Chapter 10: Thanksgiving Morning

The problem with standing right behind your bedroom door is that if someone decides to come bursting into your room WITHOUT KNOCKING, then the door tends to thump into you and send you flying across the room.

“OW! THAT HURT!” I yelled.

“WE HAVEN’T FINISHED TALKING,” screamed Mum.

The problem with being thumped by a door so hard that your brains rattle in your head and then being screamed at by an insane mother is that it gets hard to think calmly and sensibly. It makes you do dumb things like, for example, screaming back at your mother even though you know that will never do any good. Calm, sensible, thoughtful Bec would have found some way to settle things down. But calm, sensible, thoughtful Bec had checked out of the hotel room.

Mum yelled some more at me but I don’t know what she said because I was screaming “GET OUT! GET OUT!” over and over. It drowned out the sound of her voice.

Suddenly, Dan was there – blocking my view of Mum with the sheer physical bulk of his body. He picked me up with one arm and turned me so that I was facing away from Mum. I was pinned against his body with a single arm that was as tense and rigid as a steel bar. I struggled. I hit his arm with my hands. I drummed my heels against his shins. I was still screaming at Mum but by that stage I don’t think I was making any sense.

I think I heard Dan telling Dad to get Mum out of the room. He must have been right there because a moment later the door slammed shut and Mum’s voice became muffled.

Dan let go of me and I launched myself at the door. I was still yelling at Mum and I banged my hands against the door to make her listen. I honestly don’t remember what I was yelling. I don’t think it made much sense whatever it was.

Dan pulled me away from the door and wrapped his hands around my upper arms. Then he lifted me up off the ground so that I was dangling in his grip and my face was up at the same level as his. I might have been thrashing around a bit, or he might have been shaking me a bit, I’m not sure which. But then he captured me with his eyes and his voice penetrated into my brain.

He was telling me to stop – so I did. I didn’t stop suddenly. I kind of wound down like a toy where the battery is going flat. Eventually, I just hung there with my feet dangling in the air and my lungs gasping for breath. Dan had his face right in front of mine. I tried not to look into his eyes. I tried to look everywhere else but at him. But I was trapped.

He was telling me to listen – so I listened. Dad had gotten Mum to quiet down at the same time, but the house wasn’t quiet. It echoed with the distant sounds of Angie screaming in her room on the other side of the house. She wasn’t screaming with anger. She wasn’t screaming at someone. She was just screaming. I could hear the distant sounds of Tara trying to hush her and calm her down but the screaming went on. A part of me wanted to ask Dan why, but I already knew the answer so I didn’t ask.

The fear that was tangled within Angie’s voice broke my heart. It reached deep into my chest and tore my broken heart right out of there – leaving nothing but a gaping hole in the middle of my chest. The shattered pieces of my heart stuck to the door and hung there like a collection of dead bugs in some museum display. Each bit dribbled a trail of blood down the door – smearing my half-finished painting of Angie with long lines of blood-red tears.

Slowly the anger, the red-hot fury that had completely flooded through me, drained out through that gaping hole in my chest. It flowed down my front and dripped off my dangling feet to make messy pools on the rug beneath me. Soon there was nothing left inside of the empty husk that was me. I’d become a rag doll, limp and boneless.

Dan lowered me until my feet were on the floor, but a rag doll can’t stand on its own so I crumpled and started to collapse. Dan caught me before I could fall. That was good because I would’ve ended up in a heap in the middle of those messy pools of rage that had dripped out of me. It would all have soaked straight back into me and then where would I be? Dan lifted me and laid me over one shoulder. I lay there, with my head resting on the top of his back and my hair dangling down in long streamers. Every time Dan moved, my hair would sway back and forth like a palm tree waving in the wind – an upside down palm tree. It was very hypnotic.

In the distance, the screaming died down to crying – a faint, far-off crying that became the sound track to the movie of my life.

