Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [20]
‘You’ll have to think carefully about what you’re going to say to him,’ our mother warned us. ‘You’ll hardly have time for anything. I’ll give you the phone and you’ll just have time to say, “Hello, Dad, I’m missing you!” and not much else. Do you understand? Don’t waste time, because it will be terribly expensive. Maybe you should write something down so you don’t go blank.’
That night in bed I stared sightlessly at my library book, racking my brains. There was so much to say to Dad, about the presents he’d sent and the shells and how careful I was being, how hard we were trying to be well behaved all the time like he wanted and how our little brother had a new tooth, and the pool and the shoelaces. These were all things that had to be said, but I wouldn’t be able to say them because Mum, not to mention my sister, would be hovering right behind me listening to every word. We’d all be eavesdropping on each other, measuring our own self-censorship.
The date of the trunk call approached and we began to gear up for it, ready for that phone ringing like it was a starter pistol, or a signal to commence an exam. My head felt thick with unsaid things; declarations and anecdotes, secret grievances and pangs of guilt. The night before the call I lay in bed sorting and assembling, evaluating, editing and discarding, sick for the sound of his voice and the knowledge that he would be listening, the words tumbling and ebbing and churning together in my brain. Not the big, expected words, the easy ones, but the small, precious words you only found at the very end. It all seemed so fragile and breakable. I could hear the rustling of paper from my sister’s bed, the sound of a pencil scribbling something out.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘None of your business.’
We were as keyed up and jumpy as racehorses when the call finally came the next evening. I watched my mother speak into the receiver, frowning and stopping and starting, her shoulder curving away from us as she listened.
Nobody to put the pool up without you and I fixed a puncture on my bike by myself your chair looks so empty without you when are you coming home when is it going to be normal again
then my sister taking the receiver and smiling shyly, listening and answering sweetly in monosyllables, using up all that money Mum had told us about, not saying anything, just replying
Little Pete’s got a new tooth and I didn’t mean to laugh when you left I was really crying, I don’t know what happened
then the phone receiver was handed to me and when I listened I heard the whistling empty echo of thousands of miles between us and here it was, my only chance in a year.
‘Hello, Dad, I’m missing you!’ I called cheerily, boisterously; the one you didn’t have to worry about, the one who liked blue.
Everything unsaid trickled, repressed, back into silence—an underground tributary, a thread of unacknowledged self, tender as the root of a tooth. This to me defines the sheer haplessness of childhood: the ability to recognise what must be kept hidden to survive. It flows through us while we stand wretched and utterly straitjacketed by a world too complex for us; it is an endless, subdued relinquishing of the will. ‘I could control you with a look,’ is something my mother says now to my sister and myself, with something like reminiscent pride in her voice, that she could keep us in line while her husband was away, leaving her with three young children. They seem like measures of another age now—to never speak unless spoken to, to never answer back or contradict, to garner praise by staying dull and dutiful and inoffensive—like pointless, hard-won medals in a war everyone would prefer to forget. Except for the inexorable secret life that grows away from this dominion, like tiny