Carol Thompson’s husband ran off with my mother. He was taller than my father, black hair like wet concrete. His eyes were solid ice, but his skin was wrinkled and red like an old sweating tomato. And my mother loved him. His name was Dennis. Side-by-side to my father, they both had the same slouch tall men have that makes them gangly and bent out of shape. I thought he was much more handsome than my father. I liked his straight teeth. I dreamt about him, and I dreamt that Dennis was my father and my mother my mother, and we all lived in the woods with the trees and bushes and thorns and leaves and everything else that was rotten.
Carol Thompson had a dog called Julian. It was a black and tan German Shepherd, and at first I was terrified of it. I had never come across a dog as big as that one, and with so much energy, his clumsy muscular body often knocked me over. Mrs Thompson (as I called her back then) let me take it out for walks when I was around twelve or thirteen years old, and I eventually grew attached to it. We spent a lot of time together, me and that dog. When I came home after school, I’d go over to the Thompson’s and ask to take Julian out, and we’d spent most of the evening together. On Saturdays, I took him to the park and let him off the lead so he could run around, and I’d sit down on the grass and read the books my mother bought me. My mother loved books, but I struggled with reading like my father did.
One day, Julian ran into the woods and didn’t come back out. There was a wall of trees on the far side of the park where rows of wildflowers sprouted out of the dirt and grass. The woods were dark and dense and you could see the end of the sunlight were it reached as far as it could until the shadows were too thick like the darkness of a black hole. Minutes passed and I started to get worried, so I went in. The branches were hard and thick, and the thinner vines were tangled and knotted like hair. The wood smelled like new furniture but there was an ammonia smell too. I thought I heard a bird making a strange humming sound. It was Julian, growling, a deep resonance I felt in my gums, in the hardness of my teeth. The trees were uniform and perfect and blocked most of the light from above. But something white and fleshy stood out against the dark. In the dimness there, his white belly protruded over his belt like a heavy sack of rice. He was tall like most men and wasn’t wearing a shirt. I could smell the flesh of his sweat. His hand reached out, but before he could touch me, Julian leapt and tore the skin from his hand. The thickness of his blood reminded me of the oil in Dad’s car, and the skin hung ragged like paper. He fell to his knees, screaming. Then the dog tore at his face until his blood burst out and he bled over the black soil like a blood blister popping.
In the evening, we sat down for dinner. The Thompson’s had come round. We had a roast dinner even though it was Saturday. Chicken, roast potatoes, carrots, peas, broccoli and some green beans all covered in thick beef gravy. I had washed my hands before I sat down to eat, but there were dog hairs on my t-shirt, and then, as I cut through my piece of chicken, I saw dried blood under my fingernails where it had turned the colour of rust. I pretended to not have seen it but it made me sick as I brought my hand with the fork of chicken up towards my mouth. I could smell it. Copper. Like warm pennies on my tongue. No one spoke at the dinner table. Later that night, my mother left with Mr Thompson.
She had left some clothes in an untidy pile about their bedroom and left some things on the dresser. A silver necklace, red lipstick. The smell of her perfume was also still there in the room, which was sweet like pears, but the crystal-like bottle was gone. I had the sensation that she was there but not there as though she were dead and now a ghost, as though she had never left, and her scent in this room meant she would never go away. A part of her forever trapped in that bedroom. My father stood at the bedroom doorway, a Colossus of Rhodes in a shirt and tie. I never understood why he didn’t take his tie off after work. He stood there and watched me. His eyes were small and the colour of leather. The bags under his eyes made the hard lines of his face stick out. He didn’t say anything.
Mrs Thompson let Dennis take Julian with him. I didn’t even know the dog was gone until my father told me. I realised I’d already seen that dog for the last time and I’d never see it again.
‘Don’t think you’re getting another dog,’ my father said. Though I hadn’t asked for anything. I hadn’t opened my mouth. ‘And don’t go in your mother’s room. There’s nothing for you in there.’
