Brutality

The Sunday evening ritual was always the cause of anxiety and conflict. They had talked about it exhaustively on countless occasions, from each Friday evening onwards they in fact seemed to talk of little else. Ethan was capable of putting forth all kinds of inspired rationalisations as to why he shouldn’t have to participate in what he considered to be the ultimate manifestation of tyranny and victimisation. Nobody he knew had to endure such brutality on such a regular basis; he was quite sure in fact that his parents, far from being the liberal right on types his friends maintained that they were, belonged to a local chapter of some obscure and sinister medieval cult and only delighted in the practice of its more sadistic ceremonial elements on him. But contrary to what his son believed Oscar derived no pleasure from administering the treatment. He could barely stomach inflicting that level of misery with such regularity on someone he loved so dearly. But he also knew that it was required of him, that he could not hope to survive and prosper indeed even function in this community without indulging his hosts, without satisfying their conventions however repugnant they may have seemed to him or his son.

His wife had long since managed to detach herself from the whole arrangement. She made a point of being somewhere else when the time came. There was grocery shopping to do, a friend to visit or maybe even in desperation a church to drop in to. The initial guilt at being so willing to disable the emotional connection between herself and her son for that hour every week had subsided and been replaced with the kind of steel edge she never thought she would be able to summon. Knowing what needs to be done; simple, unavoidable. She just hoped the scene she arrived back to was palatable, that the aftermath would not be too brutal to bear. She had heard of the tipping point and knew that hers could not be far way.

Marianne and Oscar married in 1998. They were living what hindsight calls an unconventional life, a sort of international freeform bohemian escapade with no discernible pattern or plan. But they were ready for something new. They were ready to replace the glamour of being broke and disorientated with the glamour of expansion tanks and high thread counts. The quest for normality brought them deep into the realm of a civilisation on whose periphery they had previously existed. They both knew that there would be bizarre concepts to confront, strange conventions to grapple with, compromises to be made; change to be embraced not resisted. This was all going to be fine because they were ready to do whatever was necessary to make a go of a real life, a life with regularity and certainty where the bin is wheeled to the kerb every Tuesday night and wheeled back every Wednesday afternoon. The kind of world where the merciless efficiency of the structures themselves let you off the hook, swallow so much of your workload. Pay and display. Life by numbers.

The reality was invariably different. The idea that the machinery of society, as devised by the clever people who know how to get things done, would absolve a person of the need to think or try too hard had apparently been tried and was found to be a complete failure as a model for human behaviour. This came as something of a shock to Oscar who suspected that it had simply been run by the wrong people. Oscar began to find increasing tracts of his time given over to the accumulation of items for which he fundamentally had no need. The system which he thought would insulate and cradle him was now responsible for all the compounding anxiety he constantly felt.

He questioned everything. He struggled with the grim realities of this new world order, the illogical hierarchies, the surreal demands he felt were put upon him. His wife became preoccupied, drifting slowly away leaving him alone to contend with the great expectations of an unforgiving world of someone else’s making.

“Who made up these rules?” thought Oscar as he began the latest fraught instalment of their Sunday ceremony. Through years of practice he had perfected a way of controlling Ethan as he pulled off his clothes and held him under the tepid stream of water amidst flailing arms and other worldly screams. “When it was over his eyes blazed with a sort of demonic fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat” Oscar would remember later. “I’m nearly six, I don’t need to have a shower every week” Ethan screamed as he let go and began the dripping march to his room to seethe, sulk and plot his father’s inevitably gruesome demise.