After Nothing by Rachel Mackie

furious. I know for sure that you’d be angry at me for failing school. I’m failing really badly. I’m just so sick of having to sit in a classroom. I feel like screaming when a teacher goes on and on about stuff I just don’t care about. I’m sorry Dad, because I know how important education was to you – but if Kane weren’t there I probably wouldn’t go to school anymore.’
    Dad didn’t answer, of course.
    ‘Dad?’
    No reply.
    ‘Mom hit me.’
    That’s what I’d really wanted to tell him all along. Because I really wanted him to storm out of the room. I wanted to hear him say my mother’s name in anger. I wanted to hear raised voices.
    I wanted him to hit her so badly, to pay her back for everything she’d done to us. But Dad would never have done that. Never.
    The following day, when I went into his room, it stunk of urine. He’d peed on one of the curtains and it had all run down and soaked into the carpet.
    I sponge cleaned the carpet with carpet cleaner and disinfectant. I moved one of his chairs to the window and stood on it so I could unhook the curtain. Then I hand washed the whole curtain so it wouldn’t get a water stain. It was too wet to dry it outside so I put it in the clothes dryer, then I hung it back up. It had shrunk in the dryer, and now hung two inches above the carpet.
    The next day he peed on the curtain again, and it all ran down and soaked into the carpet, again. And I cleaned it all up, again.
    This time though, I also brought my bedside table downstairs and put it in the corner where he was peeing. That stopped that from happening again, but there were other changes going on with Dad.
    The same week that he peed on his curtains, I picked up one of his headphones to check what radio station he was listening to. It wasn’t tuned to a station, but was on static. I checked the next day; same thing. That night I checked while he was actually listening. Again, static. I asked him if I could tape the dial so it was fixed to his favorite radio station.
    He tutted in response, so I taped it.
    The way he communicated was changing. He no longer said, ‘Good,’ when you asked him how he was. Instead he’d reply with something that made no sense, like, ‘I know it. I know it,’ or there would be no response at all. Or he tutted, for a really long time.
    One day he got upset in the kitchen because he couldn’t find the drawer with the teaspoons in it. He didn’t just cry – he made this howling, sobbing noise. Mom left me to deal with it. She went out to do her grocery shopping, even though I knew she hadn’t planned to. I tried to comfort Dad by giving him hugs and teaspoons. When that didn’t work, I made him pumpkin soup from a packet, and he quietened right down. It occurred to me then that Dad hadn’t spoken my name for months. After he went to bed I put teaspoons in every kitchen drawer.

12
     
    Kane and Wayne made up, and Kane moved back home. I wasn’t allowed to know anything about it, which made me think Kane had given Wayne a whole lot of that money he’d been making from whatever it was he was doing that I also wasn’t allowed to know about.
    Thing was, with Kane being back at home, we didn’t seem to be spending any more time there than we had been when he was kicked out. He was getting even more serious about school. It was his last year, and he was determined to graduate, but sometimes he took his studying too far. Like the times, when we were in the library, he would get books out that weren’t even part of what he had to do for school. Math books written by genius math people. Art books filled with as much text as pictures. Additional design books that covered everything from buildings to furniture.
    One day he put a photographic book in front of me filled with pictures of Black British people. I barely glanced at it. He took it back and looked through all the photos.
    Kane would get really frustrated with me. He was always trying to help me with my homework,