When he said my ‘mother’s room’ I didn’t know what he meant at first since it wasn’t her room. It was both their room. I did what he said though and didn’t go back in. (I didn’t exactly want to go in, but I liked the smell of the perfume that still existed, even if diluted into the air, it still existed in the walls and carpet, in the dust). He didn’t go back in either. He put a bed together in the spare room we used to use for storage. There was an old cabinet in there, tins of paint, cardboard boxes filled with the ephemera of our lives. He cleared it out and made it into his bedroom. The bed just fit in longways which allowed one small bookcase and a bedside table. The room was smaller than mine. The books on the bookcase all belonged to my mother. He was a worse reader than I was, but he made sure the bookcase was full.
I went back to the woods. I felt alone without Julian and the world was quieter as though it was listening out for me. The sun was shining. I liked the beams of light cutting through the gaps in the brush. The ammonia was pungent. I could taste it. It was in the warm air. Strong and fleshy like the downy fur of a dog.
I recognised the place where I had been, and nothing about it suggested anyone had been there at all. The hard, black soil was loose at the rocks and stones, and grassy weeds shot out like thick, coarse hair. I was glad there wasn’t a man lying there on the ground; I thought he must have been fine. But then I thought maybe someone had found him and dragged his lifeless body away. But it didn’t look like that had happened. Could he have just stood up and walked off after what Julian did to him? I remembered it vividly. The dog’s teeth piercing the skin, its jaws clamping down hard, its head swinging side-to-side – the way it would kill a rabbit out of instinct – undressing the skin, exposing muscle. I could remember smelling it, hot salt and rusted metal.
My father and I lived together for the next few years in a painless, quiet existence. I hated that house and its stink of sweat. As I grew older, my stink became more profound; I was oil and grease and lard. I became a man. I often found myself daydreaming with the filth we had created. Pizza boxes, Chinese takeaway tubs, stale food fossilised and frozen in time.
Mrs Thompson hadn’t changed at all. I still saw her in the street sometimes and she asked about my father. She was worried, but I told her he was fine. Carol Thompson had beautiful brown hair and a thin, sharp face that cut along her jaw as though she were hardened glass. Her mouth was pursed and creased from a lifetime of cigarettes, and when she spoke it looked like she was about to kiss you.
‘Are you ever going to get another dog?’ I said.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘He was a good dog, that one.’
‘He was alright, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Vicious little thing. I hope he tears Dennis to pieces.’
I got Carol some flowers for her birthday. I’d felt sorry for her since her husband left and the only thing I could think to do was to buy her flowers. I decided not to buy them but to take some from the park, the ones near the woods at the lining of the trees. The familiar smells, sharp as vinegar and sour as off milk, caught in the pollen which made me sneeze. My eyes were watering and my nose was running. I pulled out a bunch near a thick tree when, through my wet eyes, I thought I saw someone standing there in the thicket. I blinked out the tears and wiped my eyes with the heel of my hands. I didn’t see anyone.
I left the park, gripping the flowers tightly in my hand. When I gave them to Carol, she kissed me, then invited me into her house. It smelled of coffee and tomato soup which she had been making in the kitchen. She lay the flowers down on the table, their soily roots exposed and oils oozing out over the tablecloth. Now the sun was out and harsh in the sky, it overexposed the kitchen bringing out the textures in her skin, her shoulders and neck. She boiled the kettle and we stood there without speaking as the kettle growled and eventually clicked off. We didn’t have tea, though. We went upstairs to her bedroom.
I woke up in the middle of the night, Carol sleeping beside me in her bed. Her body was warm and she slept quietly with hardly a breath so that I’d had to roll over to check she was still there. The light came in through the window facing the street where I’d grown up. On the windowsill was a picture of Dennis Thompson, big handsome smile, bright white teeth. I wondered if anything was going on between him and my mother when that photo was taken. He was smiling at me. His thick arm around Carol’s small neck who was also smiling. She looked incredibly beautiful in that photo.
