Bed Time Story

It was never easy growing up for me, and it’s even harder to describe the childhood I suffered. Perhaps it’s true that madness runs in our family; my father who jumped from the top floor of an office tower, and my mother whom was later committed to a mental asylum for reasons that I shall explain later.

I was no more than seven years old when my father decided to commit suicide. My mother, who was in her early thirties at the time, was two months pregnant. I have little memory of the period, apart from the funeral, where I saw my father for the last time; the mortician had done a good job in reconstructing his body. My mother, distraught with grief; her belly bulging with the dead man’s child, my future brother, beneath her dark funeral gown.

Only a ragtag assembly of my father’s friends and work colleagues showed up for his service; the only relative being his mother, my grandma. I had always assumed that since he came to the country as a migrant worker, most of his family remained overseas, perhaps knowing little of his circumstances, hence my mother received little monetary assistance in bringing us up, relying heavily on the welfare system to support us.

Fortunately, grandma decided to stay with us soon after the funeral to help mother. She was a quiet lady who kept to herself most of the time, staying in her room with the door locked. I’d often hear her sobbing and wailing; a mother dealing with the death of her only son. After several months had passed since my grandma moved in, it became apparently obvious that my mother and her did not get along.

I would often hear grandma’s screaming and shouting coming from the downstairs kitchen, in a tongue that I did not understand, and promptly afterwards as I watched from the landing, my grandma would stomp up the stairs, her face contorted and red with anger, her eyebrows furrowed so deeply that they would hide her dark beady eyes. She would walk past me, pushing me out of her path, enter her room, and slam the door loudly behind her. Then almost immediately, my mother would run up the stairs and slap me on the back of the head, taking her distress out on me.

It wasn’t long before my baby brother was born. For the first time, in a long while, my mother began to look happier. The baby slept in a cot beside my bed. Sometimes the baby would wake up during the night, and hurriedly, my mother would run into the room and take my brother downstairs to the kitchen to feed him. Soon afterwards, the screaming could be heard to settle down to intermittent cries until they eventually became quiet.

It was around this period, that my grandma would also come into the room to check on me while my mother was busy. I took the opportunity to ask her about my father; I wanted to know why he killed himself. She leant in to my face as I felt her breath against my neck and ear, her voice was raspy, uttering one word that seemed to forcefully shake my body, ‘madnessss’.

About a week later, about the same time as usual, my baby brother began crying during the night. I had gotten used to the routine, so I stayed still, but awake in my bed as I anticipated the door to open and my mother to shuffle in. Strangely, the door did not open as soon as I had expected. Strangely, the baby had stopped crying, and laying in bed I turned my head towards the cot. It was dark; the moonlit glow from the thin curtains unveiled the outlines of the cot; I saw nothing. Suddenly, a shadow which I had assumed to be a play of light, darted across the room and melded into the blackest corner.

A light bulb lit up on the landing outside my bedroom. I could make out the edges of the doorframe as light leaked into the room, the silhouette of the door swung open; the lights of my room came on. My mother screamed and then collapsed. I saw my brother’s limbs littered on the floor which was covered in blood; my mother laying in a puddle of redness. Arms and legs appeared to have been torn from the body. The torso was on the end of my bed, belly ripped open and blood still gushed from the gaping hole. His head was still attached, although it looked like his face had been savagely bitten off.

I spent the next few years of my childhood in and out of institutions, spending up to months at a time in therapy. My mother never recovered from the shock. The most curious thing was that the police were never able to solve the crime, although the incident was published in the papers and shown on television, nobody claimed to have witnessed anything suspicious leading up to the moment where the attacker broke into the house.

It wasn’t until I was in my late thirties that I decided to confront my mother about that incident. There was one small detail that constantly kept rolling around in my head and nagging me. My mother and I hadn’t discussed the incident since it happened. I went to visit her at the institution where the doctor told me that she spent her days weeping and blaming herself for having not responded to my brother’s crying sooner. The day I visited her, she appeared to be peaceful and rested, albeit a little dazed from the drugs. ‘Mother,’ I asked her, ‘there is one thing that I need to ask you.’ she gazed at me and smiled, her eyes distant. I continued, ‘What ever happened to my father’s mother, my grandma?’

Her eyeballs swung wildly towards me and she laughed with a fixed grin, ‘Silly boy, your father was an orphan, on his side, you have no grandma!’