A Still Life

The room is in a standard 1960s semi detached house in a part of town that is only just outside of the poorest part of town.  The house is affordable as it is in the catchment of the worst school in a town of bad schools and was uninhabited and rundown when it was bought.  Not much has been done on the house in the years that have past.  Trees line the street on either side, though the pavement is worn and the road pot-holed.  This is a poor town, its defining industry long dead, the new industry being out-priced by cheaper foreign imports and an out-dated view of people’s current lifestyles.  The town is at the end of a motorway that leads to nowhere else.  It is a road often empty and a good place to see just how face and dangerously you can drive your car.  At the end of the motorway the town greets you with the smell of burnt cooking oil and fish.  In the distance, for the place is completely flat, there are the burning chimneys of the oil refineries, where if you go too close the smell changes to sulphur.

The room is decked in the trimmings of the Christmas period.  There are cheap foil chandelier strings going from the light fixture in the centre of the room to each corner. There are still relics of last Christmas in the corner too, where the trimmings had just been ripped down and the drawing pin left in.  Around the place balloons are stuck precariously with pins too. There are always two round balloons and one long balloon.  This is an old family joke, along with saying that a cemetery is a dead end each time we drive past one and that we are going to all get out and push the hire car when we are going up a particularly steep hill.  When you live in a place that is completely flat this makes all slight inclines an opportunity for this particular family hilarity.

The Christmas tree is gaudy and cheap.  Plastic Santas with faces rubbed off and reindeers with only one antler.  Half the lights on the tree no longer switch on.  One bulb has blown and the circuit is broken.  There once were bags of chocolate coins on the tree but the dogs, three mongrels, had knocked the tree down three or four times now and the dogs had poisoned their own livers with the fake money.  This was evident in the shit that piled up in the kitchen overnight, which was white and hard in places or a runny stench-filled puddle in others. The star at the top of the tree stopped shining three years ago and is now yellow with the help of nicotine stains.

A wallpaper pasting table has been set up at one end of the room with no table cloth.  There are splodges of paint and congealed paste built up on the cheap plywood and the table dips awkwardly in the centre.  The table is decked in the buffet of Christmas tea.  There are plates of pastries made with more lard than flour, filled will spoonfuls of the basic range of jam and lemon curd.  Jars of pickles, which have been fermenting over the year, are scattered randomly: onions, beetroot and eggs all preserved in a jar of vinegar.  Plates of uncovered sandwiches filled with fake meat paste or egg are shoved carelessly in the middle.  The bread is already stale before being left in the open air and therefore the triangles stand to attention despite the tough handling.  The spread is so far from being butter that it is not even allowed to be called margarine. A treat are the sausage rolls and pork-pies but no-one was sure if there was meat inside or just jellied fat.  The tiny white picked onions and cheeses on cocktail stick offered a bit of exotic colour to the table.  The small sausages had been eaten before they reached the table – the few that were left were sitting in congealed fat in a tray in the kitchen to be perched on by flies, licked by the dogs and finally picked at and eaten by passers-by who were going to the back toilet. There is a large square Christmas cake covered in white icing, already a corner cut off and eaten before it reached the table.  The inside of the cake is dense and there is a thick uneven layer of marzipan and then icing.  The top of the cake has one holly leaf and a girl who ice skates on her own.

The wrapping paper from the presents that have been opened has yet to be cleared up from the living room floor.  The green and red shreds of paper merge with the detritus of ash and earth and dropped food and dog hair of several weeks.  Nobody is giving any further attention to their pile of gifts, which stand as monuments around the room; representing the ignorance of each person’s desires or even needs.  Some of the toys have been unboxed and an attempt at play has taken place but not by the children themselves, who have been told to wait until after lunch and then after tea and soon it will be tomorrow because they will have to go bed at exactly the time they always went to bed, God save the strict routine of the autistic man’s domain.

