Butter – by Daniel Ray
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It’s that time of morning when everything’s clean with cold and I can smell Dad’s aftershave spilling with gold light from the bathroom. My mouth is dry. I’m still shrugging off sleep and dark misshapen dreams. I focus on the yellow cut of light, imagining sheafs of steam, and Dad, face red with razor burn, looming in the mirror, clipping his fingernails while Mum ties back her hair and leans in to spit foaming toothpaste into the sink. For a moment their images converge in the mirror as if they are one person. Then they split apart like anagrams into body parts—ears, hair, noses, eyes—before they resolidify. I know little about them apart from this: their routines, their tiny ministrations. It’s as if they both died when they married.
They are arguing again.
— He’d be mad, Dad says.
— I can’t take it back.
— I think he’d be angry to learn that about you.
— Tell him then.
— Maybe I should.
Their words pulse down the hall and hang hazy in the air like smoke rings. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe they’re talking about me. They do that sometimes, when they think I’m outside or asleep or too far away to hear them. They mostly talk about school: what the teachers have told them about me. They say I’m bad at it. I can’t concentrate in the dusty classrooms with us all sitting in rows like church pews. I don’t understand the whole point of it: the squiggles on the whiteboard, how we can only enter and leave at certain times, how we’ve got to ask to take a piss. The other day I was staring at the clock in my English classroom and part of me knew it was 3 pm, but I couldn’t read it on the clock face. It was an equation with too many variables. The numbers seemed to melt and disfigure and the clock hands lengthened and curled like guttering flames and all at once I didn’t know what I was looking at. When Mum and Dad are talking about me, I get this urge to walk out and look them both in the eye. I want to see their words falter, their sudden embarrassment and confusion. I wonder if they would still be Mum and Dad, or if, like the clock, they would melt into nothing too.
— I don’t know why you still harp on about this. It happened years ago, Mum says.
— I’m supposed to just fucking forget it?
Dad’s voice is raised and acidic. He groans loudly in frustration. Something clatters without breaking.
— Now look what you’ve done, Mum says.
— And what about what you’ve done? Who the fuck deals with that?
It makes me think of the dog we used to own. When he was a puppy, he escaped from the house and crawled behind the car just as Mum was starting it and was burnt head-to-tail from the exhaust pipe. When the fur grew back, it was dark gold like the glint in the sky right before it turns indigo. Mum never forgave herself. Dad renamed him Stripe, which was cruel, I think, to forever mark him by our violence. And instead of making Mum feel better by reducing the sin, packaging it up into a funny anecdote to be told over drinks with friends, all it did was remind her constantly of what she’d done. Whenever she looked at the dog, I could see guilt burning in her eyes like a constellation.
“Whenever she looked at the dog, I could see guilt burning in her eyes like a constellation.”
One time I took Stripe for a walk and bumped into some neighbours whose names I couldn’t remember. She was small with grey hair and wore moss-green clothes. Sometimes you could see her crouching in the cul-de-sac, taking cuttings with large orange secateurs. His shorts showed off pale, blue-veined thighs, and winey skin tags. They were also walking a dog—roan and white with huge paws—and stopped when they saw me, twenty metres away. She said something I couldn’t hear, and he started dragging the dog by its collar, half in the air, back paws scrabbling on the tarmac, across the street. Only then, as if reminded of its own nature, did it start barking, hoarse, choking from the tightened collar. The man’s knuckles were white, his back turned to us, feet set, standing on the road while the dog hurled itself against the leash, barking and barking even after we were around the corner and out of sight. The next day I let Stripe off the leash and he bounded away into the brush. I don’t feel guilty. Wherever he is, I hope he’s somewhere better: where clocks and time and leashes don’t exist.
The cords of muscle in the old man’s arms. The patch of sweat on his flannelled back. Saliva stringing silver and frothy from the dog’s mouth. The woman staring at the yellow paper daisies trampled under the dog’s feet. Stripe turning away from it all, leading me home—on his back an arrow of gold. That’s what I think of while I listen to Mum and Dad fighting in the bathroom as I slowly get ready for school.
***
A year later, on a late summer night, unable to sleep, I walk into the kitchen, clammy feet tacky against the tiles. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Maybe I heard the soft buzz of television and knew someone was awake. Or maybe I’m just that age when you can still walk around the house at night and be amazed how different the world looks: how chairs can turn into giant’s bones; how shadows make everything soft and hard at the same time. Discarded termite wings, like thousands of iridescent blades, litter the floor. I stand next to the fridge and its alien hum. My parents are on the couch watching a film.
On the television, a man in a red jumper kneels over a woman face-down on the ground. As he yanks at her pants, exposing her pale bottom, he says,
— I’ll tell you about family secrets.
He slides a stick of yellow butter towards him with his foot, scoops it gold between his fingers. Pinning her arms, he slips the butter between her legs even as she says,
— No, no.
I make a noise and Mum and Dad look up at me.
— Why are you awake? Dad says.
— What are you watching?
The man’s on top of her now, moving forwards and backwards, making her repeat whispered phrases while she is crying.
As if only now aware of what is occurring on screen, Dad says,
— Listen, it’s just a film.
Mum sits quiet on the couch. I remember their argument in the bathroom a year ago. And amid the man moaning and the woman crying, all at once I’m sure that my mother cheated on my father, years ago, maybe before I was born, and that’s what they were arguing about. I try to push the thought away. I know it’s ridiculous and unfair—that they could’ve been talking about anything—but my mind keeps circling back to it. That my mother cheated on my dad. That my dad was talking about how if she told me, I’d feel betrayed somehow. That the whole idea of family would dissolve like a comic book tossed into a campfire. I can’t take it back. It happened years ago. Now look what you’ve done.
Dad pauses the film. The frame freezes on a close-up of the man’s face pressed against the woman’s cheek, mouth agape as if he is trying to eat her.
— You should go back to bed, Dad says.
***
The next morning begins with the smell of aftershave and light pouring down the hallway like butter. ▼
Afterword: The film quoted and alluded to is Last Tango in Paris. The use of butter in the rape scene was non-consensual. The image is a still from the film.
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