Читать книгу Things Even González Can't Fix - Christy Chilimigras - Страница 13

Around this time, Old Lass meets the man that will become Second Husband. He’s a tall, lanky antiques dealer whose body possesses not one Mediterranean bone. Protector & Soul and I immediately dislike him. We aren’t used to such pale skin. We aren’t used to men who actually do things, like go fishing, and who drag us along to do so. We aren’t used to men who don’t smoke crack and who instead drink beer, greedily, so that it dribbles from their lips. We aren’t used to men who braai. We aren’t used to having a loud, fishing, beer-drinking man in our house telling us what to do. And we definitely aren’t used to having to share our mother. In our young and expert opinions, Second Husband wears far too much cologne, is far too literal in the colour coding of his outfits (sometimes arriving head to toe in coordinating shades of brown and mustard) and is simply not right for Old Lass. But none of this matters. Within a year of meeting him, Old Lass has packed up our Wendywood lives and moved us to a new home.

The house is pretty and big and not at all like our Wendywood flat. Plonked in the middle of a Parkhurst road lined by trees, the path beyond the heavy wooden gate leads through the garden and up three steps to the veranda. The house is painted white. A fresh, deep, chalky white that fails absolutely in concealing the elderly cracks recently painted over. Arranged starkly on the white veranda are two of Second Husband’s antique chairs. They are brown and wooden – as is all the furniture in this house. The back garden homes the most gloriously big oak tree, under which Old Lass will later get married, as well as a pergola happily drowning under grapevines, the only Greek whisper in our new home. Protector & Soul and I hate the place.

Nonetheless, we set about making our new, shared bedroom as ‘us’ as we possibly can. Our wooden bunk beds, painted a light lavender, are placed against a wall, leaving us more room than we knew what to do with. The parquet floors are streaked with fresh damage as we push the other furniture around from one spot to the next. We know from the second we move in that we will be confined to our bedroom most of the time. Second Husband, when he isn’t in his dark and gloomy antique shop a few roads away, lies on the old daybed that serves as a couch in the lounge. No matter the time of day or the state of the weather, whenever he is at home he draws closed the heavy green-and-red velvet curtains, blocking the outside world from dancing across the screen on which the History Channel flickers. Old Lass brings him beers. Old Lass makes him bacon pasta. Second Husband stinks and stains the velvet curtains and daybed cushions and air with plumes of blue Peter Stuyvesant smoke. Old Lass rolls joints for the two of them to smoke in the garden. Second Husband returns to the couch, is brought another beer and resents Old Lass for having children who follow her from home to house. Instead of asking us how we are, Old Lass tells my sister and me to ‘keep it down’.

One day, a huge bakkie arrives and dumps piles of gravel in the front garden. Men begin raking it over the soft grass and bare earth. I am horrified by the knowledge of an impending torture on my always-bare soles. Other than my shared bedroom, the garden is my only playroom. Gravel on the outside, eggshells on the inside. My nightmarish preoccupation with stones in shoes being fully realised and leaned into.

So it is that Protector & Soul and I begin retreating further and further from Old Lass. It comes easily to us.

Second weekends insist on continuing, and off Protector & Soul and I go to My Father’s house. When we arrive, he asks about Second Husband. We tell him we don’t like him. He asks us why. We tell him, ‘We just don’t.’ We are children and we don’t know how to say, ‘It’s actually just quite crap having to share our mother, who is our favourite person.’ Or perhaps, ‘We can feel it in our bones that he doesn’t want us around and that he’s angry Mom has us.’ We are children and we don’t even know that this is our reasoning. My Father asks us about Old Lass.

Is she still going into the garden to smoke?

Yes.

What is she smoking?

We don’t know.

Are they normal cigarettes from the blue box with the camel on it that she usually smokes, or is it a cigarette that she has rolled and filled with dried green grass?

Both. None. We don’t know.

My Father then instructs us to search through the garden in Second Husband’s house when we return after school on Monday.

Collect the little ends of the cigarettes, you know, the stompies. Hide them away somewhere in your room and bring them to me the next time you come here.

And so we do.

