sanity we had left. His hands locking his bedroom door every night when he sidled off to bed. My little hands. Tiny fists, knocking. Tentatively. My empty belly wanting toast. Please wake up. Please stop sweating everywhere. Please stop dying for two days at a time – and feed us. Please stop lying, sloppily, wetly, on your back on a bed on the orange blanket that is absorbing your smell. Please wake up and be a dad. Use your fingers to make us a meal, use your hands to hold books to read us bedtime stories. Take your palms as far away from our bodies as you can. Wake up and feed us. Go away and die.

Parents are curious things. They possess everything. The lessons we’re forced to learn. The stories we’re forced to listen to. The hands that pull away the fingers we’ve shoved into our ears. I won’t listen – you can’t make me. But they do. They make us. The hands to prise away the young, sticky palms we bury our eyes in. I won’t look – you can’t make me. But they do. They make us. Whether they, or we, like it or not, they make us see and hear everything. Young minds and minds’ eyes like sieves, like sponges. Young hearts and thumping cells like cemeteries. All things buried.

I must have been six or seven the first time I decide it’s time I bath myself at My Father’s house. Protector & Soul and I discuss it at length. She helping me build up the courage it would take for me to tell him that, like my sister, I was old enough to do it myself.

We cover all the angles. What I should say if he says this or points out that. Conversations, meetings like this between me and my sister, are not uncommon. We often sit together and discuss our feelings, attempt to piece ourselves back together. Later in life, this hands-on and unrelenting approach to communication I’d honed as a child drives my boyfriends insane. To them, it seems I exist only to harp on. Never letting go, never moving on. I try to explain that my intensive style of communication isn’t intended to bleed them and our conversations dry. It is my goddamn lifeline. Spoken words like pegs in a tent, keeping me in place, keeping me anchored and of this world.

My Father’s response, as we’d predicted, is one of panicked fury. ‘You think you’re fucking old enough to bath yourself?’ he barks. ‘You’d better do a good job because I’ll be checking after.’

Minutes later my little body sits in the bathtub in that Rosebank house. My knees, my toes, my earlobes, all feel proud. I’ve fucking done it. I’ve eliminated the bathtime discomfort that has been settling into my bones like clockwork at 6 pm on the evenings I have been at My Father’s house. I soap and rinse myself, careful to never use the bar of My Father’s Clinique face soap he swears makes him look years younger than he is. ‘Always dab your face dry, never wipe,’ he’d say.

I soap and rinse. Soap and rinse. Great attention is paid to my belly button, always My Father’s go-to location for rigorous scrubbing. I climb out the bath, body dripping onto the bathmat resting on the carpeted floor. The bathmat that always stinks of damp. Always. I dry myself. Beaming. Proud.

He walks in.

‘You dry?’

‘Yes, I’m dry.’

His bulging eyes crazy, his lips pursed, ‘Let me check then.’

He runs his hands over my ankles. Up my calves. Up my thighs. In between my bum cheeks. The top of his hand grazes my source.

‘You’re not dry. You can’t do this on your own. I told you. Wait here.’

He returns with a belt. He folds it over itself. He pulls and snaps it.

I barely remember anything after this other than sobbing. Being told to shut up or I’d be given something to cry about. I don’t think he hit me with the belt then, but perhaps this is because everything is black. The snapping leather is a threat. A roaring warning. A reminder that I belong to him.

I remember my sister, the Tiger, telling me how brave I have been, how well I’d cleaned myself, and that we’d try again another time.