The Family Clause Read online

  * * *

  A sister who isn’t a mother is trying to keep her face together. She goes downstairs to let her brother in. His curly black hair is slicked back and looks like it has turned into a block of ice in the cold. His down jacket is so big that he barely needs to stretch out his arms to hug her. What’s happened? he asks in the lift. Work or ex? I swear, I’ll kill him, I’ll . . . She shakes her head. Not you, too, she says. They reach her apartment. That’s the kind of thing my boyfriend always says, she says. Your boyfriend? says the brother. Is he the personal trainer? He’s not a personal trainer. He’s a PE teacher. Okay, the brother says, taking a wine glass. What was that face for? she asks. I didn’t pull a face. That was definitely a face. Why did you say he was a personal trainer? Maybe because I knew you’d pull a face if I told you he was a PE teacher. Just tell me what happened, the brother says. Let’s talk about something else first, please, she says. Tell me something. Anything.

  Her brother tells her that his paternity leave is trundling on. That he’s decided to give stand-up comedy a try. That he saw their father earlier that day, and they talked things through. Ouch, how did that go? she asks. Pretty well, he says. A few hurt feelings, of course, but that’s always the way with him. It didn’t end in a punch-up, in any case. I think we came to an agreement that this will be the last time I give him somewhere to stay. You think? she says. He’s going to give me the keys before he leaves. If he doesn’t give them to me, I’ll take them.

  They sit in silence. You know the real reason he comes to see us twice a year, don’t you? the brother says. Because he misses us? she says. Hardly. Because, despite everything, he wants to spend some time with his grandkids? The big brother smiles and shakes his head. Try again. Because he needs his medication? she says. Warmer, he says. The real reason is that if he stays there for longer than six months, he’s classed as a permanent resident. And then he would have to pay tax. A lot of tax. The sister stares at him. Since when are you an expert in their tax system? I’m just telling the truth, he says. She gets up and takes the lasagne out of the oven. Sorry, he says. It’s fine, she says. I thought you knew, he says. Maybe I knew without knowing, she says.

  Tell me now, what happened? he says. She puts down the potholders, reaches for her phone and shows him the message from her son. The brother’s face turns pale. You’re kidding, he says. He didn’t write this. It’s his twisted dad. There’s no way he wrote those words. I don’t know, she says. But I’m not going to stop contacting him. I’m going to keep getting in touch at least every other day. I’m not going to let him think that his aggression can stop me from loving him. Can I read it again? he asks. Jesus Christ. I’d fall apart if my kids sent me something like this. How long has this been going on? Thirteen months, two weeks and three days, she says. Insane, he says. He’s so young, she says. It’ll work out, he says. I can feel it. It has to work out. He’ll see through his father’s lies, he’ll come back to you. He has to. She tries to smile. Dads, he says, shaking his head. Such bloody idiots. Imagine if our mothers had behaved like our fathers, she says, just as an experiment. We would’ve gone under, he says. Speaking of dads . . . she says, glancing at her phone. Where’s ours? Should I give him a ring? he asks. He’s got our numbers, she says. Let him ring. She prepares the salad and sips her cordial. At eight thirty, they start eating.

