Ode To Joy

My dad talked to me for the first time in forever over breakfast. I would have preferred him not to. I'm still drunk. Oh Joy. He wants me to get a job:

"I want you to get a job."

I can’t do that. My head would erupt if I sacrificed any more time for other people. I go through this fucking holocaust every day where I coast through school getting exponentially bored; all the while risking contamination by my fellow students’ stupidity. I need my time in the evening to gather the fragments and put myself back together before I go to school the next day; like applying make-up to a corpse for an open coffin funeral. I need the money but I really can’t get a job. People think I’m lazy but my mind is not a vacant cubicle. It’s occupied with other things. Predominantly, see-sawing between wanting to kill myself and wanting to kill everyone else. My dad’s the only person I can’t stand up to and typically the person I most want to confront. I can moan at him. I always euphemise. He can’t do directness. So I talk around the issue. He laughs it off. Sure he’s easy to discuss stupid trivia with but when it comes to anything tangible he’s useless. He gets defensive. Like when he has a go at me about anything and I try to stay cool; this syncopated thumping claws at my chest. When I try and arrange the words of my defence, the sentence caves in like a rope-bridge, and I deliver this queasy mangled shite in a girlie submissive voice. The sort of voice you don’t intend anyone to hear. I don’t know why he’s intimidating but I fucking hate it and one day I’m gonna explode and confront him with more than idiot shallow words and a self-imposed bedroom exile. He’s a self-righteous fucker and if you try and explain this to him he goes AWOL:

“Shut up Alexis don’t start psychoanalysing me I don’t need a loada gob from your skinny ass I’ve got enough to think about you don’t fucking know me as well as you think you do so stop being a goddamn adolescent brat and get over yourself I’ve got enough to worry about without your melodramatic shitstorms every time I ask you to do something I don’t need your shit you know how your mother cries whenever I tell her what you’re like and how you make me so angry and how you promised to do more round the house once she started working nights and haven’t lifted a finger to help anyone but yourself to notes shaved here and there from my wallet like I don’t notice any less forgiving parent would’ve shopped you to the police by now but I haven’t because I kept hoping you might pull yourself together and do something I can be proud of so we don’t have to keep moving house to erase your spiteful destructive little kiddie episodes from our family history and preserve our reputation so your mum who’s already unstable has to be ripped out of her scarce little comfort zone and inserted into some new and frightening environment where she has to go through trust trials and confidence crises just to even arrange a job interview did we ever have this trouble with your sister who’s sublime perfection radiates from her every pore like scales on an angelfish, whose schoolwork was never less than diligent and whose attitude exudes a selfless optimism and generosity of spirit and then we get you injurious snivelling trash being basically a nasty bastard, a spineless little turd an irresponsible degenerate self-aggrandising waste of mine and your mother’s time do you do you ever see your sister behaving like an attention-craving raw cyst on the good name of this family rotten misanthropic empty emotionless lazy facile intolerant fucking antisocial crybaby the world doesn’t owe you shit take more pride in your appearance you scruffy unkempt stinking turdbag faggot wretch brush your teeth more often you killed our dog because you didn’t walk it often enough you lied you said you’d walked him when you hadn’t so he died prematurely I don’t like to have to tell you this but you need to wake up to your manifold failings as a person sonny I’m doing this because I love you and I wouldn’t be a good father if I didn’t say it like it is I’m doing you a favour so nobody in the real world if you make it that far ever has to tell you this I’m saving you the embarrassment of a public shaming even though that’s precisely what an inaccessible little prick like you needs to be prised open and have the forceps of compassion probe about inside your diseased insides and rearrange your skewed moral axis into anything resembling a human being if only your were more like your sister then we might get an invite to your mother’s parents for Christmas instead of being shunned and disowned because they can’t stomach the notion that they might actually share genes with a turgid dicksore like you why can’t you use your sister as an example where did we go wrong I get mad and your mum starts crying so I get angrier and then your sister walks by to say goodnight and flashes me that sweet smile to remind me that all of this anguish and expenditure wasn’t a complete waste of time and resources why aren’t you more like your sister if only we’d… ”

Or some such bullshit. Maybe if I didn’t feel like a phantom pregnancy that to everyone’s stunned dismay, followed through, I might be as generically uninteresting as my sister.

I was an only child once. Until I was six. Then my sister barged her irrelevant way into the cosmos and what little identity I'd forged at that point got raped, upended. I'd got happily accustomed to not sharing. I've rediscovered the art recently. But for those six glorious years I enjoyed the attention of both parents, high as they were on the residual euphoria that peaks with a honeymoon and slowly dries up through the years. When I was five they found me a babysitter. Joy.

Joy said: You can't build on the sunset.
I said: I want some ice cream.
Joy wasn't a great babysitter. She was a sadistic, evil bastard of a fifteen-year old cuntsplash. It's little wonder I don't like girls much.

