by Richard Paris Wilson, 2008
JUST QUIET ENOUGH FOR IT NOT TO COUNT, she says he may as well be dead.
Under her damp, lifeless breath it doesn’t matter. The words dissipate in front of her, turning into nothing.
A turquoise dress drapes her fifty-year old bone white skin. The dress once hanging starlight bright in a shop window display, now hangs from her body crumpled, uncleaned for weeks, possibly months. Her face is like creased linen. The loose flapping skin by the sides of her mouth pulled by gravity towards the floor. In the light her cheek glimmer’s with a two-inch line of unhealed scar tissue. She wears a circle of death around the eyes. You can tell she was once beautiful, and that’s what makes her so hard to look at.
An old, light brown bloodstain creeps from her neck down to stomach like an ant trail. Still, for a reason no greater than vanity and no worse than habit, if you get up close, you can tell she still carefully dabs her neck and wrists in perfume, as if that makes everything okay. As if that eradicates the bitter smell of her unwashed flesh.
The odour of the apartment is stale, but she stopped noticing it long ago. Paint and faeces. Tomato sauce and mint-scented air fresheners. Windows bolted shut because of unpaid heating bills. The same air breathed in, out and in again.
She looks over to her twenty-four year old son and the left side of her lip curls instinctively. Resignation. She’s been feeling that a lot recently. They both stand in his bedroom. Trevor’s room has minimal furniture, and no personal possessions. No television or stereo. No posters or photographs. Grey bedsheets and a colourless carpet. The wall bears the burnt, discoloured shadow of where a Christian cross use to hang, now long torn down and discarded. The room completely void of life except for the two motionless bodies inside it.
Out of the thinness of the air, a searing pain begins in the side of face; an ice led weight bursting through her temple. She winces as it shoots downward, stealing her breath, aching a little more with every heartbeat. The cold pain tunnels through her neck, digging down viciously through tissue, until it stops and shatters into a thousand tiny fragments in her collarbone. She cups the bone with her left arm, and squeezes her eyes tight in one extended blink.
When she looks up, all he’s doing is looking out of his window, as if he were reliving a treasured memory. Playing in the tree house with his sister or chasing after rabbits, watching the motion of their legs flowing through the grass. But she knows he isn’t. He’s just looking.
Room 413 faces dead east. The schematics of the apartment devised by architects and landowners with no interest in human comfort. Just higher turnover. Walls ever so slightly thinner than they should be. Each room ten inches smaller than the approved plans, to allow for one extra room per floor. Some rooms smaller than others, but nobody will ever notice. The kitchen is big enough for the fridge door to open and not an inch more. You live in a place like this long enough and anything can happen.
The white walls of Trevor’s room hide three layers of wallpaper. First a precession of superheroes all flying and swooping with their perfect jaws and bright spandex costumes. Then a montage of his favourite football team scoring and celebrating. And then musicians – all of them dead – side-by-side-by-side. The three layers buried underneath one another, one phase overriding the last. The white was neutral, the Doctor said. A clean slate. A calming influence. And he was right. He hadn’t attacked her in so long. Long enough that her body was deleting the wounds; white skin forming anew, burying the past.
Her eyes flicker, teeth chewing the soft pulp skin on the side of her mouth, fighting the numb, splintered ache from her collarbone. She holds back tears that haven’t quite formed but could if she allowed them to. Again, she whispers Why didn’t you just die?
For him, movies move too fast, their images fleeting, lost before they were ever found. And music was just confusing. The sounds entered his brain and instantly became disconnected. Data decoded and failed and re-routed to all the wrong places, causing all the wrong sensations, making him do all the wrong things. Everything had to be simple now. If it wasn’t, then you wouldn’t want to be around Trevor. Sometimes, he’d bite into his own lip until more than half of his tooth sunk, disappearing into flesh, his brain too jumbled to register the pain. Other times he’d have a seizure, kicking out at everything that moved. Sometimes that was just the white walls of his room. Other times it was his mother’s body.
The window Trevor gazes out of is seven foot wide by five foot high. It’s a portal to what may as well be an entirely different universe. He stares completely mesmerised. Magpies circle telephone wires and cats fight to the death in the distance. The clouds are low and a storm is only a few miles away in every direction. The sun is not felt or even seen on days like this. Streetlights talk to each other in Morse code. Silhouetted tree branches bristle and dance to the arbitrary rhythm of the wind. A faraway motorway hums. Rabbits run to avoid the oncoming storm. Everything is connected but the connections do not matter.
Trevor stares brain-dead straight out of his window. He does not make a sound, and his blank expression does not change. The silence between him and his mother would be claustrophobic if it weren’t so common.
The pain temporarily vanishes in her collarbone as a memory releases itself, and she gives a brief thanks to the God she started to despise long ago.
A couple months back, she banned Trevor from having paintings on the wall. He used to just look, getting lost in the detail, dissecting each one piece by piece, brush stroke by brush stroke. Paintings were the only thing he told the Doctor he felt he understood, because they never changed. Movies and music and people were too much, too confusing, too contradictory, but a painting is always completely calm. His mother used to quietly shake her head, her eyes dropping down to the floor in embarrassment, as her son told the Doctor what he swore was the honest truth.
