The Familial Knife
Brenda remembered how she had listened patiently, made consoling noises etc. For what else could she have done? It wasn't as if she could've just popped round, held her hand or given her a reassuring hug. Her friend Joan needed to off load, relieve a bit of the maternal pressure she felt, the whole gamut of stresses and tensions that had festered and built up over time. That particular emotional dam burst with
'You wished him on me, you can have him. I'm at my wits end - the limit - I can't cope anymore. - you can have him - just take the little horror away'
Joan's voice, that had been shadowing the sense of her own upset, cracked and immediately collapsed into uncontrollable sobbing at the other end of the phone line. Though Joan wasn't serious in wanting to dispatch her son Robert for Brenda to bring up, it was not emotionally insignificant either.
Robert in reality, was no harder to bring up than any boy his age would have been. He was six, shy, sensitive, and quite prone to dewy eyed daydreaming. Living the charmed life in a realm ruled entirely by magic. A place where water may overflow, but no lasting harm was ever done. It was the world as depicted in a Loony Tunes cartoon. And yet on this day of the 'bathroom incident' the full naivety of his childish imaginings had literally been torn down.
Leaving the taps running in the bath Robert had gone back to his room. He'd become distracted enjoying playing with his car collection. Forgetting that on the floor beneath a mounting swell of water was about to spill over the boundary of its cream bath ware. This would not even be the first, but the second time, he'd flooded the bathroom. All human repetitions prove fatal. They create a pattern in the mind of others, a way of judging a person through past behaviour they'll rarely be permitted to escape, let alone transcend. The 'habit' here would forever trap Robert in the absent mindedness of himself as a six year old child.
Harold had just installed the new Formica faced cupboards and surfaces in the kitchen. Being particularly proud of the serving hatch knocked through to the dining room next door. He fitted these home interior improvements into his spare evenings, or whenever paid work went quiet. Joan was on his case, because she was the one who had to cope with preparing meals amidst the dust and detritus of his half completed endeavours. They were then both relieved, as well as chuffed, when this particular decorating project was finished. The near constant pressure from his wife would now cease, at least for a while. Though he knew from experience that Joan would soon be lining up another job for him, just as soon as the pleasure from this one had abated.
The kitchen refit had been finished barely a few days. He'd been out on a job when his customer called him to his phone and said bluntly, 'It's your wife'. At the end of the line Joan was so distraught as to be almost incomprehensible. He'd better return home pronto. Fortunately he was no more than ten minutes drive away. But those ten minutes might as well have been hours, as he concocted all sorts of dreadful scenarios. None of this quite prepared him for what would be revealed when he opened the back door and viewed his kitchen.
The ceiling had collapsed and most of it had fallen to the floor, everywhere was drenched in plastery water and underfloor detritus hung from the ceiling like dirty washing. Water still dripping down from the bathroom above. It was reminiscent of the Dropping Well in Knaresborough where anything left hanging there would over decades gradually turn to stone. The newly finished kitchen lay drenched and warped all around him. He was to remember the look on Joan's face for a long time, too emotionally drained to be incandescent with rage, yet so internally broken into multiple pieces by despair. 'I don't know what to do. At the moment I wouldn't feel safe to be left in the same room.... I could murder him'
Joan herself had been brought up a single child, her parents so devotedly loved her they'd unwittingly suffocated her with their care. She was for them this delicate valuable child who they'd striven to keep from harm. If she ate anything that gave her a slight upset stomach, she'd never be allowed to eat it ever again. These small but telling constraints upon her, made her imagine how much easier it would be if she had a sister, someone to take the pressure off being the precious and only one. That sister never came.
Soon after she and Harold had had their daughter Susan, their thoughts went to the next child and what gender they'd like it to be. Joan wanted Susan to have the sisterly companion she'd so missed, nay longed for, in her own childhood. Harold, who'd been brought up within the competitive rivalry of a mixed brood of eight siblings, professed not to mind, but certainly wanted no more than two children of his own.
The pregnancy that followed miscarried, largely as a consequence of Joan's post natal state lingering on in the form of a heightened level of anxious distress. She worried excessively about not being a good enough Mother for Susan, of getting it right, and feeling the future was pressing down upon herself, due to this need within her for the next child to be a girl too. This emotional strain, surrounded by the circumstantial aura of not really knowing the outcome for a whole nine months, proved too much for the as yet unborn.
The miscarried baby had indeed been a girl, which when she was told had thrown Joan deeper into profound melancholia. She mourned for many months, until she found herself pregnant again. Brenda, recognised that her friend was immediately slipping back into the same unhelpful mindset that had preceded the failed pregnancy. So she tried to lighten the mood by jokingly suggesting, in her characteristically flippant off hand manner, that she was certainly hoping, nay ardently wishing for it to be a boy. A phrase later to be thrown back at her. Haunting their friendship every time Robert did something his Mother disapproved of.
Brenda had just wanted the child, whatever gender it turned out to be, to not have to emerge into the world under any pressure to fill the aching void their own Mother had prepared for them. Harold, as was typical of him, had kept silent agreement with this. For he wanted a son to carry on the family name with, but dared not voice that preference too assertively for fear of the upset that might trigger another bought of depression in his wife. Then Robert was born.