  * * *

  A grandfather who is a father arrives at the daughter’s door three-quarters of an hour before the agreed time. He isn’t nervous. He feels incredibly happy to be seeing his beloved daughter soon. To avoid bothering her too early, he goes for a walk around the neighbourhood. He sits down on a park bench and feels 100 per cent at home. The neatly parked cars are polished and expensive. None of the back seats here show any signs of having been used as beds. The women have had plastic surgery, the men are fit, the children are wearing jackets that match their shoes and the pensioners are tanned. This is somewhere he could live. Fifteen minutes before the agreed time, he returns to her door. The code doesn’t work. The newly installed security system is so complicated that you need to be an engineer to understand it. He could call his daughter, but he doesn’t have much money on his SIM card and if she wants him to come to dinner then it’s down to her to at least give him the right code, or to get in touch when he doesn’t show up. He heads to the sports bar on the other side of the road. They have green tablecloths and are showing football on half of the screens, ice hockey on the others. A sign by the entrance announces that it is happy hour, with the beer of the week on special offer until nine. The father orders a beer and waits for the daughter’s call. He orders another beer. At ten past eight, he sees his son walking down the street. He is carrying a plastic bag. The father is surprised. He had been looking forward to having dinner alone with his favourite daughter. He wanted to explain that the brother is a traitor who doesn’t take care of his family. Now he feels less like going for dinner. At two minutes to half eight, he orders two more beers. Both for you? the barwoman asks. Why? he says. She mumbles something and walks away. The grandfather orders another beer, despite the price now being almost double. He takes out his phone. He can’t understand why they haven’t called him. Aren’t they worried? Though, actually, he knows. They haven’t called because they don’t really want him to come. They are sitting up there now, enjoying the fact that he hasn’t shown up. They’re toasting to not having to see him. At half nine he pays in cash, leaves the bar and heads over to her door. He knocks on the window. He leans forward and breathes on the buttons, which usually shows which of them have been used recently. He takes out his metro card and tries to pick the lock. Nothing works. When someone finally appears, it’s a suspicious idiot who asks whether he lives there. No, he says. Then I’m afraid I can’t let you in, she says. He goes back to the bar. Been a while, says the barwoman. He orders a beer. Would you like to see the menu? the barwoman asks. I’m not hungry, the grandfather replies.

  * * *

  A sister who is a mother leans back in her chair and tries not to yawn as her brother complains about his girlfriend. He says that she is impossible to live with, she is constantly trying to find faults in him and yet he is the one who does everything, or almost everything, around the house. But surely she’s the one who brings in all the money? the sister says. Not all of it, the son says. And I am on paternity leave. Didn’t you have very little to do before you went on paternity leave? she says. It’s hard finding new clients in a field that’s oversaturated, he says.

  Her brother is sitting in the same kitchen chair as always. Back to the corner, eyes on his phone. Sometimes I wonder whether we’re right for one another, he says. Seriously, you need to get a grip, she says. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Have you forgotten how in love with her you were? Was I really? he asks. I can hardly remember.

  The sister has never quite understood her brother’s taste in women. During high school, he was always falling in love with freckled feminists. While he was studying economics, he developed an interest in girls who had grown up in high-rises, girls with a certain kind of accent, with tracksuit bottoms and huge gold hoops in their ears. Then he graduated, started his own company and began falling for women who had lots of bookshelves. On Sunday evenings, the siblings would meet in the sister’s kitchen. Her son was allowed to stay up extra late, and her then boyfriend took care of the washing-up while her brother revealed he had met someone. But this girl wasn’t like the others. This girl was the real deal. She was the one he had been waiting for. Why? Because she had a cat called Duras. Okay. The next girl had a framed Patrick Chamoiseau quote in her toilet. The one with the shaved head at the lesbian party had read all of Anne Carson. The one with the scars on her wrists wanted to name her firstborn Pnin. One girl had studied library science in Borås, another had read In Search of one summer while she worked on the checkout at Ica. In Search of? asked her then boyfriend. Saying In Search of was enough; anyone who didn’t know what In Search of meant c
learly didn’t deserve to have it explained to them. The brother had started talking to one girl because she had a picture of Julio Cortázar as the background on her computer. Another had lent him her copy of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and said that he could only keep it if he agreed with her about which sections were fantastic and which were embarrassing (she had marked them out with different coloured Post-it notes). The next girl loved The Aesthetics of Resistance, another hated The Aesthetics of Resistance, but the brother never allowed himself to be interested in anyone who hadn’t at least heard of The Aesthetics of Resistance. What’s The Aesthetics of Resistance? the sister’s son asked. No idea, said the sister. The sequel to The Da Vinci Code, said her boyfriend. No, wait! My stomach after I’ve had an Indian meal. The brother ignored him. A novel by Peter Weiss, he said. Is it good? the son asked. Don’t know, said the brother. If I’m completely honest, I’ve never made it past the opening scene. All of the girls he met had a heritage of some kind. One was half Polish and half Portuguese. The next had a parent from Peru. The next had been born in Uganda, but grew up in Eslöv. The next had Algerian parents who lived in Copenhagen. They all had names that mobile phones attempted to auto-correct, all but the one who had been adopted from Korea, but she had a special section on her bookshelf dedicated to various translations of Lord Jim (something that almost allowed him to forgive her for sorting her paperbacks into colour order). He would spend a month or two with each of them. Six months. Sometimes even a whole year. Then it ended.

