Only
absolute exhaustion compels her finally absenting herself, begging help of her
husband in what tomorrow will confirm to be the final week of her second
pregnancy. For now, she sits heavy in her chair, listening with complicit
trepidation to every sound she can coming from the bathroom above.
Beneath
its green and peeling paper the exposed pink plasterwork is running wet, every
surface in the room clung with condensing steam from off the draining bathwater
as the humidity slowly dissipates, the window wide upon the early summer
evening.
Supporting
his naked son upright on the mat, he rubs the boy’s complete body with the
towel as he might dry off his own face, a quick and peremptory gesture fading
down the skinny calves in active recoil from the buckled ankle and its blemish,
vicious and accusatory, swollen with heat.
Even
before being bent into the wrap of their pyjamas, the child’s limbs are again
stippled with sweat.
He
turns now to the sink, loosening the cold tap before reaching for the
toothmug’s smallest brush, a tiny translucent blue stick with a single row of
soft bristles onto which he balances a squeezed bean of paste and works this
gently inside his son’s wide-open mouth, the boy confined securely within the
restraining span of his other arm while his teeth are cleaned.
When
he considers the obligation fulfilled, he lifts him up to the sink to spit, its
broad edge a fulcrum upon which he rests the negligible infant ribcage.
He
tastes his own breath as a composite of the room’s residual steam and,
persistent through the dwindling spearmint, his son’s stale exhalations.
Determined this latter might be neutralised by a reciprocal obstinacy in
himself he begins to brush again at the boy’s mouth, holding the body still
propped across the sink; the plastic starts to rattle at the teeth.
To
any notion of a passive defiance on his son’s part he cedes nothing, and as the
constricted breaths come more quickly they serve only to bloat him with a
hopeless tenacity he refuses to acknowledge. This growing frustration at his
efforts’ continued futility incites him to scrub harder and faster at the teeth
until the obvious inability of the little brush to realise his wish damns it
thrown to the now empty bath, clattering still as he grabs up his own whose
head he coats with the thick slug of toothpaste erupting from the tube in his
other fist, the child’s balance precarious between.
Skunk
squirms inside the discomfort of his sodden pyjama shirt’s tight-creased cloth,
one button bearing his weight bites into the thin skin of his chest. Suddenly
his mouth fills and he gags at the moving mass of obtrusion, immediately
chewing hard as he can and swallowing at both brush and paste, hoping they
might yield as food to the routine subjugation of his jaw.
He
sees his own saliva upon his father’s wrist, feels his lip ride up over and
over into his nose, and something ammoniacal occurs high in his sinus.
His
head spasms involuntarily upon the violent oscillations of his father’s brush;
the offending breaths coming now of necessity more quickly yet through the
aching jaw grinding on and on in its ceaseless attempt to soften the stiff
nylon bristles, the harsh plastic itself even.
He
feels himself inhaled into the proximity of hair-oil, fears for his gradual
disappearance within each breath drawn in anger at his ear, and then a taste he
knows only as rust as his broken gum’s ejaculate blood bubbles through the
foam, spills across his chin and out into the water circling the washbasin’s
bright white ceramic, at sight of which there comes his father’s grace.
Skunk’s
supported body stills abeyant, to move again at the gesture within which his
father casts the spoiled toothbrush into the corner bin.
He
understands the loose relief to his mouth but cannot stop it working on at the
sudden emptiness until his father’s palm scoops it full with water from the
running tap, palmfuls he must rinse and spit until the spit comes clear, then
waiting, rinsing to spit again, and still clear finds himself back upright
brightly dizzy on the bathroom floor.
With
no further awareness of his father, Skunk stands to re-establish some requisite
balance before walking out along the landing to his room.
He
listens to his mother’s slow and arduous accomplishing of the stairs for his
goodnight, excited to interrupt her remarking the dampness of his pyjama top,
saying quickly
Skunk:
I did this. I did this.
almost
as if in its repetition the phrase might come true as he wills it.
With
the sheet tucked in around and the door closed behind her, the room slowly empties
of everything beyond his own persistent little whispering
Skunk:
I did this. I did this.
