Читать книгу Haunted Childhoods - Pauline Michel - Страница 7

My father and mother both chase after skirts. They began by ogling them. The same ones. Back then, it was really awful. They tore at each other tooth-and-nail, with words sharp as knives. Yet they always tell me to share my toys and my friends. So grown-ups aren’t very consistent, now, are they?

To men who adore women, my father is tremendous. To women who love other women, my mother is, too. So I suppose women must be really interesting, mustn’t they?

I have two brothers, teenagers. They go around with mysterious friends who put them in touch with all kinds of exciting things. So children do not always follow in their parents’ footsteps.

As for me, well now, I try to catch up with them all, but never quite make it. I am the smallest, and I don’t run very fast, so I end up all alone in a corner.

They named me Katie, but it might as well be Can’t-be, because they can’t believe I’m alive. They forget I’m around. When they really want to forget about me for a long time, they send me to my Uncle Armand. He switches my name to Cutie. He plays Mummy, Daddy, doctor, magician with me and uses a magic wand that gets bigger when you hold it! He buys me pretty dresses, because he says even a girl-woman isn’t bad. Interesting enough. So I guess women are... you know! I sure got quite a deal when I was born! He gave me a doll and showed me where babies come from by putting his finger on my own spot, just so I wouldn’t forget. He doesn’t explain just once. He really goes to town. He sure knows how to teach. Not everyone’s as lucky as I am to have an Uncle Armand to stand in for parents who don’t bother!

My mother’s no ordinary mum, either. She writes down everything that other people say and puts it in books. Every little thing! Daddy gets furious at the book launchings. He launches them too by throwing them around as soon as he gets in the house. He sees himself on every other page. He’s often the bad guy in them. The big bad wolf!

Except the other night. He was happy then. Really, really happy. He even tucked Mummy in with her new girlfriend. She wasn’t somebody he was interested in anyway, because she looked too much like a guy. It gets sort of confusing after a while. Mummy liking women that act like boys. Why doesn’t she just get real ones? Is it because grown-ups like to play pretend, too? Pretend they’re something they’re not? Like me with Uncle Armand?

When Daddy tucks Mummy in with her girlfriend, what a great time they have! In fact, he does it with his man friend right before he goes hunting! Funny kind of hunting, eh? He folds some nice clothes into his suitcase: “First we hunt, then we trap! But harming females is against the rules!” Well, the two women laughed and agreed with that alright. The men sure looked hot with their guns and checkered shirts!

Daddy proclaims, all proud and happy, “How good it feels to be free. Fm so lucky I don’t have to lie. You too, girls!” Then he blows kisses to everyone as he closes the door.

I have to say, Fm totally lost! I don’t get it. Not hunters bragging about aiming straight for a woman’s heart without wounding her, not women playing men to seduce Mummy, who’s all set to let herself be cuddled and conned and lied to like a kid listening to bedtime stories. A mum who plays like a child without ever playing with the one she gave birth to. That is both confusing and depressing!

Of all the women Mummy’s brought home, Martine is the only one I don’t like, because she’s the only one who doesn’t like kids. But she’s also the only one Daddy doesn’t want too, so Mummy really has no choice! It’s worth it to have peace in the house. Mummy and Daddy do love each other a lot, when you come right down to it. They’re not so different. Both skirt-chasers, I was going to say, but that’s not quite right. Skirts are really harder to find than pants!

Anyway, whenever Daddy goes a-hunting, everything in the house smells different. Baby powder, and for a good reason. It’s time for my baby-doll’s bath. “In your room,” Martine insists, “and make sure you close the door properly so she goes right to sleep while she’s still clean.” Then the two women close their own door, and I hear them giggling, murmuring, then crying out. They seem to be moaning in pain, although Daddy was very clear about not hurting females! If Mummy’s friend is sort of a man, she ought to follow the rules laid down for their clan... and their gland!

It’s true, men laugh when they talk about their clans and glands. Fve asked Daddy about that. He seemed caught off-guard and awkward about it. He said that in the woods where he goes hunting, there are lots of oak trees, and in autumn, they drop acorns everywhere. So those must be the nuts they were talking about! A sort of forest in autumn with nuts dropping everywhere like apples!

And Martine’s like that too. She’s got apples that drop, great big fruit that is falling down her chest. I’ve seen them through the keyhole. She wears nuts too. I’ve never seen that before! I suppose it’s normal, since she thinks she’s a male on the hunt in an oak-wood bed! I understand all of that, just not why Mummy’s chosen a friend who hurts her so much. Funny, Daddy’s a lot gentler. He never makes her shout out in bed. I’ll never understand adults. But I do know the nut-clan is important. I want to get into that. We even have them on the curtains, two great big golden, silky ones. If I put one on, maybe Mummy will pay attention to me. I’d do anything for her to hold me in her heart, to cradle me in her arms. So many women sleep in her bed; you’d think there was at least room for one child.

Out come the scissors. It’s a shame to cut the decorations off the curtains like that, but it’s got to be done! I cut them off and hang them on a string around my waist so they hang just beneath. Two of them, so I’ll be even more attractive than Martine. And then, pleased with my disguise, I knock on their door. No answer, so, without waiting, I just throw the door wide open. I’ve never seen eyes wide like that, except in the cartoons! Quickly, they pull up the covers while I show them my nuts, yelling, “I want in! I want to get into the big nuts clan!”

Then someone says, “Jeez, a gotchi!” or something like that. I remember somebody calling that thing a dildo, but maybe it’s a pet name. Gotchi, like gotcha? Or like god sees? Weird. Does god have eyes in that head, too? Still, they’re totally scared at what they see, and they howl as though I’ve caught them in a trap, worse than if I hunted them at point-blank range.

