Their argument, if such it could even be termed lacking as it does any real volume in the one sense, yet having that much more in the other, is the embodiment of a frustration fomented in the every accumulate hour of their youngest daughter’s unknown whereabouts, sustained by a mutual anger that is both shared and divisive.
Their aggregate years as teachers afford them this at least, that their words are not shouted as such but rather parcelled out with a quietly feral and measured venom, spat at each other and back so hard and with such real heat that it is this very intensity itself as is rendered audible even out through the early summer’s open windows, souring the twilight birdsong.
Father: And there was nothing in her diary? You didn’t, she didn’t,
Mother: Jesus Christ I told you, the diaries are gone, all her diaries are gone. I told you this. How many times
Father: Right. And you don’t think it’s even remotely possible that maybe she took them with her because maybe she knew you’d been spying on her, creeping around in her thoughts, in her private thoughts.
Mother (mocking): Right. Right. And what have you actually done? Seriously, what is it that you have actually done?
Father: I know I didn’t do that.
Mother: Yeah well at least I showed some fucking interest.
her isolated and unemphasised profanity sounding that much louder than the moment’s discordant everything else.
Father (collecting himself): Meaning what?
finding that sluice for their consolidate anger, shame, guilt, and grief as so often before blocked by such noxious parries.
Father: Meaning what exactly?
Mother: Oh fuck off. Fuck off. Please.
and between them this same rickety bridge burned right back to its ash and rebuilt, over and again, the aching heart each harbours willing its own bitter implosion mirrored upon the other, as if their argument had come unmoored from its origin and was now feeding solely upon itself, creating an appetite for its own negative energy.
Mother: This isn’t “Virginia Woolf?”, this is an actual child; this is our. actual. child.
Father (with immediate anger): Jesus, you want “Virginia Woolf”?
pausing to calm his pulse
Father: Is that, is that what this is, you want “Virginia Woolf”?
finger to his ear
Father: Well this just in: guess who else is dead?
his fingers scratching quotes upon the air
Father: “Peggy Gordon”. She died. Yes,
nodding uncontrollably
Father: guess what, she’s fucking dead.
Mother (suddenly quiet): Don’t say that to me. Don’t say that.
her eyes brimming with a betrayal of tears that collect but will not overflow, eventually attempting her surrender with a raised thumb, the gesture lost on him.
From their ongoing counselling they recognise this extending hell as just one of those many crises upon which so many other suffering couples break, their own baseless grief and lack of resolution yet to become that manner of mutual glue as will continue to hold them together.
And for his own part he grieves at being unable to pacify her with their old common song, too as his penance, unaware he will sing those words again but once and this at her passing, to lullaby her transition between this world and its whatever subsequent, the mystery of their missing daughter, source of these repeated arguments, to remain for them forever unresolved.
And this same daughter who, right this very minute now in her different time zone five hours ahead, sings this exact same song to which he has alluded, singing to comfort herself with that little of home of which she knows she cannot ever be stripped.
