Girl A(76)

After our lessons, there was time left for play, and we spun across the garden in a game of tag, Father watching us from the kitchen door. I was It. I darted at Delilah and seized her shins, and we tumbled together into the soil where Mother’s vegetables were trying to grow. In the falling sunlight, I looked up from the ground and my siblings scattered away from me, bent-double, half laughing and half gasping, and I understood that if somebody were to come around the house and through the garden gate, they would see our beautiful family, us with our matching hair and our strange, antiquated clothes. There would be nothing to worry about at all.

And then there were other afternoons.

There was the afternoon when Gabriel smashed Father’s liquor. There was no longer any need for one of us to fetch the bottle: it stood in the middle of the kitchen table, like a condiment. Father had been drinking at lunch, and the bottle had moved to the edge of the table. It wasn’t that Gabriel gestured, or brushed it as he passed by; he set his palms on the table to stand up and placed one on top of the bottle. There was an odd second before we could see liquor or blood, when it seemed like the bottle might have survived, and in the next second, it shattered across the room.

Father was somewhere else in the house. Upstairs, the baby’s muffled screaming. We waited, none of us looking at Gabriel. Blood flashed down his wrist. He stood alone at the centre of our circle and started to cry.

‘Jesus, Gabe,’ Ethan said. ‘Stop it.’

Slowly, taking his time, Father came to the kitchen. There was no need to ask what had happened. He ran his finger across the damp tabletop, and sucked it. ‘Oh, Gabriel,’ he said. ‘Ever cumbersome.’

He touched his palm to the side of the little boy’s face, cradling it.

‘What will we do with you?’ he said, and the cradle tightened into a tap, gentle at first, as you would touch somebody whom you needed to wake, and then harder. A slap.

‘Do you know how much that costs?’ Father said, and his hand changed again: now it was a fist. I moved between Evie and the table, so that she wouldn’t have to watch.

‘No,’ Father said. ‘You know nothing of worth.’

‘Stop it,’ Delilah said, and Father laughed and mimicked her: Stop it, stop it, stop it. One for each impact. Delilah stepped from our circle. I hadn’t looked at her – really looked at her – for a while. She was so much thinner than I remembered. There were sinkholes around her eyes and beneath her cheekbones. She gripped Father’s hand with cadaver arms.

‘Don’t you understand?’ she was shouting. ‘He can’t see!’

She clutched Father’s fist as if it was a wild animal which she wanted to soothe. Their faces were a few centimetres apart. The kind of proximity where you can taste the other person’s mouth.

‘He can’t see,’ she said again.

Gabriel sat back in his chair. Blood had collected in his Cupid’s bow. He had stopped crying.

‘We can clear it up,’ Delilah said.

‘All of my children can see,’ Father said, and left the room.

And there was the afternoon when Peggy visited. The incident was omitted from her book, which surprised me more than it should have done. She wouldn’t have come out of it well. When I finished the book – Sister’s Act: A Tragedy Observed – under the supervision of Dr K, I flicked back through to make sure, with a kind of nauseous elation. I wouldn’t have come out of that afternoon well, either.

It had been a difficult day. The baby had started to cry before dawn. The miserable persistence of it, pervading the rooms of the house. I had heard Ethan groan, then throw something at the wall between us. I clung to sleep for as long as I could, cover drawn up against the first thin light. Evie lay on her back, her lips moving, telling herself a story. Even when the baby stopped, I could hear his cries, living between the walls.

Autumn again, and the kind of weather which never commits to daylight. Father instructed us to write in our journals. I sat at the kitchen table, looking at the empty page. Contemplating what I would write, if it wouldn’t be subject to inspection. As it was, my entries were all comically dull. Today, we spent a long time considering the fact that Jesus never raised the issue of homosexuality. I agree with Father’s opinion that this omission cannot be taken as permission to participate in homosexual behaviours. I glanced at Evie’s page. She was drawing a garden, completing the veins of each leaf and shading the shadows underneath them. ‘Eden?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. Just somewhere I think about.’

I couldn’t draw: I was stuck with this world. We had a tiring night, I wrote. The whole family was awake early. I love having a new sibling, but I hope that he starts to sleep a little more.

On days like this, I thought of codes and messages. How to capture – quietly – the extent of our boredom? How to record each little assault? At the table, Gabriel hunched his back, to position his eyes a few centimetres from the page. And the pervading ones. How to translate the hollowness of starvation? The feeling that something was feasting on the walls of my stomach, chewing it from the inside out?

Mother is getting stronger every day, I wrote, pathetically.

There were two figures in Evie’s garden, walking hand in hand in silhouette. Their heads tilted together, as if they were lost in conversation. ‘Are you sure it’s not Eden?’ I asked.