Trigger Warning
Their physical similarity to their mother blackened their grandmother’s already dark mood. They got dumped onto the grandmother after their father’s divorce, the mother fleeing to England.
The grandmother rued her son’s taste in women – one way of describing her feelings toward that.
One night at the dinner table, the elder brother cracked a joke. The younger brother and the father laughed. The grandmother snapped: “I know it’s funny, but don’t laugh!”
“Too strict,” the father said, shaking his head.
“If you don’t like it, get out,” she huffed.
The father always went out. She never did.
One wet day, the brothers smashed a cup when playing football in their bedroom. The grandmother ripped open a kitchen drawer, cutlery rattling, incensed grandmother pursuing her favourite weapon – the wooden spoon. She flew into the brother’s bedroom and attacked. Rage always prevented her from grabbing the weapon immediately, the rattling cutlery alarm bells for the boys.
She sometimes cracked the elder brother in the head as he came home through the back door, his exact likeness to his mother “his fault,” violence towards “harlots justified.”
One day, he crept up the ramp that rose up to the house’s back door, kookaburras laughing in gumtrees, the birds seemingly knowing what awaited him. Their laughter enraged the grandmother.
“Damn birds,” she often snorted.
The elder brother stopped, ear against the door. Was she waiting to pounce, like the flesh-eating spiders that, on hot nights, dotted the wire screens on his bedroom window?
He opened the door. The toilet flushed. Dread clamoured towards Apprehension Peak. He shut the door. He crept back down. Leafy voices wailed in gumtree choirs. The kookaburras chortled. No principle backed grandmother castigations. The bigger guy hit the smaller, ethics fluffy idealism, the elder brother’s dread so high it became his most common sensation in adult life.
He crept back up and opened the door. She stomped from the toilet and thumped him in the head, yelping: “Ugly thing you are,” before fleeing into her bedroom.
He started doing homework. Homework meant peaceful distraction. Soon he would be cycling to football training. Training halted daily life’s banal evil.
He returned in time to avoid another beating. Home arrivals after six in the afternoon meant punishment, judicial inquiries irrelevant. All misdemeanours, irrespective of severity, received the same sentence: violence, a characteristic of totalitarianism.
His brother had arrived home five minutes earlier. A friend’s parents allowed the younger brother to relax in their house – an act of humanitarianism.
The friend’s father lay on a sofa one day listening to the younger brother: “She tells us to shut up if we laugh. She clobbers us for fun. Hitler would have loved her. She even looks like a Nazi.”
The friend’s father guffawed: The Grandmother Nazi!
One day, the brothers, by coming home together at six o’clock, created uncommon reassurance, burden of receiving fists, swung by a woman in her late sixties, shared. They entered through the back door. Normally, she would be cooking. They looked at each other bemused. A pot of boiling vegetables now contained little water. The elder brother turned it off. He turned off the oven as well. They didn’t speak. She may have been asleep. Sound would have caused fury.
They crept into the living room. She was on the floor. Infinite emptiness filled her open eyes, like looking through to an ocean floor. Death, laced with an eerie omniscience, created a chilly eeriness as if a sinister ether had enveloped them in a sheath of ghostly mystery.
“What should we do?” the younger one asked.
“Ring the police,” the elder replied. “Then eat. I’m starving.”
After creepy unearthliness waned, the elder brother finally felt comfortable at home. Finally, no grudge-bearing, pernicious, belligerent, humourless tyrant rocked his realm. Years later, he realised that absurdity made him employ creativity to ascend above deprivation.
“Where’s your father?” a policeman asked.
“Northam,” the elder brother replied. “He’s a travelling salesman.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“In two days.”
The police contacted the father’s hotel. The father rang soon after, saying he was coming home. An ambulance took the grandmother to a morgue. Heart failure had done the job. The sudden disappearance of her twisted misery seemed spooky. Where did that brutality go – and so quickly? the elder brother wondered. Its disappearance was so other-worldly; he felt it could reappear with sharp fangs. Extreme experiences sharpen imagination. Years later, that imagination would take him to places few see.
The boys stood, facing the police; one, a woman, bent down and asked: “Where’s your mother?”
“We don’t the know,” the elder one said.
“She could be dead, too,” the younger one added.
“Dad said she died in a plane crash,” the elder said. “But we don’t know.”
A tsunami of sympathy swept over the woman.
“When did you last see her?” she asked.
“Six years ago,” the elder one replied.
He couldn’t remember a woman speaking to him caringly. The kindness in her eyes looked miraculous, the other side of the coin to death’s arcane spookiness.
“Have you got any other family?” she asked.
“We don’t see them,” the younger said.
“Who are they?” she asked.
Uneasy silence fell as the brothers looked at each other.