  The next Sunday, he would be back in the sister’s kitchen, complaining that he never met anyone. Maybe you need to let go to really fall in love, she said. But that’s what I’m trying to do, he said. You can’t control who you fall in love with, she said. Do you even want to fall in love? Of course, he said. It’s the only thing I’ve wanted ever since I was fifteen. It’s just that every time you describe your dream woman, it sounds like you’re talking about yourself, her then boyfriend said. The kitchen was quiet, and then they laughed the way people do when a comment is either too absurd or too true to be met with silence.

  Six months later, he met the woman who would become the mother of his children. He claimed she was his soulmate, but the sister was relieved when she saw how different they were. The only similarity she could detect was that they had roughly the same haircut. He lived in a housing cooperative in the city, she in a leftist collective in Nacka. He had two businesses that, for tax purposes, he ran in parallel: a private company and a limited company. She had just graduated with a master’s degree and worked in employment law for a company owned by one of the big unions. He used shoe trees and worried about his pension. She had a prepaid mobile phone and dreamed of travelling to India. He liked obscure hip hop, she liked easy-listening soul. And yet as they sat there in the sister’s kitchen, they were both beaming with happiness. Her brother had never looked at anyone the way he looked at her. Isn’t she incredible? he said every time she went to the bathroom. The sister nodded. She was incredible. She is incredible. Perhaps most of all because she never let herself be controlled by him. And now, two children later, the brother is in her kitchen, claiming he has doubts. Sometimes I just feel like taking off, he says. What do you mean, taking off? she asks. Leaving, he says. And going where? I don’t know. Don’t do it, she says. She’ll never forgive you. I know, he says. You’re not like Dad, she says. How do you know that? he says.

  They sit in silence. It’s eleven thirty. The lasagne has cooled and hardened. Guess he’s not coming then? he says.