When we return home to the Parkhurst house at the end of the weekend, Protector & Soul and I start sorting through the tiny, ornate boxes strewn around our bedroom that until now have had no function. Too tiny to put anything other than Christmas beetles into, which I had done a few weeks before with the intention of acquiring new pets. When I open the lid to take out my new companions hours after capturing them the first day, one has died and the other falls into my mushy palm and begins scratching away at my chubby flesh with its spiky legs. Disgusted by how they’ve turned on me, I toss them immediately, corpse and ungrateful asshole, into a bush in the garden. Thus solidifying my lifelong hatred for the little creatures.

Repurposing the beetle coffin, we make sure Old Lass and Second Husband are nowhere to be found before heading into the garden, our eyes glued to the ground.

Within minutes of our dark eyes adjusting to the sun absorbing and reflecting the grey gravel, we find the little end of a joint. The stompie thing. The rolled cardboard tip still securely held in place by determined saliva, we pop our evidence into my little box and run into our bedroom. Little hiding places everywhere. A box within a jewellery box within a music box on which a plastic ballerina dances. Filled with dread and a sense of accomplishment, we wait and wait for the next weekend we’ll spend with My Father.

At this point, my sister has already been forced to flourish into a warrior. As though her interior resilience is leaking through her pores, each year she requests combat boots, action man figurines and remote-controlled cars for her birthday. I, a living, breathing floral pattern wrapped in a bow, serve as her confidante, shadow and contrast. Father’s Friday arrives before we know it. Again, our weekend bags sit in our classrooms stuffed with pyjamas, clothes to play in, remote controls struggling against zips, and a little box in which the remnants of one of our mother’s joints lies, still, holding its breath. Our entire lives packed into bags, between two homes, neither of which we want to exist in.

We hand the little plastic box, which we have wrapped in toilet paper, to My Father.

This stuff smells so bad, sissie.

He tells us what a good job we’ve done.

Days at My Father’s house consist of watching TV, asking our YiaYia to make us waffles and playing with our cousins. On rare occasions, My Father comes into the garden and sits with crossed legs in the middle of the lawn. Protector & Soul and I sprint past, close enough for him to grab our ankles. This is the entire game. Trying to run fast enough to avoid being caught, being caught and dragged to the ground and being tickled. When the evenings come, My Father puts on a movie in his small, childhood bedroom, which is now his tiny, adulthood bedroom, and Protector & Soul and I fight over who gets to lie next to him on his single bed – the alternative being a small mattress placed on the floor. He lies on the bed with one of us in his arms, wearing his thin cotton sleep shorts and nothing else. When it is my turn, I lie on his chest and twirl my finger through the hairs, breathing in his smell. But just as I get comfortable, I immediately regret fighting for this prize, resenting this thing resembling comfort in the very instant I receive it.

Everything is sour. The single bed, his smell, his chest hair. As we grow, my sister and I fight over who gets to lie on the mattress on the floor. Eventually, we unite and come up with explanations as to why we should both lie together on the mattress on the floor, leaving My Father with more room to himself on the bed. When My Father is elsewhere in the house, Protector & Soul and I are both drawn to and repelled by the decorations and odds and ends lying openly on the white shelf that runs alongside the bed.

Porn magazines turned inwards on themselves reveal plump tits, all either too hard or too soft. Furry pussies form the top of the pyramids that have been turned on their heads. Condom wrappers, some with tenants, some without, poke out from between books while others brazenly bask in the glow of the bedroom’s exposed light bulb. Call Girl catalogues line up behind ashtrays and worry beads from Greece.

One night when my explanations have failed to convince him that I should keep my distance, I lie next to him on the bed. I am six years old. He touches his index finger down on the raised mole that sits directly in the centre of my chest between my 10-cent nipples.

‘One day when you have boobs, men will love kissing you right here on this mole, Mouse,’ he tells me as he taps his finger on it a few more times.

