Taken from h day by Renée French

Nightmares

(This is continuation from the last episode, Arrival.)

E: What were the nightmares about?

C: I can’t remember what they were about but they were no good. They had terrible smells in them. And Dad used to have nightmares anyway because of his accident and everything and so between the both of us we had a bad time trying to sleep.

In the 1960s my father was in Greece with some friends – he was 19 and on a mountain road had a head on collision with another car. The man driving the other car was a Greek General and he was killed. My father, the driver, was thrown in jail with no medical attention, with a head injury. His hair fell out. He wrote daily to his parents, a letter to send them after ‘the matter’ as he seemed to want to keep calling it, had been resolved. Here, the matter was that he had been accused of murder and needed to prove the accident was not his fault. Things happened to him in prison that I don’t know about and he didn’t want me to know about, all I have is the letter, a deeply sanitised version of events, but not without evidence of head injury. He was after two weeks found not guilty- the General had been drunk and on the wrong side of the road - and he was allowed to leave. His hair never grew back.

C: Then Herbert and his girlfriend came. God she was beautiful. Herbert caught some fish in the river and she’d get them alive and poke their eyes out for fun.

I suppose this is the part of the story which always feels most like a bad horror movie or a good nightmare. Just plonked in there, a beautiful woman being cruel to fish - you can see it can’t you. But as always, something has been left out – other times when the story has been told, I have heard of how Herbert was having what my parents both liked to call ‘a love affair’ with his maid, but on meeting her daughter - the beautiful and cruel to fish - he switched over to her and the mother continued to work for him. How old the daughter was is something that I’ve never managed to ascertain. Once my father added that the maid also had a son that Herbert had a relationship with, but I can’t remember how reliable he was being at the time.

C: When Herbert was there everything stopped and he wanted us to come down to Italy and join him there – he had a place there – but Dad didn’t want to go – he was so tired. I wanted to go, I thought it would be fun –we weren’t really having a great time in the house.

This ‘everything’ that my mother describes stopping here, was really the heart of the story when I was small. Sometimes, if she was telling it to a group of people, I’d excuse myself for this part because it bothered me so much. My mother has never been much of a performer, she likes to blend into the background and slip out the door. Quite a common thing I think when you’re married to someone who is a performer. In fact it’s strange to me that my father allowed my mother to be the teller of this story. So often if she tried to speak on other matters he would interrupt and explain how it really was, take over the story and add his own little flourishes. But very rarely did he want to talk about this one. Maybe it happened in a moment in his life when he was struggling. Maybe the nightmares were still with him.

When my mother told the story and she got to the part where the noises started, she would slap the table. She would say - ‘and at night we would lie in bed and on the ceiling just above our heads it would go, boom, boom boom boom boom,’ slapping the table in time with her booms, ‘and it would get faster and faster and louder and louder.’ and her slaps would intensify so that she could not be heard over them, so that wine glasses toppled over and the dog stood up, concerned. As a small child I would struggle not to put my hands over my ears, it seemed to me like that was where the ghost was - in my mother’s hands- like she had conjured it in to the room with us.

For a long time when I was small, I thought something possessed me. It came for my brother too, in much more violent ways. Both of us would get a feeling like our hands were not our own, like our bodies had become huge things and we were hunkered down inside of them, tiny versions of ourselves inside a giant shell. Our words came out wrong, our own hands touched like someone else’s. Time sped up, we slowed down, cumbersome in our bodies. There was a feeling of walking on fishbones, a feeling like hair rolled into plasticine and then pulled apart. If those descriptions don’t mean anything to you, that’s fine. We called it The Thingies. My brother, five years older than me, my hero, would come and lay on the floor of my room and say ‘Talk to me, I’ve got The Thingies,’ and I’d yap away. For him that was what helped - he could focus on someone else’s words. I would talk, mostly about sharks I think, which was the only subject I truly knew anything about or had any interest in. When I had The Thingies I didn’t want to be acknowledged by anyone else, I wanted to lay down in a dark small space and wait until it passed over. The pressure would build and build and eventually it would feel like it passed out of the inner corner of my eye, like I’d been punctured there. The feeling was so like the sound of my mother’s slaps on the table.

C: and me and your father never said anything to each other - we didn’t want to be the one complaining I suppose. And it felt like if we spoke about it it might get worse. So we stayed wide awake all night in the dark and dozed during the say and had bad dreams. We were pretty exhausted.

E: Why didn’t you leave?

The dog barks shrilly. She’s done another poo and my mother picks it up. My mother is suffering from what she’s calling ‘a poisoned finger’ so is slow with the poo bag. The dog barks more. The ball is tossed.

My father’s letter to his parents, written while in prison, sent when he was out.

More about this story next time. In the paid content this week I’ve recorded a rather long short story. The setting is the one I’ve been writing about in these letters - it’s as close as I’ve come to using this place in fiction.