Father pt.9
9
My bed that night, the same I had once shared with Rachel, felt empty. Particularly now, after I had been turned on and disappointed by Angela. If I closed my eyes, and thought hard, I could imagine Angela naked and warm on top of me in the darkness. But the image was blurry, and kept fading into nothingness as I realised that I may just as well image Rachel as imagine Angela, for neither of them were here.
I sighed. It was one am, and I was horny, but there was nothing I could do about it. Well, there was something, but I just was not in the mood for that, not without someone there for stimulation, her warm skin pressing against mine, her tongue in my mouth. Instead I just lay there and thought about the day.
I wondered why Angela had run off like that so suddenly. Fair enough, I never mentioned my children, but it seemed like an over-reaction. So did Gemma’s reaction. It’s not like I was intentionally deceiving anyone. And why was Gemma home anyway? Maybe she would tell me tomorrow, although I doubted that.
My suspicions were correct: Gemma spent all of Sunday avoiding me. Lucy had Sunday dinner at my mother’s house, which meant that the simple meal Gemma and I had was devoid of conversation. After lunch she just went back to her room. I did not even try to see if the door was locked. When Lucy did get home, she just came in and started watching television. I joined her for a little while, but the cartoons she watched were annoying and repetitive, even after a few minutes, so I was alone for most of Sunday.
I spent the time in my study, just killing time on my computer. I thought about emailing Angela, but did not know what to say. I thought too about downloading some porn, but with two children in the house, even if neither of them were interested in talking to me right now, there was too greater risk of getting caught. Maybe I should put a lock on my study door, I considered briefly.
I was beginning again to feel as I had when I was sixteen; that I was the only guy in the world not having sex. Sometimes it felt like I was in a loveless marriage; sexually frustrated, but tied down by my children. But I could never resent them for that, because I loved them, even if they did not always want to talk to me, and perhaps that made it worse.
On Tuesday night I had a dream. I was in bed, it was a beautiful Summer morning and Rachel lay on the bed next to me, naked, every curve, every bump, every hollow and facet of her skin, highlighted in the morning sun that shone through the blind, making her seem as if she was glowing.
I was overcome with lust, and I just kissed her slowly all over her body. I started with her legs, letting the smooth skin lightly brush my lips over and over again. Then I worked my way up, kissing her hips, her stomach, the little mole she had under her left breast. I kissed her breasts, her shoulders, her collar bone, her neck, her cheeks, and then finally, slowly, her lips. And then we were locked together, an intimate embrace, our hips moving in an undulating rhythm.
Outside, in the dream, the sounds of birds chirruping beautiful songs filled the air, and insects, flying through the sky on vibrating wings, dancing from flower to flower. But we were oblivious to all that, my wife and I, moving as one, together. And I suppose we spent the whole day like that; an hours’ long sensual intimacy, because the light changed in the room and the sun eventually set, slowly leaving us in darkness.
All was silent outside, all the birds, the insects now sleeping in their nests, their hives. And all that could be heard inside the room was our slow, satisfied groans. Slowly though, Rachel seemed to become more distant; we were still held together, but inside she seemed to be turning away from me.
The room too had changed. We seemed now to be in a single bed, although that seemed of little consequence as we were taking up so little space. Rachel seemed to become stiffer though, like clockwork slowly rusting up, and she kissed me less on the mouth. I ignored this though and started kissing her body again. She definitely felt different though, almost as a different person, but somehow still the same.
Slowly the room became lighter again. At first I thought it was dawn and we had been making love for the whole night, but then I realised it was artificial light, and it was still early in the morning. This was when the shocking revelation hit me, when the room was no longer in darkness: It was no longer Rachel beneath me at all, it was Gemma.
She began to fight me, trying to throw me off, but I resisted her, fighting back, though I do not know why. And the dream was now a nightmare, for I was repulsed by what I was doing, but could not stop, as if my body would not listen to me, and my hands pinned her against the bed against my will.