I wondered if Dan was going to throw me into the closet – to lie there broken and forgotten with all the other useless clutter that lies at the bottom of the closet. But he didn’t. He flipped me off his shoulder and laid me out on the bed. He propped me up with pillows and posed me. He arranged my legs and arms nicely, with my head resting squarely in the middle of the top pillow. It was good he did that because a rag doll can’t pose itself.

The only parts of me that were moving – the only parts of me that could move – were my eyes. They were linked to Dan with invisible wires that made them follow him as he moved around the room. He cleaned all that messy stuff off the rug with some paper towel and dropped it all into the trash. Somewhere on the floor he found something that had fallen off me during the fight. He came back to the bed and stuck it back on to the side of my head. Maybe one of my ears had fallen off and I didn’t notice. He stopped to arrange my hair on the pillow and straighten up my clothes. That was nice of him.

The last thing he did was scrape the pieces of my heart off the door. He squeezed the pieces together in his hands like a handful of play-doh and molded it back into the shape of a heart. He pushed that lumpy mass back inside me, using that convenient gaping hole in my chest. Then he stuck the edges of the hole together with his finger, like he was doing up a zipper. Finally, he laid his hand on my chest and pressed. Amazingly, I felt my heart lurch and thump back to life under the pressure of his hand.

At least I think he did all that. It doesn’t seem logical, though, does it? I think my brain was playing tricks on me, but I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t – so I wrote it all down.

Dan leaned over me and kissed me on the nose. My heart was now thumping steadily under the reassuring pressure of his hand.

“There you are – all back together again.”

Dan’s voice sounded solid and real. It was something I could grab onto and use as a handle to drag myself out of the strange place where I’d been lurking. Dan was sitting beside me on the bed with the palm of his hand resting on the bone in the middle of my chest. The simple weight of his hand held me in place as effectively as any weird ideas about being a rag doll could have done.

I felt my mouth curl up in a little smile and Dan’s face relaxed a little in response.

“I don’t know where that came from.” Dan’s voice was calm and gentle. “You and Mum don’t usually fight. Everyone seemed so happy at breakfast. Then suddenly – kaboom! World War Three erupts in the kitchen. Then you and Mum bring it into here and escalate until you both go nuclear.”

I lay there and looked up at Dan. I had no answers.

“It’s a good thing that we’re going out this morning. It will give you and Mum a chance to cool off a bit. You have half an hour to sort yourself out and get ready. By then, you need to be calm and you need to be in control. I’m not taking a ticking time-bomb anywhere. I’m not taking a zombie anywhere either. Am I clear?”

It took a moment for me to process everything he was saying, but then I nodded.

“Good!”

He leaned over and kissed me on the nose again.

“You’ve got half an hour. Stay in here until then. I’ll come and get you when I’m ready.”

The bed lurched as he stood up and made his way towards the door.

“Are you punishing me, too?” It was a little girl’s voice – small and pathetic. “Am I banished to my room?”

He stopped and looked at me, leaning against the door he’d been about to open.

“No – yes – maybe a little. Mostly, I’m keeping you and Mum apart.”

The door opened and closed, and he was gone.

A hand reached up and wiped the slobber off my nose. I stared at the hand curiously. I was surprised at how easily it had moved. I lowered my arm back down to my side and rested the hand on my stomach.

Without Dan to watch, my eyes were now free to roam around the familiar sights of my room. I spotted Mum’s old sketchbook sitting on the bedside table. Without having received any instructions from me, a hand reached out and picked it up. I hugged it to my chest with both arms and lay there.

My brain slowly got more and more active. I started to feel restless. It got to the point where lying on the bed and staring at my room wasn’t enough any more. My brain wanted to do something.

I opened Mum’s sketchbook and started flipping through it, stopping every so often to smile at the pictures I’d already studied. By the time I found the last picture I’d looked at, I was starting to feel pretty good. Mum’s drawings – the ones she’d made when I was six – were all kind of fun. Looking at them was putting me into a good mood. I turned the page to see what came next.

The next drawing was a character study of an elderly woman walking down a street. The woman had two leashes in her hand.