“Do you know them?” she persisted.
“Not well,” the elder brother replied.
“Who are they?”
“Our grandmother’s brothers.”
“You don’t see them much?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t know.”
The elder brother remembered his grandmother saying that her elder brother had just disappeared. Later he realised it was more complicated than that.
The policewoman waited with the children for the father to return.
“Do you remember your mother?” she asked.
The boys looked at each other.
“A little,” the elder replied.
“Has she tried to contact you?”
“I don’t know,” the elder said.
“What do you remember about her?”
“Sometimes happy. Sometimes angry.”
“Has your father talked about her?”
“Only once.”
“What did he say?”
“She hit us.”
The policewoman’s mouth shot open.
“And your grandmother?”
The boys looked at each other uncomfortably. The policewoman suspected something untoward because of their subdued reaction to their grandmother’s death. They rarely spoke about their mistreatment. Their home lives had trapped them into solitude shells.
“Was she nice?” the policewoman asked.
The boys glanced at each other with tight expressions.
“No,” the elder one said.
“What did she do?” she asked.
“She hit us.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know.”
And they didn’t.
“Did you ever ask why?”
“No,” the elder said.
“Did you want to ask?”
“Never thought of it,” the elder replied.
“She would have hit us for asking,” the younger said.
The elder one recalled his father saying: “too strict,” the grandmother belching: “This is my house! MINE! If you don’t like it – get out!”
When the father arrived, he put his arms around his children. He was crying.
“I love you,” he said.
They had never heard that before. Normally, their father was distant, searching for a success that would crush his mother’s carping disapproval of his “mistakes.”
“He always talks big,” she used to say, oblivious that her fault-finding provoked that.
Different possibilities collided in the father’s mind. Who was going to look after the kids while I’m away? Imagine if they had to go into an orphanage? The poor bastards. They had never known family life.
Now the chance to shut his mother up had gone. He had fantasised about that relentlessly. She had loved saying: “If you were any good, you’d be in management, not driving round the country like an idiot.”
In other words: “I wouldn’t have to look after your kids who remind me of your damn ex-wife!”
His crying sounded weirdly surreal to his children who looked at each with pitiful looks of surprise.
The policewoman fought the legions of compassion grouping in her throat. The usually dormant tentacles of her sensitivities swayed, driving up magma philanthropy from dungeon depths.
The father was also crying because he knew he should have stopped the violence his children had endured from early childhood onwards. He regretted his lenience towards their mother’s violence, for he had wanted to avoid divorce. Childhood memories of his mother’s previous kindness also magnified his distress. She had attacked him for spending money on women when he wasn’t paying her rent. He wanted to meet a woman to form a loving household away from his mother.
“He’s got a stupid soft touch” – his mother’s interpretation of his desires.
His sons hugged him tightly. This rare affection felt precious.
The kneeling policewoman put an arm around the father. The boys couldn’t recall seeing a woman’s face so close and so lovely. Her eyes shivered with concern. She was stunned that these boys had been abandoned by their mother and that the mother and the grandmother had been violent towards them, as if “those two—” had had a God-given right to behave like savages. She would have loved to have arrested “those two—.”
She was also divorced with a young child. She gave the father her phone number and said: “Please ring me. I can help. Really, I can.”
The father looked up at her with wet, widening eyes. The now standing policewoman’s right hand touched the father’s right shoulder. Staring down at the six eyes staring up at hers, she said: “I want to see you all again. I really want to help.”
Her passion soothed the father’s worries.
“Thanks,” he said.
She needed to reinforce that rare feeling of humanism. We clutch at what provokes passion, like dehydrated creatures seeking water in a drought.
He rang her that night.
“I live near you,” she said. “Your children can stay at my place when you’re away from Monday to Wednesday. My son would like that. He wants some boys to play with.”
He felt as if he had received a stay of execution.
“Wow, thanks,” he said. “I’ll pay for the food for you and your son.”
The two brothers felt immediately comfortable in their new Monday-to-Wednesday home. They had never known a woman so kind. Unearthly benevolence had seemingly arrived from beyond the Oort Cloud, bringing sanity and peace to a previously violent world.
The envy the elder brother had once experienced witnessing a school friend’s family life had evaporated. That envy had soared on seeing his friend’s elder brother in a mock wrestling match with the friend’s happy-go-lucky mother on the kitchen floor of their house. How beautiful that would be to come home to every day, he had thought.
Now he and his brother, too, bathed in domestic pleasures, like smiles on returning home, such treats, vast delights because of previous experiences that no child should ever endure.
When their father and the policewoman fell in love, the father spent his nights at home, escape now unnecessary.
“Leafy voices wailed in gumtree choirs.” 👍