Perhaps storytelling runs in our blood, because when we go off to our own bedroom at My Father’s house, my sister and I beg him to tell us stories of his childhood before we crash into sleep. Maybe we are just looking for some semblance of normality, a fantasy. I am desperate to picture him as a young boy, as someone I can relate to fully. As someone who is other than My Father. We screech for retell requests of stories he’s run out of long ago. Tell us again, Dad. This time make it even better. He tells us about how he and his best friend, who’d lived next door to each other since birth, would attach a long piece of string to cans and whisper along it from window to window late at night. He tells us about the mischief and retaliation he’d get up to at school when the pesky Jews who made up the majority of the Parktown Boys’ population would tease him, chanting ‘Chili willy’ unimaginatively. He tells us about peeking through windows that exposed the neighbourhood girls, about running carelessly through quiet streets, about bunking school. Endless tales of being a child, being a child, being a child.

One day, when he and I are alone, My Father tells me about when a grown-up touched his penis when he was a kid.

‘I was six years old, just like you are now. I told your YiaYia and your Pappou. No one believed me.’

No one believed me.

No one believed me.

No one believed me.

No one believed me.

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes My Father remembers a story he hasn’t told before. When they reveal themselves to him, he tells them immediately. I am six or eight or fourteen and I am told everything by him.

When I used to go to Hillbrow, I’d meet a lot of people you should never meet. Women who trade their bodies as currency. Men who encourage it. One night, a prostitute I knew followed me back home to Rosebank. She used to be beautiful. I was already in the house when she arrived, and she kept ringing the doorbell. I was high, and she wouldn’t stop ringing it and ringing it. I got one of my guns from the safe in my bedroom and sat down on the carpeted floor. She sat down on the floor of the patio opposite me on the other side of the door. You know the warped glass in the doors in my house? Yes, so I could see her through that. She sat there crying and begging me for crack. She said I could have her if I’d share. I sat there staring at her with a gun in my lap, hoping your YiaYia wouldn’t wake up. I don’t know how long we both sat there. But I just stared at her. And I started to laugh so much. She was so desperate. I just sat there with my gun, laughing while she begged.

A few weeks after delivering proof of my mom’s vice to My Father, a woman from Social Services arrives at the Parkhurst house to check up on me and my sister. Old Lass is hysterical.

Why are you here?

What has that fucker done now?

Whatever he’s said isn’t true.

He’s the addict … I am not the addict.

My daughters are okay.

Where did you get that?

That’s not mine.

It’s their father you should be worrying about.

I am too young to be included in any of these conversations. Protector & Soul is taken into our bedroom alone with the Social Services lady and I am told to wait outside with my mess of a mother.

My sister blocks this interaction from her mind within the time it takes for the woman in the grey pantsuit to climb back into her car and drive away. She can’t tell my mom what was discussed, staring blankly at Old Lass as she begs for details. Now, all these years later, Protector & Soul tells me that she can’t fill me in on what was said, not because she doesn’t want to, but because her cells won’t even allow her to remember.

‘Christy, I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman who came and if it wasn’t for you and Mom reminding me of this altogether, I never would have thought of it again.’

In the greater scheme of things, nothing ever comes of this visit. Nevertheless Old Lass is furious with My Father. She is especially furious with us after we inform her, screaming, that we’d only done what My Father told us to do by collecting her stompie.

Do you know how much trouble this could have gotten me into?

But Dad says what you do is illegal, so why do you do it?

I am not the addict – your father is the addict.

At this, Protector & Soul and I screech, wail, despise Old Lass openly.

He is not an addict!

We love going to his house!

He doesn’t do bad things any more!

YiaYia is there too!

We were helping you by giving him the green tobacco cigarette!

We have been trained so well. We believe every word My Father has said.

He clings to the warped notion that he should get full custody of us with such fervour that he recruits us as his soldiers in a war against our mother. He wants us all to himself and the more he fights to keep us, the more Old Lass feigns tightening the reins on us. Not enough to stop us from going to him every second weekend, but enough to buy us our first ever cellphones so we can contact her if we need to while we’re away.

We return home to Old Lass after one such weekend, and our cellphones do not return with us. She questions us, shouting in sadness, desperate for us to actually tell the truth for once, and my head swims. My knees are weak. I am so confused and broken.

A few days earlier, I stand in front of My Father, head swimming, knees weak, confused and sobbing, as he demands I give him my new Nokia. He goes out alone that night. Our cellphones take our places on his visit to Hillbrow. He smokes them when he gets home.

