Winter solstice, afternoon

I have become you.

Finally, I find the box she’s been looking for. She sits on the rug, delighted to be reunited with her Barbies after a five week hiatus. Some of the them are missing hands, one still has the tendency to pick up lint thanks to sellotape residue on her face from where she was secured to the front of the Dreamhouse earlier this year for a period of weeks. But Estella doesn’t care, it is enough that she is reunited and they are there, and so she sits with them, moves them around, loses time in play.

I sense that in being larger than these play things, she has a sense of power. There is a lot written about this time of year and awe, and how awe makes us feels small and how this is a good thing. I would suggest that perhaps when we are small the most important thing can be to feel larger than we are, as she now surely does on the rug, and it has been suggested that children like to play with things that fit their scale and this is why they like little things. But children are tyrants, we omit that in the hope we forget we also are still tyrannical, and tyrants like to play with small things in an effort to feel larger.

I think again of my father. I think of him this time of year without meaning to, which is a lie, I think of him without wanting to. I think of him dying on his winter solstice and my summer solstice and I think of him there, south of the equator, I think of the 8,208.1 miles separating us that night. I think of how I dreamt of a fox as he clawed at his mask. I think of the near straight line running from north to south and back that I became preoccupied with in the months that followed. A line I believed to be the first spun between us as if holding us in place. I would watch a spider in the shower in those months, busy with its own web and I could not bring myself to kill that spider. I would stand as I turned the dial down, willing myself to remain under the cold water, believing it to make me sharper, believing if I just did this one difficult thing other difficulties would seem simpler. I would watch the spider and I would think of the webs I believed myself to be spinning, knowing as I did that its thread has the strongest tensile strength of any other material, yet we think it so fragile. But brush a web to one side, and it still exists, it is still perfectly spun, the centre still holds the rest, just it is collapsed by our power, in on itself, as my father collapsed every world he came into contact with and that was his game, to believe himself endowed of the power of breaking, as I came to believe the same in his wake, determined to break everything I had until then built. They burnt him four, five, does it matter how many, days after he died, and after the burning, I was possessed by a great fear of birds, of eggs, of winged things rising from ashes. I was not sure what we might have set in motion by burning him.

And if this sounds fantastical, it is only because he was. The stuff of legends, my maternal grandmother used to say, fully aware he was a man who’d made himself up. I met him for the first time, or at least the first time I can remember, when I was 21, travelling alone across the Atlantic to meet him. Changed in the airplane toilets. Worried my thighs were too fat. Easier to worry about a body than the proximity of your father. We drove for days down the east coast. I recall motels, large pizzas, kidney shaped swimming pools, before any of that, being spoilt in New York, buying a denim skirt, a halter neck, and being blonde and young and thinner than I felt at the time. And South Carolina, the kind of beauty and smell and heat I have missed since. But I have not missed his house. I tried to write about it in a book. Or more honestly, I did write about it. We couldn’t make it make sense, my editor at I. I deleted his chapters. He died the next day. Some men are more vindictive than you could imagine. I am moving these parts around now for the sense of power it gives me. She is on the rug. I am writing this. See, I am always writing this. I am always rewriting this. It is better to delete it and to rewrite it so as to recapture the power of it all. What I mean to say is when we arrive at his old colonial the first thing I smell when the door opens is cat piss. They must have several cats. I have not been told about these cats or told the names of the cats. Perhaps they are strays. They have after all, spent days, if not the best part of a week travelling to New York and travelling back with me. Under that, I can smell coffee beans, and under that, some kind of soap, cedar perhaps, a soap carrying an earlier memory. The side door opens into the kitchen, a typical American kitchen with a large stove, a table, flat fronted units.

The first time I write this, I cannot use I. I become you. I would like to deploy the same tactic. You, I tell a friend is the voice of trauma, I suspect this is not the way the conversation goes, I suspect he said this to me. In his novel a child is held captive for a long time. She cannot say I, can only refer to herself by name. It is easier sometimes, to omit the I. Easier, but I stood under the shower until I was more goosebumps than anything else to teach myself how to write I. Some days, as I learnt to write I, I would throw up. But here I am, writing I as I trained myself to do.

I walk through the kitchen to the dining room, through the dining room to the sitting room. This is a long thin room, a fireplace to my right, a window to my left, another window in front of me. All the windows are shuttered to keep the sun out, the cold in. The floor is dark wood, polised to a shine. The hairs on my arms stand up. I cross my arms over the front of my Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt. On the fireplace are a row of framed photographs. I recognise the child in one of them. It’s me. I am perhaps three or four. I know I did not meet my father when I was perhaps three or four and yet, there I am, my face turned away from the camera, my white blonde hair whipping around my tanned face, my still toddler pudgy hands gripping a plant pot, behind me a whitewashed house. My whitewashed house. It makes no sense that in this photograph I am sitting on the grass in Scotland but here it is in a frame in South Carolina. I pick it up. My newly acquired half-sister, nine years younger than I am, smiles at me, tells me, it’s ok, he came back to take photographs, and then she picks up the other frames I now see are inlaid with similar photographs of children. And there we all sit on the mantle, all of us framed, all of us captured as his shutter fell, him in the distance, taking a snapshot of us to take us back to Africa or India or wherever it was he was at the time, these little play things of his, transported all over the world. All however many there are of us. I lose count around 15. Did the glass ever shatter? Did he ever replace the frames? Did he ever forget which one of us had which name? Is that why he gave us all variations on the same theme? Said his genes were strong as away of explaining the high cheek bones, above average intelligence. His self aggrandising bullshit.

When he died I asked another sister if we would mourn him twice on account of the solstice and his inability to die on our right side of the equator. Although she assured me we would not, this day is strange. All the dark and shadows, the wait for the light to come back, and it’s as much a lie as it is a fact that the light turns on the solstice. You can know a thing but knowing isn’t the same as seeing; it takes a while really, for the presence of the returning light to make itself felt.

These games of power and victory. This game I play of words on the page. This insistence I have that there is the right word to describe the right thing and yet. And yet. I try to write about him and there are never the right words. And the wrong words are never in the right order. Or there are the right words but they are ugly ones. They are words stripped of nuance. They are words that don’t carry enough complexity.

Perhaps I am still giving him too much of the benefit of the doubt.

I have come to realise this is something I am given to. Most people benefit doubt. Some don’t.

Perhaps the right word is psychopath. Perhaps the right word is cunt. Perhaps the right words are a cascade of many words. Does the right word allow for reasons? Does it tell of intergenerational trauma? Of excuses? When do excuses become pathetic? Does it tell of the stories I learn about him when I get back to Scotland, aged 21 and trying to trace the rest of the children lining that mantle? If I try and make excuses for him does that excuse the version of him I meet in the stories they tell me all the long nights I sit and listen on the landline, my back to the wall of my tiny boxroom that three years later becomes my first daughter’s bedroom? In those nights, my teeth chatter although the room is very warm. I become very thin. I start to have nightmares, or the nightmares start again. I heard things then I have not repeated or written. Likely will not. The shame of learning you have a father who can do the things he did is something that does not easily diminish. The fear that you will become the same is something you live with.

See, I have again become you. I slipped tense earlier and now I do the same with narrative position, the past becoming present and me becoming something removed from me as writing and watching will guarantee happens, somewhere always between what was and what is and what comes of that, here, on the page, some rough approximation of it all.