The Evil Orange Penguin

I’m peeling the parsnips for Sunday lunch when the evil orange penguin finally reveals itself. It’s been over a year since its last visit, but this sudden appearance is no surprise. Ever since I looked across the breakfast table at my son and he looked back with one swollen eye, I knew today would mark the penguin’s return. Before I can react, it holds up a lurid print of Cillian having his eyes plucked out by a pair of male fingers.

‘I really haven’t time for this today,’ I say, trying to keep the warble out of my voice. ‘My in-laws are due in less than an hour and I still have the spuds to sort out, so you’re just going to have to entertain yourself.’

The penguin honks its horrible laugh, a sort of foghorn screech from a sunken ghost ship, and with a sweep of one mangy wing knocks away the picture to reveal an even worse one underneath. I’m dismayed to note that the stack of images clutched to its chest is thick as a phonebook.

‘Please, I’m asking you nicely, go away. Go away and leave me in peace.’

Honk-honk, says the penguin, shuffling the images with a croupier's flourish.

‘Not this time.’ With every muscle quivering, I resume work on the vegetables. ‘You’re the sick one, not me. If you want to debase yourself wallowing in that… that filth, you go right ahead, but leave me out of it. You hear me, leave me the hell alone!’

‘Did you say something?’ Shauna is towed into the kitchen by an oceanic glass of chardonnay, her face aglow from the atomic fallout of the hairdryer blast required to achieve the mushroom cloud bouffant billowing from her head.

‘Nothing, sorry. I mean, no, I didn’t, just – just noticing the time is all. Still have to... stir the marinade.’ I swallow coppery terror and gesture vaguely around the room. My wife has been unable to see the penguin during its previous visits, but there’s always a first time. As I dig the blade into the knobbly flesh of another parsnip, the penguin cackles and sets down before me a succession of brightly detailed depravity.

The first image shows the knife being used to scoop my son’s teeth out of his mouth as easily as seeds from a melon; the next shows the boy filleted into delectable slices of meat; in the next, he’s being castrated; the next, death by a thousand small cuts. Needless to say – but shame demands my full confession – it’s always my hand holding the knife.

‘Can I do anything?’ Shauna looks through the penguin at the pile of beheaded parsnips strewn across the work counter. ‘You remember that Mummy is gluten free these days, right? There’s no gluten in any of this?’

‘No,’ I guess.

‘What about the ham?’

‘What about it?’

‘Is it gluten free?’

I look at her. ‘You do know what gluten is?’

She waggles a hand as her lips flutter back to the glass. ‘So long as you’re sure.’

As she strides from the room in response to the imperative of one of her many phones, the penguin overlays the pictures of my son being tortured with a fresh atrocity. The print quality on this one is immaculate: you can see not only the shimmer of light on the surface of the wine glass, but every blotch of skin on the part of my wife’s body into which the glass is being forced.

Honk honk, says the penguin.

My sweat has gone cold and ripe by the time Shauna’s parents and brother Zane arrive. I muster up enough bonhomie to attempt a European greeting for my mother-in-law Gertie, but neither party fully commits to the kiss and cheekbones scrape together like pieces of flint. The men just exchange a tight handshake and nod wisely at the carpet. I smile too much and try to fix my gaze on any part of the room where the penguin hasn’t pinned up a picture of Cillian being used as a madman’s finger puppet, but my choices are limited.

‘What is that divine smell?’ Gertie snuffles the air with fake pleasure.

‘That’s just me. Obsession by Calvin Klein,’ says Zane through a stage yawn. A polite laugh is shared around like a broken biscuit.

‘Nana!’

Cillian waddles in brandishing a page scrawled with crayon. His left eye beams a warning sign.

‘My goodness, what happened you?’ Gertie gawps at her grandson before turning her suspicion on his parents.

‘I know.’ Shauna looks outraged as though it’s someone else’s fault. ‘We were at the park yesterday and I don’t know how he managed it. I just turned away for a moment and he ran full pelt into a picnic table.’

‘Must have been a chocolate biscuit on it,’ I say.

Zane sniggers and I feel cheap. Shauna glares at me and Gertie’s smile is the size of a paper cut.