The first leash looped down to a huge St Bernard – like the ones in the Napoleon movies. It padded along beside her, calm and serene. Somehow Mum had captured the impression that its calmness was an illusion. The way she’d drawn the dog showed that it had an enormous potential for creating chaos boiling away inside of it – underneath the surface.

The second leash was attached to a smaller dog – I don’t know the breed. It was more the sort of dog you’d expect an older lady to have – small and cute. Except this one was obviously young – not a puppy, but still young. It bounced along beside the old lady – curious and excited, happy and lively.

In front of the lady, unrestrained but obviously still a part of the group, prowled a cat – slinking along with its body low to the ground. On first glance the cat seemed to be stalking along in its own little world, ignoring the others and not taking much notice of its surroundings. I got the impression that Mum was trying to say the cat was choosing to walk with the others for its own mysterious reasons, the way cats do. But first impressions were deceiving. The cat was the only figure in the picture that looked out of the frame at the viewer. Its eyes had that eerie thing going on where they seemed to look directly at you.

The cat gave me the clue about how to understand the picture. It was the same cat that Mum had drawn as me hiding under a table a few pictures back. The previous picture had a kind of half-human face on the cat’s body and this one was purely cat but it was still me. That meant that the small cute dog was probably meant to be Tara and the big St Bernard was meant to be Dan. At first I thought that Mum had drawn Nana, but now as I looked more closely, I saw that she’d drawn herself – only older. She was happy in the picture. She had drawn herself growing older and being happy about it because she was surrounded by her children.

I looked again at the picture. There was one person missing. I wondered why Mum would draw a family picture without Dad. I tilted my head to the side and looked at the picture again. Then I smiled to myself. As usual, Mum was being tricky. It was a pencil sketch. Everything was there in shades of grey. I had initially taken the cross-hatching on the ground as the pavement – I think everyone was supposed to initially take it as the pavement. The shading on the ground was actually the shadow of someone standing just outside of the picture – someone large and solid. Everyone was walking towards him – or maybe following him – that difference wasn’t clear. Everyone was happily looking towards him – except me. Mum had drawn me looking out at the world and not noticing my own father. What did she mean by that? She’d drawn us all walking in Dad’s shadow – that’s usually a bad thing. But Mum had shown us all happy to be there. I wondered what she meant by that.

I sighed in frustration. Sometimes Mum’s pictures have too many layers. And sometimes you could think too much about a picture when the first thing you see is what she meant you to see. I sighed again and put the sketchbook down.

I picked it up again and went back to the same page. I looked at it again and started to smile. If the shadow on the ground was a person, then my cat-like self was standing right in the palm of one of the shadow’s hands. That’s what made me smile. Even though I wasn’t looking, Dad’s shadow-hand was still holding me.

Was I really spending so much time looking at the rest of the world that I wasn’t seeing my own father? That’s what Mum seemed to be saying in the picture. That was something to think about.

I picked up Dad’s notebook and ran my hand over the cover. One way to understand Dad better would be to read the things that he wrote about. I flipped through the pages to find the last entry I was up to and turned to the next page.

Peter Stone, Sunday April 9, 10:15pm

Today was the party for Tara’s birthday. Her actual birthday is not until Tuesday but today was the party. The party was ridiculously over the top for a girl’s eighth birthday. During a Lambrecht’s-inspired planning spree, Louise had conceived of a party with a theme based around horse-racing. She made invitations to look like entry forms. She acquired some cheap material and made racing silks for each of the invited girls. She recruited Dan’s rugby team to act as horses, using a promise of their own little pizza party afterwards as a bribe. Some of the lads had been a bit hesitant about spending their Sunday afternoon at a kid’s birthday party, but Louise had got their coach on-side and he’d told them it would be good training. The Council agreed to let us use the park behind the Rugby Club and everything was set. The afternoon was planned with a precision that would put Her Majesty’s armed forces to shame.

