Family Portrait

I’ve swithered for ages whether to share this piece of creative writing on my blog, but finally, thanks to the encouragement of a good friend, I’ve bitten the bullet and posted it.  It’s strongly influenced by my gothic studies, so don’t expect sweetness & light! You have been warned…

Family Portrait

I move the knife back and forth across the faded monochrome image of that once well-loved face, removing from the family portrait those dark eyes, that straight nose, those thin lips.  A relic from times past: the weight of family secrets, the stench of scandal quickly disguised, the onerous heights of decorum demanded.  The time may have passed but this woman’s expression of repressed chaos is still etched into my soul.  Many, many years have passed since her death, and yet here I find myself defacing the photograph my father kept locked in the drawer of his rickety, old walnut bureau.

Faster and faster my hand moves the blade.  Little flecks of once black, now burnished brown paper soon cover hand, knife and table.  I am recreating the space her absence left behind.  The stuffy, high-throated dress with that damned cameo pinned at the neck is now clothing a ghost.  A white scraped space above lace and brooch, above tensely held shoulders and hands clasped as though hiding a dove which lay in black-swathed lap.  And suddenly, I am transfixed by those hands.  The long fingers and raised knuckles.  The thin wedding band encircling the fourth finger on her left, and the bare unringed fingers of her right, half-hidden, held as though anxious for the coming of some immanent possible.  Some twist of fate that would remove her from her family, from her reality, from her position in the portrait.

The face now scrubbed out and every last pinned curl erased, my attention is drawn to the other two figures of this family portrait.  Once upon a time, three people who thought they loved one another sat side by side in a photographer’s studio.  The photographer, Mr Swick, had positioned himself on the other side of the large wooden box whose unblinking cyclops eye stared at the little family unflinchingly.  Taking in the details… the red mark on the neck caused by an over-starched collar.  The tiny muscle that twitched beneath freshly clipped moustache.  The finely carved cameo image of white on black memorializing the dead.  And the preternatural stillness of a family on the edge of some devastating abyss.  Perhaps unconvinced of its presence, but definitely wary of the possibility of its existence… a dark crevasse which split through the known world releasing the black despair which would settle like soot, like ash, like death itself, upon our resolute static post for the camera.

Swick stares through the lens unable to drag his gaze away from this strange trio.  A shiver creeps into the muscles across the top of his spine, involuntary yet irrepressible.  His body convulses with the spasm brought on by… by what?  An over-active imagination?  A goose walking over his grave?  Or was it something in the faces of his 2pm customers?  He steadies himself and thinks to express an instruction to ‘Please sit very still now’ before squashing that thought as irrelevant direction to the three stony figures, already frozen as though images transposed to photographic paper.

Looking at my father now, dressed in his Sunday best, pocket-watch chain displayed prominently and his soul seeping out through his eyes, I am stunned that I did not anticipate the abyss earlier.  One’s family does not just arrive with that shared haunted stare one weekday afternoon to get their portrait taken.  That look is cultivated over days, weeks, months… maybe even years.

And it was true.  There had been signs.  Signs we had an unspoken agreement to ignore.  When one presented itself it was met with silence and a too-deliberate turn of the head.  Our collective refusal to accept the obvious.  Our collective hope that by pointedly staring in the opposite direction, the sign of unalterable change could be divested of its potency and its ultimate inevitability.  Our very visit to the photographer’s symbolic of our determination to JUST. BE. NORMAL.

Now I think of it, it seemed to start with a general sense of disorientation.  A confusion of place in general, but also of one’s own place in society.  The strange inappropriate outbursts at the dinner table.  The varying states of undress which, if left unchecked, would have caused much talk, much speculation, much shame around the smart, clean, sober streets of our neighbourhood.  But perhaps worse than all that was the detachment.  My mother was drifting away from the shores of sanity and the tide had now caught hold and was carrying her further and further out to sea.

Physically, she was still there, but something essentially her had broken loose from its moorings and was now lost.  The morning of the visit to Mr Swick’s Photographic Studio, she had descended the stairs still in her nightgown, with her polished black boots laced up tight, a heavy woollen shawl around her shoulders and a manic determination tautening the skin on her high cheekbones, strengthening her jaw, tilting her chin.  My father, seemingly rooted to the spot, appeared close to allowing her passage across the hall, through the front door and out into the outside world.  A world where they wouldn’t understand the pain she had endured, wouldn’t accept the excuses, wouldn’t forgive her ‘eccentricities’.

The pressure to maintain the illusion of normality was too much to ask anyone to bear, really, but I realise now that we should have dealt with things differently.  No-one was to blame.  Not really…  But no matter how many times I tell myself that, I remain unconvinced of its truth.  Even writing it down makes me sick to my stomach as I recognize it for the lie it most surely is.

Father, as though breaking out of paralysis, shot out a hand and grabbed her wrist.  Without a word spoken between them, a silent struggle broke out: she – focused and frustrated, he – panicked and concerned.  Unable to twist free, the stubborn spark that had ignited those dark eyes went out and she allowed herself to be guided upstairs to don more suitable attire.  Having borne silent witness to this scene, I retreated into the parlour where I sat in the corner, knees pulled up to my chest, head bent, eyes squeezed shut tight.  This is how we coped, how we endured – we stayed silent.  We didn’t talk about these episodes.  We didn’t talk about what might happen in the future.  We didn’t talk about the root cause…

… A cry cutting through the heavy velvet pitch of the bedroom flooding my veins with adrenalin, demanding an immediate shift from deep REM to full consciousness.  My body, almost jittering from the fight-or-flight hormone rush, seemed to move of its own accord, first getting out of bed and then moving across the icy varnished floorboards.  In my head, I am blind panic – a cowering wretch that just wants to retreat to the security of bedclothes till the sunlight fills the gap between the curtains.  My body, however, seems compelled to move towards the source of the screams which now follow one after the other.  Skin, slick with cold sweat, prickles at the sound as I stand outside my mother’s bedroom.  Placing one eye to the keyhole, I peer through, and feel my legs turn of water and my stomach to stone.