‘I should really take that picture down,’ she said. Her tired voice came from the back of her throat. ‘I don’t know why I still have it.’
‘It’s a nice picture,’ I said.
She rolled over and curled up revealing the blemishes and dimples of her naked back. The curve of her spine moved in time with her breathing. Her ribs looked like fingers wrapped around her body. I placed a hand on her waist. Her skin was almost hot to touch. She flinched once then rested, then fell asleep.
My father and I went fishing. He liked fishing, and I thought he shouldn’t lay about the house anymore. He was pale and his eyes had shrunk and he’d grown a shaggy beard. We stood on the bank of the lake. It was a mild day with a slight cold breeze.
‘What do you think of Carol Thompson?’ he said.
‘She’s nice,’ I said. ‘I feel bad for her since…’
‘I thought of taking her out to dinner.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’m going round tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I told her I’d have a look at her car. You can come help me if you want.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ll help.’
I caught a fish then. It pulled on the line so hard I imagined there was a grown man under the water pulling on it, wanting to drag me down. My father said to reel it in, slowly, don’t wind it, and as it came out of the water, exposed to the air, it wriggled violently, splashing the cold salty water, I tasted it, and I took the fish in my hands and smacked it against a rock, twice, until it was killed. We took it home to eat, but I didn’t eat it. He did though. He ate the whole thing.
We went round to Carol’s house to work on the car. She made us cups of tea and we got to work. The insides under the bonnet like organs blackened with oil. His large hands moved intelligently like a surgeon over each wire and tube, twisting a wrench and unscrewing a cap. I watched how the oil blackened his hands and fingernails and his skin shone with grease. His hands moved independently from him, knowing exactly what to do, methodically holding one part in place and with the other hand reached in and pulled out something like a caesarean section. I wasn’t much use since I didn’t know anything about cars so I stood there and watched. I felt as though he forgot I was there as his interest was solely directed towards the car now. As I waited for him to ask for something, I looked at the dirt and oil over my hands, less so than his, but defined and thick. Permanent-looking. The grime under my fingernails.
‘Pass me that screwdriver,’ he said, his hand out, palm-up.
I picked up the screwdriver and handed it to him. He took it and carried on working. Carol came out then and stood in the doorframe of the front door, watching me. I didn’t know if she wanted to speak or if I should have said something, but then my dad turned to look at me too. He only looked at me for a second though because dropped the screwdriver onto the ground at his feet.
Carol Thompson and my father began their relationship at the start of July that year. It was a hot, humid summer, the flying ants were about and all the grass was dry and browned. This brown colour seeped into everything. A brownish, reddish colour as though everything had been dyed in the murky bogs and clay of the banks.
Carol moved into our house before the smell of my mother’s perfume even had a chance to fade away. She settled in pretty quickly, and soon her smell overrun the house like a flood of talcum powder and Chanel. I found her energy unsettling; she was constantly moving, cleaning, fixing things, making dinner. She was like a machine whose sole function was to clean up my father’s life as well as my own. Her dinners were delicious, though. So, the three of us began a routine of sitting at the dining room table every evening around 6pm, as Carol served us what she’d decided to cook and we all ate in a strange sort of silence. It was less silence and more devoid of speaking. I’ve always thought that a place without words is a place without soul. I listened to the knives and forks clinking on the plates, accidentally scraping the china, and the chewing and lips smacking, kissing the air in an attempt to dislodge the fibrous meat from between the molars. The stink of gravy and onions and sweat. The insect-like movement of our eyes. We had our dinners like this most days for a few weeks, the wordless speech patterns of our mouths as we chewed meat and gristle. Afterwards, Carol would wash up as my father sat in the living room watching TV. I’d sit with him until Carol finished washing the dishes and came back in. Soap marred any lingering smell of food and everything was so clean it was like the dinner had never happened.
