Art Pact 133

The whole house seemed to be coated in misery, a thick oleaginous coat of sadness that clung to the walls and exuded a bleak vapour. To step through the front door was to be instantly shrouded in the family's unhappiness, and although guests came to make their condolences and attempt to help them through the dark time, they knew the minute they crossed the threshold that their efforts would prevail naught against the overpowering sadness. They came in with hopeful smiles and lively steps, but left bearing a harsh load of grief across their shoulders and a despair in their heart against the hope that their friends might ever again laugh.

The building itself began to shrink away from its surroundings in some way. As the month of February rolled on the greenery in the neighbouring gardens slowly emerged from its winter hibernation, grass clearing and beginning to grow in earnest again, snowdrops peeking up coyly from the margins of flowerbeds, and many a fat fly banging at a window or spiraling up into a bright morning sky. But in the garden of the house the brown sticks of the sleeping bushes did not quickly develop their new buds and the sickly cherry tree that had been planted to mark the son's birth faded somehow, so that the gardeners among the street's residents thought that it too must have died during the long nights, and that it must be rotting from the roots up. No birds landed in the back garden except for the braver of the crows, and even those grew ill at ease and hopped nervously from one paving stone to the next until finally the oppressive aura grew too much for them and they flapped away, cawing out a warning to their fellows to stay clear.

Inside the house the three remaining members of the family moved around each other in chaotic patterns, each the hypocentre of their own anguish, so that their different memories and regrets constantly blended in differing proportions to reinforce that drab emulsion that filled their home. The daughter was the quietest, the most immersed in her own feelings. She, the younger child, had had a pillar of her life removed - she had never lived in a world in which her brother had not existed, so the sudden transition was to her the most alien. She had not recognised how much he did for her - not willingly, or even consciously, of course, because he had been far from a loving or nurturing elder brother, but his presence alone had assisted her path, even as a mad elephant might be dangerous close up to a human but yet provide by its bulk an easy path to follow through dense woods. It was an apt thought when she thought it, and she drew misshapen elephants in her diary, filling each one in with black marker pen that bled through onto her white pine desk and left it stained with carbon-dark lines. When her mother dared to enter her room to clean it she found dozens of the shadow elephants romped angular and crippled in her daughter's waste-paper basket.

The mother stuck to her routine, and her pain was to let herself become hollowed out from inside so that she seemed to resemble her son's empty room. She cleaned the house more thoroughly than she had ever done in the past, but the very meaning of cleanliness escaped her, so that it became a pointless struggle against entropy. In the morning she would climb out of bed the instant the alarm clock rang and begin cleaning the kitchen - even, as was often the case, if she had cleaned it last thing at night and no-one else had used it. Her friends, when they came to visit, offered to help; each time they were rebuffed, and there was some discussion (when they had reached a safe distance, for they could not talk about it when immersed in the close and quiet air of the house itself) of whether she had developed some sort of obsessive-compulsion. They were none of them experts, though, and none of them wanted to be responsible for adding to her burdens by calling in the doctors to assess their friend. So they left their theories outside when they went to visit, and since they could not bear to visit for long it was not a great trouble to them. If the mother had known their thoughts she might perhaps have laughed - a joyless laugh of course - because at least a compulsion would have given her something to think about aside from her loss. Her true obsession was with the emptiness in the house, the feeling that the platform on which their peace rested was now missing a leg and might topple over catastrophically if it were not balanced askew. If her relentless cleaning had served to keep in check some need in her she would have welcomed it, but it did nothing of the sort. She might as well have been a robot, her body on autopilot while her mind focused and refocused on their loss, examining it from all angles as if there were some way of viewing the present that might allow it to be reformed, or at least admit an escape into the past.

The father was stillness where his wife was motion, sound where their daughter was silence, and dreadful presence where the son provided absence. Curled in their bed in the master bedroom at the top of the stairs he refused to rise, even for guests, who were forced to ascend the dreary steps to hold court around his great bulk as he sobbed and railed against the fates that he blamed for taking his son. If any of them worked hardest to propagate the enveloping sadness that inhabited the house in their forms, it was he. He cried when he was tired, when he was sleeping even, and when he roused from those wet slumbers he yelled at the top of his voice so that in the buildings around the neighbours were forced to keep their windows closed at all times, even in the early warmths of that spring when bright days came quickly and the warm-blooded sweltered in the airless confines of their homes.

So passed the months.