There is a three piece suite all pointed at the TV, which takes centre stage in one corner.  One chair is for the father and one chair is for the mother.  The children fight over the arm ends of the settee and sulk when they get the middle.  At the moment they are relegated to the floor or rickety folded chairs from the attic because of the visit of the Grandparents.  The mother’s chair is an undesirable seat by all except the dogs, anyway, as it is soaked in piss and covered in ash.  Beside the chair is an ash tray, a chair height brown column with a bulbous dish at the top for the over flowing remains of her habit.  These remains also topple onto the carpet and onto the fake stonework hearth.  The hearth is also the home of the brown-stained tea tray, with chipped tea pot, milk jug and sugar pot.  This is mother’s tea tray but mother never replenishes the tea.  This is the role of the children or the father.  When mother is alone she drinks the pot until it is cold and stewed and someone arrives to make fresh.

The room is warmed by an orange plastic fronted gas fire.  To light the fire you have to turn the gas on and click a button that creates a spark.  People in the household hated the job of lighting the fire because it involved sitting in front of a gas emitting giant that was reluctant to get going.  This meant that a too large proportion of gas floated into the air before it caught.  When a spark is created by the fire starter, flames burst out into the room with a whoosh, and the lighter must leap back, to save themselves from being burnt.  This is often the role of the two youngest children, as they don’t have to bend down too far.  Nobody is sure if this is actually “humour” on the mother’s part.  The fire is littered with the burnt remains of bread.  The fire is often used to make toast, with a long fork usually used to skewer joints of meat but is only used to pin bread against the grill of the never once cleaned gas fire.  This toasting was often unsuccessful, as the bread unhelpfully tore and slid down the fork unless the perfect technique was employed.  The children believe that an actual toaster or a grill must cost thousands of pounds and dream of owning one of their own in the future so they can enjoy toast made only from fresh bread.

The room still smells of the Christmas dinner, which the family had eaten hours before. The veg had been put on at 8am for eating at 1pm.  Left to simmer endlessly on the cooker, the pans often ran out of water and burnt to the bottom of the pan.  This had happened this day with the suede and carrot pan.  The suede and carrot were still mashed with spread that could not be called margarine and the worst bits of the burnt food discarded, not completely successfully. The mother had heard that salt was bad for you and had never heard of pepper, so none of the food was seasoned.  So, the room smelt of burnt food and the memory of the over marinated lunch that had no obvious nutritional value left, as it had all been soaked away in the endless boiling.

The people in the room are frozen in space and time in the eyes of the child in the corner.  There are people with food half way to mouths; fingers lifted in a point and eyes that are meeting from one corner of the room to the other.  This terrible tableau is a perfect representation of the life of the child in the corner and she snaps the scene with her eye lids.

The most dominant presence in the room is the Grandmother, who is given the special chair beside her daughter.  The chair is especially cushioned, to help with her endless aches and pains.  She insists on hugging her handbag to her mountainous middle with one hand and the other hand grasps her silver, hospital provided walking stick.  She refused to relinquish the stick, believing that it meant her escape would be hindered if she had to find it when her forced visit came to an end.  Her face was a picture of concentration, pale as it was from the powder she used to even her complexion.  She was deaf and found following conversations required the study of people’s faces.  She would probably, after this moment ends, shout for her daughter or much preferred eldest granddaughter to explain what was being said.  All activity in the room was gravitationally circling her position and the influence she exerted showed on the faces of those in the room.  Some hoped that she would cut across this moment with one her loud stories about her lurid past.  Even a story about her exploits on the docks during the war would be better than what was happening in this moment.

Her daughter sat next to her, similarly hugging her ample middle, also cushioned because of her aches and pains, which were significantly more troublesome and life threatening than those of her mother.  This much younger woman had been old before she had chance to be young and was casting dirty looks towards her husband, who had failed to psychically determine her needs before she had even known them herself.  He was clearly meant to be saving her from some horrendous danger and tears, in this split moment in time, had begun to well in her eyes.  This would mean trouble on late Christmas Day night.  Her hands gripped each other and white showed where anxiety had caused her to cut off the blood supply.  Things only got this way when her mother was in the room with her two oldest daughters and she realised she had forever lost the chance of maternal affection because she had produced better versions of herself for her mother to love instead.  The jealousy burned hot in her chest and showed in the premature lines on her face.

