|
Lake of Dreams
Martin Malone
Martin Malone lives in Co.Kildare, Ireland. His short stories have been
published and broadcast widely, and have won him The Francis MacManus Award and shortlisted
twice for a Hennessey Award. The Broken Cedar (2003) was longlisted for the 2005 IMPAC
Dublin Literary Award. His other novels are US (2000) and After Kafra (2001). Read
his Exclusive interview
in tDQ
|
We are in France, mobile
homing it down south in a place called Le Lac de Rives, near Montpellier, when my father tells
my mother he's leaving her. He doesn't mention leaving me. This is typical of him.
It didn't come as a great surprise to her. Its timing did. But
his intentions weren't to spoil the holiday. He blamed the Kronenbourg in his veins for
loosening his thoughts.
Mother said he'd always find someone or something else to blame.
We know there's another woman involved. Her name's Cindy and she's a secretary in Father's
solicitors' firm.
She's tall, red headed, and pencil skinny. I've met her once.
Her green eyes measuring me when I called into Father's office. She speaks with a put on upper
class accent. Mother says she's a common slut. A gold digging tramp. Mother told me that she'd
insisted on travelling here on holiday. She thought that a long distance between he and Cindy
would cool their relationship, but he's never off the phone, spending a fortune on telephone
cards.
Mother said he must be the first man ever to get a letter from
home while on holiday abroad.
We're sitting on a sun baked bench facing the Lake of Dreams.
There's a stand of pink flamingos just beyond the mudflats, where the brochure warns people not
to venture. Mother is quiet. We smell of sun cream and lip balm.
Mother apologises for Father. She says I shouldn't be having my
childhood intruded upon. She
| "I tell Mother not to concern herself with Father.
Loads of fellows in my boarding school have the same problem; either a father or a mother is
missing. Nothing in life is complete." |
looks at me as though she is blameless in all of this. She is
deceiving herself, for they are equally to blame for having, what they tell their friends, is,
'A problem child,' on their hands.
I am a problem because they have always seen me as one. A
calendar to their age, a rope tying up their freedom. I'm 13, with big feet getting bigger. I
spend most of my time in the pool. I like to look at the bronzed ladies and their naked breasts.
But after a week the novelty's wearing off and I don't look at breasts anymore unless they're
exceptionally large.
I haven't got much of a tan. My arms and shoulders have, that's
all. I have to use lots of after sun lotion. I tell Mother not to concern herself with Father.
Loads of fellows in my boarding school have the same problem; either a father or a mother is
missing. Nothing in life is complete.
Mother takes the sun quite easily. It pours over her. Then she's
a sunbed at home, and she lies on it most days. She's slim, too. She rides an exercise bike and
when I'm at home I wake to hear its whirring noise from the small gym Mother has set up for
herself in the utility room.
She wants to know if I understand what's going on. She says that
sometimes people fall out of love with each other, and they meet someone else...and, the rest is
nature. She's looking at her painted toenails as she's speaking, as though they were the target
for her words. I feel like telling her that if she spoke to Father instead of her toenails
she'd still have him, or at least he would know she was trying in earnest to reach him.
The lake waters are a deep blue, and a certain indistinguishable
perfumed smell travels on the warm breeze coming from there. While Mum looks at her toenails I
take in the ants. Long columns of large ants carrying morsels of food to their home,
disappearing in the red earth's myriad of cracks.
We took the ferry to France. Father doesn't like sailing, didn't
like sharing a cabin with Mother, and complained of the menu prices, the noise of the ship's
engines, the fact that every snotty nosed child in Ireland seemed to be on the vessel. I thought
it was brilliant. There was great entertainment and the food was good, and Mum enjoyed the trip,
too. Dad likes to moan. He always moans. But never about himself.
Father is lean and solemn faced. He lifts weights, and plays
squash. He sits by the pool all day wearing his Raybans, sun creaming himself, wearing his
designer shorts and expensive gold chains around his neck and wrist. Mother says he should be
on the lake with the flamingos.
We're staying in a large mobile home called an Elegance. I have
a room to myself, Mother too, while Father sleeps in the living area. At night I visit each of
them. Both are either preening themselves or looking in the mirror in search of protruding ear
or nostril hairs. Father sometimes fondles a beer can. He has jet black hair he keeps gelled
and slicked back. When he's not looking at himself he's taking in the pool ladies. I don't
think Cindy would be pleased if she saw him.
Mum doesn't mind. She passes remarks on Frenchmen and their tiny
bottoms. Cindy isn't a patch on the beauties here. Mother says she'd be like a red cabbage
alongside roses. I understand why Mother would say something like that.
She tells me it'll be great. I'll have two homes to visit; her's
and Father's. I think Mother is under the impression that the boarding school is my real home.
I tell her I feel like a dog that's been sent to a kennels while his masters go away on holiday.
