by Clare Millar
On the driveway was the kind of van you would expect to be told about before arriving home. Stark white with the letters ‘exterminator’, it was parked right in the way of where Annalise wanted to park. She turned her keys to silence the car. For a moment she lingered with the door two-thirds open, and thought it was likely a mistake; her house was more likely to need an ambulance than an exterminator. But she quarantined her doubts with the soft click of the lock. She jiggled her way between the dead rose bushes and the pearly van. There were no clues behind the windows.
Her eyebrows drooped with the exhaustion of each movement she made towards the house. She produced her keys, nudged the door open, and yelled, ‘Mum?’
‘Kitchen.’
She walked down the straight hallway with tired feet after her seven-hour shift. She passed the family portraits and her cobwebbed dad staring back at her. The house was unusually clean; mopped floors, dusted furniture, papers in piles.
‘Mum, what’s going on?’ Annalise couldn’t even see her.
‘The cockroaches, they came for me.’ Her voice came from behind the Christmas tree that had been sitting abandoned for well over a month.
Annalise shuffled over, and there she could see her mother’s knees tucked in a brace position, awkwardly but deliberately squashed between the corners of the walls and the tree.
‘We haven’t had cockroaches since before Dad left, Mum.’
‘But there were hundreds. They arrived today, I know it. They were on me. Attacking me. And then they moved to the table… the table!’
‘You’re not making sense. What did they do at the table?’
‘My medication. They ate it all. Even the thing it comes in. They did it to hurt me. That’s why.’
‘Are you sure you didn’t just throw it out?’ said Annalise. In answer, her mother’s face sank further under the tree. ‘Alright then, tell me how it happened.’
Her mother unfolded her origami legs, and slid out a little from the tree. Her eyes were still obscured by its branches.
‘Well I was going to take the tablet, so I put it on the little side table just there,’ she said, pointing towards the couches, ‘and I went to get a glass of water. When I came back with the glass, I noticed was that the tablet had been nibbled at. Part of it was gone, really. Of course, I didn’t realise what had happened at first. I thought maybe it was just broken in the pack and I hadn’t noticed until then. But then I looked down and there was this cockroach trying to crawl down the leg of the table.’
Annalise shifted her weight onto one leg as her mother continued speaking without a pause.
‘So I followed it and it lead me to more cockroaches. There were at least twenty dead on the way! All over the floor. But then I saw live ones everywhere. You know that moment when you flick the light on they all scatter away? Well, it was like that, but then it was opposite. They were coming from everywhere and climbing up me and now I don’t have any medication left because they ate it.’
‘Can you show me where the cockroaches led you?’ Annalise asked. ‘And the blister packet they ate through?’
‘Your mother is a frustrating woman,’ a voice said. Annalise looked up to see a man in a grey company shirt standing in the living room, watching them. Annalise had been facing away from him since entering the living room. Despite seeing the van in the driveway, the presence of the exterminator had not occurred to her.
‘I’m very sorry to have wasted your time. I can’t see a single cockroach,’ said Annalise.
‘Neither can I, but she had me check eight times. She said she could see them.’
‘Well, I’m sorry for your trouble.’
Opening the security door Annalise asked, ‘what do we owe you?’
She gave him all the money she had in her purse, and it still wasn’t enough. The man rubbed his beard momentarily, trying to patch up the situation. He tapped his foot, waiting for Annalise to offer a solution. But after a few seconds passed, his tone sliced through the silence, ‘fuck you.’
He stomped to his van and left. Annalise folded her arms, inhaled, and went back inside, hoping for a reprise. Her mother was blocking the bottom of the stairs, knowing Annalise wanted to escape.
‘Hey, here’s 40 dollars, go to the movies or something,’ said her mother. She held Annalise’s hand, playing round and round the garden to get the money into Annalise’s fist.
‘How did you get this money? Could you not have given this to me five minutes ago when I tried to pay that man?’
‘Sometimes I’m responsible, Leesy. I can do adult things.’
‘No, Mum! I’m the adult in this house. I’m the one who works and brings in money for food and your fucking mortgage. I cook and clean, and I study. How long is it since you worked? Ten years, isn’t it? I’ve been the grown up since I was 14, Mum. No, not even the grown up. The carer. You want to be responsible? Why don’t you take your fucking medication, then? That would be a start, just looking after yourself.’
‘Don’t use those naughty words with me!’
‘I’m sorry, Mum. Are you going to respond to me?’
‘No,’ her mother said, but continued, ‘ It makes me feel worse! I don’t want some stupid little tiny pill to fix me. It’s so fake. Why can’t I just exist as I am? That’s what all the advice is, isn’t it? Just be yourself. Myself makes me crazed and I know I do things other people don’t, but that’s me, you know?’
‘It’s hard to argue with that. But the truth is that you need that medication to be a better you. Why don’t you bring this up with the psychiatrist? Oh but you cancelled that appointment remember? The one we waited four months to get.’
