There are supposed to be two sides to every story but in my case there are three. His, hers, mine. Two parents, one child. Our personal geometry: triangulated. The shape of our family: a tricorn hat, as worn by gentlemen, pirates and highway robbers. Together, we form a wedge of cheese, a piece of cake, a segment of a pie chart.
There’s something uncomfortable about a triangle: it’s all elbows, suggesting awkward unease. Sharp edges. Not like the gentle symmetry of a square or the harmonious flow of a circle. Isosceles, equilateral, scalene: the words themselves sound pointy and acute. A triangle is easily distorted, pulled in one of several directions. Although its three sides are supposed to represent the most stable of forms, making it the preferred design for medieval fortresses, its shape rarely felt balanced to me: more often teetering, a warped and lopsided trivet that would not lie flat.
Countering the story of the three wise men and fairy tales granting three wishes, superstition suggests that bad things come in threes, from Macbeth’s witches to plane crashes. Roadside danger signs are framed in a triangle. It is the outline of alarm. In the orchestra, it is the percussive voice of warning.
When I visualise a triangle, I see the jumbo-size Toblerone chocolate mountains my father would consume, nougat-studded, peak by peak, breaking off two or three from the whole sweet row of Swiss Alps they represent. Then these mountains melt, replaced by real whipped-cream snowy summits, like the ones we used to visit during annual winter ski holidays. Mostly my father is at the apex, dominant and domineering, looking down on us from a lofty altitude. Occasionally I imagine myself at the top with my parents at the base, each tugging me towards their corner of the valley, with more or less persuasion or force. That was our dynamic. My mother never challenged either of us for the highest spot: the air up there was too thin. She preferred to let us slug it out. ‘You two are so alike,’ she would say, with a Gallic shrug.
Three barely felt like a family. It felt like it did not count. Like we were unfinished. Incomplete. There was always a gap at the table, room to set places for others. But visitors were few and far between. Mostly, there was only me.