The Hiccups

The Deadlock

This house is a body and my sister and I move within it. For three years I've stayed in this chair in the sitting room, leaving her to deal with the collapse of the house, the danger it poses to all that we own. The house is both protector and destroyer, safety and threat, and it is she who tips the scales, not me. It is her who braves the streets night after night to bring back food and water and all the things essential to our lives.

The house buckles and shudders, settles and shifts. It's been a long time since my sister answered and without light there is no marker of time. I don't know if it's morning or night, if a few hours have passed or if it's already been days. I'm so alone, lost inside my own house.

I think about all the things she used to remind me to do because I cannot do for myself. Go to sleep when it's midnight, wake up when it's time to eat another orange. I'm so tired and I should just stay in this chair but I haven't heard from her in a while and I don't know if she's still here. There's been another brick thrown through the window. I've had enough and need to board up all the windows. I have to go out tonight and scavenge like a homeless woman for wood. I think about making booby traps. To rig trip wires and deadfalls, hide walls of sharpened broomsticks behind newspaper columns, pour loose piles of broken glass beneath weak floorboards.

*

There are newspapers in this house that date back from 1985, the year we locked ourselves in. The newspapers are stacked and bundled in the kitchen, in the hall, covering the landings of staircases and filling closets and chests. I counted 39 phone books in the bathroom, one for each year from 1955 to 1985. I also came across a calico cat. By the time I found him the cockroaches had eaten his tail and the mice were beginning to carry off the rest.

When our father died suddenly all his possessions became ours, spilling out of rooms and into halls, as if we knew what to do with the evidence of a lifetime. As if there was any way to sort the essential from the unnecessary. As if we could just throw away our father or sell him to strangers. And then, not long after our inheritance arrived, we started adding to the piles ourselves.

My sister didn't understand, of course she didn't, but that didn't stop us because we knew that what we were doing could work, could solve the failure of our family. If only we gathered all the pieces with enough raw materials, maybe we could build a better father, or else gather a mother up in our arms like all the heaps of porcelain knickknacks.

When my father left us he took everything with him he took his medical books and his anatomical drawings and two specimen jars. He took his suits and his shoes and his hats. He took his golf clubs and his pipes and his records and when he was gone our mother scrubbed the house from top to bottom in her grief, removing every last particle of dust that might once have been him. He left her and she eradicated him. For 20 years he stayed out of the house and then he returned, disguised as old neurological equipment and ornate furniture bundled in the back of a truck, as something that could be bound into chests and sacks and file folders. Now the objects of him are boarded behind the doors of the second floor and he will never escape. Not as long as I live. Every stray hair still clinging to a shirt collar. Every scrap of handwriting left in the margins of his text. All of what was him I keep safe and it is all I'll ever need.

*

I tripped over the bench in front of the piano in the kitchen. I decided to sit down and take a break, resting my fingers on the keys. I centred myself in front of the piano and started to play. My fingers flickered over the keys, recalling the memory of music. The sound that came out of the piano was muffled and muted, it didn't fill the room but burrowed through it. Each note bellowed into the piled garbage and into the rotting walls like a nail, a crowbar, like something meant to hold a thing together, like something meant to tear it down.