The only thing is, that the dog's masters forget to collect him when they return off holiday.
Mother looks at her toenails and says I'm being silly.
I don't think they like having me around. Father can't believe
I have such big feet. He makes me feel as though I'm a freak.
Mother doesn't like cooking or washing my clothes, and doesn't
like hiring someone to do both for me. Grandmother used to complain about her unmotherly ways,
and Mother would buck her notions up a little. But Grandmother died last year.
In her will she asked to be cremated, which I thought was cool
at the time, and very brave of her. She left me a little money and a small cottage no one has
lived in for a long long time. I might live there when I leave boarding school, then again I
might not. I like sketching. I sketch all the time.
Mother and Father say my sketchings are 'Nice.' They like the
ones of the flamingos on the lake. They don't like the ones I do of them. I put in too many
wrinkles, especially about the eyes. This hurts them. I think it's the only way I can hurt
them.
The sketch I did of a shark in the pool is Father, though he
doesn't know. The shark wears a chain around his fin and a smile to show his sharp teeth. The
woman he's standing above is Cindy, though I've given her smaller breasts. I suspect that this
would hurt her.
Our first night off MV Normandy we stayed in a mobile home in
Les Etangs Fluery, outside Paris. Heading there Father got lost and it took numerous attempts
to get back on the right track. He said he was used to seeing Paris from the air and through
the window of a Hotel room. Mother said that this was quite true but that he'd been in Paris
a fortnight ago and could have planned the route a little better, if he'd left his hotel room.
Father glanced at Mother. He didn't know till then that she knew about his Paris weekend with
Cindy.
| "At home I leave them my sketches of the holiday;
an angry man standing on his toes, pointing his finger. A woman sitting on the edge of the sofa
with her hands to her head. A broken alarm clock, its batteries spilled. A boy sitting on the
edge of lake waters, looking at the red sun slowly sinking. " |
Eventually we got on the A86 and took Exit 13 leading us to a
roundabout pointing in the right direction. That evening Father skirted round his red 04 BMW
and checked for stone markings or scrapes. Mother and Father have a tendency to care for things
that have no feelings.
We left for EuroDisney early next morning. There, Mother said
Father walked around Disneyland as though he'd visited before. I liked Frontierland best, with
the fort, its pencil topped walls, the covered wagons. I tried to sketch a cannon by the fort's
entrance, but I got shoved too many times, so I hope to work from the photographs when they're
developed. Phantom Manor was brilliant and so too was the Pirate ride. I liked the idea of
the red mesa. If you looked at that alone your imagination could take you straight to the Wild
West.
We drove through the Pyrennee Mountains to get here. Signposts
warned of wolves and deer. I saw fields of sunflowers. Smiling flowers. I thought of Van Gogh
and his missing ear. Hang gliders flitted in the skies like colourful moths. Later we stopped
in Millau and bought chips from a van. All the while the silence between Mother and Father
was murderous. Father resented being dragged on holiday and Mother resented the reason she'd
to come on holiday: to drive a wedge between Cindy and Father.
In the confined spaces of the mobile home it's impossible for
them to ignore each other. The sun is too hot in the mornings to lie out. They try very hard
to be civil towards each other. But I sense that they are living on the edge of their nerves.
That one is going to lash out at the other.
Mother's temper is frightening. The alarm clock narrowly misses
Father's head. Mother screams and Father shouts. They say terrible things to each other. They
forget I am listening. They forget I am here. They find me easy to forget.
I sketch. The mobile shakes because of Father's slamming doors
and stomping feet. Mother is crying in the living area, holding her hands to her face. Father's
BMW takes its leave of us. He goes not having said goodbye.
It is what I expected to happen.
Later, Mother comes out of her room and says we should pack.
We're flying home. I don't mind. I don't like the insects, the relentless sun, the mobile
home's cramped space, the fact that I was expected to live on fruit and breakfast cereals
alone. The fact that my arms and neck are burned, that I can't sketch because of the heat,
can't lose myself from them.
They give me money. It is money they don't need, it is money
they intend me to spend and in the spending to keep away from them. I can do what I like with
this money. In the boarding school it ensures I have plenty of friends.
We take a plane home from Montpellier. It's early morning as
the ground drops away. I imagine I see Father's BMW turning into the camp. Because of its
garish red colour it would be so easy to spot, but I know he believes he has nothing to come
back to, and therefore will keep going until he reaches Cindy.
We'll be home before him and Mother will bad mouth him to
everyone. It is the way.
At home I leave them my sketches of the holiday; an angry man
standing on his toes, pointing his finger. A woman sitting on the edge of the sofa with her
hands to her head. A broken alarm clock, its batteries spilled. A boy sitting on the edge of
lake waters, looking at the red sun slowly sinking. The water lapping at his toes.
* * *
|
|
|
