SMITHEREENS OF DEATH 5 A Corpse's Picture

'Do you have a mother?'

We were playing Mummy-and-Daddy, she was not supposed to be asking about my mother; she was supposed to be a mother, mother to the pretty dolls strewn all over the floor around us.

We were lying underneath the steps of the uncompleted building that was our 'house'. It was dank, and stank of abandonment. 'No,' I answered, angry.

'Why?' she demanded.

Why did she want to know why! I was angrier. I did not answer.

She rose up on her small elbows and nudged my cold shoulder, 'I said why . . . why don't you have a mother?'

She would start crying if I didn't tell her why. I don't know

why girls are like that.

'Because she died,' I told her.

'How?'

'Like this –' I closed my eyes and lay still to show her.

'Like how? . . . How?' She shook my corpse. I couldn't answer – I was dead. 'I said How? How did she die?'

'Like this!'

'How do you know? Have you died before?'

'No.'

'So she's not dead.'

'She is!' I took offence to this suggestion of my mother undead.

'Not!'

'Is!'

'NOT!'

'Is!'

'Not, not, not! . . .' She punctuated with punches.

'Ow, ow, ow!'

'My dad says she is not dead!'

'How does your dad know she is not dead? Is he dead?' Punch.

'Ow!'

'My dad knows many things that many people don't know.' 'Like G.o.d?'

'Like when my mum said she was going to London with her boss for conference and my dad knew that she was not.'

'Your mum went to London!'

'No she did not! And your mum did not die too.'

'How do you know?' I wanted my mum to still be dead. 'My dad knows.'

'How does he know?'

'I don't know but –'

'My grandma says your dad says a lot of rubbish when he's drunk.'

Punch! 'No he doesn't!'

'My grandma says he does.'

'My dad says your grandma is a witch . . . and that your dad threw your mum out of his house because she was a asewo and –'

'My mum is not a asewo! She's dead!'

'No she's not.'

'Yes she is!'

'Not!'

'Is! Is, is, is . . .'

'Not! My dad says she is not, but that she is a asewo; and that is why she dumped you at your grandma's house because she could not

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find a father for you, because you're a i-lle-gi-ti-mate child.' 'A what?'

'I-lle-gi-ti-mate.'

'What does that mean?'

'I don't know,' she shrugged. 'But I know it is a bad thing.' 'I am not a bad thing!'

'You are! You are!'
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'I hate you! I hate you.'

'I hate you too!'

'I hate you three hundred million all over the world!'

I s.n.a.t.c.hed up one of the dolls – her favourite one, the prettiest, a blonde – and tore the head off its body.

The size of the pain in her gasp filled me with more malice; I grabbed the other dolls and went into a maiming frenzy, tearing limbs and hair, gouging eyes, crus.h.i.+ng faces and stabbing bellies . . .

I left her at the scene of the carnage, wailing inconsolably, rolling around on the floor among the plastic remains of her children in genuine maternal sorrow.

Tears blurred my way home.

* * *

She came to my desk during break time, weeks later.

All the other children were playing outside, running mad all over the place.

She stood there, reading the top of my head, waiting.

'I still hate you,' I reminded her, darkly, not looking up from

my Gulliver's Travels.

'I know,' she said.

I couldn't see her face, but there was a smile in her voice.

'And I'm not talking to you,' I added.

'I know. I'm not talking to you too.'

'So what are you doing?'

'I want to show you something.'

'I don't want to see your b.r.e.a.s.t.s again.'

Her 'b.r.e.a.s.t.s' were not b.r.e.a.s.t.s. They were nothing, just points like two black eyes.

'I'm not showing you them . . . See –' She placed a photograph on the picture of Gulliver tied down in my book. I looked up at her, 'What?'

'A picture.'

'Of what?'

'Look.'

When I looked at it the first person I recognized was my mother, different from how she looked in the pictures of her that my grandma had shown me – the pictures that showed her as a mother, my mother, holding a baby me to her bosom, a soft smile warming her face, a young face glowing with new maternal affection . . . (How could such a woman be this bad person they wanted her to be now?)

But in this picture she was not my mother, she was somebody else – n.o.body's mother, just a girl, a strange girl; the type Grandma and I usually saw on the streets on our way home from church vigils.

'What are they waiting for?' I had asked her one time.

'Their deaths,' she had said, in that tone that shut further questions out, her face inaccessible.

In the picture, the girl was hanging on to a man's neck, as if she would crumble in a heap if she let go, her mouth pointing a full, happy laughter in the man's drunken, uninterested face. He looked as if he would rather not be in the picture, the way his right hand rested loosely on the back of the girl's naked thigh, even the limp loll of the cigarette on his lips beneath his lazy, drowsy eyes.

'That's my dad,' Simi said.

'That – that's not my mother,' I croaked. 'It is not my mother, not my mother, not my mother . . .'

As if by repeating it the girl in the picture would somehow

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not be my mother, just somebody that looked like her.

'It is. And she's not dead, she's in Italy.'

'In Italy? Is she dead there?' I just wanted her to be dead, wherever she was. I didn't like this new image of her I was seeing; it ruined my good dead mother for me.

'No, she's not dead anywhere . . . She's just there.'

'Why?'

'Because she's a asewo.'

'I hate you,' I whispered to the happy girl in the picture. 'What did you say?'

I looked up at Simi, 'I hate you.'

I did hate her then, for digging up my mother's ugly corpse and forcing it down my throat, making me confront it.

I should have listened to my grandma and stopped talking to her. Now I hated her so much, as much as I had loved her; so much that the black hate filled my belly like a gas, toxic, hardened it, bubbled up my chest and poured out of my eyes, nose, mouth – 'I HATE YOU. I hate you, I hate you . . . I hope you die too. I hope you die!'

The hate overwhelmed my heart and lay heavy like a rock at the bottom of it. I didn't know what to do with it. I had never felt it before; it was unfamiliar.

* * *

Years later, when the stench of confirmation seeped out of the family closet that her father was my father I still did not know what to do with that old hate.

It had been sitting there in the darkest corner of my thoughts, waiting to be used, the way old hate does, getting watered by small reminiscences and flashes of memory, not growing into anything, like anger, murder, just the same black hate it had always been, the blackness not fading, not thinning . . . Now she was my sister, I wasn't sure if it would be of any use anymore. . .

But I didn't kill it; I just folded it up and tucked it away in the depth of my memory from where I could dig it up once in a while, to caress it in the darkness of my thoughts.

Because hate is not a disposable thing like that.