Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose 2024 – Long List
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
When I was eight and experimenting with the truth, sometimes disastrously, my mother told me I had a vivid imagination. Adults’ voices often felt heavy and the derision in her tone made the words weightier than they should have been; they flopped around like small sandbags unable to hold themselves up. Even as a child I had always known that words like that should have light and shape, that they should fly around the room, batting into things, even sometimes making a nusiance of themselves. Mum made those words collapse into a different meaning and they became the wrong kind of nuisance. She didn’t have many ideas of her own and had always been a follower, usually of men with sad, drinking eyes. Some of those landed up living with us for a while and the last one, with empty eyes, wooed her, fucked her and eventually dumped her. I was 14 when he left and she never knew that he had once tried to come onto me, revoltingly, like a lizard flicking his tongue around for some fresher morsel. I hissed at him and pulled out my phone, and by the next morning he had gone. He went while Mum was at work. Not even a note.
“Where the hell is he and what did you say to him?” The words were hiccuped between sobs and her hands were shaking. A river of coffee spilt down the front of her blue dressing gown, turning it into a sad estuary. The sight of that muddy line irritated me.
“I don’t know. And for fuck’s sake, stop crying,” I said, drying my very own yellow bowl and putting it in its special place on the shelf. “You’ve spilt your coffee and your mascara’s running. He’s not worth it.”
Then I saw that it could all turn annoying, so went to my room and read another chapter of The Catcher in the Rye before finishing my maths homework. I loved that book and wished that Holden Caulfield was my brother.
*
Mum wouldn’t answer questions about my father; she fobbed me off, saying he was a loser who had left when she was pregnant.
“We’re better off without him,” she said. Her voice clipped the air between us and the conversation had nowhere else to go, like a dead-end street on a cold night. As I got older though, the wonderings persisted. They fluttered through my mind, lost butterflies looking for somewhere to rest. It was very tiring, for them and for me.
There was no-one else to ask. Mum had no family and making friends at school was hard because we were always moving. I was the smart, silent type, no bother but a bit weird – the sofa that people would sit on only for a minute before deciding on something warmer and more comfortable across the other side of the room. I once overheard a girl in my form class say that even my voice was wintry. Thinking about it afterwards, I decided that people who grow up in cold houses never really feel warm.
In our flat the sun played its own game of hide and seek that only the cat could win. I would lie with her sometimes on Mum’s unmade bed after school and bury my face in her warm fur. The dusty crystals on the windowsill and smell of patchouli and stale cigarette smoke reminded me of the house trucks at gypsy fairs. Mum yearned for one, saying it was her idea of heaven. This irritated me too, how she always longed for things she couldn’t make happen. I was determined to get what I wanted, no matter what. When she was at work, I would sometimes try on her clothes and experiment with her makeup. That’s how I found the tin. It was hidden under a pile of scarves on the top shelf of the wardrobe. I pulled them down because I wanted to look like the Iranian girl in my class. She was beautiful and also kept to herself. I was scared to talk to her because she might want to be my friend and I didn’t know how to do that.
It was a sampler biscuit tin, like the ones that come from stingy bosses at Christmas. There was nothing much to find at first. The tin was full of old receipts and some cards and drawings I’d done when I was little. But right at the bottom was a folded newspaper article with brittle edges that were starting to go yellow; it was the yellow of old men’s toenails and that thought made me feel sick. I unfolded it slowly in case it ripped because I didn’t want Mum to know I had been into her stuff, but also because I hated touching it. I wish now I hadn’t.
*
The article was from a newspaper called the Auckland Star, with the headline, Unanimous guilty verdict for 19 year-old rapist. It said that name suppression had been lifted and sentencing would be four weeks later in the Auckland District Court – a sentence for him and, now that I knew, a sentence for me. The letter folded inside the article was in Mum’s writing. It was short, not even a page, but the hostility in it chilled the sun that was now lying in a pale stripe across the bed. The room grew cold and gloomy; I shivered as the ghost of my mother’s nightmare drifted through the room.
“This is the last you’ll ever hear from me,” she had written, and at the end, “I might be pregnant. If I am, you’ll never know, or what I did about it.”