Her husband was never up to the tricky task of serving his wife’s needs.  This would have taken a monumental intellect and psychiatry degree.  As with life’s love of irony, her husband was one of the most stupid men to have managed to live beyond childhood without natural selection claiming him.   He was busy believing that he was allowed to drink beer and watch Christmas television in his own chair.  He was unaware that he was meant to have given up his seat for his mother-in-law and sit next door to his wife, so that she didn’t feel so inferior in the comparison being made between her and her mother. Drinking beer was also a mistake because it meant that he would be a complete arse later in the evening, when his wife challenged him.  His need for routine would be used against him and his wife would purposely keep the children up later or let them watch something on TV they wanted at the set time he was expecting to watch The Bill or The Krypton Factor.  She would see this as suitable punishment. He was ignorant of this in this moment when he is in the middle of a particularly large gulp of beer.  He had recognised the patterns of life of the past, not quite consciously making a decision, but knowing he had to gulp his beer down quickly before his wife banned him from anymore enjoyment.  This gulp would cause him hellish heartburn later but the idea of cause and consequence was well beyond him and would one day see him in hospital facing serious surgery due to the damage done to his gut.

The second eldest daughter had seen the look pass between mother and step-father and was visibly distressed.  It had been her that was talking when her grandmother had been concentrating so intently.  The second eldest daughter was her Gran’s favourite and they were bonded as soul mates.  Whatever she was saying would clearly be supported by the matriarch in the room.  This was precarious power because it only lasted whilst the protection of her Gran stayed in the house.  In this moment not only has she spotted the look but was also putting up a spirited defence for her younger brother, who had been banished from the room to the top of the stairs.  The boy often whines for a drink of water, his mistreatment common in the household but unusual when the Grandmother was present. The second eldest daughter was making a heroic effort, using her moment of unusual strength to challenge her mother’s cruelty.  There must have been so much of her father in this girl, the father no one other than her mother knew, because in this moment she could be never so far away from being like the rest of her family.  Later, when she came back with her husband and her children and visited her mother she would show her more compassion than she was able to show her in this moment.  Still, later, on this visit, she could not come to forgive her mother for the cruelties she had witnessed growing up.

The eldest daughter was busy scanning the room, working out how she could shepherd herself and her siblings through this moment in time.  She was looking at her sister wondering if she was brave or foolish.  She had seen more, experienced more, and was less sure of the influence of her Gran in this situation than her sister was.  She had already calculated that the goings on in this household was of less consequence to her Gran than the rest of her children’s households.  She knew that she was a part of the black sheep’s herd.  Her Gran was bearing this moment, already knew of the abuse and had long ago decided to only rescue the two oldest daughters, who she loved dearly.  The eldest daughter was assessing the situation and deciding that this intervention by her sister was going to be more painful for her brother later this evening.  The eldest daughter was going to have to find a way to interrupt her sister and show her this, if trouble was going to be averted.  The eldest daughter was always going to be in this role, trying to make the family better, long after most of the rest of the family had given up believing they had any connection to maintain.   It was to prove a burden that would impact on her ability to bring up children.  Her choice of partner was nothing short of self destructive.  She purposely rebelled and married into crime to shock her parents and only managed to punish herself with a lifetime of trauma.

The invisible presence of the brother is ironic, as he is the only other child who stayed in this town to continue to fight his battle to be loved by his mother, still battling well into his forties.  He would be dogged by the psychological damage of her emotional abandonment.  He would self harm and attempt suicide and will likely one day be successful. His seat at the top of the stairs is more unusual today because the paternal Grandparents are in the house and they usually extend an invisible shield around him.  In some respects it is a relief that he is being punished in the immediate moment because when the invisible shield disappears his mother’s rage would have had time to ferment and the consequences would have been more brutal.  His crime had been insignificant but it would not matter what he had done.  It might not have been him that had done whatever upset his mother at all but he still knew he was in the wrong because he was not the one she wanted to show as being good and to be admired. 

