I was suddenly on the wrong side of dad all the time. It was like he had no patience with me anymore – always short-tempered, irritable – quick to strike if I said the wrong thing.
It probably didn't help of course that I had my mother's eyes. Well, I did according to Gran.
She kept saying that – both in front of Dad and whenever I was alone with her – and, more often than not, she liked to add: 'Didn't stop her from abandoning you, though, did it?'
Apparently, Gran was saying it for my own good, trying to wean me off this idea of Mum
as someone to idolise, like some distant omnipresent God who, despite allowing hunger and sadness to reign, and providing no logic, was still revered.
But, despite having reached the age of reason, I was becoming more superstitious than ever before. Well, in any event, I as usual didn’t want to go to Gran's, but Dad had to go to work.
The standoff ended with me being punched.
'Your dad's been having a hard time of it,' said Gran, upon my arrival still crying, and continuing to cry after dad had left. 'Try to understand that he's the one who's there for you.'
But then, at bed time, it started again. 'You have your mother's eyes.' Every time she said that, it was as if she’d only just realised – but now, while washing my hands in the sink, she realised something else: 'You have your father's hands.'
Gran was mad. Everyone around me was mad. And all of it was driving me mad.
‘You have your mother's eyes’ ‘You have your father's hands.’ Even then, I knew that that didn’t sound like a good combination.
Thomas McColl lives in London, and works in publishing. A poetry collection, Grenade Genie was published in 2020 by Fly on the Wall Press, and his novella-in-flash, The Man with the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face, won highly commended in the Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Award 2024.
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