Swallow the Air by Tara June Winch Read Free Book Online Page A

rodeo men, more hard shiny faces and no cream creased shirts. They wear big hats though, guilty of some principled crime underneath their wide brims.

    Some things you never ever forget. The way your dead mother used to smile. The way sunrise flashes against the tabletop of the ocean. My brother’s scared eyes looking up from the kitchen floor.
    Some things stay with you, even if you manage to prise them out of your history, they somehow come marching back with a slung shotgun to blow away anything you’ve managed to build. To destroy your world, the world that’s not real but you wish it was.
    And I’ll never ever forget that day, at the rodeofights, and all the days that that day had brought with it. The day that I found my father. There he was, watching the men bleed faces. There he was, Dad. The day I truly faced him, at his side, not the stranger I’d wished for, or made myself imagine. He was the monster I’d tried to hide.
    He had a hand like a claw, so full of engorged veins and leather red welted skin, so strong and like his face that hung mirroring the ravaged. How could I forget him? His fingers slung over the cigarette as he sucked from his lips that were pressed close against his forefinger and thumb. His neck contorted against the inhaling charred breath. He hunched over the whole habitual scene like he always had, down at the flame and across the room. That look, that exact face. That was his anger face.
    I remembered now, when that anger face became his always face and the world ceased to be real, to be able to be understood, so I had left it behind. I couldn’t remember the endings to the memories of him. But here they were laid bare – the bores of him that I had hidden. Exposed for the fluid truth to punch through.
    He is there. We are at the side of our old house.He’s crouching beside Mum’s racer with a spanner; he’s tightening the bolts on the wheel rims. In one hand he holds the bike frame above the cement and with the other spins the wheel round, where the red and blue buttons slide up and down the spokes. He looks over to me, smiles, because he hears the car pulling into the driveway. ‘Stay here and play,’ he says as he rounds the corner to the back of the house. Through the walls I hear the spanner; it thuds against a void, and then shatters the bathroom tiling, that chiming noise. And it’s just a mess of skin now, slapping and slow pounding. ‘You fucking bitch.’
    Midnight whimpers, so faint, so light as if never of a victim. We see it through the crack of our bedroom door. Billy and me, watching Mum’s head swinging into the cupboards, her crazy hair flinging into her own bloody mess. ‘Don’t tell me to get a fuckin job.’
    He’s run out of yarndi, he heads inside the house, clearing the back steps. We hide in the corn stalks that Mum had planted. We don’t huddle together, Billy and me – we are separated by the violence.
    Mum is in the shower. I can see him in thekitchen; he’s boiling the kettle. I see the steam rise as he rips the jug cord from the wall and disappears into the hallway. This time she screams. His aim was always perfect, like sunsets.
    And Mum could grow her hair see, leave it out and let it go crazy. Let it hide melting skin. It’s a shame women are so clumsy. Let her hair go crazy, like they thought she was, crazy just like he had made her.
    I remember now, my mother was a beaten person. She wouldn’t scream at his fist, she wasn’t the type to fight his torments. She bottled all the years too; until one day all those silent screams and tears came at once. And with such force that they took her away. The screams must have been so deafening, the river of tears so overflowing that the current could only steal her. The flood breaking so high, that she had to leave us behind. We couldn’t swim either.
    Mum’s stories changed when he left. She became paranoid and