In her hands she grasps a laden tray. On top I can see the cut up pieces of a full family-size pizza, a side of potato chips and a two litre bottle of coke. As always I can’t help but wonder if she is a feeder. The pockets of her gym shorts bulge and I just know that they are stuffed full of candy bars. It has been this way since my last attempt to escape. She doesn’t want me strong so she feeds me this junk. Vegetables are just a distant memory.
She is transforming me into a blob.
She wants me helpless.
I have long since given up not eating what she brings me. The last attempts have failed miserably. My determination always seems to fizzle out before hers. If everything on the tray isn’t finished she won’t bring me any more.
Even her tread on the threadbare carpet seems threatening as she moves over toward me. She no longer even bothers locking the door behind her. She knows there is nothing I can do.
That I am powerless to stop her.
It is quite a blow to one’s self esteem to know that your mother could kick the shit out of you. I’ve only tried to escape once and my leg has never really set right again; despite the splint she’d applied later.
‘Oh good, your writing again,’ she coos, her soft tones completely out of tune with the hulk of a body. Even her jaw appears to have gained muscles; widening it until she resembles some sort of American action hero. I almost expect to see stubble.
‘It’s not very good… It needs a lot of work,’ I stammer out. Suddenly ashamed of the scribble, I attempt to cover it with my arm.
I should know better; I can’t fool her.
She deposits the tray on the desk beside me, reaches out and effortlessly moves my arm away. My eyes fall on the veins bulging prominently through her forearms and I feel like vomiting.
Doesn’t she know what she looks like?
I can feel my heart start to beat a little faster as I watch her scanning over what I’ve written, trying to gauge her reaction from her eyes. As always they are unreadable. The same as they’d been everyday since he left. Since she’d started to feel unsafe. Like if she showed any emotion it would be a weakness that others could exploit.
Especially me. It was as though she thought that I could somehow capture her in one of my stories and force her to leave. Just like I had done to him.
It was only once he left that she bought the first weight set. I need to be strong, she’d told me, there is no on else to protect me now. She hadn’t said thanks to you but she hadn’t needed to, I knew she blamed me.
‘What’s this?’ she asks now, her voice deceptively light. I wince inside not knowing what to say. ‘I think someone is being a little silly.’
To a stranger listening in, it would be easy to miss the underlying menace in her voice. Unfortunately, I can hear it all too well. Suddenly my bladder seems too full. I fight against the urge to release it. She won’t bring the bucket in for my toilet break just yet and I shudder to think what she’ll do if I soil myself.
Her hand snakes from the page to slide through my rumpled hair and I can’t help but cringe away. I hope I’m not whimpering as her fingers close and I feel her pull my head back to its original position and resume her stroking. The power in her grip makes me think she could crush my skull like an eggshell if she so desired.
What a relief that would be. To feel my brain just oozing out through the cracks, dripping over my ears, down my cheeks. Knowing that it was over and I could finally stop thinking. Stop wracking my brain for what she wants.
Stop trying to write the masterpiece that I know is just not in me.
Her hand slips from my hair and she steps back a pace. I sigh in relief as I realise their will be no punishment this time.
‘Eat you dinner,’ she commands, ‘and try to write something, huh?’ The way she phrases it is like I’m the unreasonable one. Like what she wants me to do is perfectly simple and fair but I’m just being a naughty boy and refusing to do it. ‘I’ll be back soon to give you a bath. You smell a bit off… Have you been masturbating lately?’
The question comes from nowhere, catching me off guard. I can’t seem to make myself meet her gaze. I think about the crusted semen on the underside of the desk and blush brightly. It is the only place where the camera cannot see.
She reads it in my face of course.
‘We’ll talk about this later.’
She rumbles back through the door.
I imagine that the room is shaking with each step she takes.
I listen as one by one, the tumblers click.
I realise I am crying…
* * * * *
…It is a masterpiece she wants and I can trace this whole thing back to a single story I wrote in Year 7. Probably the only decent thing I’ve ever written. It had been about him, the man who wasn’t my father, and the things he’d done. Things he’d done to me.
I thought I’d hidden that well though. The part about it being based on me. The teacher had been shocked by the piece and stunned by the maturity of it. Personally I hadn’t thought that much of it. I’d tacked on some fantasy happy ending where everyone lived happily ever after – once the man had been brutally murdered of course.
The teacher had taken me to one side after class and spoken to me about the story, about where I had gotten the idea from. He’d seemed like he was very concerned.
He’d talked very softly and gently.
I’d told him that I read a lot.
I thought that was the end of it.
That was until I got home. My mother had been alternately weeping and furious.
He had been packing his bags. Apparently the police had been around.
She said nothing to me that night when he dragged his bags out the front and disappeared into a taxi. She didn’t need to. Her eyes had said it all.
This is all your fault.
The days immediately following his departure were a whirlwind of activity. People flashing badges, being shunted between a nice, wood trimmed office where a kindly man handed me a doll and asked me to point out where he’d touched and a brightly lit doctors surgery where the severe looking doctor asked me to take off my pants and parted my buttocks. Then there was the long stay in the corridor sitting on an uncomfortable, plastic, moulded chair while stern looking men conferred with mother behind a glass door.
I had no idea what was happening at the time. I think I was in some sort of daze. How could a story have caused all this? The car trip home had been icy. She hadn’t talked; just glared ahead, out of the window.
She’d come for me that night, just as he’d used to, waiting until the grandfather clock in the hall chimed eleven. Her breath hot in my ear as she’d pushed my face into the pillows, stifling my breath. This was back before the weights so I probably could have overpowered her but the shock of it momentarily paralysed me. My head was still thick with sleep and it took me a moment to focus on her low voice as she hissed my fate into my ear.
You want to write? Well you’re going to write. A masterpiece… You’ll write me a masterpiece… Now he’s gone you need to start pulling your weight… This is your fault… You had to write your little story didn’t you…
Suddenly she’d been gone, leaving me with just her wet spittle on my ear to let me know she’d ever been there.
The next day she bought her first weight set…
* * * * *
…I force down a slice of the pizza. Familiarity has dulled its taste to cardboard. I long for the time when she still allowed me books. Back before she realised they were more of a distraction than an inspiration.