Read Online The Story of My Face by Kathy Page - Free Book Online Page A

being like this, but the way you behaved today – looked through Natalie, didn’t even speak to her, let alone whatever happened when she came up here – is not tolerable, and when I tell him your father will say exactly the same –’ He’s her son, but Barbara doesn’t at all want to touch and tidy him. And he, sitting there so solid, so somehow other, wouldn’t welcome it. . . . How did they get like this?
    â€˜You’re a good boy,’ she says, more gently, as she sits down on his bed, ‘but you’ve always been an only one. You can’t know what it’s like to be any other way. Your Uncle Adrian and I were very close as children. Even now, despite the problems, I do believe I could count on him if it was something important – Mark, you know how I did always want you to have a sister –’
    â€˜That girl isn’t anything like any sister of mine would ever be!’ he says. ‘Don’t be daft!’
    Barbara is always bursting into tears. She cries regularly in Service, if the reading is sad, especially if there’s anything in it about a child, barrenness, or motherhood. He’ll notice her fidgeting in the chair next to him, and force himself not to look at her, though he knows she’s groping for her handbag under the chair, in order to find a handkerchief. It’s a quiet kind of crying to begin with. Her glasses mist over, her cheeks redden, shine with tears. Then she’ll start to gasp and sniff. She won’t be able to find the bag and he’ll have to do it for her, pull it up into her lap, open the clasp. Later, when she’s finished, the faint snap! of her closing the bag will interrupt him all over again.
    â€˜It was God’s will. He took her,’ he says now. ‘Don’t start crying now. Stop, Mum, please –’
    When she’s gone, apologising, gasping for breath, feeling her way down the stairs, Mark pulls a box of weights out from under his bed. He’s charged with a feeling of fight, a desire for violence. He wants to obliterate the interloper; he wants to punish his mother for the mess she’s making, but of course it’s wrong to even think this way, and anyway, he can’t begin to think how . He wants to leave school, he wants to fight the Government, all governments, who support the commerce in images, advertising, news, art, billboards, neon, full-page colour spreads, TV sets, and who now have made it impossible for them to attend the summer congregation in Elojoki. . . . He’s sick of living like this. And then again, the feeling of wanting to fight has itself to be fought until every joint and bone in his body has pitted itself in stalemate against some other part. He loads five pounds more than the last time, holds the hand weights at shoulder level, lies back on the floor, sits up.
    Heat shoots to the surface of the skin. His heart pumps. On and on he goes, up and down, up and down. His face and chest are drenched with sweat, his eyes squeezed shut. Tell me, please , he asks, a little scared of doing so: I want to serve. I’ll do anything. Give me a sign –

8

    WELL NATALIE: IT’S THREE WEEKS NOW. DOES BEING HERE BRING MEMORIES BACK FOR YOU THE WAY IT DOES FOR ME? DO YOU WISH YOU’D NEVER COME? I DO.
    Yes. Yes – and also no. There are days the village – its mixture of concrete and dried-blood red buildings under a grey sky – looks to me like the absolute arse of the earth. At other times, when there’s a little warmth in the light, or even actual sunshine, the layered views – twigs, treetops, sky – from the windows of Tuomas’s tiny house seem all of a sudden infinitely various and beautiful.
    Today, however, is definitely an arse of the earth day. The note from Christina jaundices my view and then again my face hurts badly from the freezing, gritty wind. I’m sticking to my resolution to take in as much exercise and