Cillian’s eye is the cause of all of this. When I first saw it this morning, it took all my effort not to reach out and poke it with a spoon. Every time I look at him, the urge to squeeze it as you would an infected boil makes my fingers tingle. The eyes aren’t just the windows to the soul; they’re a doorway that sometimes lets the monsters out.

‘You poor little lamb.’ Gertie fixes Cillian’s hair and tucks in his vest as though tidying up a mannequin. ‘We may get you a crash helmet.’

‘I see the tomato plants are starting to bloom out there, Kurt.’ Having peacocked himself at the centre of the room, Shauna’s father Grahame targets the vegetable patch through the window with the glare of a camp commandant. ‘What compost are you using?’

‘Coconut potting soil,’ I say, trying not to think the word "manure", but too late — plop! There it is, splattered all over my mind.

The penguin holds aloft a banner depicting in the style of a medieval tapestry my entire family sitting down to a dinner of animal excrement. I’m feeding Cillian from a silver platter, stuffing lumps of ordure into his mouth by the spoonful until it starts to leak out of his eyes.

‘And manure,’ I add, taking momentary control, 'lovely ripe manure'.

The penguin loses its grip on the scroll and the sick tableau refurls as quickly as a lizard’s tongue. It dives behind the sofa with a honk of frustration, and a furious gnashing of parchment ensues.

Grahame reluctantly nods approval. ‘You know you can make your own organic fertiliser out of poultry manure and grass clippings?’

‘And piss,’ says Zane.

‘Zane!’ Gertie’s eyes emanate shockwaves, girlish delight tugging at her lips. As always, Grahame just continues as though no one else has spoken.

‘Done wonders for my cabbages, hasn’t it, Gertrude?’

‘Kurt’s having a go at potatoes next, aren’t you, love?’ Shauna runs her fingers down my back as though frisking for concealed weapons. She blasts my face with a musk of cigarettes and cheap Californian and my head begins to nod and just keep on nodding until I become aware of four pair of eyes narrowing in unease, so I say:

‘Yes. Potatoes. Yes. I must try… that homemade fertiliser.’

The tension is discharged with the pop of silent flatulence and some more harmless platitudes are left on the coffee table to go cold. Shauna does hostess duties with a bowl of nuts and Zane does piano lounge compere with a few more bon mots spat into the conversation and I do my very best – succeeding quite well in the circumstances – to ignore the orange penguin sitting in the middle of the carpet. Then I glance at Grahame’s moccasins, and the penguin holds up a card depicting Cillian being garrotted with the shoelaces.

Cillian was only a few weeks old when the penguin first came to stay. It was my first time to look after the boy alone and I soon exhausted my repartee of silly noises and funny faces in an effort to entertain. Bored, I sat on the sofa with this gurgling ball of fat in my lap and tried to make sense of his existence. As I sank into the huge needful eyes staring back at me, the thought occurred: How can anyone harm a child?

To which, from a cave somewhere inside, a voice replied: Well, there are lots of ways to harm a child really. Take the edge of that fireplace for instance, sharp as a Great White’s tooth. If a baby were to topple forward and catch its eye on that…

What I saw was so clear it could have been a holy vision: I took the new-born child I was holding in my hands and dashed its brains against the hearth, those eyes spilling out of the broken skull like fallen grapes. I recoiled as though acid had been hurled, but there was no escaping it, no matter how much I shook my head; the image was a medieval death-mask riveted to my face.

See? See how easy it would be?

I took the boy upstairs and placed him tremulously on the bed in a protective ring of cushions, before retreating to the doorway in terror of what I might do next. He burbled and drooled and looked at me dumbly – and in return was murdered by his father, over and over and...

For two days, the images that stuck to my mind were slow-dying insects. Everything my gaze alighted on, no matter how banal or commonplace – a spoon; a towel; the grit on the road – became an obvious implement of infanticide. How easy it would be indeed to murder my son with the family dictionary: why, all I had to do was open it centrespread – maybe on the entry for ‘Mother’ – and smother him while he slept. Then leave the book in the next room on the pillow beside my wife as she slumbered, open at the definition of ‘Evil’.

