My father’s diaries and journals were hidden on the very top shelf of the kitchen larder. Hidden where he knew they would regularly be found by inquisitive youngsters, my sister and me. I was twelve the first time I climbed the shelves and discovered his writings, his daughter, just thirteen. By this subterfuge dad was able to explain things without recourse to conversations that made him sound confused. My father was like that. Now that I live with Alba and Peter we would love to turn him into a work of art, which, in his own modest way, was what I think he aspired to create. We have his works of art. His daughter read them many a time when she was younger but, in her late teens was unable to bring herself to read them anew. He created my sister and loved her dearly, but he brought me up with a quiet, desperate adoration I was never able to demonstrate in return. When I understood this, I understood his sadness, his silent despair. Pardon me if I have spoken of these things before, but sometimes I need to get these ideas off my chest, sometimes, when I speak, I can only speak through his words. Sometimes I am inside his head, I am him and so I can plead forgiveness.
The smell of death, he called it. The Smell of Nothing, he wrote, but he kept the concept quietly to himself throughout his childhood into his adolescent years. It was, he explained, a distant mixture of historical odours of institutional catering, cold cooked nursery lunches, tepid school dinners, and lukewarm hospital meals, “a prison of vast steaming aluminium vats filled with the faint smell of death. The Smell of Nothing, the smell that takes my breath away, that empties my lungs. A vacuum, The Smell of Death, it visits every now and again, like the welcome perfumes of night time pursuits, of sperm between my fingers, sperm seeping from between your late departed mother’s legs, sperm at the altar from which I so often fed so avidly. The Smell of Death, it visits every now and then like the scents of mourning toast and fresh coffee the morning after, but The Smell of Death, it stalks its way back too often for comfort, for it has its job to do; to remind me that ‘You are still alive!’.”
And then there is the entry entitled “A Child is Born.” And every time I read it I understand what my sister must feel and I long for her company ever more fiercely. Sonia never leaves news of where she may wander, so my longings remain strictly my own to suffer. How can I apologise? Father tried for an explanation but Sonia was long gone. “A Child is Born.” was written two weeks before dad died and is the last lucid scratching in the last, the newest, and the emptiest of his little pile of black leather bound journals.
“Born bald and choked up from the amniotic ocean into nothing. I was breach birthed, beached in salt sand and bathed in sticky blood, strangled with your gristle noose, but nothing happened. Birth, it had killed my art. The delirium was gone.
Then daughters mine, one breached bellowing the amniotic portal I had oft time worshipped at, she was mine, I had created her with you in love and lust. The second from the scalpel, from the burnished caesarean blade born, yours from somewhere and someone unknown to me, both born into nothing, both grown beautiful, yours, supremely, dangerously so. Adored, yours, supremely and dangerously so, but nothing happened. Births, they had killed my art. The delirium was gone.
Grown bald unto death, splattered and gagging on blood, I had been opened in caesarean canal, to give birth to cancer, in vain, and then I was drained, flushed away into the canal, into the tumourous sewers of nothing, into nothing. I watched the whole process from the fluorescent heavens, the theatre ceiling, the operating theatre ceiling. Cancer. There’s nothing to be done and nothing happened. Its birth, it had killed my art. The delirium was gone.”