Too late. I’ve unleashed a delayed-action volley of slaps. Delayed-action, because first they’ve got to chase me out of there, get dressed, then let me have it. Mummy knows the right way to do things: you’ve got to get dressed before you hit someone. I’ll have to remember that when I have kids. You can’t really pull rank on someone when you’re butt naked! Wound-up chimpanzees, that’s what they were! This monkey business! Now I know why grown-ups spend so much on clothes - clothes for hunting, for bossing, for giving pleasure, for lying and for seducing. Just a masquerade the whole time! They really do need to hide themselves. I really do need to think before I talk! My Uncle Armand keeps reminding me of that, and he shows me just where my tongue should go ‘round and ‘round in my mouth. After a while though, it makes me feel like throwing up. I wish there was some other way to learn foreign tongues. He says with two I’ll be bilingual. Well, If that’s what you have to do! There’s so much I have to learn and understand. Boy, learning sure isn’t easy, is it?

Anyhow, today’s not the day I want to take a catch-up language course. Tomorrow either. I just want to stay here! Better try and fix things now, so I take off my skirt and nuts, drop them on the floor and say, sounding lame, “I only wanted to play seamstress with you two.” I try to stitch this mess back together sweetly. “Just release a little tension,” as my wise Uncle Armand often explains it: “I’ll be a little angel!”

After the cold shower I just gave those two, I guess I’d better give my doll a nice hot bath. “There’s a good girl!”

Yeah, right, a good little girl who’s bored and wouldn’t mind running away. Like my brothers. Where are they anyway, while Daddy goes hunting and Mummy complains like a wounded doe in bed? Nobody cares. Except me. I hope they don’t grow up any more if they’re going to turn out like my parents. Adults are the worst thing in a child’s life!

I think I’ll go play in their room, just so I can catch a whiff of their smells and their games. Bizarre maybe, but I miss them just the same.

Opening doors-I like that. There are always terrific surprises behind them. The boys’ room has socks all over the floor, model planes not all finished, as though adolescence struck them like lightning right in the middle of their kids’ games. Everything just got left there. Maybe I could finish them. Got to find some glue.

I rummage through the first drawer. Nothing. Maybe they sniffed it. Sniffed... funny word. Another drawer-hey, needles, maybe to sew the nuts back on the curtains. Oh, here’s powder. All kinds of things I need for my doll and my sewing. Super! I never thought my brothers’ room would have all the stuff I was missing. Except them. It makes me want to cry. Still, remains are better than nobody at all. Anyway, at least they left me things to play with. First, I wash my doll and cover her with the powder, though it doesn’t smell like baby powder. Funny, though. I get closer for a sniff to see if it’s stale; then I taste it the way Vincent and Mario do. Whoops, hey, the room is spinning. This is fun., like a carnival ride. Whee! My brothers really know how to have fun! Just a bit more. Brrrring... it tickles my ears. Brrrring... wow, what an echo!

“Katie, answer that and tell them I’m busy,” yells Mummy from her room.

“O.K. Oh... Mum? It’s a policeman. He wants to talk to you.”

She answers sharply, like this is a bad time to bother her. Then her voice softens. It breaks. Her back curves, and tears come to her eyes. No more voice at all. She just manages to get out, “Where? When? What about his brother? Alive?”

Everything goes into slow motion. It’s cold, and I shiver. If this is magic powder, it doesn’t always work the same way. When my brother Mario tastes it, he says, “I’m flying! I’m floating! What a laugh!” They’ve just found him floating in a pool of water with a bullet in his head. Floating, soaking, in over in his head. In more ways than one.

Maybe one of my father’s hunting shells went astray.

Well, Martine and Mummy’s party is over. Daddy says he never would have thought his son would get gunned down like some animal. They say he owed too much money. He couldn’t pay any more. Even with all those oaks and acorns there in front of him waiting to be plucked.

I didn’t realize how much my parents loved him. He didn’t either. Now, of course, everyone knows, but it’s too late. His passing left a great gap, a dark hole, dark as funeral clothes. There we were, “prematurely” as mother said (that’s got to be the title of her next novel). There we were, weary before Mario’s coffin, Mario who will never glue those planes together now and fly. So high...

All in black, even me, too little to wear mourning for my derelict brother, who couldn’t even get through childhood because no one would give him a hand. I don’t want to cross streets alone any more, nor the days, nor the years, for fear of getting hit again and again straight to the heart, straight to the brain, where dreams awaken only with loony powder. I hand the magic wand back to Uncle Armand forever. And I no longer want to learn the tongues of older people! Too dirty. Too disgusting. Roaming everywhere into the most revolting kinds of dark corners.

I can’t believe it’s all just a question of clans and glands and acorns and nuts, of women playing men and men running after women while their children are hunted down and killed like prey, just for some tragic powder!

Meanwhile, here we are, next to my brother’s coffin, who hasn’t even had the time to finish growing up. All in black with red eyes, regular Hallowe’en vampires, except the celebration’s all messed up. For-real devils conjured up by a god-dam mad dog, god sees, god gotcha, god breaking bits of bread for food. Is that their kind of communion? Fm all confused... I really don’t think Fm all that bright. Fve been learning things all wrong since the day I was born. I want out of here. Die... my other brother Vincent too. We’ve got a plan, the two of us. Nobody’s going to know. We’re just going to disappear, go up in a puff of magic powder! Where and when? They’ll have to wait for that little surprise ... just so they can ask the question: Why?