Anyone watching gallons of water cascading through a collapsed ceiling and ruining all that lay beneath it, would have had their heart broken. But Joan knew this had happened the instant the nurse told her 'it's a boy'. She hoped she'd concealed her disappointment sufficiently well. Once she got over this sense of loss, she told herself, she would eventually learn to love the thought of having a son. She understood instinctively what it was to be a girl, and Susan was turning out to be such a happy contented child, helpful and kind hearted. Everything you might wish for, Susan had been. She was no trouble at all. But a boy? This left her feeling bewildered - how could she make the best of what she'd not anticipated, but now delivered into the world?
Harold's busy work schedule and, it has to be said hands off way of being a Father, meant responsibility for upbringing would largely fall back on her. Whenever she needed a masculine presence and guidance about how best to respond to Robert's behaviour, Harold would literally or emotionally, not be there. Even when he was around all he would say was 'Oh, he's just being a boy, let him alone' Avoiding meeting her on the level of her distress, at the very moment her love for their son felt unstable or challenged.
It was never wholly true that Harold did not care, because he did. His ability to care was demonstrable, but primarily through the making and physical building of things for others. If unable to do that he was at a bit of a loss, Asking him to hold a conversation rarely worked. It was completely the wrong language, a different, difficult skill set, that he did not have an easy access to. Yes, to a frequently anxious woman this was deeply frustrating at times like this one. But Harold was steady and dependable. She loved him, and married him, full knowing he was temperamentally incapable of meeting some of her needs. That, she imagined, was what her female friends were for.
Whilst it remained a swaddled infant, she could pretend the baby Robert was no different to Susan. It needed to be loved, kept clean, safe and have its nappy changed, this she already knew how to do. Once it started to walk, that was when things started to get trickier when her emotional responses and desire to control and direct kicked in. She found it difficult to stop herself thinking of her baby boy as 'it'. It did things too her. Aged two, Robert liked nothing better than to get its hands really dirty by burying its hands deep in the soil, the muddier the better, of their back garden. Later it loved climbing up on top of the back wall, or any wall for that matter. By the time it was four, it had already fallen from a great height twice and had the hospital visits and cranial scars to prove this.
The self help books on child rearing they'd read before Susan was born, had encouraged them to be consistent in how they chose to respond to good or bad behaviour, whether the perpetrator was your son or your daughter. Out of a desire not to too tightly control the children's play, they'd decided both children could use each other's toys. Robert could play with Susan's dolls and Susan with Robert's cars, if they wanted to. But Robert not only hurled the dolls across the room, but also ripped off cloths, tore out limbs, decapitated heads and pulled out eyes. This was not taking respectful care of the things the child was given, and this annoyed Joan intensely. Not least because toys were not cheap and the money to replace them wasn't always available.
Robert, however, loved his red metal tricycle to bits, because it was the first thing that gave him an expanding sense of freedom. He filled up the boot with stones and rode it, with great accompanying cacophony, up and down the pavement from one end of the street to the other. Then, most disconcertingly, started to venture further out. A neighbour reported back that they'd seen Robert blithely cycling the tricycle across the broad and busy road junction at the end of their street. Unaware of the risks he was taking, yet single-mindedly following the desire to go on adventures, to explore the world beyond the back streets and snickets near home. Particularly the abandoned railway cutting on the other side of that junction. Robert didn't recognise the dangers or unforeseen consequences. He was a child, inexperienced in the outside world, but led by a curiosity about it. For Joan, Robert was becoming the living breathing source for every worry she had. And now he had flooded the bathroom - again.
It wasn't that Joan was completely oblivious to how her attitude towards Robert crinkled around the edges. She knew she felt love, but also a fatigued type of alienation. To counter this, she took herself - her own motivations and temperament and overlay these onto Robert. Now, he would be easier to understand. Repeating constantly to anyone who'd listen, how much like her Robert was, not just in appearance but in sensibility and personality. Re-conceiving him as this cloned replica of herself appeared to work. Though you never needed an expert in genetics to tell you whose son he was.
However, whenever Robert made a mistake or got something wrong in his Mother's eyes, those other less loving resentful feelings towards him re-erupted. Robert often would wonder as he heard his Mother coming up the stairs to his attic bedroom - 'will this be good Mummy or bad Mummy?' Joan, once aroused by her frustration to a contained anger, would tend to recount the complete litany of Robert's past failures to be 'a good boy', pouring them out in infinitesimal detail to him.
This long lineage of his wrongs and past stupidities could not be interrupted, invariably concluded with the second bathroom flooding. It had become through repetition one of those family stories which, through being so frequently recounted in an almost fond manner, felt as though it had been dealt with, done, successfully neutered. But in reality it just no longer revealed the gremlin that still lived within it.
For Robert, this story was a familiar but subtle knife that would get stuck back into the old wound, to be given yet another twist. The rest of the family hardly noticing the hurt hardwired into its retelling anymore. So when his Mother retold to Robert the words she'd originally said to Brenda - " You wished him on me, you can have him.' - she never imagined the emotional ricochet this caused. For it held within it a painful unspoken implication.
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