Things deteriorate with furious speed in the home we now creep through in Parkhurst. The house that clearly belongs to Second Husband. Here, Old Lass learns how to ignore hearing things and how to unhear them altogether. Second Husband moves hatefully through the halls and over the floors. One summer’s day, Protector & Soul is reading Harry Potter on a distressed, white-wicker couch that has found a home on the veranda among its wooden comrades. Second Husband arrives home in his white bakkie, and before even having manoeuvred his body out of the car, he yells at her for not greeting him in his own home, for being disrespectful, for existing.

Old Lass says nothing. Protector & Soul gets up and joins me in our bedroom where she casually continues to read.

‘I just never read books outside again,’ she tells me now.

Second Husband makes an incredibly easy target of himself. Between the stink of his cologne trailing behind him through the house, leaving us wrinkling our noses and pretending – with much exaggeration – to dry-heave, to the way he speaks to Old Lass as though she is undeserving of any semblance of love.

He speaks in the way that I now recognise as an adult, a way that keeps certain women going back to awful men. Like shoes that we insist on wearing only because they feel so good once they’ve been taken off. So Old Lass stays, wilting at a rare kind word that slips from a nasty mouth every few days.

His grip over the house and its three inhabitants tightens. Protector & Soul and I aren’t allowed to eat his food or drink his drinks or breathe in his oxygen or cough within his earshot. Hating him is as easy as loving our mother.

And so we forget My Father’s indiscretions with a graceful ease as we thrill him with the stories of Second Husband’s instead. Soon, we became spies instead of nuisances in the Parkhurst home. Upon hearing about Second Husband’s plan to take Old Lass and us away to Mozambique on a school holiday, My Father instructs Protector & Soul to steal his passport. Now, at 26 years of age, my sister’s mind draws welcome and infuriating blanks.

‘I remember being told by Dad to steal it. I remember waiting until Second Husband left the house and going through his cupboards. I remember finding the passport. I don’t remember taking it or giving it to Dad. But I must have, because a few days later it was discovered missing.’

One day not long after our Mozambican trip is cancelled due to the curious case of the missing passport, Old Lass is standing over the stove boiling pasta and melting butter. Her two friends Eugene and Nathan sit at the long, narrow wooden table that runs down the centre of the kitchen, tossing back drinks with Second Husband and waiting for the pasta to be placed in front of them and fatten them up. The three men discuss relationships and marriage, not children.

Second Husband glances in my mother’s direction and says to her back, ‘So … should we do this thing?’

‘What thing?’ she asks, pouring the strained penne into the scorching butter that has singed a nutty brown.

‘Get married.’

‘Yes.’

To say my sister and I are devastated is an understatement. On this occasion of protest, as with those that have preceded it, Old Lass reminds us how lucky we are to have Second Husband. Because of him, we have food in our belly and a roof over our heads. We are children. No one has explained to us that the Splodge Shop is barely making any money, flower soaps and textured pillows failing to bring home the big bucks. We are children. No one has explained to us that sometimes you have to bite your tongue and walk on eggshells and betray your children and climb into bed with horrendous men because you need a roof over your head and food in your belly, to ‘protect’ the very kids who now resent you because of it.

The wedding day arrives and Protector & Soul and I argue with Old Lass. We insist on wearing jeans. I insist on wearing jeans. We are determined to don the least celebratory outfits we can find. Jeans don’t say, Good job, Old Lass; jeans say, Go fuck yourself, Soon-to-be-stepdad. Old Lass is gentle. Even at her hardest she is one of the gentlest souls. After tiresome negotiations, I trade in my jeans for a grey skirt with denim trim and try to be furious with her, but on this day she is more breathtaking than ever. I stare at her and devour the sight of her fingers, the fat knuckles we’ve all inherited, and her ankles, tanned and slender, and her eyes, the black beads brought to attention by her black hair, as though the universe has gifted them to me. I count my blessings, knowing even at such a young age to look at my grown-up mother as a crystal ball, a gateway to the features, wrinkles, figure and hairline that await me. In this, I am smug, often revelling for hours in how exquisite my mother is compared to some of the ugly moms my friends have been stuck with. Old Lass pulls a cream-coloured lace leotard over her midnight hair, which falls freely, the tips just grazing the top of her tiny boobs. She snaps shut the three metal buttons of the bodysuit between her thighs, does the same to the three buttons that secure the leotard at her caramel neck, before stepping into a floor-length skirt that on any other woman would look like a repurposed gold bedspread embroidered with flowers rather than a boutique dream. On my mother it looks magnificent.