It’s odd to suddenly fear you’re losing your mind. You expect these things to sort of set in like arthritis; but it can be just as abrupt as a broken leg.

Throughout lunch, I feel as though there is a pane of observation glass bisecting the table, but I’m not sure of which side I’m on. The penguin takes its place by my side as a faithful pet, flicking through a fat wallet of photographs all featuring my son having inserted into his body the various items of cutlery, condiments, candlesticks and corkscrews arrayed across the tabletop. Talk settles on us like ash.

‘Zane’s little thing is working now,’ says Gertie, maternal pride glowing through her wine blush.

Shauna cocks an eyebrow sculpted in the shape of a frown and tops up her mother’s glass. ‘Excuse me?’

‘His little radio thing.’

‘How many times, mother? Seriously.’ Zane rolls contempt around his eye sockets. ‘It’s a blogcast. Blog. Cast. Radio is as dead as VHS.’

‘Is that it, love? He does this thing with a friend of his –’

‘Only fossils still listen to the radio. Like you and him.’ Zane spits the last word sideways at his father. Grahame’s rooster stare flitters between the faces of his wife and son, before he returns to venting his frustration on a jacket potato. Gertie lubricates her banter cogs with another guzzle of wine.

‘Most of it goes over my head, but they’re starting to build up quite a following.’

‘What’s it about?’ I look interested. At least, I hope I do.

‘Board games.’ He says this with such hauteur I think I’ve misheard.

‘Ones you play with a dice?’

‘Die,’ he says, relishing the word. ‘And no, not always. Some of the best are role-playing strategy games.’

‘Role-playing?’ Shauna lowers her near-empty glass to reveal the family sneer. ‘You still at that?’

Zane bares yellow teeth. ‘Give it a rest.’

‘Whatever happened to that job in the civil service you applied for?’

‘Why don’t you take a day off from being a bitch and save the batteries.’ The teeth stay tightly gritted.

‘That’s enough.’ Grahame targets his son with a gravy-smeared pout. ‘We’re having our lunch.’

Gertie raises her glass. ‘And a lovely lunch it is too, chapeau to the chef.’

I nod and smile and look suitably humble. Shauna sets down her now drained glass so hard it tings against her plate.

‘What do you pretend to be in this role-playing thing? Someone not still living with his parents at the age of twenty-six?’

Zane’s smile is a knot. ‘You should try one some time. You could pretend to be a good wife and mother.’

‘The ham is so tender, comes apart like candy floss,’ says Gertie to no one.

‘I said, that’s enough.’ A tiny spud meteorite flies across the table from Grahame’s splutter of indignation. Shauna sniffs and reaches for the wine bottle.

‘Much money in it?’

‘Piss off.’

‘Hey!’ Grahame bangs the table with his fork hand, instantly looking embarrassed as he remembers this is not his castle to hold court in.

‘I’m only asking.’ Shauna shrugs as she takes her first sip of glass number ten.

‘That’s enough.’ Grahame threatens each of his children in turn with his knife. ‘I’ll not say it again.’

‘My goodness, that really is delicious,’ says Gertie, slurping up a trickle of glaze.

My eyes wander to the curtains and it prompts the penguin to produce a picture of Cillian being smothered, the shiny beige material yanked tight as a shroud across the boy's silent scream.

‘Glad you like it,’ I say, trying to project myself out through the window into the sky and the nothingness beyond.

It wasn’t until the penguin’s third visit, when Cillian wasn’t quite two, that I recognised it for what it was. I was nursing the boy in front of the television when I happened to glance down and those muddy brown eyes sucked me in once more to the dark place. The black wellspring of images that assailed me was so vivid I knew it had to be erupting from somewhere buried deep inside me.

So, I went to the cave and I dragged the penguin out into the light. Once I saw it everything changed. It doesn’t look like a penguin, not exactly: it’s more simian in appearance, with a maw of fangs and the cold eyes of a rapist priest. There’s tawny fur coating its fat body, the wings ragged as a witch’s claws. But I know it’s a penguin, the most detestable kind – the orange penguin, who grows stronger the more you try to deny its existence.

‘Show me,’ I said.

