Julie > Books: dysfunctional-families‎ (24)

Zhu felt a stab of uncharacteristic pity. Not-wanting is a desire too; it yields suffering just as much as wanting.

Zhu felt a stab of uncharacteristic pity. Not-wanting is a desire too; it yields suffering just as much as wanting.

"I especially like your face. You don't show much emotion--is that a Darre thing, or your mother's training?--but when you do, all the world can read it."

***

In the empty chamber, his voice echoed. The edge of it sawed against my temper like a dull knife.

***

What he snarled in reply, in his own tongue, needed no translation. But the walls did not fall in, and I did not turn into a frog, so he couldn't have been that angry.

***

I took his hand and held it while he bowed his head and trembled and fought to keep control of himself. He led and protected the servants here; tears would have made him feel weak. Men have always been fragile that way.

And tonight, as though the showbiz gods could tell that I needed levity and sparkle and wacky Euro froth, was the night of the Eurovision Song Contest!!

Most Americans of course have never heard of this great institution, and I can only feel sorry for them. I know this because I spent almost all my down time between takes in the movie Spy Kids playing Eurovision trivia with Antonio Banderas, much to the bemusement of the crew in Austin, Texas. They looked at us as though we were members of a cult, and in a way, we are. It’s somewhat daunting to try to convey the enormity of this program and the far-reaching and intense magic spell it weaves across the European diaspora, but I will try. First of all, anyone who has ever seen it will never be the same again. In terms of its place in the cultural zeitgeist it is the Oscars and the Super Bowl combined. It is untouchable and awful at the same time. It is part of every European's pop DNA, it is a rite of passage, a touchstone, and eventually it transcends its awful shallow shininess to become a communal nostalgic shrine to which we make our annual drunken pilgrimages. It’s like Christmas or Thanksgiving but without the family feuds and with a pretty racy bpm. We grew up with it, and we will almost certainly die with it, or perhaps from it. It gave us ABBA, people!! Celine Dion won in 1988, representing Switzerland!!

Every story's a kind of violence perpetrated on the facts. You cut off their arms and legs, stretch them out, break their ribs until they fit where yo

Every story's a kind of violence perpetrated on the facts. You cut off their arms and legs, stretch them out, break their ribs until they fit where you think they're supposed to. All of it in search of meaning. Some stories, the job is so clean, everything's arranged along an arc so bright that you can't see the carnage that went into making it.

But this story isn't like that. There is blood everywhere, pieces all around us. There are so many people involved: the Hightower family and all the people they touched, all the people they hurt. People and politics and history, of the family and four countries. This means we have to move around a lot. If you're looking for the kind of story where you follow one person from beginning to end, and the clock ticks forward, sentence after sentence—well, it's not going to go like that around here. You won't be confused at the end, you'll know everything then, I promise. But where do we start?

(view spoiler)[It had been six months since then but her hair had been kept short. She didn’t know why, she couldn’t remember having expressed a preference. There was much that she was unable to remember. Especially unclear were the days immediately after she and Eliot had had the news of Lily’s death. She remembered going into school and everyone being very sorry for her loss, but Eliot said that he had gone to school and she had stayed at home. The incident with the hair was completely lost; it seemed that when she’d left herself she’d left completely and it was not worth trying to fetch the images back, pointless trying to identify what exactly it was that had made her snap.

***

To make conversation, Miranda said, “Why are you reading that book? Are you in doubt about something?”

Eliot yawned, as he did when uncomfortable. “I told Cambridge that I’d read it and now I’ve got to make it true.”

She said, “You’re applying to Cambridge?”

Uncertainty worked his mouth. She thought she had wobbled in her seat, then realised she hadn’t moved at all; the thought don’t go had flashed through her like a swarm of pins. Eliot was one of those boys that made girls go quiet. He was so beautiful that it seemed certain he was arrogant or insensitive or stupid. He’d taken Luc’s contrast of fair skin and dark hair and he’d taken Lily’s curls and lively wide-set eyes. His bone structure was scary and unnatural and flawless. Besides that he was her knight.

