When my brother used to beat me, a part of me wanted to encourage him. It felt like he was getting something out of his system. He’d be focused on the task, like when he was juggling a soccer ball with his feet or threading a worm onto a hook. I’d usually curl up and play dead, but there were times where my outrage became too much, and I’d scream. He’d keep going, although a bitterness would kink his closed mouth – he saw this as a betrayal – and through my screaming, I’d hear the creaking stairs carry our stepfather’s heavy breathing and guttural curses to the room we shared: God Verdomme! God Verdomme!
Dutch is an awkward language. It sounds humorous to me even now, except when used in anger. When my stepfather cursed, I imagined dirt in his lungs, old black farming earth from the north of Holland, clotted with blood and bone.
The door swings open; Harry enters the room and my brother backs away. My brother is particularly handsome at times like this, upright, very alert. He doesn’t show fear, not like I do.
My stepfather’s head swings from him to me, and back again. ‘What did I tell you? Idiyote! God Verdomme!’
From where I sit on the floor, I can see the crack of his arse, huge and pale, with a swirl of black hair plunging into his corduroy pants. He wrenches off a paint-stained work boot and lifts it over his head. My brother throws a hateful glance my way before Harry’s back obscures him.
I wish that I could take satisfaction in what happens next, but I’m not at all well. I am sick – I should be in hospital – I have a watery core of illness and my spine is disintegrating. I am not going to hospital; I am waiting for my turn with my stepfather. I am always second in line when we are due for a beating. With each lift of that boot, I glimpse my future. Whenever I hear the word ‘anticipation,’ or try to imagine what will happen next in my life, that feeling laps up against me, even now, thirty years on, with my stepfather nowhere in sight.
*
Metal chains squeal in protest with each thrust of my arms. May is two, and she has learned how to say ‘more’ and ‘push’ and ‘harder.’ With these three words, she keeps me busy. I push her on the swing and she keeps returning to me, hair floating on the air like an afterthought, a determined line in her jaw when she throws me a quick glance to make sure I won’t give up.
This is one of the things we do together. Half of every week I take care of my daughter by myself and we wander around the city looking for things to do. The other half of my daughter’s week belongs to my wife. We are not divorced, we live in the same house, but our lives are neatly separated all the same. There are times when we do things together as a family, visits to the beach or the park or some other outing, and my wife always says, ‘This is good, isn’t it?’ and I agree although my eyes don’t. My eyes have always betrayed me. But I have learned to look away at the crucial moments. I have learned that it is possible to do this with an entire life.
The time that my wife and I spend alone together happens after May is asleep, when we sit in front of the television. We massage each other’s shoulders with oil for lovers and exchange conversation in the advertising spaces that dismember the usual television programs about crime and death. I don’t mind talking then, because we are staring in the same direction. I have come to see television as one of the sacrifices you make for love.
*
After the park, I take May to the library. We walk in through the large, open doors, just as a young woman walks out. She is wearing those pants that look like a cross between jeans and tights. My gaze snags on her and I glance over my shoulder as she walks off. I experience regret, and an erection that withers with the next few steps.
Whenever such longing comes, I think of my real father. One of the ghosts of my childhood left behind when my mother moved us to the opposite side of the world with a different man. My father, I am told, was famous for his wandering eye, though he was generally forgiven for it because of his charming nature. I know more of my father through what my mother has given me than through my own interactions with him. He still lives in another country and is caring for his other ex-wife, who is dying of cancer. We haven’t spoken in twenty years but information trickles through.
‘It’s strange,’ my mother will tell me, ‘how you hardly saw him, but then you laugh or move your hand, just like that and I can see him there, just like when I fell in love with him.’
May is singing a song. I lift a finger to my mouth and catch her eye, and she smiles, then frowns and falls silent and runs ahead into the open spaces of the library. I imagine sometimes that I am moving through life like some kind of blundering surgeon, pinching off possibilities as if they are arteries.
*
This is the story I have of how my parents fell in love: my father was dating my mother’s best friend, but he was always close and talking to my mother whenever her friend was out of the room, a brush of his hand, a smile, playful and light, as if they were brother and sister. One day, he hugged his girlfriend, stared lingeringly at my mother and winked, like they were sharing a joke.