Louise had me decked out in a borrowed top hat and tails. She’d recruited Bridget, Penny and Ally to help with the management. A few other parents had also either been recruited or volunteered to help. All the men were in tails and the women were in gowns and extravagant hats. It made a scene to rival Ascot as all the adults milled around outside the marquee sipping on champagne while they consulted (and admired) the ‘form guide’ for the races.

I felt the need to speak briefly to the lads before teaming them up with their riders. Many of them don’t have sisters and would’ve had very little contact with eight year old girls before that moment. They were all thirteen or fourteen. Boys of that age can be very muddled about girls – even young girls – and how to relate to them. I think ‘clueless’ is the current expression.

I barely got past the first sentence of my speech when one of the boys stopped me.

“If this is about treating the girls nice, Mr Stone, then Dan already told us.”

“Yeah, we get it,” added another.

I swallowed my prepared speech and limited myself to thanking them for agreeing to be involved like this.

“Don’t worry, Mr Stone. This’ll be fun.”

I decided not to worry.

We paired up each boy with a rider. A process that involved much jumping around and squealing from the girls. Tara teamed up with Dan of course. There were two other brother/sister pairs, one pair teamed up and the other pair refused to have anything to do with each other. I suppose that speaks volumes about the relationships within those families. I’m not judging others but I take heart that Tara not only didn’t hesitate to work with Dan but was enthusiastic about it.

We ran several events along our temporary racing track. I know that they were only glorified piggy-back races but, with everyone in their finery and the girls in their racing silks, it was so much more fun than mere piggy-back races. The lads had even tied long tails to the back of their belts. We took the winners into a winner’s circle and presented each with a little trophy and circlet of flowers. Each time we did that, our crowd of adults would clap and cheer and toast the winner with champagne. There was some collusion between myself and the boys to ensure different girls got to be the winner in different races.

Tara was in her element, riding high on Dan’s back and absolutely glowing.

The entire event was extraordinarily funny. I laughed and laughed.

There are times when Louise’s condition can make life difficult, but there are also times when it’s truly a blessing. Today was such a time. The intense period of work that she went through to prepare it all paid off in spades today. I mean – horse races. Who else would have come up with such a thing – and recruited the boys and prepared everything? Who else would do such a thing? Sometimes Louise worries about going insane. Sometimes she worries that she’s already insane. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know what ‘insane’ means. I do know that Louise isn’t always what you’d call normal. I also know that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I was in charge of running the races, following a time-sheet that Louise had prepared and printed for me as part of her planning spree. During a pause in the program – carefully included at regular intervals to let the lads get their breath back – I noticed that Bec was missing. In fact, I hadn’t seen her since before getting the crowd together and assigning pairs. We had a couple of spare lads and she had her racing top on so we’d been quite prepared for her to join in if she wanted to. Apparently she didn’t want to.

I circled around behind the table where the women were setting up all the food. A big horse-shaped cake was the centerpiece. Bec was sitting on the ground with her back against a tree, hugging her knees and watching everything from a distance. She looked a little overwhelmed by all the activity.

“Hello, sweetie, what are you doing over here?” I said.

She shrugged.

“Don’t you want to join in with all the races? Everyone’s having a lot of fun.”

Another shrug.

“Alex is free. He’d love to be the horse for you. You know, Alex. He’s always nice to you when he visits. How about you and I walk over and talk to him.”

A shake of the head.

“Well, there are a couple of other lads available. Who do you want to carry you?”

She pointed at me. I looked around nervously. I really didn’t want to be doing that.

“Are you sure, sweetie? I’m not fourteen any more. I don’t think I could keep up with all those lads.”

She scrambled to her feet. “I don’t want to go in the races. I just want to ride around.” She had her little whisper voice going. I suppose she was feeling a bit daunted by the crowd.

Bec was looking up at me with pleading eyes. I glanced around nervously, preparing myself to claim I had a sore back. I really, really didn’t want to do this. Suddenly Louise was standing beside Bec.

“Give your daughter a piggy-back ride, Peter,” she said.

Her tone of voice and the steel in her eyes gave me no way out. It was part of the deal we’d made. I’d given her permission, at times like these, to tell me what to do. She knew why I was hesitating. She wouldn’t tell me to do something I shouldn’t do. Faced by the combined glare of Louise and Bec, I caved in.

