A Cup of Pee - Excerpt 11

When we got home, things were different from what I expected them to be. I was sent into the bedroom to take my clothes off to be beaten.
Christopher shook his head as I oozed past him and said, “Doan know why Esther left she children with you, look at this one,” he smiled and nodded in my direction.

Mammy called me ‘that one’ or ‘this headache’ too, but never by my name unless she was shouting for me when I was in another room. So at first I thought he was siding with her, but then I looked at him and saw that he was smiling, and became even more confused. You never knew exactly what to expect with Christopher, he had very big lips, so smiling, snarling, snickering – they all sort of rolled into one when they reached his lips.
“She locked up in the house all day,” he continued. “Bony, malnourished and pale, she is. She don’t go nowhere, don’t do nothing, don’t even smile.”

“When was the last time you smiled, little girl?” he turned to me.
I started to answer, even though I had nothing to say. I’d learned that you always answered. Always.
“No?” he asked.
“When was the last time you laughed, eh?”
Again, I started to answer, with no words in my mouth.”
“No?” he asked again.
“Do you ever laugh, eh?”
By this time, I realised that he was asking what my English teacher called rhetorical questions, so I made no attempt to say the answer my brain held captive.
No! No! No!
“See,” he turned back to Mammy. “She waiting to escape just like we all waited to get away.”
“You don’t dare get on my nerves now,” Mammy replied.
“Look at the neighbours’ kids, they all runnin’ ‘round, and playin,’” Christopher continued as if Mammy had said nothing.
“I doan believe in keeping neighbours close, I like keeping them at arm’s length,” Mammy cut in.
“Maybe they keeping you at arm’s length,” Christopher said. “Ever thought ‘a that?”
The two of them could never live in a house together and not argue. Theresa said that they were too much alike to ever get along. She said that Mammy let Christopher get away with lots of bad things, so he runs wild sometimes.

I had a feeling he wasn’t making things better for me, but for the time being, I was thankful I could put off the shame of taking my clothes off. He seemed to be baiting her just to get her angry. I wasn’t sure why.
“You destroy us, that not enough for you, so now you destroying yuh grandchildren,” Christopher continued, “turning them into mad people.”
“I hope when you get yuh children, they talk to you the same way yuh talk to me. I am yuh mother I had fourteen of you, yuh shouldn’t talk to me like that.”
“You always talk ‘bout having fourteen children, how many us alive? Eh? Seven! Only seven!” Christopher shouted.
“I sorry I had yuh,” Mammy shouted back. “You bad seed!”
“I didn’t tell you to get pregnant again for the married man. He tek you to court and disowned Theresa when you ask him for child support, and a year later, you had me. Not my fault. Blame you self.”
“I want you outta my house tomorrow!” Mammy barked at him.

But why didn’t she hit him?
“Yeah, use me money out then chase me away. See if you can get rid of me. I staying until I want to go.”
Mammy suddenly looked at me and shouted, “You like this, no, people blaming me for you.”
I was keeping my distance because I knew that there was always a way for the blame to find its way to me. I didn’t want to be like the cat, so I put my head down and moved towards the wall by the front window.

“This is what you like, no, me getting blame for you,” Mammy said, stomping over to where I stood willing my body to become invisible, but before I knew it, she had slammed my head into the wall. Part of my head hit the wall but my forehead met the window frame and the room went dark for a minute. Christopher put on his shoes and left, slamming the door.
“Wait till he get his children,” Mammy said.

Little did any of us know, he would die child-less.
Christopher came back in the early hours of the morning and peed in the wardrobe. He was drunk. I woke up and saw him at the cupboard, I heard the wet noise but it didn’t register. Mammy woke up too, but not in time to stop him. At least he had got a cup from the kitchen and held it under the pee. That might have helped, except it was a tiny cup, and he peed lots of pee.
From that night on I felt like he was my friend, because even though I went to bed with a sore head, he had saved me from the shame of once again having to strip down to my bare skin, in order to take my beating.
He didn’t know, or did he? That although the beating hurts, taking it naked was steadily sweeping my eroding soul into a sea of dry, aching dust.
Flying away . . .
Sailing away . . .
Light as a feather . . .

Children Can Be Funny, Can't They

My husband and I walk with the kids to school every morning. To make the journey less tedious for them we usually play various guessing games. Yesterday morning the two girls ran ahead leaving my husband and son Gabriel to play “I Spy” on their own.

Lost in my own thoughts, I walked slightly ahead of them could hear them chatting away animatedly behind me.

At one point Gabriel shouted out “Tentacles!” I smiled as I heared my husband explain for the umpteenth time that the point of “I spy” is that you could actually see the object in question. Needless to say, tentacles are not often on display during a lazy walk on the way to a primary school in the somewhat-but-not-so-leafy suburbs.

From this point onwards, Gabriel would shout out “Tentacles!” in frustration every time he could not guess what his father had his eyes on.

The quiet streets almost reverberated with the shout of “Tentacles!” from an anxious little boy as he battled to get his little mind around what the real answer could be.

After about the tenth time I stopped to let them catch up with me and said, “Gabriel, you sound like you’re saying ‘Testicles’” in the hope of making him stop. As a particularly shy child, who still suffers with a social anxiety disorder, he finds it difficult to look people in the eyes, and frightening when his voice is heard. Surely calling his attention to the fact that he sounded like he was saying a private body part (although we let them refer to those body parts by the usual childish names, we’ve always made sure that they know the proper scientific names as well) in public would calm him down a bit.

“Testicles!” Gabriel shouted, at the top of his voice in the quiet street.
“Shhh.” My husband and I said simultaneously.
“Testicles!” He shouts even louder.
“Gabriel is saying testicles” his older sister giggled, running back to us to see what was going to be done about that. She delights in the idea that everyone gets equally disciplined, as her life is never fair if the others don’t constantly get told off.
“Stop it Gabriel” his dad was shouting in that impossible kind of whisper-shout we parents manage to conjure up for situations exactly like these.
“Testicles!” That boy had got something to say and no one could hold him back now.
“Testicles! Testicles!”
But I was laughing. You know, sometimes in your life, your kids do something so funny, that even though you know you should stop them, the child in you just wants them to carry on because naughty can sometimes be very funny? Well, I certainly thought it was funny so I walked ahead as fast as my legs would go, so that he couldn’t see me laughing. After all if he did, wouldn’t that make him do it even more. But that boy didn’t need any help.

When he was a baby we used to say that he cried like a sheep. His voice has always had a low-pitch quality to it. However, in an ironic sort of way, he can scream like a woman in labour - high pitched and blinding, yes I meant to say blinding.

Behind me he screamed with the largest smile on his face.
“Testicles!”
“Gabriel do you want to be punished?” my husband was asking in that freaky whisper-shout kind of voice. He sounded like he didn’t know what else to do to make him stop. Me, I was almost running away because the laughter was coming faster now, couldn’t wait. No sir. Had to laugh. Must laugh.

“Testicles!”
“Gabriel, stop or you’ll get punished!” My husband was now also shouting at the top of his voice.
Gabriel grudgingly stopped shouting, but by then us girls were almost foaming at the mouth with laughter.
But he had to get a last one in.
“Testicles?” he asked silently. But then he took one look at his dad’s face and didn’t bother saying anything else.
“It’s your fault.” My husband said to me, but he was smiling too.
“What? Testicles?” I asked.