–’
I look at my mother. She’s watching my father with a familiar expression – a mixture of disgust and affection – that she adopts when she sees me use my own earwax as lip gloss. I believe in recycling.
I turn back to Dad.
‘I am not delicate,’ I say. ‘And you two are no stimuli at all!’ My correct use of a difficult plural spurs me on.
‘So we have failed to fulfill a certain need,’ my father says, in between chews. He looks at me. He has a spot of yoghurt in his beard.
‘No. You just don’t care.’
I slam my fist on to the table to no effect. It’s made of stone.
I leave the rest of my dinner uneaten and walk down the valley’s steep side. The tangled vines are stiff as spiders’ legs squashed in a notebook. I pick my way through nettles to the river’s edge. Yesterday, I began to build a dam across to the other side.
I am annoyed that I cannot rouse my holiday parents.
Drinking espressos on the balcony, they cannot see me because of three large pine trees overshadowing the river. I crab-carry the largest rocks out into the centre of the current. With each splash my weir reaches further towards the other bank.
I think about an exhibition my parents took me to at the National Botanic Garden of Wales where the artwork had been installed in and around the various ponds, streams and water features. The exhibition was called Show, which, I discovered, is also a word for a plug of cervical mucus expelled at the onset of labour.
I imagine myself as modern art: I am in the womb. The waters break, plashing on the awkward boulders. The sun on my eyelids glows an amniotic pink. I am a footling breech, coming out feet first as if my mum were a water slide. Forceps nip at my toes. The water turns misty, my feet cloak beneath plumes of silt. I need to be crying; I think of sad things: imagine if your parents were dead.
In history, we were shown a photo of Belsen. There were corpses lying beneath the trees, speckling the forest like fallen fruit. Their faces and upper bodies were covered with blankets so that they could have been anyone. I flutter-blink but my eyes stay dry.
The oldest photo my parents have of themselves as a couple is black and white. It is not black and white because there were no colour photographs – it was a specific choice they made. The corners are rounded like a playing card. The photo shows them having a picnic beneath some trees during the late seventies. I imagine them setting the camera timer, then lying back, pulling the picnic blanket over their heads. Not napping but dead.
My favourite photo, however, is in colour. It is my seventh birthday and we are in the back garden. It shows my dad, the prankster, pretending that he might pour a bowl of strawberry jelly with fruit pieces on top of my mother’s head. Mum sits on a camping stool; Dad stands behind her, holding the bowl above her, tipping it slightly. Our au pair, Hilde, myself and four of my friends sit on the grass around them. We are all grinning, looking up at Dad and hoping his hand will slip.
Dad looks mock worried – pursed lips saying uh oh! – while Mum’s face displays genuine terror: it’s her war face. She looks so ugly. Her hands and arms are slightly blurred, as she moves to protect her lovely hair. It’s as though she has just realized that, after years and years, her husband dislikes her and – worst of all – he has waited for their son’s birthday to let everyone know.
Further down the river, the bank changes into stretches of glistening, untouched mud, smooth as whale skin. I walk downstream, getting deeper with each step. My feet squelch and fart; the mud takes on the consistency of jelly with fruit pieces. I allow myself to sink. I think of things that bite or sting.
Earlier this morning, a scorpion made a home in one of my father’s loafers. Dad put on his shoes in a rush, giving the creature no chance at all. He tipped it out on to the tiled floor; it landed the right way up with its tail and sting intact, claws slack and open. We watched it, waited for it to start up again. I nudged it with a thin twig, but nothing. My