I knelt and let Bec climb up onto my back. Her arms wrapped tightly around my neck – so tightly that I had to adjust them before she strangled me. Then with her soft breath warming my ear and the heat of her body warming my back, I went back to marshalling the races. I wasn’t completely comfortable with the idea of carrying Bec around like that. But Louise had said I should and fathers everywhere give their daughters piggyback rides every day. I was determined not to let my own phobias prevent me from doing the same.

There! Did you see that? I admitted that it’s a phobia. But isn’t a phobia supposed to be an irrational fear? My fears are perfectly rational. But anyway, back to the story.

From that moment on, my periodic rumbling laughter at the absurdity of what we were doing was punctuated by the soft giggle in my ear as something or other tickled Bec’s fancy. Sometimes we laughed at the same things, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes I laughed at something purely because Bec did. Bec’s happy little giggle was quite infectious – except that I didn’t actually giggle. I’m a grown man after all and grown men don’t giggle – it isn’t done. My back really was getting sore where Bec’s weight dragged against it. With a little determination, and sufficient distraction, ignoring pain is not difficult. I was having too much fun to let a little thing like a sore back get in the way.

Just writing about this afternoon makes my heart full. Tara and Dan, Bec on my back, Louise and her mother, Penny with Ally and little Sam toddling around, Tara’s friends and Dan’s friends, everyone was having so much fun. Life surely doesn’t get better than that.

Eventually the planned races were finished and the final presentations made. The girls descended on the table of food like a plague of locusts and we pointed the boys over towards a separate table loaded with fresh pizza and drinks. We were surprised when the boys grabbed their drinks and handfuls of pizza and returned to mingle with the younger girls. There was a lot of joking and laughter in the mingled mob and many of the girls quite literally latched themselves onto the ‘big brother’ they’d been assigned for the day.

Bec slipped off my back and grabbed a plateful of food before ducking under the table where she could eat protected from the crowd. Penny checked up on me and smiled when she saw I was okay. We produced the horse-shaped cake and went through the usual ritual. I found myself in a little knot of finely dressed adults, with Penny’s arm looped through mine. We were all in a good mood and I received a lot of compliments about the success of the party so far.

According to my running sheet, it was time for me to start a series of party games – ‘Pin the tail on the race-horse,’ and so on. I looked around and realised that a game had already started up, involving all the girls and the older lads. It looked like one of those semi-chaotic children’s games that develop every so often where the rules evolve as the game progresses. As with all such games, every time a new situation arose there would be a short but heated discussion as they negotiated a new rule. Then the game would resume.

It seemed to involve the boys standing like statues while the girls ran around them shrieking and yelling and trying to evade the boys’ reaching arms. Every so often, one of the boys – for no reason I could discern – would start racing around trying to tag as many of the girls as he could. During those times, the other boys became safe places and quickly became plastered with a layer of shrieking girls clinging to them. That’s the best description I can give of the game. There was more to it than that but the intricacies remain a mystery to me. I suppose it doesn’t matter what the actual rules were. I simply couldn’t get over how much fun they were having.

I sidled up to Louise and suggested we postpone the official party games since they all seemed to be enjoying their own game. She was hesitant to deviate from her carefully worked out schedule, but with my encouragement and that of several others, she accepted, and we stood back to let the kids’ game play out. I looked around and couldn’t see Bec. When I asked Louise, she silently pointed at the table. I remembered seeing Bec crawl under there to eat. Apparently she hadn’t come out since. I reached one hand blindly under the table, clicked my fingers a couple of times and then held my hand open.

I held my hand still and waited. After a short pause, a little hand tentatively placed itself in mine. I closed my hand around it and tugged gently. Bec got the hint and crawled out from under the table, never removing her hand from mine. We didn’t say anything to each other. She simply stood beside me amongst the adults with her hand engulfed in mine as we watched the older girls running around.

