Читать книгу Because I Couldn't Kill You - Kelly-Eve Koopman - Страница 11

CHAPTER 3

Home invasion

I have been looking for you, writing about you because I am afraid I will forget you. And now I’m afraid I never will. I forgot about you successfully, or pretended to forget, for almost 15 years. But now, when faced with the threat of your extinction, you are back.

You keep intruding here where I want to be alone. You have now successfully crept into my new life. With my new family, my partner and my new home. You’re doing your damage from the inside. I feel myself become small, stifled. You are feeding off all the parts of me that are damaged, broken, unwhole. These are the spots that are vulnerable to parasitic mould, the invisible stuff that enters through even the smallest of cracks and suffocates from the inside. I can feel the beams and roof of me caving in. The water damage is spreading, swelling and bloating inside until my self, my home, will come crashing down and you will have slowly infected everything I love. You are trespassing in my life. You are sabotaging me. I am reminded you still have power over me, that even though you were banished from our house so many years ago, I will never be able to really kick you out.

Just before my mother was born, my grandparents moved from Athlone to build the house in Glenhaven. The main accelerating factor behind the move was that the house in Athlone was damp and becoming covered in a mould that would not disappear in spite of endless cleaning. The kids, my mother’s older siblings, were developing swollen lungs. They should have recognised the damp on you when it came the second time, when you moved into their house. They should have moved us all out, and set the whole place alight, when they realised they couldn’t move you.

For months, I hold Sarah close at night, latched to the harbour of her skin, hoping to anchor myself there. We can both hear the soft, foreboding drip, and I carry the fusty smell of mildew, it has crept into the sheets. My partner of five years. She needs time to talk and wind down. She has thoughts that spill over onto the pillow, drowning her head. She has become scared to open her mouth sometimes for fear these are not acceptable, so she comes to bed with them; but they are beautiful and terrifying, they both inspire and frighten me.

We have emerged from a dank place, suffocated with rubbish and the flotsam and jetsam of the past; we clung to each other out of half loss, half loathing, and started thinking this looked like love. I am tempted to blame only myself. It seems I have brought all the worst hauntings of my old house into my new home. Maybe I am cursed by my father, maybe my parents’ mutilated love has left me with a mangled heart. But there are two of us and more in this home by the sea: Sarah’s revenants, her own complex histories, are here too. The past and the present, the ways we have injured and disappointed each other hang thick in the air between us, along with the ghosts of our past, who do not get along well, and the anxieties of an uncertain future. There are bills we are struggling to pay, jobs we are unable to finish, personal and professional crises that have come relentlessly one after the other. In our home there is a thick suffocating fog. We cannot see ourselves, so we cannot bear to look at each other.

The depression is like an Arctic winter. Almost a year of time has gone by in darkness, without even an anchor for memory, only the oil of endless junk food, pizza, fish and chips, which accounts for the new 15 kilos of evidence we each bear of the Great Depression. We go to sleep bloated after the exchange of ugly words, a pitiless endless sleep. I don’t know what happened to time – it became quicksand we got sucked into, unaware of the passing of hours, days, months. It’s the kind of thing we thought we would not come back from, and that we are afraid we might still not come back from – that if we aren’t careful, and love each other too carelessly, we will fall into the rip tide and again be drowning, clinging to each other, arms wrapped around each other’s bodies, both unable to swim.

The house we rent together in Muizenberg was a gift. Vacated by Sarah’s mother and generously handed over to us. With its lush back garden, its broad rooms and ageing high ceilings, she was gifting us the space we needed to expand ourselves, to cultivate our wide, wild dreams. On a good day the house is like an exuberant organic wilderness. One day we found a blade of grass peeking out from the floorboards, resilient, the triumph of nature. On a good day the quiet industry of a scorpion or spider was worth protecting, a privilege, an indication that we were not so separate from nature but an extension of it – no separation from the earth and the old wooden walls, the persistent sea air coming in thick through the broken window panes.

On a bad day the creatures are a pestilence, the cockroaches emerge and we hear the rats scurry through the walls, and instead of the charm of a cottage by the beach it is a mouldy dump, with every leak and every crack. Nothing feels lovely on these days, it looks like rotting wood and rusty nails.

We have had problems before. But I had done the thing I had learned to do through my generational memory and my upbringing, which was to suppress.

Together we fell into all of each other’s dark. Merging to make a massive sinkhole, a black hole. We broke up over and over again, I ran out the house in my pyjamas, crashed on the couch at friends. Over this period of months, we break up with the slamming of doors, the breaking of hearts. Words so bluntly ugly and so banal that they do not deserve to be written down. We are scratching at each other’s flaws, insecurities, eviscerating each other. Yet we are compelled back here, intertwined in every way – bank balances, job options. Bones, hearts. She clutches me by the shoulders. I’m standing by the door. ‘Please, please. Just go. I love you and I hate this.’ Almost every day she asks me why, why do we do this, why are we still here? What is there left?

I don’t realise she expects an answer. I think somewhere deep down I have come to think that this is the way it is meant to be. That love means suffering, hurting each other, enduring the pain, punctuated by pauses of joy. I don’t want to lose her. I blame my father for his curse. I need a shaman, a medium who banishes living ghosts.