It was the kind of joke that never gets old.
A year later, my brother was born, and three years after that, I came along, a home birth on the thirteenth floor of an apartment block in a town near the southern border of Holland. My first words were Dutch, but I can’t remember them.
I arrived early by kicking a hole in my mother’s stomach; so I believed as a boy. I was always accused of a terrible clumsiness when I was young, and this version of events made sense to me. The midwife coughed and smoked through the whole labour and had to wipe the ash from my face before she announced in a voice dry as paper that I was the handsomest baby she’d ever laid eyes on. When my father returned from whatever errands had been absorbing him, he borrowed money from my grandfather for a bunch of flowers, came into the bedroom with the flowers in one fist, his other hand in his pocket, and stared at me long and hard, with a look equal parts disappointment and doubt.
‘Are you sure that I’m the father?’ he asked.
We moved on from Holland to England and rented an apartment where everything was coin operated: the heating; the stove; the shower; the phone. We didn’t have a lot of coins. My father was struggling to find work. He had borrowed five thousand guilders from my grandparents, but most of that money had vanished. There was a mystery to this money that I would hear of years later, but what I grew up knowing is that we didn’t have anything; that it caused the inevitable conflicts; that I would often turn blue with cold of a night-time; that the walls ran with condensation; that my father was not often around; that I was not a good sleeper. My mother would walk the streets of London by herself, driven by loneliness and the crying that leaked out of me as if I were connected to some limitless reservoir beneath the city. ‘The moment that I saw you,’ my mother said, ‘I knew that you’d been here before.’
I think that my mother confuses unhappiness with experience.
*
In the library, May wanders into the wide-open spaces of the children’s section and fondles the spines of books. She pulls the books out and leaves them splayed open in her wake. Someone ought to pull her into line. I take a book about the decline of the Roman Empire from a shelf and sink into a chair. My daughter comes up to me and touches my knee.
‘Done poo poo,’ she tells me.
We collect our things and go to the toilet. I use up half a packet of wipes to clean her and her underwear goes into the bin. My daughter stands on the counter next to the sink, catches sight of herself in the mirror and starts swaying her hips from side to side and humming under her breath. I tell her to stop, and she puts more sideways thrust into her hips.
‘Just cut it out,’ I tell her in a sharper tone and her body tenses and stops.
I regret my tone immediately. My daughter is not afraid of my wife, only of me. I get irritable when I am tired, and these days I am tired all the time. I have lost control of what I had always assumed would be mine: sleep. I knew that it was coming – plenty of people warned me – I just didn’t know how bad that lack would be. My daughter wakes sometimes in the middle of the night crying so fiercely that her face develops a rash, and in that hysteria, she is impossible to communicate with. She looks enraged, as if she does not recognise a thing in this world. My wife, who gets up exactly half the time with her, holds her and rocks her and pleads and eventually starts crying herself. Please go back to sleep, she tells my daughter. Please, please, please go back to sleep. This can go on for hours. I can’t help but listen. The muscles in my arse are like the workings of a clock that mark the passage of this time by winding more tightly into themselves.
When it is my turn, I pick my daughter up and I too tell her to stop. If this doesn’t work, I take her to the shower and hold her head near a stream of cold water and threaten to put her under. Twice I have put her head under. When I make this threat, she bites at her own sobs until they retreat back into her chest. Sometimes I imagine my daughter, twenty years from now, shrugging when someone asks about her overwhelming fear of water. I hold her after she has calmed down until she goes to sleep and feel tender at her peacefulness, her vulnerability, but I am ashamed rather than satisfied and my wife treats me with a wounded contempt that transmits itself in the angle of her body as it turns away from me in the bed.
With my daughter asleep, I lie down beside my wife, separated from the mattress by my own knotted muscles. I lie there, listening to my wife breathe, and wait to fall asleep myself. Something clicks in the back of my wife’s throat when she sleeps. I imagine it is the last sound someone might make before they die. I know that my daughter could start up again at any moment. Her distress stays with me like the pain of a burn long after she has drifted off. Falling asleep is like putting my head between the jaws of a lion.
