did I see him last, five, six years ago? He didn’t turn up for my mother’s funeral.
“What do you want?”
We look at each other. Everything about him screams good life. I can’t be more jealous. More bitter, reeking of betrayed. My stomach rebels: the whirl of forced emotions and food makes me queasy. I am no longer in control: screams, abuse, reflux bile, half-chewed lettuce and lumps of dough and chips pour out of me. I throw up things bottled up inside me and the only thing I can think of is how lucky it is that I didn’t take the pills otherwise they could have been wasted and I can’t buy another batch.
You should have been careful not to part with the stolen coffee you drank, Elizabeth.
I don’t pay attention to Liam but continue to vomit over my father’s velvet hipster jeans as he holds me repeating, “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right.” Has he gone mellow or mad?
Some time later, I have cleaned him, me and the sofa and we sit on the floor facing the book-case and my mother’s portrait. I work her blow-drier on him as he drinks my freshly ground stolen coffee, we dart stealing looks to each other, trying to read the degree of tension and hatred, trying like cliffhangers to throw a hook somewhere in a solid rock where it would hold the next go at a family conversation. I try to manifest how much I hate him but I am so weak that my scrapes of animosity melt down by that illusionary feeling that a father can take care of everything and for a moment I wonder what my beautiful Indian doctor could say about that “comfort thought” for my soul.
Once the volatile sentimentality of the surprise encounter is gone the reality kicks in. “Why are you here?”
I switch off the blow-drier.
Anger is an easy feeling to come back. I should have never opened the door and let him in the house where we tried to live with his absence for years. I should have shoved the chips down his throat and showed him how my mother last looked with her face smaller than my palm. I grasp for air.
It must have been something he has rehearsed because he says it in a controlled and flat tone, “You need money! I could help but my wife will raise the hell and I don’t want hell in the house where my children live.”
As if I am not his child. But then: am I a child? He doesn’t need to make me more jealous than what I already am. I don’t want to listen to him but I sit there listless thinking that it might not be such a good idea to blame him for everything happening to me. Things like Alec, Manoli, and panic attacks.
“What I can do but,” he continues, “is send you to Switzerland.”
I am so stunned that it triggers the preliminary symptoms of another panic attack so I try to beat it by blabbering, “When in Bern Einstein was known as a heavy drinker of thick black coffee known as Turkish or Greek, coffee made in metal jezve, coffee that burns the tongue and…”
“Really? I thought he was known for his relative theory!”
Right, dude! Einstein was a relative! Not like you ignoring us, your dear relatives!
I can afford to apostrophe Liam and remind him that he is not a relative but a squatter in my mind, making me paranoid and mental, making me exposed to cosmic black matter and my own black holes where he comfortably lives.
“If you needed spirituality in your life, Elizabeth, I’d be happy to send you to Tibet so you can chant incantations and learn the art of nothingness encompassing everything but you have more than enough of spirituality. I am sorry to say as a result of your mother’s influence. She was a beautiful human being but you have to balance and learn the language of money. Only pure money energy can help you…”
…get juicy scorpions. I am coming with you, Elizabeth?
I can’t stand this: the charity visit, the business-like talk! Who he thinks he is? It annoys me that he looks fabulous: his neatly cut thick hair still wombat brown, specks of white around the ears, his face plump, no wrinkles, his broad shoulders, the strong arms, his figure more stocky but no belly pushing against his light blue shirt: the Italian fashion style accentuated by a navy blue pullover draped around his shoulders, the sleeves tied loosely in front. His shoes Portugal as always. I dart a stealing glance at the mirror next to the bookcase. I could have been my mother.
“You should have come to see her!”
“Elizabeth, I know that you are mad at me for what happened to your mother…”
“Don’t talk about her as if all she’s been is my mother and nothing else in your life!” I am shouting and my heart responds with a fierce palpitation. I start to feel dizzy. All I need is another panic attack so he can feel really sorry for me and see that it’s not a rock bottom what I have hit because from a rock bottom you can bounce back
He doesn’t say anything about the piano madness.
“Around her I felt a filthy bastard who had to dirty his existence by doing unspiritual things like earning money for the family. She made me feel unworthy and probably I was. But I had to survive and the only way to survive was to break away from her constant disapproval. I loved her…”
I burst out crying, my sobs are uncontrollable. I feel a wreck. I feel a carrier of an incurable disease called misery and I spread its virus thus contaminating everyone I come in contact with. If I come to think it was Alec talking to me in these terms. My beautiful GP also mentioned something like this making me feel part of a statistics showing the growing number of people diagnosed with chronic unhappiness. She tried to tell me that the soul also has an immune system and its failure leads to a diagnosis like that, “Elizabeth,” she said after handing me the prescription for the anxiety pills. “Hypocrites, the father of medicine, said nearly two thousand five hundred years ago ‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food’. In twenty first century we have to add a modification saying, ‘Let thoughts be thy medicine and medicine be thy thoughts.’ You are killing yourself, kid!”
My father places a hand over my clenched hands. “Now, now, you better stop this, you are a big girl, remember?”
“I don’t want to be a big girl,” I sob with another doze of desperation while wiping with my tongue what’s pouring down from my nose. He finds the paper napkin they put in the burger boxes. It’s greasy but does the job. I blow in it and he wraps it up carefully, then squeezes it into a ball and targets the sink through the open kitchen door. For a moment I strain my ears so I can judge by the sound whether it has landed on the plug or bounced against the tap but he is back talking to me.
“…I have made tons of money, now I can find a purpose in my current life.”
The dude has money! Rob him! Or better kill and inherit! “You call me a purpose?”
He looks me in the eyes and sighs. “You can be as hostile as you want, kid! But that’s the normal way to go. Read all these books about successful people who were killing themselves in the rat race, have sacrificed their health and love life in the name of Mammon until one day death reminds them that they are mortals and they embrace spirituality in order to heal themselves. You have to try the other way around. Heal your life by embracing the right notion of money.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.” The fat lie wobbles on my mouth like a deflated gum bubble.
I sit aware of my clenched hands trembling in his warm big palm, tears that now don’t find their way to my eyes block my throat. I swallow and choke. He taps my back and brings me water.
She drinks coffee not water, dude!
“She was not exactly a “material girl” your mother.” A thin smile slides along his lips. “She was not made for this world.”
Saying this he crosses the space to the bookshelves. There he stands for a while browsing the shelves until he picks out a loosely bound print out. “That’s it,” he says then opens the pages with utter care. “I knew I’d found it still here.”
He