As it happens, his younger sister had sneaked a Battenberg cake from the box and shared it with him before tea had been set out.  These cakes were her mother’s favourite and there was an unspoken knowledge that only she was to eat them, even though they were to be placed on the communal table.  The younger sister, stood in the corner by her own choice, looking on, hadn’t known this was wrong but knew she had yet again caused pain and trauma for the people in front of her.  The taking and sharing of the cake had been a way of apologising to her brother for something that had happened the day before.  She did not know what she had said but something in the tone of her words had meant her brother had been beaten.  Her brother and sisters had let her know how bad she was for having brought this venom on his head.  They had taught her a lesson in being hated that she herself would carry with her.  She would forever know that there was something about her personality that meant that people were damaged and harmed by her presence.  She would live a lifetime trying to make up for the evil she had done before she was even four years old.  The youngest daughter was the precious possession of her mother, which did not mean she was loved as such, merely owned.  Neither Grandparent saw a need to take the youngest under their wing, so she was all her mother’s work.  Her mother would take all opportunities to show how her mothering alone was superior to what had happened with the others.  The youngest daughter was in the corner watching, vigilant, fearful of the danger of the situation.

The paternal Grandparents were in the process of putting on their coats.  They were angered by the treatment of the only grandchild they cared about.  The elder girls were the product of two other men, an unspoken shame to these traditional people.  They were willing to accept that their son had married a woman with two children only because they feared he would never marry at all and forever be their burden.  When their son and produced a son the pride was bettered only by the surprise they felt at this new generation carrying on the family line.  It was difficult for them to understand how the love they showed the boy was the reason he suffered so much.  His mother could not bear the feelings of envy and would vanquish her own pain by the giving of pain to him.  The only way these two people felt they could protest was by making a statement in leaving.  It is likely that this was the anticipated response and the mother of their grandson had manipulated the whole event to get rid of them.  This scared, tearful woman in the corner looking to her husband for help was her mother’s daughter and had learnt some of her tricks in stage managing a room.  It occurred to no-one that the answer was to pick up the small boy at the top of the stairs and carry him away with them.  The Grandparents were certain they would not have their son’s support and so could only show protest by leaving before tea.  They were also old now and had done their child-rearing, it was not their time to bring up children anymore; in short they felt it was not their responsibility.

The child in the corner blinks and the scene resumes with the clunk of the front door and a blast of cold air through the house.

A Still Life: Through the eyes of a child with a box on her head

Two children stand at the top of thirteen steps.  The fourteenth step is to the right and leads to their parents’ bedroom; straight ahead is the door to their bedroom and up the corridor is the empty bedroom of the two older sisters, who had escaped to Nana’s for the weekend, as was their habit every weekend. 

It is Sunday morning and a traditional time of no noise, or else.  The two children were conditioned to play in silence and had organised a quiet game of box roulette.  This was a new game they had dreamt up in the early moments of this day, when the birds still sang outside and the light was still more grey than yellow.    The girl with the box on her head had been designated by her older brother as the pioneer of the game.  She stood on what they ironically called the landing, as it would soon be a launch pad, one way or another. 

The box used to hold the boy’s army helicopter that his father’s mother had bought him and was his prized possession; it was the only item that he claimed as his own and no one in the household insisted he share with his little sister.  This made his loyalty to all aspects of the toy ferocious and in his mind important that it be the box in this new game.  It was also tall and stood like a hat high above his sister’s head and helped him forget that she was real and not a toy too.

The rules of the game were this: the boy would spin his box-headed sister three and a half times, as quickly as he could.  He would not tell her which way she was facing and the garish pattern on the carpet made it impossible to work it out either.  The sister had the chance then to turn any way she thought she should and then she was to sit down.  There were four possibilities. Outcome 1: she would fall into the wall; outcome 2: she would fall down the step into the bedroom she shared with her brother; outcome 3: she would sit on the step leading to her parents’ bedroom (this was counted as a victory) or option 4: she would tumble down the stairs to the bottom. 

After round one, when his sister had toppled haphazardly into the wall, the boy made up a new rule that said she must keep having a go until she had sat on the fourteenth step.  Being a girl happy to please and wanting to win the game, as would be a pattern throughout her life, she carried on with the game as her brother requested.  Her chances of success were being manipulated by her brother, who noticed that she only ever really opted for a tentative jiggle to the left, only one or two steps. 