The first week Miranda and Eliot had moved to Dover, they’d played King Arthur’s Court with Martin, Emma and Emma’s older brother, Mark. Martin was Merlin, Miranda was Morgan Le Fay, Emma was Nimue, the Damosel of the Lake, and Mark was King Arthur. Eliot said he didn’t care which knight he was—they were all badasses. He’d pulled the green ribbon down through Miranda’s ponytail, tied it around his sleeve and he’d said to her, “I’m your knight.” Miranda pushed him. He took a single step back and scowled. Miranda said loudly, “I’m Morgan Le Fay—I’ve got spells and I can stick up for myself.”

He’d said, “I know, but just in case.” Eliot at ten was slight and earnest, his face all eyes. He’d been quick to feel and quick to anger, and when he was angry he would smile very deliberately and with incredible sweetness before walking away. He didn’t care that the others heard what he said and sniggered, but Miranda cared. That’s why she’d thought, but hadn’t said, I’m your knight too.

***

He would get into Cambridge, of course he would go.

She said plaintively, “Is it too late to apply?”

She felt Luc and Eliot not looking at each other.

***

Everyone would believe her because at the back of their minds, everyone thinks that twin brothers and sisters grow up magnetized towards each other, the prince at the foot of Rapunzel’s tower before the tower is even built, the lover you can get at all the fucking time, the one who is you but a girl, or you but a boy, whose bed you know as well as your own. How could you endure that without falling in love? The question is, were they born in love with each other, these twins, or did it blossom? At any rate it’s already happened, the onlookers agree. It must have. Ask them when they fell. The brother and sister say no, no, it’s nothing like that, but what they mean is they can’t remember when.

***

“True. But they’d put up with the screaming,” Miranda insisted. “A psychiatrist would sedate you and act as if it wasn’t normal to be so scared. In a situation of Poe’s kind I would always, always go to a priest before I went to a psychiatrist. I’d be out of that House of Usher like a shot and off looking for Father Joe. And I’d have gotten rid of Ligeia with holy water.”

“Would you now,” Eliot muttered, and Luc, lolling in his armchair with the newspaper spread across his lap, looked up and said, “Easy to see the solution when you’re not in the story, isn’t it.”

***

I folded that page over at the corner and read on, no longer aloud. As always, the soucouyant seemed more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so you couldn’t decide if she was a monster. Still, I wondered if the salt and pepper were really necessary—they seemed too cruel when it would be easier to despatch her by blowing out her flame before it grew, or by holding a mirror up to her wrinkled face and saying, “I don’t believe in you.” But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruellest way to kill a monster.

***

The University Library is a mouth shut tight, each tooth a book, each book growing over, under and behind the other. The writing desks are placed in front of bookshelves, some of them between bookshelves so that whoever is sitting at the desk gets a feeling of something dusty, intangible and unspeakably powerful, something like God, watching them through tiny gaps in the shelves.

***

“What do you do when you can’t sleep?”

“Walk about,” I said.

We looked at each other for a decade, or at least eight months.

***

“Would you like to watch me drink some tea?” she asked. “It’s a very ordinary sight, but ordinary in a way that’s good because then you could use it as part of a representative sample in a study on the habits of the English tea-drinker, a dying breed.”

***

I felt every vein in me move closer to the surface of my skin, all veins plucked in one direction as if I was a stringed instrument.

***

Away from my sister it became more and more difficult to tell whether I was alright. Before it had been simple: I could look at her, or think of her at the clinic and then there I was, paper-clipped to my flesh, tidy where she wasn’t. (hide spoiler)]

Women, I know from watching hundreds - maybe thousands - of films and television programmes, cannot withstand really major things happening to them; they get raped, or their loved one dies, and they go to pieces, go crazy and commit suicide, or just pine away until they die. Of course, I realise that not all of them will react that way, but obviously it's the rule, and the ones who don't obey it are in the minority.