Keep it open, I think to myself, keep it open, but I am no longer talking about a lion and instead thinking of a door that connected me to the outside world when I lay in bed at night as a boy.
I was terrified of the dark. My stepfather, who did not share my father’s doubts about paternity, would open the door and look in at me over his thick black beard.
‘You’ll never learn,’ he would say, ‘if I don’t teach you.’
Then the door shuts.
*
May and I have left the toilet and returned to the library. I sink into a chair with my book. I start flicking through the pages, reading summaries about the late Roman emperors and how they spent their lives going mad or patching up ruptured borders, chasing barbarians out of the slowly disintegrating limbs of the empire, quelling the mutinies of their own armies. The decline of civilisation, onset of the dark ages, all of that. It must have been daunting for an emperor to wake up every morning knowing that there was just one problem after another, making decisions that could wipe out cities or nations, just to keep something going for a few decades more. It fascinates me how all the intricate struggles of countless human beings over several decades can be shoe-horned into a couple of paragraphs on a piece of paper. So many people can disappear between those words.
A familiar-looking mother walks past, glances at my daughter and then at me.
‘Gosh, she’s grown,’ the woman says. ‘It goes so fast, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘It does.’
‘Best make the most of it,’ she tells me.
‘OK,’ I say, fighting the urge to salute. ‘I will.’
I don’t say anything else and the woman walks off. My daughter has come to sit in the chair beside me. She has collected a pile of books and is making a show of reading one. We read together for a little while in silence. She lifts one sandalled foot onto the chair cushion and hums softly as she pushes it back and forth in a dreamy way. I note this from the corner of my eye and then turn to look at her more directly. She is pushing something with that foot, and when I look at it closely, I realise that it is shit. It’s vital stuff, shit, a sure sign of life, as compelling as any book. I pick her up and put her on the floor.
‘Don’t move.’
The shit is all over the chair. I glance from this to her legs and see streaks of it along her thighs, a clump hanging like a pendulum on the inside of her shorts. It is all over the floor, too. She’s just been to the toilet. Where did this all come from? I feel like I have just woken up, like I’m still groggy, trying to disentangle myself from my own thoughts.
‘Don’t you dare move!’
I take out a wipe and run it across the chair. I succeed in spreading the shit over the cushion, turning it into the kind of economical but expressive flourish you might see in a Japanese symbol. I back away, feel myself flush with despair, pick up several clumps from the carpet, fold them in a wipe, drop them into my pocket, and look towards the service desk, where a young woman runs a stack of books under the scanner.
‘Look, Daddy,’ my daughter exclaims behind me in a voice that rings through the quiet. ‘More poo, there on the carpet! And there!’
I have some on my fingers. Everyone will turn around soon to see me and my poo-stained hands standing guiltily in the middle of all this. My daughter will be happy to point out the sights. She is giggling with delight. I grab her hand and pull her small, light body along.
As we pass the woman at the service desk I almost yell at her, ‘We don’t have any books!’ I imagine myself smuggling drugs through customs.
In the toilet, I clean my daughter up the best I can. I am infuriated at her betrayal. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why?’
I throw her pants in a plastic bag, put another bag against her bare arse – it sticks there without a problem and waves sadly as I put her in the pram. She’s finally realised how upset I am and doesn’t even attempt to sing. We begin walking home at a brisk pace. She quietly asks for her wrap. She likes to put the corner in her mouth and suck on it for comfort.
‘No,’ I snarl at her. ‘Not your wrap. You’re not getting your damn wrap! Don’t you dare even ask for it again!’
There’s shit everywhere, in the pram, on her belly, on the plastic bag flapping up between her legs, tar-like and sticky. I don’t want it getting into her mouth, but I can’t deny it; I also want to make her suffer a little. It’s not as bad as I think, I tell myself. I suppose that there are other libraries I can go to around the city. Maybe there’s a witness protection program for people who leave shit in chairs for other people to sit in.
My daughter begins sobbing.
‘Not a sound out of you!’ I snarl loud enough for people across the road to look at me. This makes me more ashamed and angry at May all at once. I know that I’m being an arsehole, but I know it only from a distance. ‘All you have to do is tell me when you need to do a poo, or afterwards. You don’t sit in it and play with it! Not at the library! Daddy’s not happy at all. When we get home, you’re getting a bath and going to bed. I don’t even want to talk to you anymore.’
We walk on in silence. My daughter chokes back her tears. When we get home, I put her under the shower. I wash her without any tenderness and even stick her head under the water, which makes her finally break into sobs. Then I put her pyjamas on and put her into her bed. Finally I stop moving and I look down at her. My daughter has put her wrap in her mouth. She feeds the corner between her lips and works it with a slight, repetitive motion of her jaw. Her sad blue eyes are turned up at me.
‘All you have to do is tell me,’ I say softly but I feel the conviction, the rage, draining out of me.
She nods. I stand over her and think suddenly of how small she is – her nose the size of my thumbnail – and how tall I must seem, the fury written on my face, my hands hanging by my sides. My hands are very different from how I remember my stepfather’s, but suddenly they feel just as heavy. I walk out of the room and stand in the middle of the living room, staring out the window at the cliffs overlooking the ocean in the distance.
*
When I return to her bedroom, my daughter doesn’t notice at first, or pretends not to. She lies on her side, staring at the ceiling, her small jaw still working away. Then her gaze slides towards me.
I stare down at her. ‘You want a hug?’
She nods and I pick her up, hold her body against mine, and I shudder with love and self-loathing. My daughter frees an arm from my embrace and points down at the floor.
‘No poo,’ she declares with a solemn sweep of her arm. ‘No poo anywhere.’
‘Yes,’ I concede softly. ‘Wonderful. You want some lunch?’
My daughter wants rice bubbles and eats two bowls that I feed her, although she knows very well how to do it herself. After that she goes to sleep without a sound. I lie on my bed and doze and snap out of it when the door to the apartment opens and shuts. I walk into the living room and my wife throws me a smile. We are always throwing each other smiles and expressions. They are barely caught, as if we are keeping something up in the air that is doomed to give in to gravity sooner or later.
‘How was your morning?’
I tell her that it was OK. I look away. I get my stuff together, kiss her on the cheek, and leave the house. I tell her that I’ll be back soon, but as I close the front door, I imagine myself leaving her for good.
*
When my brother and I get together for a drink, he talks sometimes about the past and the way he used to beat me. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know why he did it; he feels like it wasn’t him.
Who was it, then?
I tell him that it’s OK, that I understand. He still doesn’t know where his anger comes from, when he gets drunk for example and something happens and it boils up. Then his pleasant manner evaporates and he acts in ways that are hazy in his memory, though the fragments he recalls are enough to fill him with a shame that takes a little longer to dispel.
You could say that my brother is an old soul.
*
‘Do you know what your father did with our money?’ my mother asked me one day. ‘He spent it on boys, when we were living in London. Prostitutes. That’s where your father spent his nights. That’s where he was when you were born. That’s why we were so poor.’
I wish that this were the most unpleasant thing that I knew of him.
*
And my stepfather – who emigrated to Australia with us, and brought with him his language of heavy curses – has become no more than stories and memories too; the sort that unwrap inside your head even when you don’t want them to. I have an image of him tamping his pipe, lifting it to his mouth hidden in the dense mass of his beard, bringing the lighter close with his other hand and making the knot of tobacco at the centre flare into life. That sense I have of his heavy calmness and how quickly it could change.
I have never hit my own daughter. I never would. But when you have such a past, there is an awareness of the possibilities, a question that stays with you, that aches whenever you stray near.
*
After my divorce, which came soon enough and then felt as if it had been there forever, when I was alone and my daughter spent the nights with me, she slept more soundly. I would stand sometimes at the doorway of her room, and think of the men that stood at the threshold of mine, that stand there still, and what they had left in me.
No further than this, I warn them. No further. I watch her sleeping, the peacefulness of her expression, and feel better about the world. She sleeps through the night, although sometimes she still wakes when she is sick or restless. I don’t make her go back to sleep but let her sit beside me on the couch while I read a book. She is happy to be there, to eat a sandwich, to watch a cartoon and glance over occasionally with a knowing smile, like we are both visiting someone else.