Joy said: we're going to watch the 'Thriller' video.
I said: I don't want to it looks scary.
Joy said: If you don't I'll tell your parents you pissed yourself.
I said: Fine if you feel like that I'll watch the damn movie you manipulative bitch.
Joy said: Like, you so wished you said that.
I said: Actually no, given the opportunity, I'd like to have said 'if you tell them anything like that, I'll tell them you habitually pushed me down the stairs and fed me drugs pretending it was lemonade and threatened me with even nastier things if I told my parents.
Joy said: But, er, then you’d be right. I did.

And she did. I'd be right. My parents would deposit me in her care; head off to their opulent soiree, get shit-faced, throw buns at other guests, turn up stinking and gooey at about half eleven; Joy would appear in doting, compassionate babysitter mode, return a roughed-up, slightly dopey kid to them. They'd be too drunk to attribute the dopeyness to anything other than his being an active go-getter of a child and it being way past his bedtime. I'd lie awake all night panicking about the gravity of her threats - should I squeal? What if she tells my mummy that I got my penis out and started playing with it? Mummy would be really disappointed. I never did like disappointing her. In fact, my dick still never gets much exposure. Joy could resurface at any moment to manifest the threat. By the morning, I'd have paranoiacally weighed up the situation from every angle and invariably decided that I wouldn't squeal this one time, but if she does it again, I'm definitely telling mummy. And that's final. As final as perpetual deferment of the truth could ever get. And here I am now, documenting it in some hermetic little prose piece. Next time, next time...You won't get away with this, you evil bitch. But she has.

"Alexander, do something ridiculously humilating/ potentially frightening/ utterly beyond your post-toddler grasp of the world or I'll tell mummy you broke my mum's limited edition floral plate." The plate dangles from her stumpy pig-fingers.
"No, I don't want to. That's a bad thing to do."
"Oh, go on. Don't be such a goodie-goodie. Don't be so fucking safe."
"It's bad to swear. I don't want to. I like cats. I don't want to hurt her. Put the plate down."
"Ok, well in which case, you're a very brave boy for saying no. That's the right thing to do. So come with me upstairs and I'll give you a present." The plate is back on the wall. The cat darts for the garden.
"Oh. Ok." Greed fuels our ascent. Hers, for my pain and her sick gratification. Mine, for a phantom present.
"So where's my present?'"
"Sit down up here, cover your eyes and I'll go and get it." It's a tall flight of stairs.
Hey, this is cool. If I were made of paper instead if meat, bone, skin and hair, I'd leap off here and flutter slowly to the ground with all the grace of a swan's feather. Peace. Freedom. Joy. Where is she? The anxious voice of greed. Oh there she is.
"Ready? One, two, three..."

Then I'm crying. Crumpled, upside-down, my head forcibly tucked into the concave of my collar-bone. I wasn't engineered to be naturally arranged this way. If I were made of paper, Joy would have just performed the gruesomest origami on me. Being tiny, it took about four revolutions of my pretty lean body to arrive at the floor. By which time, my limbs had undergone so many fucked-up contortions that I felt like one huge, amorphous double-joint. Jolts of hurt ripping through my slim, underpadded kid body. About two thirds down my head scraped along the bannister railings, rebounding like a scale plundered across the bars of a xylophone by an over-zealous player. Disoriented, the only sense I can rationalize is my hearing, which picks up Joy laughing at the top of the stairs. This hurts at least as much as my journey down them, and my crying escalates. Inappropriate choice of words perhaps. My babysitter joins me; cradles me into a nervous calm. Maybe she's not that bad. Perhaps it was an accident. She was laughing because she's so in love with the giants of slapstick. I've just performed one of the famous slapstick routines. Now she feels bad for laughing when I'm clearly experiencing profound discomfort. I think my nose is bleeding. Maybe it's just snot from crying so much. Either way, she wipes, takes my hand and manouevres me into the kitchen.
"Oh, you poor little dear!" Still laughing, with a hollow, forced self-consciousness at this point.
"Let's fix you a drink. You're a very brave boy. And a very good boy for not telling your mummy about this."
Only now do I appreciate how to unravel such loaded rhetoric. Oh, that's a good idea. I won't tell mummy. Wait a minute. I've been duped.
"Which you can't. It'll be our secret - mummy already knows you're a brave little soldier. Don't want her thinking you're a fearless trooper who knows no humility and has no understanding of danger, do we? Let me fix you a drink. You deserve some lemonade after those nasty stairs sucked you down them. It was like being swallowed by a big, hungry giant wasn't it? And now the giant's poo-pooed you out of his bottom and you're safe. And you can go home knowing you're a hero, and the only one who ever survived being eaten by the big wooden giant. But you musn't - would you like a straw? - you musn't tell anyone about your victory against the evil giant because nobody will believe you. Everyone knows that nobody can be eaten by the giant and come out in one smiling piece like you have. There you go. Drink it all down. So it'll be our secret, what a brave little man you are."
"Ok."
"And you'll never tell anyone will you?"