Carol and I exchanged few words then. I remember she was making tea in the kitchen and she asked me if I wanted one when I came in. The kitchen was always hot and close now with her constant cooking, and the added steam from the kettle as it moaned under its breath.
‘How many sugars?’ she said.
‘Just one,’ I said.
Her eyes were bright and had the look of sage. She smiled by curling her lips to her teeth. She made me my tea and passed it to me and I drank it and she watched me drink.
‘I want to make dinner tonight,’ Carol said.
‘Lovely,’ my father said. ‘You hear that? Carol’s going to make us dinner.’
‘I have a guest, if that’s alright,’ she said. Both my father and I looked at her, confused as to who a guest could possibly be. ‘His name is Graham. He’s my cousin. I wanted to have him round. He’s not been doing too well recently, so I thought a little dinner with you two would do him good.’
‘Sounds fantastic,’ my father said, but I didn’t say anything.
Graham was bald and as tall as Dennis Thompson. He stuck out his hand. I took his hand and shook it. His neck had recesses in the skin like the fold of a bulldog’s face. His swollen fat cheeks made him look like a bulbous mushroom. The sad look in his eyes, wet and stupid, along with the broken red capillaries, made him look like a corpse.
The evening drew in and Carol was busy making the dinner while my father kept going in and out of the kitchen to help. I sat in the living room with Graham who didn’t say anything to me and I didn’t say anything to him. His shoulders were slouched and his head low. He was a little bit older than me but he held himself like a child. I didn’t want to say anything to him. I didn’t want him or Carol in my house. The warm, dark shadows of the evening riddled his face turning him into the Phantom of the Opera. He was smartly dressed in a green corduroy suit and smart brown shoes. I thought he was well-put together. He looked like pieces of different men sewn together. My father called us to dinner.
At the dinner table, I still didn’t speak and I saw my father glare at me, embarrassed. But I didn’t know what to say. I ate my chicken. It was nice. Carol and Graham both chewed their food. I thought the way Carol chewed her food was as though she was by herself. But it was only at the table that I noticed Graham’s face didn’t look right. The folds of his bulldog face was pink and white with pockmarks and soft misshapen jowls as if he had no distinct jaw or cheekbones. He sort of frightened me, and when his small eyes peered at me, I looked away, a heat rising in my stomach, and my father still glaring at me, meaning for me to say something.
‘Why’ve you not been doing well?’ I said to Graham, and my father glared harder at me.
‘We’ve been fixing up Carol’s car,’ my father said before Graham had time to reply. So, he did have some conversation after all.
Graham turned to him and showed an interest in what my father was saying about the car. I carried on eating, hurrying almost so I didn’t have to sit at this table any longer, when I noticed Carol staring at me. Her eyes were soft and wet like a dog’s eyes and she didn’t move only for chewing her meat as I did in that moment too. I didn’t trust this woman. She was a stranger in my home. I looked away from her and continued to eat, listening to my father tell Graham things about the car.
‘…you have to know what you’re doing with an engine like that. It’s only one litre but still, it’s all about the mechanics, you know?’
Graham nodded along to what my father was saying, caught on his every word, wide-eyed excitement to hear him talk about this. I was desperate to get away from the table but I found myself unable to move. Carol’s eyes were on me, my father’s eyes kept going to me with resentment then back to Graham. Graham’s head bobbed up and down as he chewed his potatoes.
My father looked at me then. ‘We’re bringing Carol’s car over here tomorrow. Be easier to work on it. I’m going to need you to help with it.’
The next day, the afternoon became blood orange and warm. I stepped back and watched the two of them work on the car. My father took our empty mugs inside and was talking to Carol when Graham and I got in the car to test it. I watched as Carol and my father went in the house together and the door closed behind them. Graham drove the car down the street and onto the main road. Sitting next to him, he seemed even larger as though his body could hardly fit in his seat. His round belly almost touching the steering wheel. His chicken skin hand pushing and pulling the gear stick. His bloated head with its crevices of scars, discoloured to white and pink, moved as if with a mechanism.
