Suddenly the car swerved, as if Rangi had seen her too. “Be alert,” he ordered, squeezing my shoulder. That odd intensity he had magnified. I didn’t know what he meant. Was it an opening for me to confess what I saw? Or tell him what I was feeling? I turned to look behind me. Anon sat in the back seat, wet from rain, you let me in she said. She was holding a paperweight; a chunk had been taken out of it. An image of me broken, crawling on the bathroom floor turned slowly inside it. I realised she’d been there all along, not pushed out by different oxygen.
She’d been there, in the sneaky half smile of the woman serving at the chip shop, in the hands of the B&B owner, whose fingers lingered overly familiar on my skin as one blue iris became brown. She’d been there at the beach, rising to the surface of rough waters. My feet cramped on the dashboard. Rangi’s nose began to bleed.
“That happens sometimes,” he said, grabbing a tissue from the glove compartment, wiping his face, then tilting his head back, one hand on the wheel. Blood trickled from his nostrils, seeping into the paperweight scene.
By now the bruised ceiling of our room at the B&B had washed up on the shore. The gulls from the beach had followed our departure too, each sporting one blue and one brown iris. They flapped their wings violently, screaming down the sharp bends, trailing in exhaust pipe smoke.
Keyholes
It was summer when I discovered keyholes spinning in the ether, hiding figures made of dark matter that let me catch a finger in their mouths. I was seven. Nighttime in our household found me tiptoeing down red softly carpeted stairs to spy on my mother, the memory of the school day’s activities sticky on my skin. I’d worn a dead blue oleander flower in my cornrows to school and the fed up expression on my class tutor Mrs Phillips face had been worth it. For God’s sake Joy, take that thing off your head! It’s morbid.
The week before that, I’d re-enacted the birth of Christ for classmates during break time, focusing particularly on the birth scene, complete with tinfoil Jesus and ketchup blood on my thighs, huffing and puffing and crying out, the way I’d seen a woman do on TV. Mrs Phillips had been furious, barging through the circle gathered, glasses steamed up, chest rising and falling rapidly as if it would detach from her body. Her creased, knee length grey dress was fit to burst and her thin features were pinched.
What on earth? What is going on here? She zeroed in on me; lips curled back looking like she was ready to fling me into an advert for starving African children, never to see another English dawn. And my tinfoil Jesus would accompany me by a murky, half-hearted lake, counting flies hovering over our distended stomachs.
This attention seeking has got to stop! My audience of co-conspirators sniggered, scattering like marbles, they slunk off to entertain themselves in other ways, swapping their canoodling expressions for innocent ones. Honestly, I don’t know what your mother exposes you to Mrs Phillips continued, shoving aside the small coats I’d used as straw and the paint splattered plate that acted as my moon.
You said you liked creative interpretation, I piped up defensively.
I know what I said, she spat, hauling me up. You look absolutely ridiculous.
I swiped a blob of ketchup from my thigh and licked it, thinking of hot dogs. The tinfoil Jesus and I were dragged into Mrs Phillips office.
Later, in afternoon art class I sucked on strawberry bonbons. Streams of sunlight fed the artificial plant life cut-outs stuck on the classroom windowsills, forming a surrounding jungle. The smell of wet paintbrushes and chalk hung in the air.
Draw pictures of your family on an adventure, anywhere you like. Mrs Phillips instructed in her typical, grim faced manner. Sadness crept into my fingers as I drew on the scratched wooden desk harbouring hangmen in its corners, that seem to be plotting to meet each other in the middle to converse in a language only unhappy children could interpret.
Everybody else’s family had a roundness to them; father, mother, brothers and sisters, smiling by the Eiffel tower, eating pink candy-floss at the fair, on the carousel ride laughing. Mine seemed uneven, filled with absences I tried to measure using hands that hadn’t grown wide enough to do so. Strangely loaded sentences my mother never bothered to explain lingered in my strokes. You come from me she’d say. And your father has powers beyond imagination. I considered drawing my mother sleeping in the afternoons, for hours sometimes, or the secretive, quiet conversations she had at nights to somebody at the other end of the phone. But they’d ask me why and I didn’t have any answers. Lead-drawn fathers from other children’s pictures surrounded me, their sympathetic expressions faint. The classmates took turns holding my dead oleander, breathing thin breaths into it in hope of a resurrection. Mrs Phillips stood over my shoulder peering at my drawing; a picture of my mother and I wearing duck heads in a rippling pond, surrounded by broken bits of bread and large footprints in the sky.
What a curious image, she commented. Whose footprints are those?
My father’s, I said.
And who is your father? She asked. I’ve never met him.
God, I answered seriously, punctuating the response with a flick of my paintbrush.
Orange paint splattered onto Mrs Phillips’s frumpy, grey dress. She pursed her lips. An uncomfortable silence followed.
I stood by the slightly open door that hot summer night, peeping through the tiny crack. A man sat on our deep mauve sofa. His brown torso had a light sheen, its own exotic animal in the lowly lit room. I pictured it falling at my feet, waiting for a spell from my hands by the edge of the doorway. I couldn’t see his face; I’d have to adjust my position to do that. If I leaned too far forward, they’d spot me and I’d be banished upstairs, told off for spying. I was rooted to the spot, listening to my mother’s laughter. I rarely heard it sound that way. It was softer, breathy, more feminine somehow. She sat on the man’s thighs, her upper body naked, a silky red camisole pooled at her waist. Her breasts jutted forward. She cooed as the man’s large hand stroked her thigh before disappearing between her legs. Aware I was watching something I wasn’t supposed to be seeing, I bit my lip anxiously, careful not to move and make the floorboards creak. I knew adults sometimes did those things to each other, I’d seen snippets on TV before my mother flicked the channel over.
She began to move into his hand, gyrating, head thrown back. Her mouth was slack and distorted as if would overheat and fall into the ashtray on the table, orange embers flickering in the glass. The man chuckled, a low rumbling sound. He moved down her body like some large, brown skinned python. He placed his head between her legs, obscured under the camisole. He unbuckled his leather belt.
I turned away then, weighing the secrets of the door. I slunk up the stairs carefully; head filled with this new knowledge that seemed adult and mysterious somehow. Back in my room, I peeled back the rumpled duvet, crawled into bed listening to the fan blades turning. I stayed awake for a bit, thinking of brown torsos in slim cracks waiting to be identified.
The fan blades sliced through scenes I imagined belonged to the man downstairs, who was making my mother groan like some foreign entity, exposing a side of herself mothers kept hidden from their daughters, tucked beneath their darting, moist tongues. On the dresser beside me, a paper plane I’d made from old comic book pages was half off the wooden surface, with only the sound of the blades and my breathing to propel it skywards. I pretended me and the man downstairs were co-pilots on foot. Wherever we went, the plane followed; dented by a fox’s paw from a night time rummage, damp from skimming its reflection in the pond at the local park, marked by frustrated fingers trying to fly it in the trails of real planes, whose destinations we chased till they vanished from sight.