Eventually the game fizzled out, as such things do. Except this one didn’t run out of energy and die. What it did was transform into a new game that seemed to involve each boy grasping a girl by the hands and swinging them around in circles a few times before putting the girls back on their feet. The girls would then dizzily stagger a few steps before seeking a new boy and getting another spin.

Without giving Bec the chance to argue, I grabbed her, dragged her into some open space and gave her a few spins. She giggled in glee and collapsed onto the ground as soon as I released her.

“Again!” she demanded.

I pointed at Dan who was temporarily unattended. “If you run, you can get a spin from Dan before some other girl grabs him.”

A very determined look set itself into Bec’s face. She scampered back to her feet and literally sprinted at Dan. She took a flying leap into his arms, arriving seconds before another girl. Bec laughed and squealed as Dan spun her around in the air. I saw Dan set her down and push her in the direction of his friend Alex. She barely hesitated before running over and accepting a whirl from Alex. I smiled and stood watching. Bridget came up on one side of me and Louise on the other. Bridget reached up and kissed me on the cheek.

“You’re a good man, Peter Stone,” said Bridget.

I smiled. “Thank you. I’m glad I was able to change your mind. You didn’t always think that about me.”

She grinned. “You were trying to steal my baby girl away from me. It’s a natural reaction for a mother to be suspicious of any man trying to do that.”

She gestured out to where her two grand-daughters had disappeared into the mass of children running around.

“Maybe you’re starting to get an understanding of what that might feel like.”

I nodded. “Maybe.” I wrapped an arm around her and squeezed.

“It won’t be long before the boys start knocking on our door. I’m not sure how I’ll cope with that,” I said. “It’s bad enough with the teenage girls swarming around Dan every chance they get.”

Louise tucked herself under my other arm and cuddled her way into my side. She sighed happily.

“Look at Dan,” she said proudly.

We watched him as he strode amongst his friends, calm and confident. He was so friendly and caring with all of the little girls at the party. He was honest and genuine and carried himself with a youthful dignity as he moved amongst his friends.

“He’s growing into such a fine young man,” continued Louise.

I nodded happily. “I think we did a good thing, giving Dan a couple of sisters to be big brother for. They’ve taught him more than we ever could.”

“I worry,” said Louise. “We’re both so messed up. I worry that we’re twisting up their lives with all of our problems.”

“Everyone has emotional baggage,” put in Bridget. “No parents are perfect. The two of you aren’t doing too badly – given your own childhoods. Your children are healthy and happy. Ultimately, that’s all a parent can really ask for.”

The whirling game didn’t last very long. Two girls ran over to the edge of a slope leading down to a small stream that wound along beside the park. Soon the whole mass of kids disappeared over the edge and we could hear the sound of laughter and calling out and periodic splooshes as someone dropped rocks into the stream.

I hadn’t seen a single child for quite a few minutes so I decided I should probably go and check to make sure they weren’t getting into any trouble. The ground where we were holding the party was flat, until it dropped off sharply down to the small stream. I found the crowd of children a little way along the stream at a point where a section of the bank had slid away leaving a steep and slippery muddy channel down the entire length of the slope.

The kids were taking it in turns to sit at the top and slide down through the mud to the bottom where Dan and his friend Alex would catch them and stop them from landing on their bum in the middle of the stream. Already nearly a third of the kids – both boys and girls – had the back of their clothes caked in mud as evidence that they’d already been down the slide.

I grabbed the sides of my head in shock as I took in the scene. I suppose I should be grateful that the girls were wearing the cheap racing tops Louise had made as well as a variety of shorts, track-suit bottoms, bike shorts and jodhpurs. If they’d been wearing the fancy party dresses that girls normally wear to a birthday party, Louise and I would have been chased out of town by a horde of angry mothers waving pitchforks. As it was, they would probably demand that we be stoned for letting their precious daughters get mud in their hair. I could imagine the headlines: ‘Stone Family Stoned.’ The boys were rugby players and getting muddy is a weekly occurrence for them. Their parents wouldn’t be so fussed.