Published in In Parentheses Magazine August 2020
Dad slept most of the bright-light day but it is night now and night is different. Night is bottle-rocket nervous; a dullness slipping under the doorframe like smoke, likely to screech and soar. It is not quiet. I can hear his feet drumming a figure eight, hard on the wooden floorboards. His steps sound wire tight like a metronome. Outside, the sky has a funny colour; coal red falling asleep into black.
I can hear the fizz of our television too. It is white and empty and it twitches. Nobody is ever online to chat and I think that’s because of the sirens that cry out in our estate at night. Maybe it is because six of us live in a house that was built for three or that we share our headlice like a game of tag and Dad says that he will scream if another one of us catches the little shits. Catching them is a funny way of putting it though because when my neck is bent into the sink and his hands, rough like tarpaulin, fidget through my hair, I don’t remember ever chasing them. There is nobody online and maybe it’s my own fault or maybe it is the patchy internet that blows through the rooms like a ghost or it could be that they are lying under laundered sheets being read to or sung to instead. There are reasons for most things but tonight might be different.
A dog is barking, deep and slow, down the street and I wonder if ours has gotten out. My bed is in the living room. It folds back into the sofa like an accordion and that’s good because I am close to the fridge at night when people are asleep but when I look outside to see if it is a jumper day, our dog barks and won’t stop until he has woken everyone up. He gets hungry and hot and is pressed wet-nose-close to the glass. When he does that I close the curtains and hope that he quietens down because I don’t want to feed him and I don’t want to clean the glass with rolled-up balls of newspaper. I know it can’t be ours though because ours has a chainsaw growl that makes the hair on his neck stand up like nails.
When we got him, the dog, he had the smell of powder and dryness. It was summer and I filled bowls of water to watch him scoop it up greedily. I liked him then. He ignored the summer insects and had thick strings of drool swinging from his tongue. Dogs don’t get embarrassed. I brought him to the beach but that only made him worse. The water drove him salt mad and he trailed sand around the place so Dad took a clippers to him. He made me hold the dog still while he ran it through the knotted and damp fur. It sounded like bees.
I think I can hear my brother talking upstairs but I’m not sure. He doesn’t talk much and when he does it sounds angry. His voice used to sound like a rollercoaster and it would make me smile thinking of the sing song of it but not now. He had been sent on messages for Dad since he was old enough to walk to the shop on his own and old enough to be laughed at by the lads in hi-vis that get paid for doing not very much at all. It was around the time that things change for boys and he had firecrackers in his blood. He said he wouldn’t go to the shops anymore. He said it was too cold outside and he finished off by shouting that Dad could drive himself if he really wanted something. Dad didn’t say much but he did get mad in the eyes and teeth and later he lit up the side of my brother’s arm with a match, holding it against him with his angry Dad thumb, and I think that was the last time I heard my brother shout.
I can hear a stereo playing through the walls and the music is soft like marshmallows. Kids on the other side of the wall are dancing. I can hear them laugh and teach each other a sequence. Their voices sound like caramel and I bet I’m older than them. I wouldn’t dance around the place and I say that to them in a whisper in case they can hear me. I like music though. There is a guitar upstairs that someone once tried to learn and I think about playing it sometimes. Dad changed the strings a while ago and he played a chord and said that it sounded like a bird but then he ignored it for long enough that you can write your name in the dust.
I can hear my sister walking across the landing, slow at first but she quickens and slams the door. They are shouting, my sister and brother; blunt bursts of it and now I hear him joining in, losing the thin breath of patience he has left, pulling at drawers, his words sounding chewy.
It is night time and the house is full of sounds; a fist hitting the door, our maybe-dog barking at the coal red sky. A hand twisting the handle and a foot kicking the wood when it doesn’t turn. The microwave bell. A car horn. YouTube videos about a computer game. A mobile phone. A knock at some door that isn’t ours. The dull thunder of their words and a line of nail polish bottles rolling off a dresser upstairs. Their happy next door dancing. The pressure he rests on her shoulder to hold her steady and her voice, keening, shouting at him to leave her alone. I can hear the low hum of bees.
The television is frost white and empty and my sister had been growing her hair for almost ten years.
David O'Neill 