Last night the little girl had been chattering away without thought during tea.  She had described how she and her brother had spent the day at the park.  She thought she was telling a funny story about how her brother spun her so fast on the roundabout that she done a forward roll onto the gravel.   She showed the pretty patterned elbow, which was missing a lot of skin.  She was proud of her war wound.  She hadn’t noticed, whilst telling this story that her brother was sinking further into his seat and the line of her mother’s mouth was becoming thinner.  He had been sent straight to bed, without the rest of his food.  His little sister had heard the bangs but did not know that he had been hit once more with the metal bar of their football table.

So, as the brother was positioning his sister in this new game he was considering the best way to help her tumble down the flight of stairs below.   He knew he would get another beating for being the designer of his sister’s downfall; he did not care.  He was aware that his sister would be given no consequence for being his co-conspirator; it would never enter his mother’s mind to believe she was a willing participant.  Therefore, he felt this was justice, this manipulation of probability on this early Sunday morning.

The brother twisted and twisted his sister, more than three times, more like eight or nine.  This made is sister very dizzy and she was tottering around precariously before he even let her go.   She, for her part, could now see nothing inside the box.  The small slither of carpet she had been using as a form of guide was a blur of reds and blacks.  Her brother counted down from 5, the time in which she had to choose where to sit.  She timbered more than sat.  In slow motion, the floor fell away from the little girl.

The box fell away only half way down the stairs.  The first half on stairs was done in three bumps of lower spine against stair tread.  Then, as the box slid off the little girl saw the world as upside down and blurred and she backward rolled onto her belly.  She was fortunate to not take the last 4 steps, as her feet jammed into the carpet and she ended half standing downstairs.  She giggled; an involuntary breaking of the silence.  Her brother joined in, for once proud of his little sister.

It is hard to tell if it was the bounce of body against floor that woke the parents or whether it was the uncharacteristic sound of laughter in the house.  Whatever it was, there was an ominous thud, as feet hit floor, joined by the asthmatic wheeze of their mother before her first morning cigarette that shattered their joy of their moment.

In a moment of insight that the sometimes too young girl managed, she ran up the stairs to stand beside her brother.  She knew this way they would appear more equal in the noise and it might just mean that they would be sent back into their bedroom with a swear word and a threat.  She stood a little in front of her brother and touched her finger tips to his arm, trying to communicate that she had this covered, she would save them both.

The mother did not speak; she just glared in her too tight night gown that was not long enough to cover the rag that dangled from the crack between her legs.  The little girl widened her brown eyes as wide as they could go and whispered an apology.  Her brother, wise to the instructions given through the finger tips, remained quiet with eyes averted.  The mother did not speak but just gestured back to the bedroom, where they were to stay they knew until she shouted them down much later in the day.

Both children returned to the bedroom and neither one spoke.  They both got back into their beds and pulled the covers up to their chins.  The complex fallout of justice that they had just experienced is difficult for both of them.  They do not know if they should be pleased to have escaped punishment or not.  The little girl wished she had been beaten, as she had clearly shown that it was her that had woken her mother.  The little boy also wished his sister had been beaten but then also wanted his mother to look at him and see the vulnerability in his eyes.  He wanted her to have forgiven him because he had asked her to and not his sister.  He lay in bed devising a new game with his little sister that might do more harm. 

On the other side of the room his little sister was lying in bed wondering how she could make it up to everyone for the badness she had shown once more.

A Still Life: Through the eyes of a child lost in a market

It was Thursday.  This is the day when the mother has some money and can, to the last penny, divide this between shops.  She did not want to be alone in this task today, so she kept the little girl off school to keep her company.  The mother decided the little girl looked a little too pink this morning, as she did yesterday and the day before.  The little girl would have liked to go to school, it was hard when she was eventually sent back and didn’t know how to do the work.  She didn’t argue with her mother though, there was little point.

