YOU MADE TEARS FOR DINNER LAST NIGHT AND tears for breakfast today. I watched as you ladled out the porridge, meant to be a sugary comfort in the morning, ladled it out in thick, salty lumps. I stir it around in the bowl, watch the fat curls of steam rise off the top, then try to wash the first mouthful down with my tea. Or what looked like tea. I keep my eyes down as you go about filling the kitchen with the noxious fumes of burning coffee, put a sweaty carton of juice on the table. Listen to the silence, broken only by the sound of your feet, shuffling across the floor in threadbare bedroom slippers. The ones you had been so embarrassed about putting in your luggage, but did anyway. It is from years ago, from the hotel in Thailand where we spent our first holiday together.
I want to ask if you remember. The fried crickets sold like kebabs at the snack stalls. The live budgies, snakes, lizards, rabbits, and other tiny mammals which we saw stuck in cages at the market, right next to each other. How the animals looked as if they didn’t know or didn’t care. Prey and predator squashed side by side, separated only by bits of wire. How you started crying and shouting abuse at the stall owners, skinny men hunched up on their wooden stools. I had to drag you away, saying yes it’s cruel but it can’t be helped, before adding that you were just premenstrual. And you turned around and whacked me quite hard on the head and then started laughing out loud, your face still wet from tears.
You try to hide it these days. But I smell the tang of it, on your skin, your pillow in the morning. I know from the way I find you at the other side of the bed, right at the edge when I wake up in the middle of the night, when before you would be close, curled up, your face squashed into my side. I know from the way you hold yourself tight so that I won’t be able to feel you shaking, you think. The way your voice sounds like it is muffled, choked down, over the phone. And your eyes, especially your eyes.
I try to bring it up all the time — gathering the questions in my mouth once the lights are out and we’re both in bed. But I cannot, they come out different, slip out of my mouth dressed as completely mundane questions like How was your day? and How’s that project coming along at work? As if I’m missing the vocabulary for the questions I need to ask. On these nights, I end up thinking about my mother, my father, how they dealt with it by not talking, never talking. About how people say history always repeats itself and I always nodded, thinking that I knew exactly what they meant, only I didn’t. I do now. I never actually saw my mother cry either, but I heard her. Through the door of the bathroom, through the walls even as I sat in the living room, crashing my toy soldiers into each other, into the furniture. And then there were her eyes, dull, filmed over, and red at the waterline. The skin around them puffy, looking as though they were threatening to close in and blind her forever. Just like yours.
Kim? I say, catching myself by surprise because I didn’t intend to speak. Was rehearsing the words in my head. I do this a lot now, sieving out any subject, any words that might hurt you. Listen, let’s both skip work and go for a drive it’s a nice day we could just drive along the coast we don’t even have to get out of the car, I say. The words come tumbling out, much too fast. It makes you frown and smile a bit at the same time and you say yes, okay.
WE are on the long stretch of highway when you decide to roll the windows down and stick your hand out. You like to touch the wind, you said once, you like that it feels like an actual living thing, pushing against your hands, weaving between your fingers. The roads are clear since rush hour has passed. I don’t go too fast so you can admire the faraway river on the left, and the buildings lining it, their windows glittering in the light like so many precious stones.
I take a deep breath. I’ve never told you, I say, to get your attention first. It works and you turn to me, and say, told me what?
About my father, I say, we used to go out on Saturdays, the two of us. He would drive us all around the island, for his odd jobs. This was before my mother died. She would stay at home on those days, I say.
I stop to think about how I had pretended we were running away, my father and I. We were running away and leaving my mother with her silence, her cold hands. I think about that day. When the ride had taken longer than usual. Passing slowly from our side of town, with its neat, tall buildings, all white or eggshell coloured; clothes, linen, a floral dress, dancing in the wind. We drove into an unfamiliar street, and another, and I pressed close to the window until my father said I could wind it down if I wanted, so I did. These streets were narrower, darker too somehow, even though the sun was still at its peak, giving out a lazy, damp light, honey swirled in a glassful of water. There were people slinking about in what looked like their pyjamas. Also, Bangladeshi men, squatting roadside in their dhotis, passing food, fingers to mouth, from a paper bag. They watched me coolly as the car drove past, scattering dirt and smoke into their open mouths. Even the air was different — a mixture of smoke and the smell of cut apples browning on the kitchen table.
Your father did odd jobs? you ask.
Yes, I say, we were poor then and my father had a lot of other jobs beside his normal one. Jobs cutting grass, feeding white people’s dogs when they were away on holiday, jobs cleaning out their swimming pools. He worked very hard, I say.
