Read Online God's Callgirl by Carla Van Raay - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Carla Van Raay
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the living room. Papa had the large carving knife in his hands and Mama was saying breathlessly, ‘Go on then, do it! Kill me!’ while she dared him with her eyes. She said it so many times that the only way he could save face was to actually stab her. She let go a scream and we children wailed the more loudly. The tribal bond with our parents was temporarily broken; we were abandoned, floating loose, drifting like flotsam on a churning murky ocean.
The blood brought my papa to his senses. He grabbed a towel and stemmed the flow from her neck. In time, the scar mended very well and was forgotten. I only noticed it again years later, in a photo of her lying in a nursing home bed,looking affectionately at my father, who was holding her hand. That’s how it was between my parents—they truly loved each other and would never part. And yet they could not stand each other. When the stuff of passion can’t be positive, let it be there anyway.
WHEN LIFE WAS not light but heavy, I escaped into daydreams. I had friends who lived with me from day to day—my dolls. I had several and they became alive for me. I talked to them, made clothes for them, put them to bed, gave them flowers and showered affection on them. My clever papa had made me a wooden doll’s house painted a beautiful red. Even though the soft little carpets were the remnants of my pet rabbit, I kept them to decorate the floor. They gave me an eerie feeling of pure clean softness.
Only my dolls saw anything like the real me. I related to them as I would have preferred to relate to the people around me, if I had dared. With my dolls I was an untiringly tender mother, a sister, a child asking for help, a nurse, and a creative problem-solver. The dolls were alive for me until I was ten. When I was eleven, they were sometimes alive and sometimes not—curiously, it depended on how I chose to look at them.
I kept my doll’s house in an open flat space halfway up the staircase, close to the ceiling. The area was big enough for a mattress and one day I persuaded my parents to let me sleep there with my family of dolls. However, a nocturnal visit from my papa, or maybe the nightmare of it happening again, made me wet the bed. I never mentioned it, and nothing was ever said to me about it. This was both a relief and a disturbance, because it must have been noticed by my mama, who washed my sheet and put a clean one on the bed. Why didn’t she say something? Was she suffering fromhaving to square things in her own confused mind? Didn’t she know what was happening? Did she choose not to know? Instead of protecting me, she grew bitter and as I grew older began to regard me as a rival, calling me degrading names like vuile dweil , filthy rag.
MY MOTHER HAD to find some way to absorb the roughness she sometimes received at the hands of the man who demanded his marriage rights. One day she was nursing a mysteriously sore foot. It was never explained to us children why it was bandaged, or why she couldn’t move from her chair. She whimpered whenever anyone came near her foot, and cried and rolled her eyes, sucking in her lips in pain when I accidentally bumped it. I felt the pain as much as she did: it went up my legs like knives of fire and I cried for her. But not far away was a bitch, growing and feeding on suppressed anger at my mother.
There were times when this bitch came out to bite everyone in her vicinity. I was eleven going on twelve, when my mother realised she was unable to stop me. There was to be a photo session—there were seven children by now—and a real live photographer was coming to our house. I knew instinctively that this would be an opportunity for my mother to show off her favourite son, Markus, the fourth child and her second boy. He had golden curls that were not cut off until he went to school, and both my mother and father adored him. Markus could do no wrong, but I knew how to wrong him and I knew how to destroy this special occasion for my
The blood brought my papa to his senses. He grabbed a towel and stemmed the flow from her neck. In time, the scar mended very well and was forgotten. I only noticed it again years later, in a photo of her lying in a nursing home bed,looking affectionately at my father, who was holding her hand. That’s how it was between my parents—they truly loved each other and would never part. And yet they could not stand each other. When the stuff of passion can’t be positive, let it be there anyway.
WHEN LIFE WAS not light but heavy, I escaped into daydreams. I had friends who lived with me from day to day—my dolls. I had several and they became alive for me. I talked to them, made clothes for them, put them to bed, gave them flowers and showered affection on them. My clever papa had made me a wooden doll’s house painted a beautiful red. Even though the soft little carpets were the remnants of my pet rabbit, I kept them to decorate the floor. They gave me an eerie feeling of pure clean softness.
Only my dolls saw anything like the real me. I related to them as I would have preferred to relate to the people around me, if I had dared. With my dolls I was an untiringly tender mother, a sister, a child asking for help, a nurse, and a creative problem-solver. The dolls were alive for me until I was ten. When I was eleven, they were sometimes alive and sometimes not—curiously, it depended on how I chose to look at them.
I kept my doll’s house in an open flat space halfway up the staircase, close to the ceiling. The area was big enough for a mattress and one day I persuaded my parents to let me sleep there with my family of dolls. However, a nocturnal visit from my papa, or maybe the nightmare of it happening again, made me wet the bed. I never mentioned it, and nothing was ever said to me about it. This was both a relief and a disturbance, because it must have been noticed by my mama, who washed my sheet and put a clean one on the bed. Why didn’t she say something? Was she suffering fromhaving to square things in her own confused mind? Didn’t she know what was happening? Did she choose not to know? Instead of protecting me, she grew bitter and as I grew older began to regard me as a rival, calling me degrading names like vuile dweil , filthy rag.
MY MOTHER HAD to find some way to absorb the roughness she sometimes received at the hands of the man who demanded his marriage rights. One day she was nursing a mysteriously sore foot. It was never explained to us children why it was bandaged, or why she couldn’t move from her chair. She whimpered whenever anyone came near her foot, and cried and rolled her eyes, sucking in her lips in pain when I accidentally bumped it. I felt the pain as much as she did: it went up my legs like knives of fire and I cried for her. But not far away was a bitch, growing and feeding on suppressed anger at my mother.
There were times when this bitch came out to bite everyone in her vicinity. I was eleven going on twelve, when my mother realised she was unable to stop me. There was to be a photo session—there were seven children by now—and a real live photographer was coming to our house. I knew instinctively that this would be an opportunity for my mother to show off her favourite son, Markus, the fourth child and her second boy. He had golden curls that were not cut off until he went to school, and both my mother and father adored him. Markus could do no wrong, but I knew how to wrong him and I knew how to destroy this special occasion for my
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