Mum hadn’t addressed him and hadn’t signed her name. It was still in the tin so I figured she hadn’t sent it.
*
My heart was beating so fast I had to lie back and stay very still. It felt like I was made of glass; what would happen if I shattered, ending up as tiny shards all over Mum’s bed? Would they cut into her while she slept, making her bleed steadily to death during the night? Or might the cat roll in them, feel them prickle under her fur and skin and wonder about this new sort of grooming? My thoughts were scorching and chaotic. Like a swarm of killer bees, they seared my mind, stinging me all over and terrifying me with their persistence. I drew on all my reserves of energy and courage, concentrated really hard and pushed them into a cold, fridge-like room. Then I closed the door and locked it.
*
Soon the stillness returned. It morphed into clouds that enveloped and shielded me, letting me observe from far away. I was looking through a mirror, watching as my life slipped down a mountain in a slow mudslide. The letter from the 18- year-old girl who had given birth to the kid of a rapist was still there on the bed in Mum’s careful writing. That girl was only two years older than me. And that pristine paper, white lined Croxley that hadn’t yellowed, was older still. The words Mum had written were menacing and ugly. They threw contempt over the article beside it, stirring me into action. I moved out of the stillness into the room, took out my phone and stashed the photos away in a hidden file. Then I went back into the cloud sanctuary where white was the only colour and stillness the only shape, and started watching again.
I watched the girl in the mirror refold both pieces of paper, replace them carefully in the tin and send them back into that murky land at the top of the wardrobe. I watched her close the door on it all, pick up the cat and walk steadily back to her own room where she lay down with exquisite care upon her neatly made bed. I watched her fold so deeply inside herself that she became unknown and unrecognisable. And as I watched, the bundle began to shudder, slowly at first, like a light breeze. But the wind picked up and the shuddering became frenetic. The cat shrieked and leapt onto the windowsill, knocking over a glass of water. It fell to the floor and splintered into those tiny shards I had feared I might become. I heard her growling as the water flowed over her paws and dripped in a steady stream onto the floor. And I heard a different sound – small whimpers and soft breaths that came in jerks, sobs that were never quite completed.
I watched the cat watching that girl. Eventually, after a quick shake, she picked her way off the windowsill and settled on the bed. Her wet paws rested against the girl’s hand, beckoning her back from the white cover of the cloud. The girl sat up, stroked the damp fur and went back to the story of Holden Caulfield.
*
There are still gaps in my mind about the days that followed. I remember telling Mum I was sick and had to stay home and I remember noticing, for the first time, the kindness in her, a kindness that had always been searching for somewhere to rest. She couldn’t have known, but something had changed with that noticing. The annoying bits were still there, but for the first time in years, I yielded to her kindness and let it rest on me. It felt different, but sort of okay.
For months, of course, I was bent on revenge, fantasising about ways to locate, harm or even kill him. I pored over the sentencing report, stalked him on social media and ruminated on monstrous schemes that were fed on rage and disgust. I had no-one to talk to so ran my ideas past Holden Caulfield.
“Don’t be a phony,” he’d say. “You’ll never do that stuff and there’s already too much ugliness around. Sometimes life just doesn’t make sense.”
I knew life didn’t make sense to him; he was a bit of a phony himself. But I liked that, so I listened. I took him on as my very own catcher in the rye, the one who would save me, even as I was falling over the cliff. I listened to his little sister Phoebe, too, because she saw through us both. She taught me that I could love my mother, need her, and be annoyed with her, all at the same time.
When I talk to Holden Caulfield now, we speak of other things. There’s no room in my life for those two words, m _ f _ _ _ _ _.
Nor for the other version, mother fucker. They’re both cancelled.
I’ll choose my own family, thank you. I’ll keep my mother and the cat. Holden Caulfield can be my brother, maybe my twin. And I’ll have Phoebe for my sister. She can keep us both in line.
Michal Horton lives with her husband and therapy dog in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Her life is filled with work as a counsellor and counselling supervisor, children and grandchildren and a small but very full garden. Michal has always been an avid reader, mainly of fiction, but started writing only over the last few years.