your father

“Your father was retarded,” she said. “Simple as is. Retarded.” She repeated the word with some relish, the perfect summation, as it was, of her husband’s more notable traits.

“Mum, you can’t say that stuff anymore,” he said. “You just can’t.”

“Defective then. Broken, maybe even incomplete, something… missing. Something important. That thing, its absence. Left him retarded.” She sipped the tomato cup-a-soup, closed her eyes to savour it, necked a fist-sized hunk of farmhouse, almost stale, just the way she liked it. She left the loaves to go hard over a course of days then broke them in splinters to crunch through during conversations, in front of films on TV, a distracting pleasure, harder and sharper of edge than even the best available crisps. All were as croutons to her. “He was a charmless man,” she continued. “Dense and unyielding, stunted emotionally. He was forged of an intense ugliness, of both character and appearance. Joyless, unfunny, simply incapable of pleasures either high or low. There was no connection there,” she pointed to her head as she spoke, “no connection at all. To anything. He just… was. Though what he was is unclear.”

He cleared the soup cup away, rinsed it beneath the tepid tap water, the sink rimmed with a watermark line of gelatinous orangey scum, the soups of a lifetime having finally left their mark.

“You refer to him in the past tense, mum,” he said, failing to dry his hands on a sodden threadbare tea towel. “He isn’t dead, or gone, or lost to this world and others before it.” He filled the kettle and turned it on. Yet more boiling water. He tired of the sound, the bubbles, the taste and proceeded regardless. Was he too defective? He had heard tell of the genetics of these matters, the defectiveness and ugliness, the uncompromising and inevitable power of heredity. Condemned to his paltry lot, so to speak. The selfish bastards. “He’s upstairs.”

“Upstairs, downstairs, gone, otherwise,” she said. She was crafting a cigarette little thicker than a cocktail stick, a hair’s thread of tobacco drawn tightly through its middle. “Matters not.” She lit it and sucked on it greedily, swamped as it was within her thick wet lips, its empty end saturated and inconsequential between them, paper severed by the sheer weight of flesh. “Fact remains.” She finished it off, the minute strand of combustible plant racing like a fuse to the bomb of her skull. “Retarded.”

He sorted the tea out, milky and weak and very sweet.

“You married him mum,” he said. A boy himself these affairs of the heart were of great interest to him. They defied science as he understood it and succeeded in so doing. “Why would you do that? If he is so… defective?” It felt less true – which he knew it to be – if he whispered the last word.

“His dick,” she said, holding each hand some two feet distant from the other. “Huge.” He squinted in repugnance and wished himself absent. “Now come and kiss your mother.”

He did as asked, obedient boy, those fleshy lips on his like hands round a throat.

“Tell me you love me,” she said.

“I do.”

“Tell me then.”

“‘I love you.’”

“Good boy.”