off when the light turned green, and then. Then.
Then.
Then I remember why I hate “Auld Lang Syne” so very much. I find myself hoping that the occupants of the upended car are either properly dead or properly alive, not in some ruined place in between.
I am struggling to go home, my car complicit with my mood, slowing to a crawl before I notice: after Sylvia, I cannot face the indolence of Tracy, Gabriel sleeping through his most vibrant hours. I turn off the highway after the University and take the steep little road up to Rhodes Memorial. Hop through the car park, feel surprised to find the coffee shop open. It’s too windy to sit outside; a yawning waitress ushers me inside. There are Christian posters on the wall. The waitress brings me a menu and a badly designed pamphlet that poses the question, Does God Exist? and provides possible answers next to three tick-boxes: Yes, No, Maybe. When was I last in a church? I don’t know – God in man’s image and all that. I push pamphlet and menu aside and tell the waitress that just a coffee will do. She looks relieved. “Glad you didn’t order tequila, I couldn’t deal with the sight of it right now,” she says and shivers. I’m tempted to change my order, to demand a tequila and to down it while she watches, but I don’t.
I’m the only patron, but the coffee takes an age. When it arrives it is tepid, and I suspect that party-girl forgot about it and left it standing after it was poured. Or perhaps she was in the restroom, temporarily incapacitated by her night on the town. I mean to complain, or to rile her by asking what the Bible teaches about excess, but I can’t be bothered. Instead, I watch the wind tearing at the stone pines while on the other side of the Flats it piles clouds onto the tops of blue mountains, like a great cosmic child trying to see how much ice-cream it can cram into a cone before it all falls out.
I don’t have the experience or the practice that nurses have. It has to be easier when you’re a nurse – your charges are the organs, the lives, of other people. It must be a simple matter – no, a necessary one – to let a carapace grow over your softer bits, to build dense layers of keratin, and to top it all off with Teflon so that the ornaments and the food and the words that are thrown at you cannot pierce.
I am unprepared for any of it, have no such protection. Unprepared most of all for the barb of denial, the sting and the burn of it. My defences are paper-thin, academic – she is ill, she is mad, and none of it is her fault. I know she is in control of neither her mind nor her mouth, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to go back to the home, to shake the old bitch, slap her, shout at her – for hours if need be – until something sinks in and there’s some kind of acknowledgement.
But the truth can be told in different ways. The accepted truth, one I’d held to all my life, is that after Michael and Sylvia adopted me, I became their son; I suppose now she, or her disease, has simply rephrased it. Because she is factually correct, of course. She’d never had a son: there had never been conception, never been a birth, so no panting or pushing or blood or torn birth canal, no placenta, no cabbage-cradled breasts or cracked nipples. Sylvia had never had a son, she’d simply had one handed to her.
But still.
I go home because there is nothing else to do. Pick up the dog shit on the lawn – one leg, one crutch, one poop-scoop. Make lunch because the combination of antibiotics and alcohol is still hurting Tracy, and Gabriel would rather eat Coco Pops straight from the box, starve even, than make himself a sandwich. Afterwards I sketch out some ideas, not very good ones, for the new Murray development that I’ll have to start on in earnest next week.
Google nothing. Read a book whose words don’t hang together despite the writer’s respect for syntax, grammar, story. Feed Schultz because nobody else will. Long for nightfall. Shower when it comes, go to bed. Lie there thinking about the son that Sylvia never had.
And then, at three in the morning, Gabe snoring, Tracy deceptively peaceful in sleep, even the squirrels quiet, the question: the endless, forever question, poking always just beneath the fabric of me, perfectly defined, but like a malevolent spirit never spoken of. The question now stabbing, at last, through the heavy cloth of sleep like a needle through skin –
Then who did?
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