by Kaaron Warren
Not long after my father killed my mother, I removed him to a special home.
“I’m taking you somewhere nice, Dad. They’ve got big TV and lots of food.”
“Why can’t I stay with you?” I thought of the shit in the seams of his trousers, the smell of him. He was so helpless. Such a child.
“It’s for the best.”
I carried his empty suitcase to the front door.
“Got my Agatha Christie books in there?”
“Yep.”
“And my photos? And my postcards? And my pyjamas?”
“All there, Dad.”
I patted him. “You’ll love it. I’ll visit often,” I said. I couldn’t wait to see him settled in his new home.
The house was mine at last, and I didn’t bother with a garage sale, didn’t sort a thing. I called the Salvation Army and told them to take the lot. Everything. All my belongings were those of the man I used to be.
They marched up and down the stairs with load after load, and they were friendly at first, making jokes.
After a while they were dead silent, and they worked quickly.
They wouldn’t look at me.
They carried out boxes of clothes, books, ornaments. Clocks and crockery. Glasses, flags, beakers, needles, syringes, stainless steel bowls, drips, magazines, photos. Papers they would burn or read. They carried out furniture.
They carried out bedspreads, sheets, towels. Toaster, fridge, TV, stereo.
“Shower curtain,” I said, and they even took that. I went on inspection when they finished; they wouldn’t come in.
I brought out one last armful of things; toothbrushes, soap, a hula hoop, jewellery, a bucket still crusty with blood, a pair of shoes and a teapot. I passed these over the threshold and waved my past goodbye.
It was still there, though, in the walls, the carpet, the ceiling, the smell of the place. So I hired a wallpaper stripper and a carpet remover and a floor polisher and I bought some paint and that was a full month’s work for my girlfriend and me.
Then it was time to go see Dad. The pathetic little marks he’d scratched into me were gone, the memory of his light weight, too. He was always a small man. Smaller than Mum, although that made no difference to their happiness.
They married soon after they met, then spent fifteen years living the life. They never wanted kids. Kids would interfere. Kids didn’t travel well or eat well and they were no good in restaurants. They cried and were dirty. They couldn’t speak for years and when they finally learnt it was only to abuse you.
Mum and Dad planned to remain childless.
As I was growing up, people often said, “Were you an accident?” because Mum and Dad were so old when they had me. I eventually gathered that “accident” meant “unwanted” and truly did not want to know the answer. Thinking they were comforting me, my parents said, “No, you were the most planned baby ever,” and told me why I was born. I realised then we were not a normal family; that not everyone shared blood with their father.
My parents exchanged fond glances as they told me the story of my birth. I always felt they cared about each other so much, one day they would both love me together. I was well-treated, properly schooled, impeccably fed, but the giggles and the games they saved for themselves.
“You were planned for very carefully, because your father got sick after a lifetime of being healthy. We just didn’t know how to cope. We couldn’t do the things we used to; he tired so easily.”
“So you had me to keep you company at home,” I said.
“Not quite,” Mum said. “We went to so many doctors, and none of them could tell us how to bring him back to life. After weeks of tests, all they said was, ‘It’s middle age.’ It really was a terrible time.”
Dad was silent.
“So we started trying the other doctors, the ones you didn’t see at hospital. Now they were a funny lot.”
Dad smiled now. “They had me naked for the night air, eating raw meat to clear the toxins, swallowing byproducts I wouldn’t like to discuss. And there was always the sex, of course.”
“But none of it worked. He was still lethargic, so tired. He drooped about the house, driving me mad.”
Mum always hated it when I was tired and weak. “Get a move on! Show some life!” she poked at me. She thought I did it on purpose.
“And then there was the doctor who made us young again,” said Mum.
“And caused you to be born,” said Dad.
“So you had me to keep you young?” I said.
“Yes.”
“It was his blood that was the problem,” Mum said. “It was old and tired. That’s all. I would have given him all of mine, but we didn’t match.” Again, the fond smile. They sat together on their couch. I was on my chair in the corner; I had to twist to face them.
I said, “But you do match.” It was one of the rare times I impressed them.
“Everything but our blood,” Dad said. “My family were no use; they either had different blood or they were diseased. And the hospital wasn’t interested in helping us.”
I didn’t know much about Dad’s side of the family. There was a big fight years ago, around when I was born, and they didn’t talk anymore.
“Is that why you hate them?” I said.
“One reason,” Dad said. He and Mum had only ever needed each other.
“We were often at the doctor, begging him to help us,” Dad said.
“Demanding, really,” “Mum said. “How could we live like that, with death? We couldn’t.”
“Lucky you didn’t die, Dad,” I said. He wasn’t much of a believer in luck. He always said, “Luck is what you do with your opportunities,” which was okay if you got opportunities. If your parents took them all, how much luck could you expect to have?
Mum said, “The doctor told us it was a shame we didn’t have a child, because it would probably have blood which wouldn’t clump his. That was when the planning began.”