  VI. MONDAY

  A daughter who is a sister who is no longer living, or who is actually living more than ever now that she has finally lost her body, floats above the city on the hunt for her father. She doesn’t miss anything. Or, rather . . . The only thing she misses is her long black hair, because it would have been so nice to fly around, high above unfamiliar cities, and feel the wind in her hair. But aside from that, she doesn’t miss anything. Her body was just in the way. Her brain was wrecked, her intestines trashed, her immune system had given up, the production of endorphins had stopped. Her arms might have looked normal from a distance, but the pain was worse than rheumatism thanks to all of her shredded veins. Both legs, the right in particular, were covered in dark red patches that looked like burns; children would stop and stare whenever she dared wear a skirt, and adults would pointedly look away because the track marks went all the way up to her thighs. Her body was a hovel, and saying goodbye to it was like taking off a heavy coat that stunk of a stranger’s sweat. She was finally free. On the first night, she woke up at her mother’s house. She wanted to make sure she wasn’t alone. She held her and comforted her when she collapsed with a whimper in the middle of the black-and-white kitchen floor, when she fell back into bed and started to hyperventilate, when she got up, straightened her cardigan and picked up the phone, scrolled down to her daughter’s number and then threw the phone away with a blank face. Where are your friends? the daughter asked. Why don’t you call Philippe and Marie-Christine, where’s your sister, why are you shutting yourself away and trying to get through this on your own? The next day, there was a knock at the door. Marie-Christine shouted for her to answer, Philippe said that if she didn’t open up voluntarily he would kick the door down. The daughter who didn’t have a body smiled at the thought of Philippe, a man with the leg strength of a tapeworm, attempting to kick down the flat’s security door. The mother sat perfectly still on the sofa. The daughter tried to push her towards the door, she floated over to the lock and tore at the key. But she hadn’t worked out yet that, with a bit of preparation, she could summon up enough energy to affect the real world. Somehow, she could still feel the glossy metal of the key, the roughness of the mother’s apron, the prickle of Philippe’s neat grey moustache when the mother eventually got up from the sofa, opened the door and was embraced by her friends. Every time the daughter tried to affect the real world, her hands passed straight through. It was like trying to grab a hologram, like trying to catch a jet of water, like trying to trap a scent. Philippe and Marie-Christine helped the mother with the practicalities. Everyone but Patrick came to the funeral. It was a beautiful ceremony. The daughter floated back and forth between the rows of pews. She felt elated at everyone’s tears. She laughed loudly when Marie-Christine stood by the coffin and gave an incoherent, expletive-filled speech about how the daughter and the mother had battled against the odds, how they had never given up, despite so many people having let them down. Marie-Christine didn’t refer to the father by name, but everyone knew who she was talking about. That was when the daughter first noticed that the father hadn’t come. Of course he hadn’t. He had a new family. New children. A new life in a new country. In the weeks after the funeral, she floated around and investigated her powers. She got to know others without bodies, there were more than she could have imagined. They gathered on flat roofs at dusk, spent their nights talking about what they regretted, what they would do differently if they could return, what their reasoning had been when they chose not to move on to the next place. I don’t remember choosing, said the daughter. I think I just got stuck here. After she said that, the atmosphere changed. Everyone gets to choose, said a woman in her forties with a carving knife sticking out of her right eye. No, not everyone gets to choose, said an older man with clusters of blackish-brown tumours on his throat. I didn’t get to choose either, said a middle-aged man with no lower body. I just got stuck here, no one said anything about a two-week trial, I just died and ended up here. Forever. Maybe it’s different for different people, said the woman with the knife. All I know is that I got to choose, and I decided to stay. Me, too, said a crooked old woman dressed as a soldier. Us, too, said two teenage twins with third-degree burns. We were only fourteen when we died, but we still got to choose.

  Over the next few weeks, she checked in on her friends to see how long they spent grieving. Some went back to work immediately after the funeral. Others spent several days at h
ome, calling their employers to explain that they were dealing with the sudden death of a close friend. They then spent their breakfasts reading the morning papers and their afternoons playing computer games. But Justine was genuinely sad. She continued going to work, not because she wanted to but because staying at home seemed harder. On two occasions, the daughter saw Justine pause mid-class and go out into the corridor so that her students wouldn’t see her break down. The daughter smiled and thought that Justine was a real friend. Patrick was sad, too. The daughter could tell by the way he walked down to Saint-Charles station and bought more weed than usual. He went home, rolled up and sat down in front of the computer, looking through pictures of holidays they had been on together. He never cried. He just sat there, empty-eyed, and went through one picture after another. Every time he came to a video, he skipped over it.

  That summer, Justine and Patrick started spending time together. They met at Patrick’s place. At first, they spoke mostly about the woman who was no longer living. But before long they started talking about other things. Justine spoke about difficult students, good students, crazy students and students whose naive questions gave her the sense that they were teaching her more than she was teaching them. Patrick told her about his plans for new documentary films, he said that he wanted to go to Peru to record something about the Bagua massacre, he wanted to make a film about Zidane and another about Rahel Varnhagen. Or maybe a combined film about both. Justine smiled. Does Zidane have anything to do with Rahel Vernhagen? she asked. Don’t know, Patrick said with a shrug. That’s what I want to explore. The daughter without a body wanted to pull Justine out of there. She wanted to give her a slap or two. She wanted to float out into the kitchen, dump a load of cutlery in the microwave, switch it to full power and then laugh loudly as the smoke forced them out of the flat. The daughter jumped around on the sofa. She roared. She hit Patrick on the shoulder, as hard as she could. They didn’t react. They just continued to look into one another’s eyes. All she ever managed was to make the candle on the table flicker. Then they moved in together and started talking about kids and the daughter who no longer had a body decided never to visit Patrick or Justine again. It was too painful, even though she had no body and couldn’t quite work out where the pain was.