the tenancy agreement: chapter 1

1974

May


The record plays. Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover”. The man has placed the needle down with dirty fingers, his nails thick with shit, black, cuticles cut and scarred. It starts with a crackle. The turntable struggles against itself, the grooves of the record worn in with play. The sound dulls out the flies, buzzing in the thick dead air, congesting the windows, daylight filtered through the jerks of insect bodies. An electric fan rotates on the floor, pushing the stifling air, moving piles of papers and spent food wrappers scuttling to the corners. Off-white walls are doused in greased hand prints. There’s a mattress on the floor beneath the windows, no sheets or pillows; it smells decayed, like expired soft furnishings, like sun-turned chicken, unwashed and layered with skin cells, sweat, sperm. Dead brown blood of indiscernible age. The boy is laid out on the mattress naked. His back has deep cuts running down it, into the sparse flesh. It’s thick with blood. Stick arms pulled rough behind him and bound tight and hard at the wrists with plastic ties that slice into the bone with each of his short breaths. He can’t help whimpering. Like a fucking animal. He’s an animal on this mattress, Darin’s angel voice constructing inhumanity in his pleas: to God, to girl, to fuck.

“Shut up,” says the man. His voice scraped out of his throat.

The boy tries to stifle his panic, gasping in air he can’t keep down. It’s a practised ritual that always plays the same. The man opens a can of beer and drinks from it in ordered mouthfuls. He opens his belt.

“Dad,” he says. “Please dad.”

“I said shut up.”

The man punches the boy in the back of the head, a quick hard surprise. His faces hits down on the mattress, its harsh fibres scrape his skin. The quickly empty beer can thrown to one side, lost in the room’s parameters. The man is singing along. His thick arms too are covered in recent wounds, wet scabs trying to stem the flow of blood. He is panting excited, his jeans edging over buttocks.

“Please dad.” The boys name is Lucas.

“You’ll shut your fucking mouth.” He growls this, dehumanized by the intricacies of the stylus, by 1950s soulful pop.

The man lowers his stubbled chin towards his child, hovering with a bizarre sexual tenderness above the broken skin that was once smooth. He runs his chin up and down the back, his nose buried at the base of Lucas’s hair. Their two breaths merge reluctantly together in the silence behind Darin’s precious urgency. The whirring fan is like a claustrophobic addendum to the song. You can’t hear Lucas crying over the ancient vanes. There’s a resignation to his tears. It has happened before and it will always happen. The man licks at Lucas’s back inquisitively, tonguing the cuts with increasing energy. His head pushed downwards Lucas tries to focus through wet eyes, staring sideways from the mattress, towards the door. He thinks about his sister. The only toy he has is on the floor too far away to reach. A bear he calls Samuel, solid like brick with dirt from where he sucks its limbs when he’s asleep. He always waits for someone to come through the door. Samuel has his back turned on the mattress. Lucas screams when the man sinks yellow teeth into his shoulders and his underarms. Can’t help it. Can’t move. Man’s too heavy. Drunk pigfuck breath turns his stomach. He pushes one big hand down into the back of Lucas’s head.

“Dad.” He tries to speak past the tepid blue-white tartan of the mattress design.

“You’re just like me,” says then man with the authority of self-approval. “And we’re just like everybody else. Say it.” He rams his head down harder.

“We’re just like everybody else.”

The man rubs his rough hands over Lucas, who closes his eyes and tries to black it out. He still feels the roaring pain. He stays exactly where he is. The man sings and he fucks his kid.

“Because I want... a girl... to call... my own... I wanna dream lover so I don’t have to dream alone.” Etc.

Lucas cries, and outside the window the world goes on.