I conjured up bits of a life for this man. Maybe he got lonely sometimes and he and my mother entangled their half-naked bodies till they rediscovered themselves in each other’s eyes. Maybe he was a butcher who gutted animals that dangled off ceiling hooks and pleaded for the insides they’d lost. Who couldn’t get the blood off his hands no matter how many times he washed them in scalding hot water or sat in public fountains.
I saw him pushing me on my yellow BMX bike, comic book plane caught in the wheel, its tip damp from saliva and all the things he couldn’t say to me yet. I rode the bike to school, ringing its silver bell to announce the arrival of something waiting in the wings, misshapen from being in the dark too long. Eventually, I waved goodbye to the bike trail disappearing on the concrete. I looked over my shoulder. The man from the dark pressed his face between the gates. In the distance of the school hall, I continued ringing the bell. I couldn’t see his face but I could hear him, crying the tears I’d lent him. Prompted by the cold, the lines of the grey bicycle disappeared into the hole in my chest. The paper plane stumbled, attempting to take off from one last, large male footprint.
The next morning, a package arrived for my mother in a thick, brown envelope lined with bubble wrap. I watched her from the balcony upstairs, flanked by secrets from the previous night, knocking one foot lightly against the over-filled laundry basket. She ran her fingers over the package at first, appearing hesitant to discover it’s contents. Then she tore it open slowly, a sad expression on her face. A slash of midnight blue appeared. She smiled wistfully, maybe recalling a memory, clutched it to her chest, staring at the letterbox as it noisily swung closed. The dress looked expertly cut. Held up to the light spilling from the glass on the door, it shimmered like a silken sea, whispering against her fingers.
“Mummy who got you a gift?” I bounded down the stairs a couple at a time, a habit I had whenever I got excited. “Can I see?”
“It’s nothing,” she said dismissively, folding the dress, her happy expression fading into the silken sea. “Just something I ordered from the catalogue. I’m going to order those dungarees you liked soon. Change that t-shirt, it has hair oil on it.”
“Can I see your dress on?” I asked. “It looks nice.”
“Later baby, I have to take care of a few things first. Please change that shirt!” she hollered before disappearing into the sitting room, the package tucked under her arm.
Later, I watched her try on the dress in her bedroom. It fit perfectly. We both stood inside our reflections before the finger printed mirror. Then I left her perched on the edge of the bed, unzipping. Her fingers skimmed the pulse on her neck as if contemplating throwing it to her mirror image. We didn’t talk about the half naked man whose deep laughter rumbled in the cracks of our house. I didn’t confide I’d told my teacher God was my father. And that he left ink footprints on creaky wooden floors and pale paper skies and could fly a model plane left-handed while the engine noise sputtered in his chest. We didn’t talk about the silence at our backs rising, catching secrets in its colourless, shapeless trap. We avoided discussing the white pills she took at night sometimes. To help make mummy sleep she’d said. We skirted around the debris in our beds, shoes, and the most random of places and the signs of her secret life; ticket stubs to a show, lace underwear, wine corks rolling off the glass table into the echoes of something passing.
The week Mrs Phillips sent a concerned letter about me home; I bought an orange yoyo using money I’d won from a dare. It had a long white string, flashed bits of red light unexpectedly, like a torch. A quirk I liked. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit at the top of the stairs flicking my yoyo, watching God creep into our photographs on the hallway walls, telling my mother lies, draping his arm around us lovingly, illuminated by the silent yoyo light.
Fallow
In the following weeks, the gulls from Chesapeake made random appearances. One repeatedly smacked its beak against the jar of stones on the kitchen countertop till a crack like a small scar appeared in the glass. Another having lost its head in the doorways of the flat continued scuttling headless through rooms, in search of rising ripples. One more dangled from the living room ceiling, its white convex chest swelling and sinking as the sounds of traffic spilled from its beak; tires screeching, the bleep of lights turning green, the low grumble of an engine overheating. I knew it was Anon behind it all. She was building an army, showing me she could command whatever she wanted. She was preparing them for something, laughing mockingly as panic rose inside me. I knew something dark and sinister was breathing in the flat, her hands embedded inside it, her ventriloquist doll.
Sometimes, I stuck my head out of the bedroom window to breathe another air, escape the din, or I’d turned the radio up loudly to have the false company of others, hoping to lose her in some frequency I’d attracted turning the knobs or that she’d be sucked into the static, reduced to tiny grains sparking malevolently in an electric blue kingdom somewhere. But she began to talk through the radio, interrupting heated debates and news items: You are nothing. Nothing good will ever happen in your life. You ruin everything. Why do you even exist? The gulls became more twisted. One sported a mangled neck. The gull from the ceiling came down, the left side of its breast gone, only darkness spun there when they gathered at my feet. They listened to her talking on the radio, growing in stature from my misery.
It was after one am. The sound of the tap dripping in the kitchen seeped into my brain. Outside, a can tumbled on the road; tires left tracks in the mouths of the odd person wandering in the cold. Green light of the 7/11 shop sign across the street coloured my vision. I lay sprawled on my bedroom floor, clutching the neck of a bottle of rum. Anon had her arms around me, her mouth orange in the light. Her lips moved but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. My right eye throbbed. A small, rum sky in the bottle threatened to shatter the glass. Anon’s mouth kept moving silently. My limbs were too heavy to find the words she’d left imprinted on my skin, already dissipating in the feverish sweat on my forehead. I watched her moist, pink tongue moving in the dark, wondering about all the things it had collected.
I stood in the corner of my own peripheral vision, listening to footsteps crunching on branches scattered on a trail, the demented cry of a panicked bird in the sky, what sounded like a shovel sinking into the ground. A hole expanded, the earthy smell of recently damp soil lingered, mocking laughter rose, faint, accented voices waned. There was the rustle of clothes, a man grunting and the pain in his limbs becoming mine. Anon’s mouth was a burning sun. The tap’s steady drip had slowed to a stutter. I shut my right eye to rest it. The left continued to flicker above small things coming over the horizon. Somebody had taken the time to dig a hole for me somewhere, a deep hole wide and big enough to store all my tattered belongings.
All you have to do is fall. Anon instructed. Let go. It will be better for you.