His Hands

Her brother was sweet and generous and kind. Everyone should have a brother like him, Ann said. He looked like her. They were identical twins, in her imagination, though he was taller and broader than she was. He had the nose she once had, before her plastic surgery.

He was glad she was gay, he said when she told him. They joked about it. They thought of all the anti-gay slurs they could. They laughed together as they painted the hallway and listened to Seal. He had a band, her brother, Ann said. They'd been signed by a major. They had a stylist. Her brother wasn't allowed to go out except in clothes their stylist had bought them.

Her brother's band were being produced by Bob Clearmountain, she said. She didn't expect me to have heard of him, but Bob Clearmountain was really famous. He did Sowing the Seeds of Love. She wanted to go and see them play, her brother's band, but lately she'd been afraid to go out. She was afraid to go downstairs and out of her door. Do you ever get afraid like that?, she asked me. Do you ever get frightened?

Her brother was really sorted, Ann said. He had a great girlfriend. She could see them getting married, Ann said. Someone was going to come out of the mess alright. It wouldn't be her, Ann said. She'd already messed up. She was messing up her life. But her brother – he was going to lead the life she should have had. And her brother's children (she often dreamt of her brother and his girlfriend having children): they would have whatever they wanted.

Is there a way of replaying your own life, of retaking it? Her brother's daughter: she thought of her, her non-existent niece, far ahead of her, living far beyond her. A perfect child: calm, like her brother. Long-nosed, like her brother. A blessed child.

Sometimes Ann thought her violence would disappear before the perfect calm of a sleeping baby. But sometimes she saw herself become yet more violent, shaking it to death, dashing its head against the wall. She was a murderer, she thought at those times, not a child rearer. She was a strangler, her hands were talons, and one day, they would drip with blood.

She laughed. She and her brother had the same hands. Their father's hands. I said I couldn't see it. They looked like elves' hands to me. She turned her hands into fists and looked down at them. The same hands with which she installed her kitchen. The same hands that lifted all that garden furniture from the back of her car.

Sometimes she expected to see cuts on her knuckles, dried blood. She fought people in her dreams. She scraped her knuckles along rough walls. She dreamt her arms ended in rounded stumps like baguettes. She dreamt her veins had opened and her blood fell like red rain.

What is a child? Innocence. What was she? Corrupt. We're all corrupt, she said.

How had her brother come through it? How had he survived? Because of his immense calmness, she said. He was like that as a baby – calm. Everyone loved him as a toddler. No one liked her – she was difficult and demanding, but he was calm, a kind of calmness possessed him, and set him aside from the madness of the family.

How old was she when she burned down the house? You see, she was mad, too; quite mad. She found some matches, struck them. The blankets went up in flame, the bed. She went screaming to her mother. At the doorway, they saw the whole room on fire. Nearly choking on smoke, they carried her brother downstairs in his Moses basket and went out onto the street.

Windows broke. The flames roared. Her mother took the baby up and walked up and down with him, but he was quite calm. She looked on in awe. She was a destroyer. Then the fire engine arrived.

No one blamed her for the fire. It was odd. They went around her in their temporary house on various errands. She felt left behind. Hadn't she just accomplished something, done something, a real act in the world? But her act was invisible. It had been smothered straight away. So she sang to her brother in his basket and looked out of the window at an unfamiliar street.

Her sister was born two years later. They'd moved into a third house, the young family, the one in a rough area where needles scrunched underfoot. Her parents barely talked. Her father went out drinking every night, and came back late. He was up at dawn to get ready for work. He'd started his own business. His eyes were dark and puffy from sleeplessness. His face was red.

Her sister filled the house with squalls of crying. Her mother kept her father away from the baby. She kept her, for her safety, in another room. And so they grew up, the three of them, the brother nearly silent at the centre.

What was he thinking? What was on his mind? No one knew. Some took his silence for a lack of confidence. They smiled at him. They sat him on their lap and stroked his hair. Others saw him as a source of strength. Ann did. He was somewhere firm and calm. He closed his eyes and closed himself upon himself. The house turned around him, a calm planet. Light and darkness fell on his closed eyelids. 

When he woke in the morning, he called up to Ann on the top bunk. She called back. Another day had begun. And at night, going to sleep, he called up to her then, too. Night night. Night night, she said to him, too. But her sister, who shared a bedroom with her mother, was never calm. She cried terribly as a baby, and, when she was older, they would find her trembling from some imagined horror.

Her sister had different hands to she and her brother. Her mother's hands. They trembled when she was upset, just like her mother's.

And now they were grown up, the three of them. And now her mother had left her father. And now her father lived in his house on the hill, alone but for his cat, which slept beside his bed.

*

His cat. It was later that summer that Ann drove me out with her to her father's house. Her father's new wife had phoned her and asked her to come up. There was an emergency: the cat was dying.

We drove out through the suburbs. The house on the hill, as Ann had described it. The lawns. And in the mud along the border of the grass, a black-furred cat, writhing. It's had a stroke, the wife said. 'It' – the cat had no name.

The vet had already been out. Have him put down, the vet said. He's not going to get any better. But the wife wouldn't put him down. She wouldn't ring her husband, either. You should have him put to sleep, the vet says. It's cruel to let him live. You can't do anything for him.

But the cat had to live. It had to be there when the father got home. The cat has to sleep beside him. The smell was bad. Faeces along the fur. The body spasmed. The cat cried. Pure pain. Pain, arching in a body.

But the father would want the cat alive, whatever. Because he was afraid of the dark, the broad-backed, bullying father. He feared the dark as he feared madness. Why did he fear it so? No one knew. He spoke to no one, the father, not about those things, though perhaps he spoke to his cat. 

The house, the lawn: that's where the father returned, each evening. It's from where he left, each morning. His business thrived. He worked hard. He saw his new wife and his new children at the weekends, inviting them up from the house he bought them. People had to come to him. He didn't go anywhere. He met the world on his terms.

And there was the cat, who slept beside him. He was a man who held himself together through rituals, Ann said. His cat was woven deeply into his life. They lived together, man and cat, used to one another, perhaps the father hoped they would die together.

The cat writhing in the dust, spittle round his jaw? What should she do?, said the wife. The cleaner had called her, she said. The cat had been like that all day, writhing in the dust, no longer living, but not yet dead.

Ann called her brother. Do nothing, the brother said. Do nothing: leave the cat. So we left it, and came away, driving back through the suburbs.