“Who’s in the room with you?”
“My mother. She’s-…”
“Good. What is she doing?” he asked.
My breaths were coming rapidly. The chair became a vehicle transporting me to the past, a long buried memory. My mouth went dry. “She’s sitting on the toilet seat, crying and watching me in the bath, mumbling something. Sorry, sorry she’s saying. She gets up, walks towards me. There’s a brightly coloured woven bracelet on her left wrist. I’m-…”
“Go on. Keep showing me what’s in the room. Remember, you’re alright. Nothing can happen to you now,” Dr Krull encouraged patiently. “Stay relaxed. Carry on. Now what’s she doing?”
My body began to shake. “I’m singing in the bath. My eyes are closed. I open them. She’s standing over me. She’s pushing my shoulders down. She’s shoving my head under water. Her hands are holding my head down. I can’t breathe! I can feel the water up my nose, my arms flailing. My legs are kicking but she’s strong. Oh God, I can’t breathe. I can’t scream. Everything’s shrinking, becoming tiny, like I’m falling through static. I can’t hear the water anymore. I can’t hear anything. Something, somebody pulls her off me, my body is slack, I try to lift my legs but I fall from the bath. I don’t feel the landing. The pebbles are scattered all over the floor, rolling into my eyes. How could I know they would follow me into the future?”
A choking feeling spreads in my throat. Dr Krull stood up. Sound was coming back slowly.
He took a few paces then said. “Why do you think your mother tried to kill you? Why do you think you buried this memory for so long?”
I opened my eyes. Tears ran down my cheeks. “I don’t know. I don’t know!” I roared, “Maybe she didn’t love me. She was always… melancholy. Maybe that was my fault somehow.”
He sat on the edge of his desk. “No. It wasn’t your fault. It’s never the child’s fault.” His mouth was a grim line. For once, his neutral expressions had vanished.
My body continued to tremble. Something had uprooted from my gut and was making its way towards the centre, causing splinters of pain like nails being hammered to my chest. I stood abruptly, knocking the paperweight. And the woman from the painting lay sideways in the snow, arms outstretched, reaching for something beyond her confinement.
In the days that followed, bits of a memory came back to me, a fog lifting from scenes I’d buried. The night I lost my arm Rangi and I had argued. I’d gone into his car to borrow a torch. The boiler had been playing up; making unhealthy chugging noises and the hot water ran cold. I remembered walking to the car, tucked behind a hearse with the words MH and Sons emblazoned on the side in peeling gold lettering. The cold air made me shiver. My slippers snapped against the pavement and the dewy shoots of grass sprang up randomly. I was rummaging in the glove compartment when I found them, the photographs, hidden behind a folded map of the Andes.
I spread the pictures on the driver’s seat. My eyes stung. Winter chill from my lips became smog in the corners of the pictures. Straight away I knew these women were prostitutes, working girls shot in cars. I could tell from the bleakness in their gazes, secret half smiles lifting the corners of their mouths, a tiny black skirt riding upwards to meet a bought silence. These were women photographed in different cities around the world, a pair of naked pale breasts jutting, bathed in moonlight, long white beads encased in stockings, full buttocks against the wheel, bruises on an elegant neck angled defiantly away from the lens. Windscreen wipers in their mouths punctuated the language of the multi-limbed invisible thing sharing their strides, secret things that exited through the corners of frames, holding streetlight, smoke and other instruments of the night. The women were different races, dark haired, dark-eyed. I searched for the common thread. Their faces blurred, becoming one broken headlight. I carried their tears on my tongue, bits of a ceiling crumbled into their frozen movements.
I headed back inside. Cold, dead air followed. The door was on latch. Anger rushed through my veins like molten lava. I remembered screaming, flinging the brass head at him, missing by inches. Then his hands were at my throat, squeezing.
“Shut up!” he snapped. “Shut up or I’ll finish you.” His eyes were raging, twisted.
I don’t know you, I thought. I only know what you wanted to show me.
I clawed at his face, scratching.
“You bitch!” he yelled, flinging me off him. And it was as if falling from a great height. The air left my body. Panic came. He began to kick me repeatedly on the stomach, grunting in the process. A carton of orange juice toppled, spilling over a slipper, which had broken during the scuffle. I’d have to get a new pair. He snarled above me, landing a backhand that knocked me sideways. I held my stomach, cowering by the table leg. The pain was agonizing, as though he’d kicked each organ in my stomach individually.
“What are you going to do about it?” he taunted. “What the fuck can you do?” He watched me struggling to move my body forward. Blood trickled into the hundred silences in my mouth. He searched my face, looking for the pig’s features he thought were rearing up again, the snout winging its way into the gap. His right arm twitched at his side. A shooting pain cracked my head open. He left me struggling to breathe, footsteps fading away. The panic was overwhelming. I lay there, thinking maybe he had been the smoking gun in the farm owner’s bed in Buenos Aires. Perhaps the painter in Mexico paid for his love in currencies other than cash. Maybe the pig he’d killed as a boy continued to have human guises. I tasted its blood on my tongue. I thought of Rangi the drifter, the shaman, the night in those photographs of red light women, stealing moments from them; a ring, a lock of hair, a last rite. I imagined him leaving those items in a passenger seat, the pig’s snout turning between them. I passed out. When I came to, Anon stood above me, touching my skin with cold hands, leading me outside.
I caught up with Mervyn in Harlesden at a community project he volunteered for on Wednesday evenings. A former sports centre, the faded brown building looked abandoned except for the orbs of light morphing into shapes behind the smoggy windows. It hosted pop-up comic book fairs, knitting workshops, treasure hunting days and music gigs. He was playing chess in the small sports hall when I arrived. Cross-legged, he moved a piece three squares up to the centre poker faced; he glanced at his opponent, a spotty kid stroking his chin dramatically. Reggae music played softly in the background, Peter Tosh crooning defiantly. At the far corner, a couple of kids were kicking soft a yellow ball over a damaged badminton net grazing the ground. A cluster of teenage girls wearing brightly coloured leotards was hoola hooping, throwing their bodies into the swing of the hoops. I didn’t know why I’d run from the station but I felt wired. My chest was burning and my heartbeat quickened expectantly.
“I need to talk to you,” I said by way of greeting. Squeals from the other end interrupted my train of thought. A bunch of other teenagers trudged in carrying chocolates from a vending machine somewhere in the building that spat out multi-flavoured delights at the jangle of coins.
Mervyn unfolded his legs, half-smiled at the boy apologetically. “Give me a moment yeah? Joy this is Delroy, our reigning chess champ and mathematical problem solver.” He laughed heartily but a fleeting look of worry crossed his face. I nodded at the kid, whose retro high top fade made me think of De La Soul and sleeper summer anthems. Mervyn grabbed his Queen. “I’m superstitious about leaving her unattended,” he joked, pocketing it then leading the way.