You can look at one painting, Trevor said, and see something different every time. Art galleries are full of the same people walking around the same route looking at the same old paintings with the same blank expression, yet most see something new every time.
The Doctor pretended like he understood, and even though the condition didn’t fit any medical description he knew, maybe he genuinely did, somehow. What was clear from the brevity of Trevor’s visits, was the Doctor didn’t want to search for an answer when he already had one. He didn’t want to dig into family history and discover any ugly truths, especially with the way Trevor’s mother looked at him. No way could he bring up the death of Trevor’s sister with the way she dressed back then. Back when she hadn’t let her body decay beyond its years, and her face wasn’t wearing the pleated signs of alcoholism and distress with every glance.
Instead the Doctor labelled Trevor with a rare form of Attention Deficit Disorder, and as suffering from a distant cousin of Epilepsy. He prescribed him to take three doses of Ritalin a day, and with what can only be described as a cold, wry smile, told him to enjoy his paintings.
To Trevor, the touch of dried acrylic paint becomes the sound of ocean water. The smell of his favourite painting becomes a classroom crush. The sight of an idyllic lifeless mountaintop becomes complete and utter serenity. The look of a hypnotic sky as clouds spiral inside each other feels as good as seeing a beautiful woman slowly reveal her naked body. What it’s like to be on a rollercoaster becomes the subtle deviations on the surface of the canvas. What it’s like to feel accepted becomes finding where one brush stroke begins and another ends. What it’s like to be admired. What it’s like to be lusted after. When he looks at the desert sky of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, he remembers what it’s like to be alive.
Some people rely on television shows or club’s or their favourite song or their favourite drug for these feelings. Trevor relied on paintings. The sensations slow enough that he can decipher them one-by-one-by-one. His mind arches free. Releases. Dances. To him they were everything.
But for Trevor’s mother, that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t out of spite, that’s what she said. She must have repeated it a thousand times, to reassure herself as much as anything else. It wasn’t because she hated him. It was because she wanted him to be something approaching normal. To have a life.
After six months of staring at paintings and not one single seizure, she took them all away.
Her son, now a lifeless void. Now the distant cousin of Epilepsy.
The night she took all of his paintings down, Trevor stared blankly until he took her shoulder and pressed it firm until they both heard it pop. Her collarbone snapped in half, and blood trickled down her turquoise dress as she screamed. You ask Trevor and all he can remember is bulging muscles and poisoned noise. Images decoding, failing, re-routing. Tears falling and the energy and excitement of confusion.
That’s why there was a lock on his door, but only on the outside.
Still, months later, and the moments of silence shared between them in Trevor’s bedroom, she looks like something’s weighing her left side down. Like half her body has fallen into a gravity vortex. Her collarbone not growing back quite the way it was. Her dress still unwashed, because she can’t bring herself to forgive.
Now without his art, Trevor just looked out of his seven foot wide by five foot high window. They lived on the forth floor, over sixty feet above ground level. To Trevor, the scene was never quite as calm as a painting, and the tiny movements in the distance were still occasionally confusing, but it was the best thing he had.
But, today, she has Trevor a present.
The memory of what brought them here fades as the pain returns. She feels the wall for a hole that would’ve been painted over months ago. Her fingertips brush the hidden rivets and she fiddles with her pocket, finding two screws. She twirls them inside quiet enough that her son doesn’t notice.
She leaves the room whisper silent, disappears into her bedroom and comes back holding a three-by-five foot board. Her son, still mesmerised by the oncoming storm, looks out of the window.
Her arms raised and outstretched causing her to wince with pain, she hangs the framed painting on the wall. Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. She studies the melting clocks being eaten away by scrambling ants and for a moment she understands everything.
She takes two steps backwards and loses herself in the desert sky for a second or an hour, she couldn’t tell you. This was her daughter’s favourite painting. And after her death, it had become her son’s favourite too.
She walks up to the window and kisses her son on the cheek. Her lips dry as bone. His cheek cold and distant. A static pause in time holds them together, until she turns and walks out the door, newborn tears forming and starting to plunge to the floor.
Through the stale air Trevor’s voice says “Thank you”.
His words freeze her. The deafening noise of silence stopped for two hollow words. She looks back, then looks away, lost in the past, like she’s looking at him playing in the treehouse, or Trevor and his sister chasing after rabbits in the garden, before he accidentally took her life. But that’s not what she sees anymore, either. She’s looking into the future and shuts her eyes for one long second.
Her lip curls again. She continues to walk towards the door and just can’t help it. Fuck you, she whispers, again just quiet enough that it turns into nothing, that it doesn’t count. Fuck you.
She takes all his medication into her fist, and presses it tightly. For the last time she turns the key to lock his door, bolts the chain to let him savour his present. To stare forever. She closes her eye’s one final time and swallows the contents of her fist before gently collapsing as the night’s first ray of thunder strikes and the rabbits sixty feet below run to avoid the storm.