Hollow Bones

Chapter Four.

4.

I rummaged through the contents of a cylindrical trunk I had found in my grandmother’s cupboard.

Never seen this thing before, I thought.

It looked old, and beaten. Restful silence whispered around the bottom. Inside was a string of glass beads and yellowed lace.  Three photographs – two of my grandmother as a young woman. Shiny shoulders and a straight, small nose. Beautiful. One of a boy I didn’t recognise. He had horn-rimmed glasses and lilac bellbottoms and a frozen smile full of teeth and happiness. He was riding a bicycle. I ran my fingers over them, removing a film of dusty time that had settled as the years set in.

Things that meant nothing now. She was dead. Tangible things were as useless as a piano to a physicist.

I looked up, into the mirror on her cupboard’s sliding door.

I look like her. Kind of. Nnnyes.

 

Green eyes and long, tangled hair. My grandmother’s straight, small nose. Fair skin and three too many teeth. For my unusually striking appearance, I had, strangely, very little presence.

Maybe because my mother’s absence seeped into my own eyes.

Maybe because normality lurked so close. In a stained coffee-cup. Or the reality in a dream.

I heard a breath at the door and whipped away the trunk. My mother appeared at the threshold looking ethereal and holding a stack of slack, wavy-paged books entitled with fancy Oxford-esque names.

‘All ready?’ she asked.

I stood and nodded.  She smiled and drifted out of the room. I followed and left the trunk of little memories to coagulate into something distant and blurry. Nobody would remember it.

The doors closed with a solid THUNK. The car smelled of dog fur and acrid cleaning products.

‘So,’ my mother began, twisting the key in the ignition. The engine sputtered to life and coughed black, opaque smoke. ‘Have you written your speech?’

She manoeuvred out of the driveway and onto the road.

‘I think I’d rather not speak,’ I said. The car slowed a little.

‘You have to!’

We rolled to a stop in the centre of the bitumen.

I didn’t look at her.

She didn’t look at me.

With an exasperated sigh, she croaked out two thoughts I knew she had withheld for years.

‘No one in this goddamn family has the dignity to do anything.’