I know, you say and nod. You are fond of my father, and he, you. When we go over to his place for the fortnightly visit, he spends the entire day cooking your favourite food. On those visits he beams at me, evidently proud even though once he pulled me aside and hissed don’t screw it up boy.
So one day, while we’re in the car, he brings out these new shoes, blue Nikes that I’d wanted for a long time, I say, he tells me to put them on, they are a present. I do and I’m so happy I don’t realise till he parks the car that I have no idea where we are. So I ask him where we are going and is this a new job. My father tells me no, he’s not working today and like an idiot I suddenly see that he is wearing dark trousers with his shirt tucked in. Not the usual old things that can be thrown away if they get too grimy. I ask him where we are going again and this time he says that we are going to meet someone. I thought he was going to sell me, for real, I say.
They don’t sell boys, silly, only girls. You say all this, smiling.
I say, what? I was six! Anyway, he was in a really strange mood, which made me even more nervous. I think about the smile that he had that day, an awkward thing that hid in it something I hadn’t seen before in my father. A shyness, a faltering. I remember thinking that maybe this man wasn’t my father at all. That his face was actually a mask and I was being kidnapped but it was too late. He was holding my hand to cross the parking lot and then we were there.
We were in front of a hairdresser’s, and out comes this lady. Young. With very long hair, I say. I go on, telling you about how my father tried to make me say hello. How he asked me to greet the stranger, to thank her for the new shoes, they were a present from her. He pushed me a little, his hand splayed flat against my back. But I turned away to stare at the blue and white stripes of the hairdresser’s sign. Then, after some very loud jingling from his pocket, my father produced a fistful of coins. Cool, metallic. Put them in my hands. Wait outside, don’t walk too far, he said, pointing to the coin-operated children’s rides.
I sat outside for an hour, I think, maybe more. He didn’t come out with shorter hair, I say, as if you need me to spell it out.
In the car afterwards, homeward bound, with the windows rolled down and the rush of warm air making it necessary for him to shout, my father kept making me promise not to tell my mother. All the while, the glowing orange tip of his cigarette threatened to come away with the wind any second. I didn’t have to answer. He knew I wouldn’t.
I TOLD you about my mother when we first started going out. About the few memories. Vague snapshots that I can never be sure are real. My mother watching from the window, waiting for my school bus to pull up at half past three so that I could come home to biscuits or sugared toast already laid out on a plate. My mother sitting close to help me with my homework. Steadying my writing by gripping my hand in hers so that the words turned out precise, perfect. My mother, humming me to sleep, patting a smooth rhythm on my back. I can never be sure if she ever did any of that or if I had plucked these little pictures from books or the TV, or simply from looking in at someone else’s life, watching them through a window, an open door.
These are the things I have told you. Then there are the things I have left out, or lied about.
I think about telling you that my mother didn’t die from dengue fever, I’ve never told anyone before but I was the one who found her. I had arrived home one day to a closed door (my parents thought me, at eight, too young for my own set of keys). So I knocked, rang the bell, knocked some more before giving up and going to the neighbours’ to ring my father. He arrived in little time, perspiring from the rush and the heat, and opened the front door to a stillness, a quiet that I had never heard before. He ran into all the rooms, my schoolbag dangling from the tips of his fingers. But I needed to go so I headed for the bathroom. A little push at the door and there she was. On the dark blue tiles, face up, her hair in a puddle of sick.
My father made me sit in the living room as the ambulance and the people and the stretchers all came and left. I sat on the couch for a long while, not noticing when it got dark. Woke up in warm arms, jolted awake by the ripples of my father’s steady footsteps, carrying me through the flat to my room.
Everything’s going to be alright, he said, tucking an old stuffed toy next to my face, shushing me before I could ask any questions. He sat on the edge of my bed as I slowly fell into a fitful sleep but I woke up to the same stillness, the sharp buzz of silence in my ears. And a note, stuck onto a foil-wrapped packet of sandwiches made by rough, first-timer’s hands on my bedside table. Will be back before noon. From, Pa, it said.
I think about telling you all of this. Some irrationality, some superstition makes me imagine that if I told you, if I said it out loud, you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t do the same. Something else makes me think that you might hate me.
Instead, I keep quiet. We are right next to the coast now. There are tall palm trees lining the road and people skating, their dogs running alongside. I pull the car into a shaded spot, ask if you would like to take a walk.
Sure, you say, since we’re here. And you open the door and step out. We walk together, towards the sea. It isn’t far.