Read Online Brothers and Sisters by Charlotte Wood - Free Book Online
Authors: Charlotte Wood
Tags: Family
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day when he got up on the truck to go back, he handed me a little parcel, a little hand-wrapped parcel. With a clean folded hanky inside.’
On the tape I hear my father’s voice crack and break. It wrenches with sobs.
‘I’d given him nothing,’ he whispers, ‘but he’d given me this. And these are the things that used to break my heart.’
The story of that little boy was about the only thing our father ever told my sister and me about Vietnam, and only then because we asked him about the handkerchief, which remained one of his most treasured possessions. In a story in one of my books, I used to think with a savage sense of having been cheated, it would have turned out that we would have adopted that little boy. That was how it should have ended, clicking into place with satisfying story-like inevitability, in a bigger world where bigger hearts ruled. I opened my books after that, and doubted their veracity. They were just pasteboard, really, holding together pages of paper in a certain order; their magic began to seem a little childish. Real life, colourless and hard and demanding to be endured, was the thing that would still be there when you woke up in the morning.
Over thirty-five years later, I listen on the tape to that poor little boy still breaking my father’s heart, then the sound of him manfully swallowing, trying to continue to speak. The words scrape faintly and huskily through his ravaged voice box, scarred with tumours, like every sentence hurts. In the background of the recording I hear my baby daughter start crying, demanding to be fed, and it seems like the cruellest irony that of all the things his cancer robbed him of, it took away his voice, ensuring that the rest of those stories would never be told, after all.
My golden-haired, cherubic brother was just over a year old when my father returned. Considering he’d missed his son’s first year of life in its entirety, my mother was anxious to have something, some ‘first’ he could be present for, and so she had valiantly fought a losing battle to keep my brother from toddling before Dad was home to witness it. She’d strapped him, squirming, into his stroller at the airport as we saw the plane carrying our father touch down and taxi towards us. As we waited, craning our heads in anticipation for Dad to appear through the doors at the end of the long corridor, she must have let the baby down for a brief respite from the confines of the stroller. My sister and I strained at the barricades we’d been expressly forbidden to step beyond.
When I saw the figure of my father striding towards us in the distance, thin and tanned and lanky in his fawn short-sleeved uniform, I became, for the second time in my life, a momentary stranger to myself. Heedlessly, I ducked under the barricade to run towards him. I think I remember feeling my sister hesitate, wavering between following me and maintaining obedience, and me running out alone, and my father bending down to sweep me up, the expression on his face one of unutterable relief.
He rose and kept walking, towards my mother and sister. A few more seconds and we were all over him . . . well, everyone except for my brother, who took one look at this stranger and burst into howling tears. Putting his newly acquired toddling skills to use, he took off in the opposite direction.
Now that I am a parent myself, I imagine how that must have felt to my father, watching his child run terrified from him, feeling the rest of us cling to him like he was a lifebuoy. I imagine everything he vowed in that moment, to subject none of his family to what he’d been through, to bear it in silence. Pain like this, I can see now, heals in us like an unset broken bone; the fracture knitted together uncertainly under the surface, something you can never quite trust to bear your weight.
As is the way with childhood, I look at that scene now and I doubt the exactness of my recollection. Memories get tumbled together like
On the tape I hear my father’s voice crack and break. It wrenches with sobs.
‘I’d given him nothing,’ he whispers, ‘but he’d given me this. And these are the things that used to break my heart.’
The story of that little boy was about the only thing our father ever told my sister and me about Vietnam, and only then because we asked him about the handkerchief, which remained one of his most treasured possessions. In a story in one of my books, I used to think with a savage sense of having been cheated, it would have turned out that we would have adopted that little boy. That was how it should have ended, clicking into place with satisfying story-like inevitability, in a bigger world where bigger hearts ruled. I opened my books after that, and doubted their veracity. They were just pasteboard, really, holding together pages of paper in a certain order; their magic began to seem a little childish. Real life, colourless and hard and demanding to be endured, was the thing that would still be there when you woke up in the morning.
Over thirty-five years later, I listen on the tape to that poor little boy still breaking my father’s heart, then the sound of him manfully swallowing, trying to continue to speak. The words scrape faintly and huskily through his ravaged voice box, scarred with tumours, like every sentence hurts. In the background of the recording I hear my baby daughter start crying, demanding to be fed, and it seems like the cruellest irony that of all the things his cancer robbed him of, it took away his voice, ensuring that the rest of those stories would never be told, after all.
My golden-haired, cherubic brother was just over a year old when my father returned. Considering he’d missed his son’s first year of life in its entirety, my mother was anxious to have something, some ‘first’ he could be present for, and so she had valiantly fought a losing battle to keep my brother from toddling before Dad was home to witness it. She’d strapped him, squirming, into his stroller at the airport as we saw the plane carrying our father touch down and taxi towards us. As we waited, craning our heads in anticipation for Dad to appear through the doors at the end of the long corridor, she must have let the baby down for a brief respite from the confines of the stroller. My sister and I strained at the barricades we’d been expressly forbidden to step beyond.
When I saw the figure of my father striding towards us in the distance, thin and tanned and lanky in his fawn short-sleeved uniform, I became, for the second time in my life, a momentary stranger to myself. Heedlessly, I ducked under the barricade to run towards him. I think I remember feeling my sister hesitate, wavering between following me and maintaining obedience, and me running out alone, and my father bending down to sweep me up, the expression on his face one of unutterable relief.
He rose and kept walking, towards my mother and sister. A few more seconds and we were all over him . . . well, everyone except for my brother, who took one look at this stranger and burst into howling tears. Putting his newly acquired toddling skills to use, he took off in the opposite direction.
Now that I am a parent myself, I imagine how that must have felt to my father, watching his child run terrified from him, feeling the rest of us cling to him like he was a lifebuoy. I imagine everything he vowed in that moment, to subject none of his family to what he’d been through, to bear it in silence. Pain like this, I can see now, heals in us like an unset broken bone; the fracture knitted together uncertainly under the surface, something you can never quite trust to bear your weight.
As is the way with childhood, I look at that scene now and I doubt the exactness of my recollection. Memories get tumbled together like
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