The little girl had watched as her mother wrote in her notebook.  The notebook listed the bills she had to pay and how much.  She had decided she couldn’t afford to pay Jack with the scary club foot this week.  So, at 11am, his normal time to call, the little girl and her mother sat behind the sofa.  They waited for a full hour, as when Jack arrived he spent a long time banging on the door and peering through the window.  This was not his first Thursday when this mother had not paid him his due.  He was using words like police and bailiff.  The little girl didn’t know what they meant but they made her mother cry.

As they waited the little girl looked closely at the numbers and the totals.  She was good at adding up at school and was worried her mother had made some mistakes.  She could see that in her mother’s mind all pennies were covered but the little girl had an acid bore hole forming in her belly because she thinks there is a time when a number wasn’t carried over.  She reaches out her dimpled hand a strokes the palm of the mother.  This eases the sobs and returns the mother’s breathing to normal.

Soon they are ready to leave, to lock the dogs away in the kitchen, and with wheeled trolley and ancient cloth bags that smell of rotting root vegetables, they exit towards the No. 4 bus stop.  They travel into the town centre and catch a 3F to Freeman Street.  First there is the delicate matter of the Halifax cash machine.  The little girl sees the many money notes in her mother’s hand and feels something close to fear. She was unsure her mother knew what to do next to make this bundle work for her family of 6.  In stress she headed straight for the newsagent 2000 cigarettes.  A large number of notes were passed over her, the little girl noticed.  Yet, she also felt the tension leave her mother’s limbs and she was no longer being tugged urgently along the street.

The first stop was the vegetable stall.  A sack of potatoes was the mother’s one strategy for feeding her children over a week.  There was enough to stop them feeling hungry in one sack and delivery came for free.  She then always bought the same: a cabbage; some carrots; suede and some Brussel sprouts.  She never bought fruit, unless it was Christmas and then she forced all the family to come along to carry the bags.

The next stall was the butchers.  She ordered a massive bag of meat that couldn’t quite be called beef but had the texture of minced something.  She also ordered a mixture of pig’s innards that she turned into a form of fried casserole, with a hefty log of lard and two stirs of the pan in between cigarettes to prevent too much burning.  It was the meat equivalent of Revels, you were sometimes going to get orange sweets and sometimes it would be coffee.  In this case you would either get a lean juicy chunk of belly pork or found you were grinding an over cooked pig’s liver around your molars.  Meat was expensive so the joints, sausages and bacon that others purchased had to be left for a future created by the little girl.

Something happened in the next few moments that would cause only a minor skirmish of concern in all parties involved; barring the stall holder who was responsible for rescuing this pair from disaster.  The mother had headed further into the market to a sweet stall where she would buy her chocolate peanuts.  The little girl had wondered off in the direction of a book stall, where she had clearly seen a book with a girl on the front that was part of a series her sister was reading.  The little girl had a little bit of pocket money and wondered if she could buy the book for her sister.

Scared of any new person, the little girl was having difficulty breaching the edge of the stall.  She stood still with her toes neatly lined up to the edge, as if crossing the road.  She then froze staring at her toes wondering why they wouldn't move anymore.  Looking up she sees the stall holder looking concerned but then looks to her left and the sunshine come through the open doors of the market.  The little girl was so caught up by the contrast of the light outside and the dark inside that she walked unseeing towards the door.

It was only a few steps before she realised that she had not come to the market alone and had mislaid her mother.  The stall around her were suddenly giant.  The legs of the shoppers formed like bars around her and she stood, frozen, as she often did when she was afraid.  She did not cry and she not cry out.  She waited in the small corner of her brain for the story-line to play out in front of her.

The face of the book stall holder appeared onto her screen from stage left and spoke silent words.  The lady's eyes were brown and wide and she had thick gloop in the corners of her lashes.  Her skin was the colour of caramel and she smelt of flowers in the garden.  The little girl was still cowering in the corner of her mind and could not answer the questions that the lady was asking.  The little girl was aware she had been careless for not looking after her mother as well as she should, she should not have allowed her to wonder off.

From a voice in the sky came a description that the little girl recognised as being similar to her.  The colour of her jacket and the way her hair was styled was being shouted across the market place.  From the crowd emerged her mother looking distracted and inconvenienced.  She took the little girl's hand with little comment to the lady from the book stall and walked towards the exit.