Feebleminded - Ariana Harwicz

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Pushing her up against the bathroom sink they stick something inside mum, the blonde guy’s baseball bat. She doesn’t like it much but she pretends so I think she’s enjoying it. We look at each other and nothing matters. Possessing those dark, clashing eyes. They grab us by the armpits, spin us around and our long hair sweeps over the hay like a shadowy curtain. Is there any whisky left, daughter dear? It’s such a relief your childhood’s over, wonderful now everything’s so distant it’s almost like it never happened, the smell of wet eucalyptus from when you trapped your finger in the automatic door gone for good. The smell of hot tarpaulin, of rubber, of bicycle rental shops. The smell of sugared almonds, apples, pink candyfloss. I’ve been waiting for this moment since you were born. Did we or did we not go to the sandbanks when you turned six? Didn’t we balance on the jetty? Didn’t we lie along the shore, covered in sand like pieces of schnitzel, inches from the jellyfish? Is it true that when you heard a gunshot from our hotel room that day you thought it was me? Didn’t we spend a whole summer sleeping under the tourists’ beach canopies without them knowing, your little piles of poo like defensive walls? Those golden days, holding in my sour breath and taking you roller-skating, whole days spent helping you do headstands on the water’s edge, making you jump on the trampoline, scrubbing your knickers with my fists. Hiding on the cold sand as the sun set over the beach, vomiting up your childhood.

      Whisky with my mother as the electric blue fades into the small hours and now, a long way from home, my hands are covered in excrement. I didn’t know my own smell, the layer of smell that forms on the body as the hours without water go by. My tongue gets distracted eating grass. Sucking on an animal’s hard udders, sucking on the fur, teeth galvanised, or imagining the death of your parents. It’s all the same. From the moment he entered my head, this saltwater hell. Zealous hammering on my veins. The trouble with my brain is I can’t hold it back, it rolls on and on through the spiky undergrowth like a bulldozer. Where am I. I don’t recognise these big houses. I’ve never rounded this bend in the road. Degenerate desire. Damaging desire. Demented desire. I don’t know how to get back. My mother will be blind drunk, sprawled on the sloping grass, her poor feet carved up by the blades. The clouds are tree trunks at this time of night, my hangover’s going nowhere and I throw myself down any old how to masturbate, my hair on end, my skin hot, my eyelids rigid. My hand works away then falls still as an insect, so that nothing is enough. Me and him in a convertible. Me and him on a muddy road. Bodies shouldn’t have breasts after a certain age; when my breasts turn to thick heavy flesh I’ll have them removed. The sex should stop opening, too. I look for a word to replace the word. I look for a word that shows my devotion. The word that marks the spot, the distance, the very centre of my delirium. We should be like tiny snakes till the end, and be buried that way, in long holes. I get up feeling anxious, my head thick with blood. I walk round the house and open the windows. The wind sweeps over the insect corpses trapped in the mosquito net. He keeps jars back there full of rusty water and all kinds of fossils. He looks like he’s never slept, always needing a wash, a new haircut, a pair of trousers with no piss stains. And after all, what is that scant pleasure we get from our fingers when we’re young. What is that scant golden liquid dripping, diluting, if afterwards, later on, when at last I find her holding the thick-bottomed glass, swirling the ice cube around and asking the waiter for the same again, my mum and I are sitting at the garden table with a pot of thin broth and two spoons. What is that leftover desire, that sunken desire, while we eat our soup and the steam hits us in the face and nothing, but nothing is left.