Yes.

"No"
"Good boy." She ruffles my hair. Her behavioural contradictions are really fucking with me. Her inconsistencies are probably accountable for the fact that I still trust apporximately noone; and for my assumption that any authority figure is covertly plotting to destroy me. All because I wouldn't tie a sparkler to a cat's tail. Actually I hate cats too now, which may be tenuously post-dated.
"Drink it all up."
"It tastes funny."
"Well it's from the same bottle you had last time."
"Well it tastes funny."
"Don't be so ungrateful. You're mum and dad said I wasn't supposed to give you any sugary drinks at all, so drink up and shut up."
"OK." Like, she's giving me something; like she's turning me against my parents by allowing me to gorge on the decadent fancies they so explicitly prohibited. Joy is wonderful.

I feel dizzy. I feel sick. Why was that lemonade all powdery at the bottom?
"Well you drank it. It can't have been that bad."
"It tasted really..." Bitter, I sensed but couldn't articulate.
"Hahaghhaha." Fifteen, and she's already got a smoker's cough.
"Joy...." I'm swaying on my stool, trying to steady myself on the kitchen worktop"
"...What was that drink?"
"Ha. Alka Seltzer."
"What?" My vision is obscuring, like I'm viewing the world from the bottom of an industrial kitchen sink.
"Alka Seltzer."
"What's Alka Salka?"
"Alka Seltzer. It's a drink grown-ups have to stop them feeling. It's nicer than lemonade isn't it?"
"I feel sick. I feel dizzy."
"Oh, that's just from the fall. That'll pass soon. You're being such a brave boy. Do you want some more drink?"
"Ok. What if I'm sick?"
"Oh, you won't be. What you need is plenty of drink to wash the bruises off those bones. You'll be good as new tomorrow." I'd seen my mum make gravy by crumbling a stock-cube into a pan and adding water. Joy did something similar with a white capsule to make Alka Seltzer. There couldn't be anything wrong with it if it's made like gravy. I used to find myself absorbed in the sound of my mum stirring the gravy saucepan with a metal spoon, a rhythmic, muffled, modulating 'chrring' as every figure-of -eight circuit brought us closer to lumpless gravy and a big dinner. This new drink just emits a big fizz, like if a snake could foam with rabies when you startled it.
"There you go".
"Thanks Joy. You're really nice." I downed this one in two gulps.
"Oh, you think so?" A slutty smile, I later decide.
"Yeah, well you look after me when mummy and daddy are having playtime."
"Well, they give me some money for it. But I like you too. Do you really like me?"
I hiccup a giggle. Then I belch, and giggle again.
"Yeh!"
"Well, do you know what girls and boys do when they like each other?"
"Play Transformers?"
"Sometimes they do. But Transformers is kids stuff. Do you know what brave, grown up boys and girls do when they like each other?"
"Can I have another drink?" She's spun my stool round.
"Look at this. Put your hand here."

So over the next few weeks, I develop a taste for Alka Seltzer. The third time I fall, and beyond, I'm fairly convinced she pushed me. Sometimes, twice in one night. Then I'd feel dizzy and sick and she'd give me some Alka Seltzer for being a brave little soldier. And because I'm a big strong boy, the aching subsides really quickly. After a few weeks I start to feel sick for longer though, even at home, so I ask my mum for some Alka Seltzer. She wants to know how I learnt about Alka Seltzer. My parents no longer give Joy any money. I'm back on regular lemonade. I use the stairs very tentatively. One evening, I saw a Gremlin on the landing window-sill and freaked out. My new babysitter's name is Chelsea. I tell her it sounds like a dog's home. This endears me to her. My mum's gone to the freezer to fetch the sausages. I sneak myself a stock cube from the cupboard and chew it up. It's really strong.

I was six then. At six years and ten months my sister arrived. I'm no longer an only child. At seven years and three months I push my sister down the stairs. I hate her. At eight years and four months, my auntie and her boyfriend come and stay with us. He's young, muscular, wears a sleeveless vest, is called Simon, beats her up. I have a real taste for strong flavours these days. And that's another reason I can't get a job. Because I'm still drunk. I'm no longer an only child. I'm still only a child though, only, longer.

Ode To Joy:

Joy is now a junkie single-mother. I'm so sorry. I hope for the kid's sake she lives in a bungalow.

Joy says: I want you to get a job.
Joy Jr says: But I'm only seven.
Joy says: Don't answer back. You're the reason I'm in this fucking state.
Joy Jr says: So the cycle of abuse perpetuates.
Joy says: What did you say?

Joy Jr says nothing. So the cycle of abuse perpetuates.