Dad wanted a transfusion whenever I was able to provide one, so I have never been strong. As soon as I felt rich with blood, I’d be drained again. It was all they asked of me, though. I had no chores; no cleaning, cooking, visiting, politeness for me. Just that look in Dad’s eye, that need, and the pain, and the life going out of me. Our special room was called the theatre. I thought that was normal, “I went to the theatre,” people said, until I realised there were two kinds. I no longer boasted about having one. People only laughed, anyway.
I always knew when it was going to happen. I’d be the centre of attention, have favourite meals. We’d go for a drive one month, shopping another. I could never enjoy these special days though. I knew what was coming. And all day Dad would pinch and squeeze at me, wanting me pink and tender.
I never had an imagination, so I had nowhere to go while the transfusion was taking place. I wished the ceiling was a story book, all the cracks and lines making rabbits and bears. All I ever saw were cracks and lines. I knew them very well.
Dad liked to hum along to a bit of music in the background. I still hate anything classical. There was always that silence, between the movements, when I’d hear Dad’s bad blood drip drip into the bucket, as mine was slowly entering his veins. It was perfect, that rhythm, and I imagined I could hear it over the crashing cymbals and roaring chords of Dad’s favourite music.
Mum’s favourite was the garden and she threw the full buckets over the flowers. I couldn’t understand why she never answered when people asked her how she kept it so nice. Why didn’t she tell them? So I answered for her. Just the once.
“Dad’s blood,” I said. I was locked in my room that day, all day, and the shock of being a bad boy kept my mouth shut for a long time. I liked it better as Mum’s good boy, Dad’s blood boy.
It was a private, quiet life. My pleasures came when they took their excursions. Dad would fill up, jovial and magnanimous as he took my strength, and Mum cooked my favourite casseroles and desserts for the freezer.
I was left to pretend the house was mine. Sometimes I dreamed a crash, their caravan folding in two and their blood pouring out when rescuers freed them.
And then things changed.
“Poor Old Girl needs to save her energy,” Dad said, though he was the pale and shaky one. He liked to joke people thought Mum was his mother. “Old Girl,” he called her. Never thought to let her have a go at me.
He lost his license, was the thing, and she’d never had hers because he did the driving. They took my pleasures away. Now, they never left the house. They sat quietly with me, listening to the blood pulsing through my veins.
Dad wanted blood every three weeks then. It got so I couldn’t bear those nights at home, all three of us waiting for the others to talk, and almost the only thing we had to talk about was the next visit to the theatre.
Sometimes they discussed grandchildren as if I wasn’t there. Never, I thought. I knew how they would treat a grandchild. They thought my blood was getting old. I’m not one of those types who feel better when they do the same things to the next generation of innocent children.
I began to go out at night, leaving the house without a word, slamming the door like a teenager. I wasn’t sure what people did, out. I tired very easily, and would sometimes just sit in a place where there was a lot of noise, and absorb the energy.
I found there was an undertow in the city. It dragged me, without a fight, to kindred spirits. Damaged people without armour.
I went to one of those bars where people are whipped and manacled, because I knew about receiving pain. I’d been strapped down, pierced, drained, all my life, but I’d never liked it. They gave me a whip to use but I wasn’t strong enough. Under the lights you could see my thin arms. It was very warm in there although I’m usually cold. You could see how many times I’d saved my father’s life, a record of tracks.
Someone was impressed. It was a woman, with a black cowl over her face to cover the criss cross scars there, her body shrouded, her voice low, her fingers cool. I wouldn’t take her offered drink, but allowed her into my car. I agreed to drive her home.
I stayed with her for two days. It was the longest I had been away from my parents, and I felt breathless without them.
We ate pizza and drank wine, and I told her my life. She was sickened. Sickened, a scarred woman hiding in black.
She said, “Why do you agree to it? You’re an adult.”
I had often tried to answer this question, alone, in the dark, thinking terrible thoughts in the middle of the night. When I was young, it had all seemed so normal; when I realised it wasn’t, I was embarrassed, like an abused child, or children in a strange religion. Now, it’s the guilt, mostly, and the fact that I’ve never lost my need for approval. They liked having me close by and I was too weak to move away. I didn’t finish school, which Dad found irritating. He said intelligence was only a matter of looking and learning. They learnt how to give transfusions, didn’t they, by watching? Mum going to hospital once and watching the whole thing. It was Mum who did it; Dad hated the sight of blood. He always kept his head turned away.
I didn’t need a job either. They gave me plenty of money. I never wanted for anything.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I began to suffocate in her arms. She was draining love from me, swallowing it in breathless gulps. So I returned home.
I had never heard my father raise his voice; now he screamed, screeched, called me a killer. I said, “Who am I supposed to have killed?”
“Me, me,” he said. He took my wrist and tried to lead me to the theatre.
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Mum said. Her face looked dark, damaged.
“I’m not giving blood anymore. I need it all for myself.”
My father wailed. My mother cried. “Where were you?” Mum said.
“With my girlfriend.”
My father stopped wailing to snort.
I went to my room.
