Bad Dad
I decide to intervene when our son’s fiery face is bunched up like a fist in the direction of my wife, who is standing in the kitchen twisting a dishcloth as though wringing a puppy’s neck.
‘Right, bucko, get up those stairs and ready for basketball.’ The finger I point only succeeds in pushing his meltdown button.
‘I’m not going to stupid basketball and you can’t make me!’ The beanbag swells into a mushroom cloud as he hurls himself into it with the force of a suicide bomber. My muscles clench as I breathe in the pink mist.
‘If you don’t get up those stairs now, your Pokémon are going in the bin. I mean it.’
‘Don’t care!’
‘That’s it. You were warned.’ I grab the VMAX box recently bought for his eleventh birthday and stride to the back door. My wife flaps the dishcloth in surrender.
‘Don’t. That cost me a hundred euro,’ she says.
‘Don’t care,’ I echo.
With every step across the back yard, I’m expecting him to follow frantically, but the little bugger’s stubbornness exceeds mine. I open the bin-lid and lay his collection of overpriced tat to rest on a pile of sodden bags, overlooking the husk of dead mouse I disposed of the day before curled up on a cairn of tea bags. Life mocks art, or at least blows a raspberry in its direction, as a scene from a Stephen King movie claws its way through my mind’s topsoil: an abusive father chucks his son’s horror comic in the trash and the boy exacts a voodoo doll revenge. A zombie memory lurches forth, dragging me back through the decades to a teenaged bedroom adorned with video nasty posters ripped from old film magazines, a fog of cigar smoke filling the air.
I watched the VHS freight train go rocketing past my gawping eyes, driven by the locomotion of my father’s fist. The cassette boxes plummeted off the shelf’s precipice in a lemming dive to splatter the floor in a plastic death mound, one cassette splitting open spilling a spool of oily black entrails over the rug.
‘There now,’ my father said. ‘Just treatin’ your stuff with the same respect as you treat your mother’s.’
He plugged the gap in his sneer with a Castella and swaggered off to the kitchen puffing clouds of contempt. I stared at the scattered remains of my movie collection and tried to comprehend this atrocity. Was this fair recompense for accidentally singeing my mother’s oven glove on the electric hob? I hated him then, his pettiness, his weakness.
With shame trailing from my heels like toilet paper, I extricate the box from the mouse’s mausoleum and trudge back to the house. I leave my self-respect in the bin, next to the dead rodent. Something gurgles sickly in my belly. It’s probably just my son twisting a knife into the gutless stomach of a ragdoll effigy of his weak and petty old man.