After Old Lass and Second Husband say their vows under the oak tree in front of the forty-or-so family members and friends serving as tipsy witnesses, the photographer asks for photos of the newly married couple and their children. Old Lass sits on a bench next to her sickly sweet husband. Protector & Soul and I sit on either end of them, and Second Husband’s two daughters – who until this point I’ve been ferociously pretending don’t exist – squeeze themselves into the shot.

This is the first time Second Husband has ever embraced me in any way, I note as he slings his arm over my shoulder for the photo. Without meaning to, I feel a joy boiling up inside of me. I consider how happy my beautiful mother looks. Her smile is so big its claws are tugging at the corners of her eyes. Her energy is so light, limitlessly loving. Maybe the wedding will change everything, I think under the foreign but welcomed weight of Second Husband’s arm. I begin to burst with hope and feelings of guilt, as though I am abandoning my sister on an island of resentment, pushing myself from our shared shore on a raft of forgetfulness, to the horizon of forgiveness, leaving her rubbing sticks together, all the better to burn that whole fucking place down, alone, behind me.

Click. The photographer turns his back to go and take pictures of the other guests. The instant Second Husband realises the lens is no longer on us, he rips his arm from behind me and stalks off to get a drink. My face falls, skinny chicken arms ache as I turn my raft around and paddle with everything I have to join my sister on the island of hate; she, thankfully, hasn’t noticed I’d left.

Old Lass and her freshly acquired husband flit off to Mauritius a few days after the wedding. My sister and I are forced to stand with Step Sisters 1 and 2 on the pavement outside (which too has been covered in gravel), to wave them off as they leave for the airport. As though recreating a precious and nauseatingly happy scene from a romantic comedy, they turn their heads back at us, waving at their children and their new children as they peel off. Before they’ve turned the corner, I decide I’ve had quite enough of this waving business, and lower my arm. Step Sister 1 grabs my arm, hoists it into the air and insists I wave until their car is completely out of sight.

Life for Protector & Soul and me is uneventful. Not as though nothing is happening; we’re just used to what is happening. We’re used to going to school where I have one friend and my sister has two. My friend is a girl named Alexia, a squishy and uninhibited Cypriot with whom I bond through tears on the first day of Grade 1. My sister’s two friends are me and Alexia. I am used to stealing the Slim Slabs from Alexia’s lunchbox and giving her half my sandwich in exchange. Not because I want the Slim Slab – no one ever actually wants the Slim Slab – but because I am sad she’s been given the Slim Slab in her lunchbox in the first place. ‘It’s because I have all this puppy fat,’ she tells me as she grabs at her fleshy, dimpled side with her index finger and thumb, just as her mom has taught her to do. ‘Also, I’m pre-diabetic,’ she says, hungrily chewing on her sandwich ration.

I am used to being told I’m going to fail. I am used to Protector & Soul pushing people down the concrete grandstand with all the force she can muster as she defends my honour. I am used to picking fights and using my big, pushing, warrior sister as a threat. We are used to going home and straight to our bedroom. We are used to our new life, just as Old Lass is used to hers. She continues to bring Second Husband beers, to roll joints, to light joints, to now rid the garden and house of any evidence of the smoked joints. We are used to the way Second Husband shouts at our mother, at the dogs and at us.

One day we’re in the kitchen and he kicks a dog belonging to one of his friends who is away on a vacation and I scream. I scream at him to stop, I scream at Old Lass to give a fuck that her husband has just kicked a creature that is now in pain, tail between its legs, black-and-white torso crumpled in on itself lying on the threshold of the kitchen door that leads to the back garden. I decide people who kick black-and-white dogs, people who kick any dogs, are the worst people of all.