And it did. I made it show me everything it had stored away. We watched together in the fleapit movie theatre of my mind all of the horrible stuff I had tried so hard to censor, and the more I watched the duller it became, evil so banal and senseless, until the screen became a glare of meaningless noise. For two days I watched it all and asked for more and when the auditorium lights finally came on, the penguin was gone.

He’ll never leave for ever. You can’t exorcise the orange penguin; to try only brings you closer together. But he can be controlled when he flares up with the irritation of a venereal disease. You don’t scratch, that only makes it worse. No, when you feel the orange penguin creeping back into your life, you just meet him head on and wallow in the muck.

The penguin’s already waiting for me when I go to the bathroom. As I reluctantly relax my bladder, it holds up a picture of my son being baptised in a paternal rain of gold.

‘You twisted freak.’ I seethe at the penguin in the mirror. ‘There’s something wrong with you, you know that?’

I address my reflection. ‘Not you, oh no, there’s nothing wrong with you. This is normal – so normal it’s boring. But him, that other guy…’

I drop my gaze to target the orange smear. ‘He’s the sick one. You need help. I pity you, so full of poison. Is it because you can’t fly, is that it? Such a resentful little creature.’

I stare long and hard at the penguin’s elongated snout, brown fangs sprouting wart-like from gums red as swollen buttocks. Its human eyes taunt me.

‘All right, you hate-filled bastard, I’ll do it. I know how to get rid of you.’

When I return to the kitchen, Shauna has managed to remove my homemade pavlova from the fridge and is staring at it as though it’s a bomb she has to defuse.

‘What do I do with this?’

I remove the spoon from her hand and give her my oiliest smile. ‘Leave it to me, love. Why don’t you see if anyone wants a top up?’

‘You sure?’ She already has her hand in the drawer searching for the corkscrew.

As I pick up the second largest kitchen knife, I tell the penguin, ‘We’re having my son for dessert, lightly baked and garnished with cream, washed down with a cup of his blood sweetened with brown sugar. Bet you can’t wait.’

‘Who’s for a little treat?’ I stride into the dining room brandishing baked boy and knife with butcher’s relish.

‘Just to ramp up the diabetes risk,’ says Zane to his father, rewarding himself with a snigger.

I set the souffled body of my son in the centre of the table and break the crust with the knifepoint. I fancy there’s even a little scream as the blade sinks to the plate with a porcelain thunk.

‘Is this homemade?’ Grahame attempts a diffident frown as the first portion comes his way, but the dollop of drool that leaves his mouth is limpid as a raindrop from a gutter.

‘Family recipe.’ I wink and flash the canines.

The family gets wolfish. I watch Gertie daintily chase one of the boy’s eyes around her bowl, satisfaction wetting her lips as the eyeball finally pops beneath the prongs of a dessert fork. Zane nibbles at pieces of skull slathered in cranial fluid, occasionally cursing under his breath as he’s forced to wipe yet another droplet of his nephew off his bootcut jeans. Grahame’s cheeks bulge as he methodically spoons up his viscera in cream, bits of liquified intestine painting a clown’s smile around his gurning mouth. Shauna washes down no more than a spoonful of bloody brain matter with a slurp of wine, too preoccupied decrying yet another ‘thundering bitch’ who crossed her at work this week. With every mouthful that I see consumed around the table, I think of my son’s guts pureed in a blender, bones ground to powder, heart divided up into the holy wafers of communion.

‘More,’ says Cillian, who isn’t Cillian at all but a replicant I substituted in the night, with dollops of the real Cillian smeared across his face.

‘Of course, son,’ I say, spooning out seconds.

I eat my penance with a martyr’s fervour. The penguin, caught in the glare of my darkness, is frozen, silent and helpless. As I wipe my bowl with a finger that is then sucked clean, he begins to quake a tantrum, moulting a flurry of slow torture images that carpets the table in confetti.

‘My word, you really are a man of hidden talents,’ says Gertie, a single pearl of grandson embedded at the corner of her mouth.

‘You have no idea,’ I say.

The rest of the day throbs along dull as a bee-sting. A pot of tea and a plateful of iced fancies are further stuffed into us by the demands of our faith, Sunday being the day when all good Christians indulge their gluttony and sloth. Chatter scuttles over me, meaningless talk of neighbours’ disputes and holiday plans and something something tracker mortgage. I nod, the fixed smile cutting into my face tighter than an undersized strap.

