13. To Kill a Father

David childhood, dominated by a brutal father, is used to spur him to a dreadful response.

THE BODY IN THE BED

13. To Kill a Father

It was an uneasy night for David Shrimpton as he lay in his hospital bed, attached to monitors and with a succession of caring nurses checking on him.

He was awake and he wasn’t awake. That was the best way he could describe it when, eventually, his scrambled brain made some sort of sense of his experience. And that sort of sense wasn’t really any kind of sense at all. But bits and pieces of stuff that had happened, long ago when he’d been a nipper and only yesterday when he’d been a man, surfaced in a motley series of fragmented memories.

Because he had killed his father, hadn’t he? Killed him stone dead, and that would finally sort out the chaos that was his affection for his parents. And his mother had helped him, hadn’t she? She’d stood there next to him as he had pointed the gun at the man who had caused him so much childhood pain and had said something to him. Had told him what to do.

“Come with me and Joshua,” she had said, “we’ll take your pain away from you… we’ll send the fool to hell, and he’ll not be coming back… Let him drink some sweet wine.”

The wine.

They had given him a glass of wine. Red wine from Africa, brought back from one of Joshua’s secret bible missions. Special wine.

“When they find him they’ll find no trace of the magic powder I’m putting into this wine,” she had said to David with a sort of cackle, and she had offered the glass of wine to an unwary hated figure. “Just you drink this,” she had said to him.

“But I don’ like wine!” he had protested, his eyes suspicious even though they looked glazed and half dead.

“Then don’t she had smiled, “don’t touch it and remember what you had felt like the moment we created this boy here,” and she had gently taken him, David, by one shoulder and shaken him as if he was a fragile child afraid of being broken.

He had loved that, the softness of her grip, the fragrance of her motherly breath and the closeness.

“I’m thirsty,” his dad had said. He’d always been thirsty, back in the days when he’d been a giant against the tiny David, and he’d struck out at him, so much pain, so much agony with every syllable when he cursed him for being so very tiny.

“Then drink the wine,” she had whispered, and made her mouth curl into a huge toothy smile. “Sip it down in memory of the creation of your son, your excitement, can you remember, the crashing of your heart as we coupled, the thrusting and the chaos, you forcing and me resisting… and the chaos as life flowed from you to me in excited flames of lust,..”

And he had nodded, the reprehensible man, memory had turned his silence into an unheard cacophony of noise inside his head, and then taken a sip of the wine, and then another…

“Wine from Africa,” he had mumbled, and then, like a dying zombie, he had fallen to the ground, or like a breaking twig in a hideous gale smashing itself mindlessly against reality.

“See, David, the wine has sent him to sleep!” cackled his mother, and her mouth and teeth were still stretched hideously across er face.

“Stand up,” she had ordered the prone figure of the hated man, “do as I say and stand up…”

And like an obedient schoolboy afraid of the strap he had risen, but there was no thinking in his stance, no knowledge, his movements were blind as his eyes looked around and searched for nothing.

“We’re going to David’s school,” she had said, “remember the woman who you once said you loved? Years ago, when you were little more than a boy yourself? You were going to wed her, then bed her, then nothing… So come on, man of the hour, come with David and me to school.”

And that’s how it had been. Then from somewhere or nowhere Joshua had appeared, without his wretched lying dog collar, and he had actually picked his father up as if the one were a giant and the other made of floss, and then they had walked the street towards the school.

The empty streets leered at him, but David marched behind, cerytain now of the one truth that had dominated his life. His father was going to die and it was going to be wonderful, as if a spirit had foretold that what must be would be.

And at the school they had found a window open and like an automaton, when he was told to climb in his stupified father had climbed in. No sound, mother had hushed him to total silence, and as if motivated by a need for total obedience, somehow he had changed being one side of the window to being the other side.

It was a bedroom. And there was the cranky old woman in her bed. He remembered her, oh did he remember her! But she, at least, had been kind

“Get undressed,” mother had hissed at the father, the obedient, do-as-you're-told-or-else father.

And the silly man had pulled his own clothes off, all of them, even his stained underpants, and then he was told to climb next to the old woman in her bed.

And like a docile lamb, he’d done just that, put his hread on the pillow, closed his eyes, and then the magic had happened.

“Here!” his mother had said to him, “pay him back for all the beatings and your ruined arm! Pay him back right now!”

And she had handed him a gun. He knew guns, all right. He’d seen them on the television and at the pictures. He’d seen men being shot all right!

“Now, David, teach the swine a lesson!” his mum had rasped.

And he’d done just that. Pointed the long end of the silenced pistol straight at his father, and whispering daddy, daddy, look at me...and at the precise moment when his father, coaxed by a rasping order from his mother, sat bolt upright next to the sleeping woman, he had lovingly squeezed the trigger.

He had killed his own father! And didn’t he feel good!

© Peter Rogerson 31.05.23

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