The words still echo in my ears, two sharp-edged voices representing both factions of my parents’ crumpling marriage. It has been two years since my parents broke up, yet, the words, as clear as the notes of Bocelli’s flute, resonate in my ears all the time. Perhaps warring voices are immune to time. OR maybe the weight they carry is too much for time to thaw out or sap out. So the words haunt me, wherever I go, clanking noisily after me with undivided dedication. Sometimes it nudges me out of the fairytales of my sleep, ruins my night, and simply disappears, as if into the dark depths of a raging sea. Maybe I have been carrying the guilt all these years, the slaughtering feeling that everything has burnt into a crisp because of me. Or maybe not. But everyday something unlocks that memory, and takes me to the edge of it all as if to beckon me to enter into the past and rewrite the script. But if that weren’t an illusion best left un-harboured, wouldn’t scriptwriters have a field day?
Sometimes I get the stinging feeling that I should have seen it coming--- that those nights Daddy didn’t return home from work, were not signs of unrivalled fatherliness or the nights he simply pushed me into my room and turned the key as if I were a scourge to his very existence, weren’t because he’d missed me so much he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. I guess I should have put the pieces together or maybe I was in denial?
Research has it that the human mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that produce too much stress for the brain—thus, constantly I may have declined the opportunity to put the pieces together or the signs were boldly etched before me, but I chose to ignore them. It is a well-proven concept called denial.
Now, as the words constantly take hostage of my mind, I guess I am not in denial anymore. I can hear Mummy’s voice which was mostly thin and melodious when Daddy wasn’t around, rise, slowly from the ashes of patience, love, weakness and the frailties of a mistreated woman, into something of a muffled shout, and then she’d let go, her anger sprawling right before Daddy as I remained tucked away in my room, my head plastered to the back of my door, listening in on my parents as they turned the family over to marital conflict.
In the midst of Mummy’s incessant wails and complains Daddy would remain quiet as if he were a stubborn child being scolded by a mean old nanny. But when Mummy was done, ‘ranting’, as he called it, he’d say:
‘Are you done shouting? Can I go now? Of course I can go.’
He would turn the lock to the main door, and far away in my room, I could still conceive the fading sound of the door being unlocked, then the sharp swoosh of fresh air wafting through the opened door, and then a sharp thud---Daddy’s boots would make contact with the world which laid beyond the struggles of keeping a marriage. He’d walk away as if nothing had happened, as though, if he turned around, he wouldn’t see his family, slowly crumpling down from the rafters. He’d leave Mummy sprawling backwards as if she’d being pushed by the weight of it all, gasping for air, her hands moving searchingly for a chair as she applied all sorts of theatrics in a quest to demonstrate the pain she was suffering from being married to a lost soul. But could you blame her?
I’d walk tentatively to my Mum’s and take her frail hands into mine as if to pacify her. Her hands were mostly, understandably cold. Anyone in her shoes would have had the same cold hands, or maybe worse, frozen hands. Her face would turn ashen, as pale as a leaf which had lain abandoned, under the scorching sun. She’d wipe away her tears with the back of her palm without even realizing it, and then usher smiles just to calm my aching heart. Sometimes I thought she was a psychic—she could tell exactly how I was feeling and do everything to make me feel better—later I’d learn she wasn’t a psychic, she was just a mother who loved and knew her son so well. If only Daddy could be a father!
Most of the time I knew where Daddy was headed but I never had the edge to chase after him or to howl until tears soiled my shirt and then beat his shoulder as he took me in his arms as if to pacify my aching heart. The only time I’d done that, I’d seen him in a bar, sitting on a long table with a bunch of skunk heads, whose families, from the telling of their own stories, under the influence, were being burnt to a frazzle.
From the recount of the stories of dreamless men, I had learned that one man had returned to an empty home after what he called ‘a hard day’s work.’ Apparently his wife had left a note saying she couldn’t live under the same roof with such a loser, so she’d left with their two children. They’d laughed over it, probably because the wife was ignorant of the fact that he’d been putting up an act just to get her to leave the house.
But in my mind I thought, ‘at least he returns home from work.’
If Daddy had done that, just once, I would have had that glimmer of hope, that despite the staggering evidence of our family’s immediate dismemberment, the situation wasn’t beyond salvation. But Daddy never admitted that light; he never left the darkness he’d surrounded himself with.
That night, in that bar, where Daddy drunk one too many bottles and exposed his plans for the family, I had known what kind of monster he’d turned into. As he recounted the story of a young voluptuous girl who had come to his company as an intern and his plans to turn this intern into his personal assistant both off work and at work, I had fought the edge to buy a big bottle of champagne and smash it into his head so as to end it all. Perhaps in order to release my mother from the emotional bondage of hope, I should have bought that bottle, taken those clandestine steps towards him and repainted the bar with his blood. Instead I’d held on tightly to the arms of the chair as he told and retold the story of this young intern, and spoken extensively about her as if he’d known her all his life, signing off with a moment of poesy which was applauded by all and sundry :
If I her eyes were a sea, I’d swim in them and never leave.
If her body were an ocean, I’d disappear into its dark depths.
She sparkles and bewitches like a Halloween candle in the dark.
The foxiness of her skin tone;
Is as captivating and beguiling as the petals of a blooming cherry tree.
I’d simply die to have her in my arms.
I’d give twice my family to father her child.
She’s a work of art, that girl.
Emotionally he’d smashed the very champagne bottle into my head. As I sat in the bar, I bled out for my mother who had still shielded herself with the hope that somehow, whether by some supernatural epiphany or perhaps by Beatrice Portinari’s epiphany, she’d wake up one morning, to her beautiful family again, knitted together with unbreakable threads of love and togetherness. A storm rocked our home, my mother disappeared into its masked eyes, failing to see the truth which lay under the veil. On the other side of the storm, my father, lay on its dangerous yet swooshing brilliance conjuring plans to set our family aflame and live to tell the story with a young curvaceous girl.
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