Tuesday 8th November

Mathilde – Sunday

Miss Phillips had been allocated a different class after her shouting fit, and Mathilde doesn’t remember seeing her much in the rest of her time at primary school. But she does remember that feeling of paused silence, when you can hear your heart beating and feel the electric tension of raw, expressed emotion in the air, and the pause between now and the next thing is an agony of not knowing. That was exactly how she’d felt the first time she’d heard mum and dad arguing in the night.

She’d been half asleep, drifting in and out of a fantasy of being a captive (male) soldier in a prison of war camp, with a gun hidden under her pillow. In this fantasy, she was adult and full of responsibility – the usual calm, unflustered fellow whom everyone respected and whose skills were manifold. She imagined – and dreamed – herself moving with slow, supple confidence, in control of her movements and her destiny despite the bald fact of her captivity, able to anticipate problems and deal with anything that came her way. Earlier in the year, dad had taken her to see her first war film at the cinema – though she’d seen stacks of them on the telly; she’d already expressed interest in soldiers and tanks, and had asked for a camouflaged sun hat for her birthday, and mum and dad had been indulging her tastes as a ‘tomboy phase’. She played with the boys in her street rather than the girls when she got the chance, and she looked as comfortable with a football or a roughly-carved wooden rifle as with a pink pony or a plastic tea pot and a set of plates: secretly, mum was pleased with the way that Mathilde bucked the conformist trends of ‘girly’ behaviour; she was a pretty little girl, and there was nothing boyish about her, even when her hair was cut short in the fashionable elfin look of the day. She moved elegantly and athletically, she smiled readily, and she was doing well academically at school, even though her teachers all commented that she was a little too quiet and shy in class.

The first thing that had struck her in the cinema was the amazing size of the screen and the vividness of the colours, the way the sound and the pictures seemed slightly out of sync, and the way that, even though there was darkness and floating dust all around, the screen seemed to be full of sunlight that beamed out onto the faces of the audience. In the film, a suave, laconic [German/Dutch? – still unresolved] spy/lieutenant had infiltrated a wartime Russian headquarters, and managed to dispatch dozens of thick, stereotypically straw-haired Russians via the judicious use of explosives, machine guns, and a nifty little silenced pistol that tucked invisibly under the left armpit of his tightly cut tunic. It was this figure (played by a famous American actor, despite the character’s nationality) that Mathilde identified with, and whose graceful movements, sardonic drawl and cool killing actions she tried to emulate in her solo, self-narrated games, and when playing war games with her boy friends in the street.

When she heard mum and dad shouting that night, she couldn’t at first recognise what she was hearing: there was this strange sound rumbling against the ceiling below, like shingle being tumbled and dragged by the waves; and then the high-pitched whine, like the start of feedback from a microphone too close to a speaker (?); an unusual, previously unheard dynamic of high and low tones, with none of the spaces that people usually left for other people to absorb and respond to what was being said to them. She lay there for a while, electrified with fright, with her heartbeat’s bass loud in her ears, and her ears straining to hear the sounds from downstairs above the sounds of her own body, and to fit them into some kind of framework of meaning [like when she first…??].

Gradually, as she differentiated between the sounds, separated them out from the distant traffic noise, the surrounding silence, and her body’s punctuation , the gravelly shingle sound resolved itself into the emotion-hoarse shouts of her father, defensive and desperate in tone; the feedback sound was revealed as mum’s shrill, tearful, sobbing accusations. After a while, the energy levels in the argument diminished, as if the tide was going out, leaving just a few last waves of emotion lapping in its aftermath; the speed of the exchanges slowed; the pauses got longer; and both of the grown-up’s voices settled down into a lower, more even register. Eventually Mathilde heard the downstairs lights click off, and then came the sound of adult feet on the stairs – first his mother’s light, quick tread, and the snit of the bathroom door’s lock; then dad’s slower, heavier ascent. She heard dad stop outside her bedroom door, and found herself rigid with fright as she heard dad turn the handle and open the door. In the silence, as dad stood there in the doorway, a shadow seen through her night-thickened eyelashes, Mathilde could hear the disturbing echoes of emotion-hoarse shouts, and she had no idea what to think, or what he could possibly say to her dad again, ever, without a rush of questions spilling out of her, craving explanation and expiation [for upsetting her mum and destroying the peaceful idyll of childhood trust in the parents – EXPAND!]: the memory of those sounds, and that unprecedented anger and betrayal of expectation would always sit there between them, a prism that could never be removed, and which would always distort their interaction. How could he shout at mum like that? What was the matter with him? What was going to happen next? It was shocking.

Later, she heard mum go downstairs again, crying quietly after the steam roar of the boiling kettle had terminated in the mechanical clack of the automatic cut out.

Whenever she hears her dad on the stairs now, that night’s uncertainties and fears rush back into her mind and body, and she’s filled with panic, confusion, distrust, and a sense of betrayal.

(c. 1030 words)