[A character-driven story chronicling the experiences of a woman in an abusive marriage and how the impacts live on in the woman after her.]
3. THE BOY IN THE PHOTOGRAPH
He bought her that dress for their traditional wedding. The one she never got to wear, because he never gave it to her. I hear her talk about it on sad days; how they quarrelled and he withheld it from her. I wonder if he still has that cloth, she muses. The regret is usually evident in her tone. Like she wishes she could go back in time and see that action for what it really was. She said she had to improvise, so she wore that colour-blocking outfit for her traditional marriage. I don’t know which angers her the most. The colour-blocking outfit or that she has had to improvise every day since then.
I asked her about her wedding gown one day and she said she didn’t own one. That she rented the dress she wore for the wedding. Some nights I still think about it. He was well off. He could have afforded any wedding dress of her choosing. Lord! He could have gotten her a dress for the wedding, a different one for the reception, and throw in an extra one for backup if he had wanted to. But you don’t care for the happiness of those you despise, and he truly despised her as he would go on to tell her years after, time and time again, till it was a phrase so casually cruel it no longer moved her. Till I knew, and every living being within and beyond those green walls and its metaphorical ears knew. He hated her so much that the stench of hate seeped out permeating everyone and everything acquainted with her. Her family, her friends, the neighbours she spoke to, her food, her clothes, and on occasion, the children she bore.
It was their wedding and he withheld that dress. What she didn’t know then was he was going to withhold a lot more than that.
In that green house somewhere on the first floor is a vanity cupboard. In it is a grey bag filled with photos, some as old as I am, some older, some younger. There are over a hundred pictures there, worn out from constant handling and if you had the patience to go through them all, you’d find a 7 by 8 cm photo of the man and his wife kissing. There’s a five-tier cake in front of them and adorned at its peak is a miniature groom and bride holding hands. I believe lifeless as they might have been, they were a lot much happier than the actual couple. I also believed that was the last time they ever kissed.
Grey as that photo was, it wasn’t the greyest of them all. If you indeed looked carefully, you’d notice another photo larger than the first, 14 by 10 cm of a young boy. He looks like the kind of child they’d predict to be stubborn at first glance. There’s a bump on his forehead like he knocked his head on a hard surface, presumably while playing, and his hands are clenched in a fist. The picture is creased. Someone must have crumpled it in despair, regretted the decision and tried to straighten it out in repentance. That’s forever how he’d be remembered. Stuck in a crumpled piece of paper in that grey bag. 5. Headstrong, different, sick. He’ll be the child that never made it.
The doctors said it was tuberculosis and asthma, malaria, and they listed more. The man’s sisters said he was attacked spiritually. The wife, so religious agreed. Why would a boy so young suffer all these sicknesses at once? The sisters despised her too but it was their nephew so they volunteered to help. Churches to churches… he wasn’t recovering. Places of worship…he was deteriorating. The pastors prayed and prophesied. The boy was dying right in front of them all. Early morning school runs replaced with hospital runs. Machines beeping. A fragile boy put on a drip and a mum sitting beside him weeping, praying to every deity that her son is spared. Clueless siblings living in oblivion. That headstrong boy was getting thinner and sicker.
When do people resign to fate?
When do they realise that after all is said and done, we’re still human and there is only so much power we yield?
It’s my opinion that we never truly give up hope as much as we think we have. Even at our lowest, there is always that tiny- very tiny glow of hope- that maybe things would change, because we REALLY want it to. We say, ‘I’m not expecting anything at all’, ‘nothing fazes me at any more’, ‘I’m done caring’ but it’s all a facade because we cannot deal with the disappointment or despair that comes with actively holding on so we let go, but deep inside there's that ‘what if’, that passive glimmer of optimism. Hope is a tricky thing like that. It either makes or mars you.
Did the boy know he was going to die? Did he cling to whatever shred of life he could hold on to till he couldn't any more? Was he stubborn and headstrong even till his last breath?
I cannot answer that. I was young too, and it would be years before I actually cry about his death. All I remember was that I was older than he was but at school, he fought for me. All I remember is that, and a bicycle that was promised him if he survived. All I remember was it was I who ended up with a bicycle. I know now that the headstrong boy suspended in that crumpled picture was fragile. I wish I remembered more.
The house was silent the day he died.
I think a piece of the wife and the man died that day too.
On the day he was buried, the man let her carry his dead body in a different car.
There at the backseat of the car with the driver, she held unto his wrapped up lifeless body and felt that tiny glow of hope die. Even hope, however persistent it is, flickers out at the end. All she had left was love but all the love in the world she could give and it would never bring him back. All the love in the world she could give but she was never going to be loved the way she wanted to be loved.
In the course of that marriage, he would never love her once, not for better, not for worse.
C.G; 23rd SEP 2001 - NOV 2006
"Now these three remain; faith, hope and love - but the greatest of these is love." 1st Corinthians 13:13
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