I thought of my father and Carol Thompson together. I wondered what they were doing. The car moved faster and faster towards the bright setting sun. It was like I was heading towards a flaming field and the heat was incredible. Graham shifted gear, and again, his arm moving like machinery, the solid joint of his shoulder to the bready dough of his upper arm, to the more solid structure of his forearm. I watched how his movements were very precise and well thought out as though what he was doing he’d done many times before. The car picked up speed and I wondered if he’d forgotten I was there with him. He pressed his foot further down on the gas pedal and the car moaned and hummed as we shot down a steep incline and the trees were being thrown backwards on either side, the fiery sunset now an orange blur. I felt the pressure of movement in my body – in my chest, in my stomach, in my groin – as I hurtled through empty space at fifty, maybe sixty miles per hour, and I felt the terror of having no control over what might happen.
‘The car seems to be fine now,’ I said, my hands were gripping my seat. The pressure was resting in my heart. I looked at him side-on and his unbothered expression worried me.
‘What?’ Graham said.
‘The car,’ I said. ‘It seems fine.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right you are.’ The car slowed and eased to a normal speed, which suddenly felt very slow. Then the car stopped and Graham sighed loudly and laughed, patting himself on his large belly, his grin wide and sharp with a bit of spit on his lip. ‘Car works just fine,’ he said. ‘He’s a good mechanic, your dad. You could learn a lot from him.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘No, I’m sure I could learn a few things from him.’
Graham then suggested we step out of the car and watch the rest of the sunset. ‘It looks nice here by the trees,’ he said. So that’s what we did. We stood near the trees of the woods and watched the sunset down the hill. It was engulfed in a ball of red flame. We watched how it slowly sank and burst like a bubble and let swell the harsh cold of night. As soon as I felt the chill on my arms, I said we should probably head back.
‘You don’t get on with your dad, do you?’ he said.
‘I do,’ I said. ‘It’s just that… my mum.’
‘Didn’t she run off with another man?’
‘She did, yeah,’ I said. ‘But I can’t let go of the fact that she’s my mother. I’m sure there’s still the smallest bit of good in her.’
Graham sighed and opened the driver’s side door. ‘He did his best for you, your dad. And, well, I don’t know your mother, but I suppose she would have done right by you, had she not left.’
I began spending more time with Graham who showed me the working mechanics of cars and their engines. I liked the precise nature of the engines. The inhuman organs where everything has its role for the whole to function. We worked together in his garage for a few weeks and he taught me a great deal about cars. Often, we’d take one of the cars we’d worked on for a drive. We usually headed for the fringe of the woods where it was nice and quiet. Sometimes we parked and got out, sitting on the roadside, eating sandwiches, drinking a beer each, and talking about our lives. One day, we decided to go into the woods. We walked and walked, crunching leaves and fallen branches under our feet. The shadows of the trees and the pouring light caused a mesmerising optical illusion of people standing between the trees.
‘I used to bring my dog here,’ I said.
‘Did you now?’ Graham said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, it wasn’t mine. It belonged to Carol before she lived with us. She used to be our neighbour, you know. Her ex-husband took the dog with him when he left. I really liked that dog. After everything that happened, I wish he’d left the dog behind, that way I could have looked after it.’
The light caught the few disfigurements of his face and he smiled. His mouth was long as though it was being pulled from either end.
As one bird took off, several other birds scattered, flapping their wings, knocking leaves from the branches. The leaves and twigs rained down on us. Graham was looking up at the birds, not talking anymore, his back to me. I had this sudden unease then, as though he was waiting for me to speak but I didn’t have anything to say. I couldn’t speak, once again unable to get my words out. I thought of the dog, Julian, which was long gone now, and I thought of my mother too. In a few weeks, I would turn twenty and I would leave all this behind.
© Michael Holloway
Cover image by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash