The
first line, and he was seven years old.
She
saw him through the kitchen window playing on the slabbed-over section of back
garden immediately behind the garage, lurching around after a ratted and
lifeless tennis ball. Seven years old, summer sockless, and the uneven flap
flapflap flap of those precious gutties upon the concrete.
She
wanted just to leave him be, to return upstairs and seal the tin and forget it,
but suddenly she was outside and could feel the sun on her neck and see the
shadow pooled about her ankles and he was looking up at her and she was
indicating the open back door with a quick tilt of her head as the tennis ball
reeled into a crack between the stones and stopped.
Skunk
followed her in through the kitchen and living room, and she could feel him
right behind her all the way up their climb of carpeted stair, his seven years’
accumulated knowledge being brought to bear upon the preparatory excuse for
each suspected misdemeanour.
When
she turned to him outside his bedroom door she was hoping to hear her voice
tell him to go back to his play; inferring from his face that she had yet to
speak she simply pushed the door to reveal the open biscuit tin there in the
centre of the stained gold carpet.
He
hung his head, breath coming culpable from both. This was not some other
child’s biscuit tin with its pocked red lid clamped down on mass of marbles,
nor another’s crammed with plastic cowboys squashed and dirty, nor still
another’s enclosing knitting nancy and her fallen fabric entrails. This was her
son standing convicted by the content of his own: a two inch depth of urine
still as set jelly.
Not
trusting her voice to bear any question, she could only watch as he sought
possible answers in his gymshoes, his scalp ablush to its black root.
Mother
(sympathetic): I’m not angry at you Skunk, I just... I, I wondered what
Skunk
(in earnest): You were in the bath. I had to go.
Mother:
But Skunk that’s more than once in there isn’t it?
knowing
this question not to be for him, rather the sudden realisation she had no idea
how much passed from her own body at toilet.
Skunk:
Well another time I had
but
too quick to begin the excuse he became lost halfway through, compounding his
shame.
He
stepped past her into his room, and having carefully lifted it carried the
tinful of now rippling piss along the landing to the bathroom.
She
went back downstairs to leave him be, her every step breaking eggshells.
When
he passed her in the kitchen later she could not know he had pulled a long and
skinny needle from out her pincushion, and she did not hear the line being torn
down his little flesh with a sound like the slow rip of thin fabric.
She
will be terrified in the eventual disclosure of this congealment; Skunk himself
will have moved on somewhere else.
