Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [5]
‘You’ve utterly ruined her,’ I overhear him say one day as I crouch low at the kitchen door.
‘I don’t know what to do with her,’ my mother responds. ‘She’s well and truly beyond me. She wears me down.’
I know she doesn’t mean it. It’s awful. My poor mother has to say these things to defend herself. I can hear the exasperation in her voice. She’s tired. Worn down by his constant lurking presence, his grey shroud of a face. And now, to shut him up, I hear her rattling metal in the utensils drawer, then the sound of her whisking something, frantically beating the sides of the bowl.
‘Divorce him,’ I tell her when the kitchen is ours. ‘He doesn’t make you happy.’
She laughs. ‘Oh, Bubba, you are such a funny little girl.’
‘Am I?’ I say, frowning at her, for I certainly don’t feel very funny. I miss not waking up next to her. I miss not seeing the sheers at her windows blowing in like veils.
‘I love your daddy,’ she is saying as she picks up her crystal glass. ‘He’s my husband. He’s the father of my children.’
‘Children?’ I say. ‘The others are hardly children. They’re old enough to look after themselves.’
‘This girl’s scalp is yellow,’ he says to my mother as I loll around on the carpet after a long day at school, twisting and stretching like a cat. ‘When on earth did she last have a bath?’
When on earth . . . I’m astounded by his melodrama.
‘I have no idea,’ I hear my mother say. She’s hesitating at the entrance to the lounge, her wet hands frisking guiltily over her apron.
‘Well she needs a bath—now,’ he says, with such confidence.
‘I will not have a bath,’ I say. I’ve developed an aversion to water since my failed attempts to swim and I will not put my face beneath its surface. ‘I will not!’ I shout at him. ‘I will not!’
‘You will have a bath,’ he says. ‘Mother, look at her scalp,’ he commands. I’m appalled by this sudden authority over my being, this late arrival, this johnny-come-lately, and it seems my mother is too, for she won’t look at my scalp.
She says she knows nothing about it, ‘Nothing at all.’ And she turns her back, and disappears into the dull light of the kitchen, her hands flapping at the sides of her head.
My brothers, who ran wild during my father’s trips away up-country, have since found a sense of purpose and unity in his presence. Hearing the rising tension, two of them arrive like henchmen to lend a hand.
‘We’ll take her feet,’ they offer, leering at me as they drop into a wide-legged stance. They inch towards me with stalking movements, haka-style, their raised palms shifting erratically in an attempt to bamboozle me.
‘She’s like a wild pig,’ one offers excitedly as I ram my heels back and forth into the carpet. My kick is wild and off the mark, the childish limb flailing hopelessly in the air.
I hear my father breathing hard above my head now; his hands hook under my armpits, he’s struggling to restrain me.
‘Come on now,’ he’s saying. ‘Come on.’
‘It’s not easy, mate. She’s a bloody mental case.’ The reference is more loaded than they realise, for only I know the family history. They wouldn’t understand it, my mother has told me—it’s not their thing.
I grow frightened as the muscles in their jaws jut forward in a grim overbite. Determination is taking them over. In the uplift, one of them swipes at my calf and finally grabs hold. Now I have one leg free, heel hammering the floor like a mallet.
My mother’s crashing pans in the kitchen.
‘Mum,’ I cry. ‘Don’t let them do this to me. Please don’t let them do this to me.’
‘Stop it,’ she cries back. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it. I’ll have nothing to do with it. Nothing. You can all go to hell. I hate you. I hate the lot of you.’
She’s increased the stakes.
‘You little bitch,’ spits the one with the softer flesh. Humiliated by his