      No more whisky ever again, I say. No more whisky ever again, she says. Ever again, huh. And we make crosses with our fingers and toast ourselves with water and throw the empty bottles in the incinerator. What did I say. I want to say there’s an aura of death. No. That death is all too present between my mother’s mouth and mine, and in the bottom of the sunken glass. And the hours can’t fix that. Starting a new day, like unplugging the refrigeration unit and plugging it back in once the storm’s died down and the power’s returned, and the rush to gobble up the food before it rots. But the maggot-infested cheese and the meat and entrails make us nauseous. Or mending, a whole week spent with a needle and thread, mending the holes in the mosquito nets on the window frames and painting the flower urns green. Or setting wire traps to stop the owls shitting everywhere, or throwing stones at their nests. The canary-yellow stickiness of the yolk between your pinkies. Or buying a turtle and forgetting to feed it and change the water. Wake up, mum, before the day’s over, stop nodding over the scissors. She’s trimmed the ends and the fringe, like every time she gets drunk. Let’s go for a walk down the muddy path. Her body hunts for liquid in her organs, in the tissue around her brain. She scrubs herself with lilac-scented soap and I watch her in the oval mirror, knowing that this pot and coffee and pills isn’t the only way night can fall.

      On the road, we empty ourselves out. First onto the velour seat, then onto the steering wheel. Mother onto her blue blouse with small white buttons, me down my long legs. Covered in my own waste, I had the pleasant sensation my new look suited me. We strip in the layby, our shorts tangling in our high heels. Our bras on the back seat, our guts on the tarmac, we drive off with open windows and our hair tied up. We stink as we cross the white lines, no headscarves, no lip gloss, but we’re laughing for the first time in years. We never used to do that, it’s not our style to drive at a hundred miles an hour howling with laughter. To want to live and laugh again. We run inside, two teenagers with sticky skin and we shower.

      The phone, mum. That’s enough now. We’ve fallen back down, back to tidying the cupboards and sweeping, the hot eggs cackling in the pan. Where is it. How do you want them? Don’t make me look at you again. You’re not getting it back, I won’t give in. I look at the hanging baskets we put up with so much effort. I look at the tiles stuck side by side. I look at the walls and the foundations, the pieces of bread. Give it to me, now. Why do you want to leave again, we’re moving on together and no thanks to old Mr Knife, the two of us alone in the old dodderers’ midst. We’re doing it and the day turns beautiful just like that. How about a picnic? I’ll let you go on the swing. Give it to me before I overcook the eggs, before you’re crying yet again in front of a cold plate of food. I should fry that fucking telephone. Give it to me right now. I should stick it in the oven. Fine, as you wish, but on your head be it, and she flounces out of the kitchen, her hands sopping wet. She enters the darkness of the corridor and returns to the light of the living room, which is dark now, in spite of everything, and she throws it straight at me.

      I go outside jumping for joy. He’s sent me a message and it’s a shower of sparks like an ejaculation bringing me back to life. It creeps up through my body like an illness. I call him. I listen to him. He’s coming. I wait at the motorway intersection, under the bridge with its far-right posters and junkies’ graffiti. What is there to understand beyond this suffocation. My head is a huge flashing lamp, and now and then motors drive by at full speed. A lorry carrying a dozen carcasses of old cars. The road to the boneyard. It’s been days since I last saw him. And as I occupy the anteroom, I’m a beetle on its back with fleeting pulsions pushing me into the white. Rapid pulsions pushing me into the pure. To look through a crack and see only the tree branches. The air is sweating. Horses, grass, dung, air, all covered by a single sheet. All covered by compulsion. He appears, I get in the car, we pull up outside a motel. There’s nothing in between, no landscape, no motion, no succession of space time until we reach the room. Just a cut, a jump. I stay standing and my veins dilate. He unzips my trousers. I hear them fall. He turns me round, pulls down my underwear and his hand enters me like an object. With one blow the destructive force of sex obliterates my mother’s blonde mane, my mother from behind, from in front, running towards me on the shore, scrubbing the salt off my swimsuit lining in the middle of a sandstorm. The times I’d board the happy train with its silly music while she’d go for her aperitif and I’d wave down at her, my head floating in the colours. The times I’d search for her among groups of women, when I’d grasp a stranger’s hand. I have this monomania, how much higher can it go. Still it creeps up. While the room exists, it has the clarity of an axe.

      Afterwards, if I’m not delirious, he said he had to stop coming so often. He wanted to say something but he couldn’t, though he said it clearly enough when we went under the bridge and the echo sent it back. Something about his situation, the context, being responsible. That we’ll still see each other, that it would be crazy not to, that I’m

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