Each day my mother grew fearful, my father begged and drooled, and I yearned for my girlfriend. So I went to my girl in black. I never imagined my mother was in danger. Their blood didn’t match.
I stayed away for two nights. She wanted to meet my parents. I said, “Soon.” We went for a drive in the country, to the old boarding house where she kept her mother and we watched her mother take a bath.
It was very quiet when I returned home. Quieter than usual; I could hear no pottering. The house seemed darker, and colder. But I could be inventing. Could be the house was the same as ever, and it was only afterwards I turned it into something else.
I found Dad lying on his bed in the theatre, waiting for his transfusion. The room smelt so very clean, compared to the world outside its walls.
Dad told me the story. He told it in a wheedling tone, he told me the truth, hoping it would make me help him.
“You hadn’t been here for weeks,” he said. To him, I only existed in the theatre, or when we were preparing for it. “And I was very ill. So I wanted your mother to do that one small thing for me. Just once. It’s not like I ever asked her before.” He led me around the house, indicating a wall, a room, making me look at nothing.
“But her blood was no good for you.”
“That’s what she always said. But I thought, maybe she’s lying. Maybe it was always good. And when she said no, no, no, all I could see was red. She was cooking the potatoes how you like them, in case you came home, and I said I’d do it. But I saw red.
“I just scratched her, I thought, so I could see the blood, see if it was OK, but it wasn’t.”
And neither was she. My father wept and snuffled in a corner in the kitchen, denying what he had done, not looking at the proof before his eyes.
I had no time to prepare myself. I felt greater grief than I could have imagined; this woman had cared for me, kept me alive, kept me clean and fed.
We were always good at secrets. We took Mum’s body away to the country and buried it. We were the only ones who would miss her.
Dad never got another drop of blood. He was probably addicted to it; he suffered. He seemed to get old very quickly. Was it Mum’s death, or having to live with his own blood?
Dad finally paid attention to me. He followed me around like a little lamb, and I loved ignoring him. He didn’t complain. He shrugged and sighed.
He became quite tender towards me, remembering things which never happened, emotions we never shared. Then one day he reminded me of the truth.
“Sometimes you just have to be patient. We had to wait those first few months while you grew your own blood, to take the place of your mother’s. I didn’t want anybody else’s blood. Only yours.” He said it casually, as if we had all been involved in the decision. I think he thought he’d talk me into going back to it.
We had a lovely time alone, Dad and I. He’d talk and I wouldn’t listen. I cooked food he disliked or couldn’t digest, and I locked the door of the theatre and kept the key on a nail out of his reach. I never washed him, till he hated the stink of himself. I sprayed him with after shave and perfume, toilet deodoriser, and laughed as he cringed from me.
None of it was enough.
It was never going to be enough. I wanted him used, drained, sucked out.
I took my girlfriend home to look at Dad.
We stood outside his bedroom window as the sun rose and watched him struggling from his bed to greet the day. He slept naked; I wouldn’t help him into his pyjamas.
My girlfriend thought he was perfect. She helped me get the suitcase down from the cupboard, and watched from the car while I cajoled him out of the house. We laughed all the way there, her hand on my thigh. We felt committed; both our parents would be in the same home.
It brought tears to my eyes. It was only a small place, just a few mothers and fathers, ancient things; this one guilty of sexual abuse; that one of beatings; that mother nagged still, her purple tongue swollen from some unprescribed drug. My girlfriend’s mother had her skin scrubbed in the bath. And scrubbed. And we could visit any time. We could watch it, stare at them, hate them even more.
I dropped him off and went to my own home. He saw something he didn’t like before I left; his own greedy need perhaps, in someone else’s eyes.
I said, “You’ll fit right in, Dad. “They’ll love you.”
He fought like a demon to come back home with me.
My girlfriend and I visited often. We joked about our parents falling in love; everyone loved Dad there. The other residents and their occasional visitors. People loved to make him bleed, because he hated the sight of it. They pinned open his eyes and made him watch as they cut off a little toe and sold it to the highest bidder. They took his blood, plucked his white stringy hair, shaved his body. We watched from the gallery, my girlfriend and I, and we talked quietly about love and revenge.
You just have to be patient. You just have to wait until they’re old and helpless.
Dad was in good company. One old man was daily raped and forced to perform orally. He liked it at first, I was told, but soon learned fear. A woman was hit every time she opened her mouth and sometimes when she didn’t. She soon learned to bite her tongue.
In the dining room, hungry old people sat in front of food they hated. Some of it was mouldy, all of it was cold. They had to eat what was in front of them.
All the rooms were small and dark.
I felt unwonted tenderness when they let Dad wander the grounds in his nightshirt, a small figure with a painted face, laughter drawn in red around his mouth. He stroked and patted every part of his body. I imagined he was memorising it for the day it would be taken away from him completely.
Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She has published five multi award-winning novels: Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone, and seven short story collections, including the multi award-winning Through Splintered Walls. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil was nominated for the Stoker Award. “A Positive” won the Aurealis Award.