I woke breathing hard with sweat running down my forehead. That was all I remember of the beginning of my conscious day on Wednesday, for it seemed like seconds had passed between my waking and my being stood, as I now was, at the stove cooking pasta. I looked around the kitchen, confused for a moment, and then realised that I must have had an attack of my epilepsy that had wiped the memories of the day, my first in eight months.
Usually these did not bother me too much, but I was already disturbed by my dream of the previous night, having only just remembered it, and now I could not remember anything since it until this moment. I could have, though probably had not, done anything, but what worried me was that I was occasionally prone to sleep walking.
I noticed the pasta was about to boil over, so I turned down the hob and tried one of the soft shell-shaped pieces. It was done. I went to the front room and told Lucy, then shouted up the stairs,
“Gemma, dinner’s ready.” She did not answer. I went back to the kitchen and started to dish it out. Lucy came in and sat out. Somehow, having no memory of the previous few hours gave the rest of the day a dream-like quality.
We had already started eating when Gemma walked into the room. She said nothing, just sat down and began to eat, almost robotically. I watched her for a moment, sat there on the side of the table between Lucy and myself. Lucy too watched her, but longer than I did because I looked back at my food.
It was not for a while that I noticed Gemma’s black eye. Lucy had obviously seen it straight away, being sat on Gemma’s right side and it being Gemma’s right eye that had sustained the injury. From her left, where I sat, it was obscured, until she happened to glance over my way at the same time as I looked up.
I just stared at her at first, at the purple bruising around her pretty blue eye. She stared back for a few moments, then broke eye contact and looked back at the table. Sometimes she reminded me of a timid little animal. I was about to ask her what had happened, but I was afraid of the answer, just in case…but surely not. I put down my fork.
“I’m just going to the toilet,” I said slowly. Lucy looked up and watched me leave the room. Gemma did not.
When I got into the bathroom I locked the door. I had never felt the need for a lock before that time I walked in on Gemma, but now that we had one I was beginning to use it all the time. I stared into the mirror. I looked tired; dark circles under my eyes and the stubble I usually let grow for a few days, that I usually thought looked quite stylish, just seemed to make me look tired and unkempt.
My dark eyes looked back at me sullenly. What sort of face was it in the mirror? I loved my daughters, and I knew I would never hurt them, but that dream had been so real. And I was feeling so sexually frustrated. And I had no recollection of what I had done since it. How had Gemma got that black eye? Had I done it? But I would never. But someone had.
I clenched my fist a couple of times and looked at it, my hand; the fingers were thin, a little bony (that perhaps came from all the time I spent with a computer). What if, I wondered, what if I had suffered more severely than the doctors realised in that car accident? What if I had worse brain damage than they thought and it had made me psychotic?
On the landing behind me, through the door, I heard Gemma’s door open and close again, even in the quietness the little click as her lock slipped into place. Maybe she did not just not want to talk to me, but she was afraid of me. Had I ever given her any reason to fear me though? Well, at least she was safe, locked away in her room like her own little cocoon. I wondered if she locked it when she slept, or if she would start doing so now.
Then I turned my attention back to the mirror. I stared again into my face, I rubbed my eyes with my hands, splashed a little cold water onto my cheeks. I needed some time alone I decided.
Leaving the bathroom and going back down to the kitchen, I met Lucy about to leave the room, her plate cleared away from the table. Neither of us said anything as I entered, but she just came over and hugged me where I stood. I felt her little arms wrap around my legs and her head press into my crotch. The contact was awkward and so I did not want to hug her bag, to press her any more against me.
She looked up, sensing my awkwardness.
“Daddy, is Gemma okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, looking back down at her. She loosened her arms from around me and left the room. I looked at the now cold pasta on the table. I no longer had an appetite, so I scraped it into the bin, put it into the dishwasher and turned it on.
Tags: family, father, Fiction, isolation, loneliness, novella, original fiction, part nine, Relationships, Silent Hill 2
