10

“It’s never one sock, one shoe and then move to the other side. Foolishness is too easy. What if you had to get up and run? You would look like a stilted boy. Hobbling and acting a fool. Not here. Not while I am here. I can only pray that God helps you remember all I say. This is all fatal.”

He never really had to face anything that dreadful. He never had to get up and run.

The boy was at the mercy of a meticulous father. His corrections were too tight. Change this and do this and obviously not that – it’s plain to see it’s not that. Every situation was a chance to rein in disorder. He moulded a stifled, unhappy little boy; as happens when your stable base is hurtful, and what base there is, is closer to military commandment.

In fact, it was not out of hatred, but for the fear of life slipping away at any moment, that the boy’s father took to making him stand upright with a desperate consistency. He, after all, was being driven by something too. He was answering the questions his parents had asked of him. He had spent 28 years outside of his childhood home before he wished to and found his partner, moved in and had a child. That child that would grace the lift on Mondays.

The father’s father was one degree stricter than he. The grandfather’s behaviour was built on a strict conservatism, where the known was better than the exploratory, where what was known was safe and what was outside was a risk which had no place in the household in case it weakened its foundations. Besides, the times were changing only so slowly such that what was applicable in the grandfather’s youth was still applicable now. It served his son finely up until he graduated from his childhood house and moved on to finding the boy’s mother. For lack of reason then he never questioned it. He had no need to fix what was not broken, and so he did not. It further meant that he didn’t need to concern himself with any choices of what to do. What he should do was already chosen for him, just like an outfit literally picked out by his parents or a death sentence – an indiscriminate choice. The multiplicity of options became one and even if it was boring, it was preferred. One path from many.

In having a child, the boy’s father would learn, in fear, what he was like when he was young. In the youth of his own child, he saw rebellion. The child had not yet grasped that there was an order to the world and some things had to be operated in the right way for them to work. This meant that when he smashed the square toy into the circle hole he didn’t get what he wanted. It was wrong for the boy’s father to assume this naivety was an uprising against his household order but he did. It was only simple fun and no coup to his premiership. His father was driven by something else after all.

The boy’s father was kicked into action upon seeing him play wrong. There was a way to play right. The former did not come before the latter in his mind. Fuelled by a neck-breathing fear that his own father would appear behind him and re-enact the punishments of his youth, onto his son or himself, he doubled down in discriminating right from wrong.

The boy’s mother was no respite to the maddening order of the boy’s father. Her depression came in regular waves of ever-increasing length. The length of her depressions meant that when she came up for air, after the passing of many months, it was difficult to treat her any different. Her depressed mode was her most reliable way of being. She was typically retreated and isolated. She found it hard not to harvest the life from happy things and in doing so remind all others, inadvertently, that there was no cause for joy when she couldn’t find it. Her affliction, in the worst months, was an all-pervasive omen to the boy’s father that he was doing something wrong and that his father was soon to wreak havoc. Having that thought alone was the returning of his father.

Her blacker months invited her into the foetal position atop her bed, save for feeding, excreting and hazily seeing the shining boy with his toys. Convinced there was a disparity with her food-in-waste-out, she became convinced she was creating and expelling a bile similar to the personal view of herself she had come into. She despised the fact that she removed herself from this life but she never gave credit to herself for attempting to sit up during the darkest of months. Her burdens were heavier than most and her credit should have been charged accordingly. All of her movements were rusted and tough. Her muscles had atrophied from underuse, but she retained an interesting, if not gaunt, facial structure.

At the age just before the boy’s first memory, his father received news. His own father had passed in his sleep just four days ago. The rest of the family were sorrowful that he hadn’t had the chance to say his goodbyes but it wasn’t sorrow that followed for him. Well, there was a hint but it wasn’t the primary emotion. As it was, his abdominal muscles relaxed, his waist and lungs expanded into new space, and he breathed the first full breath he had taken in half a century. Relief.

It was not for the sake of order that he commanded his child, it was for his father. The voice of his own father’s guidance had sunken into his way of being. Never outrightly thought but pervasively the feeling of the man dictated his behaviour. For all the time he had spent directing his son, in a more than harsh way, he had been doing so as a furtherance of the paternal feeling that rode on his back. He had been answering the questions of his childhood. And after that moment, he no longer wished to.

In the days following, where grief would usually be, there was a lightness to the air. It was easier to breathe and the climate wasn’t so thick. The pressure to act, and to act right, was easing by the minute after the findings of his father’s fate. There was a hole leftover where there used to sit a vague, constant instruction to be doing something and to be slightly alarmed to error. Before, sitting still meant letting things succumb to entropy, toward the disorder all things craved without his oversight. Now, sitting was a moment for sensation and experience. Passively, things could find him and show themselves in their full beauty. His wooden porch, even wet and swollen, was home to a bench for him to sink and succumb to the natural events of the surrounding forest, to awe and sprinklings of natural joy. Their relatively isolated cabin did nothing to ease the sensation of being the lone island that the boy’s mother felt she was. She wouldn’t ask if she was truly alone, even if she wanted to, for the lack of people to hear her question answered it at the same time.

Many weeks into his parental freedom, the boy’s father awoke to a racking conscience. He had seen himself, hindsight in full action, and how he had treated the boy. He could only pray there wasn’t a trace in the young child of the suffocation he had applied nor a resentment for him as he grew into his senior years.

With good fortune, the boy did not remember his father in that light at all. Who he knew was an emphatic, good-natured, even-keeled man with occasional flavours of bad temper. No more than anyone else. Aside from any of his thoughts around himself or his father, his behaviour was irreversibly prone to perfection, tortured by that imperative. There was no more emblematic a behaviour of this than the performances he put on to draw a smile from his mother. Her seeing, through squinted eyes, despite the room already being shaded so that her eyes could tolerate it, a boy trying to win her over. He would offer her his toys and babble words he didn’t know before growing and trying to engage her in more narrative, shared play, first beginning with prosaic, benign storytelling and then finding things of moderate interest even to the adults. While her moods were unstable over a large space of time, the boy’s efforts were regular. His ability to play developed with this practice and he brought his mother and father along with it. For her, this was a bridge back to life. It was her only bridge back to life.

The boy restored her halfway in his whole time at home, enough to keep him hungry. On his nineteenth birthday, when his parents agreed that he was turning from adolescent to adult, they bought him a small apartment nearer to the city centre. This was three streets away from the St. Germaine and when strolling with no particular purpose, he asked a managerial-looking man, who retained the newly “adult” boy’s attention hostage with caffeinated eyes, if there was any room for him or any jobs to hand. All that was left was a Monday shift and he took it. Getting the job was only a relief for him too. It was not the reason he walked away with a wide smile. He had made the manager laugh and he reckoned he had come off interesting. The conversation went perfect.

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