Blood.  Blood that soaks through her white linen nightclothes and sheets turning bed, flesh and floorboard a hot sticky red.  A writhing figure on the bed whose body contorts with pain, her face a rictus of pain and terror.  Eyes rolling, her hair dampened with sweat, skin the colour of unbaked dough, and the tortured guttural moans of “my baby, my baby, my baby.”

The death of my stillborn sibling, after that night of screaming and crying and moaning, passed in silence.  It was the first of the two unspeakable events to befall my family; however, unlike the one which was to follow, only God could claim the guilt, the blame and the betrayal for this atrocity.

I turn the photo over in my hand and see a date written in the corner, in pencil: 25th May 1898.  The course of that day has haunted me throughout my adult life and now into old age and infirmity.  Amazing how one afternoon can permanently alter a life…

Upon leaving Mr Swick’s studio, we began our short walk back home, Father tightly clenching Mother’s arm to ensure her compliance.  Despite her placidity following that morning’s episode, if we had learned anything from my mother’s descent into madness, it was her awful unpredictability.  It was the thought of what she would do next that constantly occupied our minds.  It was, indeed, this very thought that hastened our footsteps through cobbled streets and chased us all the way home.

As we stepped across the threshold into the cool, slightly clammy air of the house, some kind of elemental switch was flicked in my mother’s psyche, and, breaking free from my father’s grip, she let out an ascending scale of broken glass laughter.  The noise sliced through the cocooned silence our secrecy imposed.  It rebounded off the walls and ceilings, rattling round cornice and mantle clock, penetrating the skulls of both my father and I.  Her insane cackling changed to a long drawn-out, high-pitched moan which preceded her into each of the downstairs rooms of our house, as she flew from room to room to room: a trapped bird whose discordant song had become irredeemably fractured.

The noise, that pitch, invaded every cell of my being, driving out any capacity I had for rational thought.  I stood in the hallway, eyes wide open, as this madwoman who used to be my mother gave issue to the chaos that had been fermenting within the confines of her flesh.  Although it seemed impossible, the noise began to escalate; a slightly higher pitched whine had joined in to create a disharmony so great, I thought my mind would rupture under the strain of this combination of notes no human being should ever be exposed to.

Just at the moment when I stood upon the precipice of insanity, she ran out of the parlour door to my left and I stuck my foot in her way.  My intention, such as it was, was only to stop that sound, that awful sound that threatened the coherence of my self.  Her foot connected with mine and she flew forward, her head crashing into the corner of the windowsill.  The dull thud was sickening in its finality.  The sound still hadn’t stopped though, and it was only when my stricken father turned to look at me that I realised the source of the high-pitched moan was me.  The note died in my mouth and my knees gave way, as the scene before me became imprinted on my retinas.  A scene that I am condemned to see every time I close my eyes, disturbing my wakeful hours and interrupting my sleep for the last 73 years.

She was on the floor, a huge violet mark blooming on her right temple, her eyes open yet rolled up in her skull, and her black dress ripped and hitched hip high, the fabric caught in the umbrella stand.  My mother was, once again, my mother.  The madness that had erupted from her had departed, leaving her body rent and her skirt torn and her mind… gone.

My father started moaning then.  Deep inarticulate expressions of grief as he sunk to her side and dragged her thin body towards him.  Looking up at me, he cried, ‘What have you done? What have you done?’ Over and over he asked the question and I, incapable of answering, began to sob.

He carried her then to her bed where he laid her down upon the crisp linen, her dark form on white bed like an inversion of the cameo pinned at her throat.  The doctor was called, and, when he arrived back in that bedroom where he had been witness to the miscarriage, he was told a story of a stumble on the staircase.  Those moments filled with the unhinged song of a broken heart, a broken mind, my own culpability in my mother’s comatose state, went unspoken.  Another secret shrouded in stifling silence.

She lay in that bed growing steadily and steadily paler and gaunter, as her skin took on a loose transparency, almost appearing detached from the skeletal structure beneath.  A week after the ‘accident,’ the photograph arrived from Mr Swick – our little family of three, on the cusp of unalterable change that would ripple through the remaining years of the survivors, immortalized on paper… She died later that same morning.

Father died in his sleep back in 1964.  Words intended as comfort from those who knew us only superficially, assured me of the ‘peacefulness’ of his passing.  Only I knew that my father suffered from terribly recurrent nightmares – nightmares of a bird-like woman fluttering from room to room: a songthrush trapped.  His death was not one of quiet repose.  It was one marked by the trauma of my mother’s death.

This morning, as I lay in bed, I heard a soft dull thump against my window pane.  Pulling back the curtains and raising the heavy sash frame, I saw the still, lifeless form of a sparrow.  Perhaps the reflection of the morning sun upon my bedroom window had bedazzled the bird in flight.  Perhaps it was destiny which drove it into the pane.  Perhaps the spirit of my mother, whose own still, lifeless form forever preyed on my mind, remaining an omnipresent accompaniment to all I did, sent it to me to remind me of my role in her death.

This last thought possessed me – taking over my thoughts with an imperative so strong that its refusal was simply not an option.  Taking the photograph from the bureau I had inherited from my father, I began scraping at the image of my mother, removing her from the picture in an effort to scrape clean my guilty conscience.  But here I sit, staring at this space where my mother’s face used to be and I know.  I know that altering the image doesn’t alter the past.  I know that I am sentenced to look upon her haunting figure till I too go screaming to my death, hounded by nightmares of my own making.