Cells by Gavin McCrea

Author:Gavin McCrea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, BIO007000, BIO001000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2022-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Usually, N saved the worst of himself for the hours when our father was at work. Our father was an anxious man who believed himself unworthy of true respect, but it was not the case that he possessed no authority in the house. His physical presence, which was imposing, the opposite of wimpish, had the effect of containing N’s most belligerent impulses, of blocking them and driving them inwards. Which is to say, when our father was home, N, as though following his example, became quieter, less crazed, more gloomy, more discouraged. Together, at least until one of them spoke, or N had one of his outbursts, they tended to resemble one another. Although distinguishable by their respective expressions of sadness, and by a long chalk not equally likeable, when on the opposite side of the same room, trapped inside themselves, they were unmistakably father and son.

Apart, however, they turned into different beasts. While our father was out putting on a rickety performance of responsibleness at a job he resented, N, stuck at home, let fall all pretence of personal responsibility, put aside any sense of measure, and thus liberated gave vent to his grievances: the injustices he believed had befallen him, which, whether perceived or real, functioned as justifications for attacking our mother, at whose door he laid the blame.

‘Why do you fight with her so much?’ I remember asking him.

‘Because I hate the woman,’ he replied matter-of-factly.

Because, I think he meant, he had never been able to make her love him.

All his life, he had watched her share her love with everyone except him, and still now she seemed intent on denying his demands for it; even when he begged her, as though for a salve, she remained cold to him. There seemed to be nothing he could do, except the one thing he knew how to do, which was to spoil other people’s enjoyment of her love by poisoning its source.

‘Listen to you, putting on the poor mouth,’ he said to her once, while she was entertaining the family with a story from her working-class youth. She was, by general assent, at her best during such performances: bright, sharp, funny, self-ironising. N’s interruption—‘poor mouth’—put a fast end to her show and was, to my ears, worse than any obscenity he had ever thrown at her.

But it takes two, this tango of love’s denial, and my mother, on account of her own withholding of love from herself, danced for her life. Far from floating free of the whirl, she was implicated in each and every movement; oftentimes she was the one who stepped out first, who led; she could not help herself. By finding fault with him. By nagging him. By saying his name in an admonishing way. By throwing disapproving looks to others, about him. By commenting on his eating habits as a means of criticising his body weight. By reminding him of who he was, as opposed to what he thought he was, or would be, or could be.

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