Free What Becomes by A. L Kennedy Page B

brave. I have heard people talk about meditation and hypnosis and I imagine this is mine.
    My acquaintance usually doesn’t enjoy the show, doesn’t want to talk about it on Monday mornings, has no interest in how the adventure is getting along. This is another reason to dislike her. She is also why my parents are upstairs – my father knew he could get away with this while I had company and would be trapped into being polite. I have been brought up nicely, to entertain visitors, to be caught.
    And I am still laughing.
    This keeps on without any effort from me and is part of the sounds of the house and not mine.
    I am also staring at the screen, but can’t follow the story – that’s an irritation – like the way they move the programme around, so you have to check when it starts – fifteen minutes later, five earlier, you never know – and maybe the cooking smells are nagging through at me, because it’s almost time for tea, but I can’t go yet because it hasn’t finished and I have to be near the adventures and soak up their happiness, their braveness, so I can take it in with me to the table where she’ll be defenceless, so soft that it makes me angry, and he’ll be complaining about the food, or asking me questions I can’t quite answer. He’ll be starting to build a fight and she will be in a kind of free fall and I won’t feel like eating, but if I can’t then that will be a problem and one more reason for an argument, because if there is something wrong with me then he will hurt her, so there can never be a single thing that’s wrong with me.
    I am old enough to see that I can’t stand this – can’t stand him as he is, or her as she is – I cannot stand this any more. But I do have to. This is clear.
    It is also clear that I want to be able to shout at them, to explain, ‘There is nothing that fucking frightens me more than you, there never fucking was and never fucking will be. It’s you I shouldn’t have to fucking watch. And I don’t want to be either of you and I know I will be both.’
    Because I am old enough to fucking swear.
    And I’d maybe end up laughing afterwards, I can’t guess and won’t find out, because I’ll never shout a word at anyone – too polite.
    Laughing now, though.
    Before I run up to my own room – forget I should excuse myself to my acquaintance, I just leave her and go to find my little hatchet. I’ve started collecting hard-edged tools, pseudo-weapons. It’s not as if I’ll ever use them, but I do like to have them around, and I run more, out on the landing, stop at my parents’ door and clatter the hatchet against it. I barely dent the wood and I am worried I will get in trouble and worried that my mother’s dying, will be dead, and worried that my hatchet might hurt someone in my family.
    I have a family.
    There are three of us.
    I hate the three of us but not enough, not yet.
    Because this part of me is still waiting for everything to turn out well.
    I still expect myself to save the day.
    But all I do is laugh.
    Which is making the sound of hurt things, who are trying not to be, falling things who are trying not to be, dying things who are trying to bounce back, looking like a different actor so that everything goes on just as before.
    Which is my theory about laughter.
    For what it’s worth.
    Which puts the poison in the water, the bad colour in the slippery dark.
    You have to go and spoil things. Every time.
    So change the subject.
    Be elsewhere.
    He mainly had dusty shoes, that Doctor – scuffed about and covered in pale dust, as if he’d been surviving, travelling all his life, as far away as he could be. I loved it when he wore the dusty shoes.
    But I ought to forget more, clean things out.
    Headache at the thought of so much memory, of me.
    And I think that I’m crying – the water jolting in around me, the