‘I’m not staying in that villa again without an air rifle for the lizards-’

‘-there’s more to that jewellery box story than she’s letting on-’

‘-I’m telling you, it was-’

‘-all I know is that the mother swore she’d never set foot in that house-’

‘-I’m telling you, it wasn’t-’

‘-the size of a cat-’

‘-she was no better-’

‘-was-’

‘-less twenty-five percent-’

‘-wasn’t-’

‘-hateful old bit-’

As my in-laws toot their farewells from the driveway, Shauna places a kiss on my lips that’s dry as a napkin. ‘That went well. Leave the clearing up. I’ll do that after I give Miriam a quick ring.’

Cillian is making an ambulance repeatedly crash into a fire engine on the floor to a soundtrack of slabbery explosions. Brandishing plucked feathers like a knife-thrower's blades, the penguin starts sticking the sharp ends into the boy’s eyes. I watch for a while until both the penguin and I get bored. Finally, the penguin waddles off into the kitchen with a huffy honk. I squat beside Cillian and cause a few minor traffic collisions until Shauna returns from the garage in a miasma of cigarette musk.

‘Having fun?’ Her smile is as messy and inviting as an unmade bed.

‘Couldn’t you just eat him up?’ I say, stroking the top of our son’s head just a fraction too hard.

As I’m settling him for the night, tucking him in tighter than a mental patient, he says, ‘Am I getting a cwash helmet tomorrow?’

‘What?’

‘Nana said...’

‘Nana was just being silly.’

I look at the eye: a bulbous tomato turned soggy in the sun. One quick squeeze and the blood would squirt like pus from a boil. The smile weighs heavy on my lips.

‘Go to sleep, little man. Night now.’

I place the kiss gently on the boundary of the bruise. The urge to take a bite lasts no more than a few seconds. I go downstairs to crawl to the bottom of the last wine bottle with Shauna.

There’s no sign of the penguin at bedtime, as I make my monkish rounds of the house closing curtains and twiddling light switches. Discarded images still litter the rooms, as faded as old newspapers lying in a ditch. I stare out into the void of the night from the landing window, but there’s no hint of vile orange spoiling the black.

‘That was a lovely day, thanks again.’ Shauna pats my hand as I slip under the duvet.

‘Glad everyone enjoyed it.’

She glances over woozily from her home furnishings catalogue. ‘You okay? You seemed a bit distracted today. Daddy didn’t annoy you going on about the holiday villa, did he? It’s just that this could be the last year we’ll get the chance, what with Mummy’s hip.’

‘I’m just tired. Long day.’

‘You shouldn’t sit up so late during the week. You’re always burnt out by the weekend.’

‘It’s a fulltime job keeping an eye on them, eh?’

‘What?’

‘Kids. Cillian. I mean, look what happened his eye.’

‘Och. Children get bumps and bruises. It’s no big deal.’

‘Hard to look at though.’

She scrunches up her face. ‘What are you trying to say?’

‘Freaks me out a bit, is all.’

She sits up and inches away from me. ‘What? You don’t think I know how to look after him? And what was that chocolate biscuit crack about earlier?’

‘Don’t get worked up. The boy’s fond of his food is all, everyone knows that.’

‘Oh, everyone is it?’ The catalogue is slammed shut and tossed to the floor. ‘You always do this after we spend some time with my family, you always get horrible.’

‘Forget it, Shauna, I wasn’t saying anything.’

‘You were saying our son is fat.’

‘Is that what you heard? I’m just saying we have to be careful. Some people have an addictive personality.’

‘He’s five years old, for God’s sake!’

‘You can be born with it.’

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

It’s a good question, and one I keep asking myself after she puts out the light and turns away to wrap the duvet around herself like a fire blanket. The darkness hums and shimmies, the furnishings of the room emerging from the shadows with the slow moving reveal of objects through fog. I wonder if the penguin will still be with me tomorrow.

Just as my eyes are starting to close, through the stillness of the night from the confines of the garden shed, comes the sound of a solitary honk.