OUR HOUSE HAD four bedrooms. There was mine, my little brother Sam’s room, that of my parents, and the one with the carcasses.
Deer calves, wild boar, stags. And antelope heads, of all sorts and sizes, including springboks, impalas, gnus, oryxes, and kobus. A few zebras minus their bodies. On a platform stood a complete lion, its fangs clamped around the neck of a small gazelle.
And in a corner was the hyena.
Stuffed she may have been, yet she was alive, I was sure of it, and she delighted in the terror she provoked in any gaze that met her own.
In the framed photographs on the wall, my father posed proudly with various dead animals, holding his rifle. He always took the same stance: one foot on the beast, fist on hip, the other hand victoriously brandishing the weapon. All of which made him appear more like a rebel fighter high on genocidal adrenaline than a father.
The centerpiece of his collection, his pride and joy, was an elephant tusk. I had heard him tell my mother one evening that the hardest part wasn’t killing the elephant. No. Killing the beast was as easy as slaughtering a cow in a subway corridor. The real difficulty had been making contact with the poachers and avoiding the patrolling game wardens. And then removing the tusks from the still-warm body: utter carnage. It had all cost him a small fortune. I suppose that’s why he was so proud of his trophy. Killing the elephant was so expensive he’d had to split the cost with another guy. They left with a tusk each.
I liked to stroke the ivory. It was silky smooth and large. But I had to do it behind my father’s back. We were forbidden from entering the carcass room.
* * *
My father was huge with broad shoulders, the build of a slaughterman. He had a giant’s hands. Hands that could have ripped the head off a chick the way you’d pop the cap on a Coke bottle. Besides hunting, my father had two passions in life: television and Scotch whisky. When he wasn’t scouring the planet for animals to kill, he plugged the TV into speakers that had cost as much as a small car, a bottle of Glenfiddich in his hand. And the way he talked at my mother, you could have replaced her with a houseplant and he wouldn’t have known the difference.
My mother lived in dread of my father.
I think that’s pretty much all I can say about her, leaving aside her obsession with gardening and miniature goats. She was a thin woman, with long limp hair. I don’t know if she existed before meeting him. I imagine she did. She must have resembled a primitive life form—single-celled, vaguely translucent. An amoeba. Just ectoplasm, endoplasm, a nucleus, and a digestive vacuole. Years of contact with my father had gradually filled this scrap of nothing with fear.
Their wedding photos always intrigued me. As far back as I can remember, I can see myself studying the album in search of a clue. Something that might have explained this weird union. Love, admiration, esteem, joy, a smile … something. I never found it. In the pictures, my father posed as in his hunting photographs, but without the pride. An amoeba doesn’t make a very impressive trophy, that’s for sure. It isn’t hard to catch one: a bit of stagnant water in a glass, and presto!
When my mother got married, she wasn’t frightened yet. It seemed as though someone had just stuck her there, next to this guy, like a vase. As I grew older, I also wondered how this pair had conceived two children: my brother and me. Though I very soon stopped asking myself because the only image that came to mind was a late-night assault on the kitchen table, reeking of whisky. A few rapid, brutal, not exactly consenting jolts, and that was that.
In the main, my mother’s function was to prepare the meals, which she did like an amoeba might, with neither creativity nor taste, but lots of mayonnaise. Ham and cheese melts, peaches stuffed with tuna, deviled eggs, and breaded fish with instant mashed potatoes. Mainly.
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OUR GARDEN BACKED onto Little Gallows Wood and a small valley, all green and brown, its two slopes forming a large V with dead leaves piled up at the bottom. At the end of the valley, half-buried beneath the dead leaves, was Monica’s house. Sam and I often went to see her. She once told us that the V had been formed by a dragon’s claw, a very long time ago. The dragon had scraped out the valley after being driven mad with sorrow. Monica was good at telling stories. Her long gray hair danced across the flowers on her dress, and her bracelets jingled on her wrists.
“An awfully long time ago, not very far from here, on a mountain that is now gone, there lived a pair of gigantic dragons. These two dragons loved each other so much that at night they sang strange songs of intense beauty, as only dragons know how. But this scared the folk living down on the plain, and they could no longer sleep. One night, when the two lovers had dozed off after singing their hearts out, they came, those morons, tiptoeing along with their torches and pitchforks, and they killed the female. In his fury and grief, the male scorched the entire plain, killing everyone—men, women, and children. Then he ripped at the earth with his claws, scouring out these valleys. Since then, the vegetation has grown back, and people live here once more, but the claw marks remain.”
The surrounding woods and fields were littered with scars of varying depth.
The story frightened Sam.
Some nights he would come snuggle in my bed because he thought he’d heard the dragon song. I explained that it was just a story, that dragons didn’t really exist. That Monica had told it to us because she liked old tales, but that not everything was real. Yet deep down I had the shiver of a doubt. And I always dreaded that I would see my father return from one of his hunts with a female dragon head. But to reassure Sam, I played the older sister and whispered, “Stories exist to contain everything that frightens us. That way we can be sure those things won’t happen in real life.”
I liked going to sleep with his little head right under my nose so I could smell the scent of his hair. Sam was six years old, I was ten. Brothers and sisters are usually at each other’s throats, riven by jealousy, fighting, whining, crying. Not us. I loved Sam with the devotion of a mother. I guided him, and told him everything I knew; that was my mission as his big sister. It was the purest form of love that could exist. A love that expects nothing in return. Indestructible.
He was always laughing, with his tiny baby teeth. And each time, his laughter warmed me like a mini power plant. So I made him puppets from old socks, invented funny stories, and put on little shows just for him. I tickled him too, to hear him laugh. Sam’s laughter could heal any wound.
* * *
Monica’s house was half-swallowed by ivy. A pretty sight. Sometimes the sunlight falling through the branches resembled fingers caressing it. I never saw the sun’s fingers on my own house, or on the other houses in the neighborhood. We lived in a development called “The Demo.” Fifty gray detached houses lined up like tombstones. My father called it “the Demucky.”
Up until the 1960s, this was all wheat fields. In the early 1970s the development sprouted like a wart, in less than six months. It was a pilot project, at the cutting edge of prefabricated technology. The Demo. Demo of I don’t know what. Those who had built it must have had something to prove at the time. Maybe it actually reflected their aims back then. But twenty years later all that remained was the muck. The beauty, if there ever was any, had dissolved, washed away by the rain. The street formed a big square, with inner houses and outer houses. And then all around lay Little Gallows Wood.
Our house was one of the outer houses, on a corner. It was a little better than the others because it was the one that the architect of the Demo had designed for himself. But he didn’t live there long. It was larger and lighter, too, with wide patio doors. And a cellar. Seems silly, said like that, but a cellar is an important thing. It prevents groundwater rising up through the walls and rotting them. The houses of the Demo smelled of old damp swimming towels forgotten in a sports bag. Our house didn’t smell bad, but it did have the animal carcasses. I sometimes wondered if I wouldn’t have preferred a house that stank.
Our garden was also bigger than the others. On the lawn was an inflatable swimming pool, which looked like a fat lady who had fallen asleep in the sun. Come winter, my father would empty it and pack