’I didn’t need it.’
‘That’s what you think.’
‘Yeah and I get to decide for myself, don’t I?’
Annalise knew that technically her mother was right; adults decide for themselves. She knew her mother couldn’t reason with her, so instead of fighting back, Annalise went upstairs.
An hour later, whilst she was studying, Annalise heard a sound from the kitchen. It sounded mechanical, but as if a person was stuck inside, their screams muted by the distance. It didn’t match the noises of any of the appliances they used regularly; Annalise had put the washing machine on early that morning, and the blender had long been rendered useless from some other household mishap.
‘MUM?’ Annalise yelled from the top of the staircase. The wailing did not cease, and it wasn’t until she was three-quarters of the way down the staircase that she found a clue. Paper, like a child’s excited cuttings after learning to command the scissors, and for just a moment, Annalise bent to run her fingers through the paper. She stood, straightened her pleated work skirt, and walked back into the kitchen. Her mother rarely cooked these days, but also rarely left the kitchen.
The entire kitchen was awash with paper shreds of just four colours. Black, white, red, and green, and in the middle of the domestic jungle was Annalise’s mother and an office bin with a shredder on top.
‘Mum, come on, let’s clean this up,’ said Annalise, searching for a garbage bag to put it all in. It was such a waste, paper never used, and cleaning it up felt the same as attempting to fix the nothingness of her mother’s life.
Annalise’s first thought was to recycle. At least then all that paper would have some use. But as she started piling it into the black hole of the garbage bag, she reconsidered. It was the running thought of responsibility that connected everything together. There was another use for all that paper.
‘Hurry up. Once this is cleaned up we’re going to the pet store at the shops.’
She had cleaned up more than half the room whilst her mother had only collected four handfuls. Annalise quickly stuffed the remaining handfuls into the garbage bag and took it out to her car. It was the opposite of the garbage bag, a total dichotomy with everything in the house and her mother. Red saturated the whole car and it felt bright enough to wash over the problems in her family. But when she would drive away and leave her mother at home, she knew the colourless life stayed behind in the house, waiting for her to return.
Annalise walked back to the house, grabbed her phone, keys, and wallet, and lastly, clutched her mother by the arm and pulled her to the car. Off they went to the shops, but only after Annalise checked her mother was suitably detained by the seatbelt. It was only a five-minute trip, but Annalise felt her mother’s internal cries of ‘are we there yet?’ Annalise’s fingers crunched around the steering wheel; otherwise she would have been tearing at her hair.
When they arrived, her mother couldn’t read the shop’s window.
‘Pit stop, pit stop!!’
‘What, mum?’
‘Pit stop, Anna!’
‘Yes, we are stopping, Mum.’
‘No, not stop. Pit shop!’ It came out like a New Zealander’s accent, and this time Annalise understood.
‘We are going to the pet shop, Mum. We’re going to give them this shredded paper because they need it for the dogs and cats and bunnies. Your mess is going to be a good thing, Mum.’
‘Good thing,’ she parroted.
Inside the pet shop, the exchange was simple. Annalise explained to the shop assistant that they had some shredded paper, and the assistant was appreciative, smiling ever so slightly. Annalise turned to leave, but her mother wasn’t by her side anymore. How could she not have noticed? Or even a better question, why had she thought it was a good idea to bring her mother? Annalise felt out of control, her hands empty to the breeze of her mother’s whims.
Annalise found her mother over by the fish and reptile section of the shop.
‘Oh please Anna, Anna, Anna. We’ve got to get that fish. Look it’s so pretty.’
Her mother’s hands were absently tapping the glass in time with her frenzied thoughts. In this tank, there was just one fish; rainbow and sparkly, just like the fish in a children’s book.
‘We can’t get a fish now.’
‘But you want me to be responsible. I can look after the fish. You can’t tell me to be responsible and not let me be!’
Not so much persuaded by her mother as irritated, Annalise relented.
‘Alright, we’ll get the damn fish. But I’m not feeding it.’
They went home, quietly. For the first time in years, Annalise’s mother seemed somewhat content just to be. She had her fish, what else could a grown woman need? Back in their house, time passed uneventfully. It was as if the fish itself had sucked the family’s suffering through its slippery gills. Annalise got on with her life, working and studying and feeling drained of the possibility of a future other than the life she was passing through. Her mother continued her slow existence, but with a new focus: the fish.
It was Friday, exactly a week after going to the pet shop, when Annalise came home to the fishbowl missing from the rickety kitchen table. Her keys rattled as she spread them on the linoleum bench. The Christmas tree was gone. Green plastic needles left a residue on the floor, reminding Annalise of the joy that other families experience.
On the couch was her mother. On the couch, the fish was white, a ghost of its former radiant self. A rainbow dripped onto the floor, each colour carefully segregated, like a melted crayon artwork. Her mother’s fingers were painted in a spectacular glitter; the sort you could only find on costumes. Her head was stuck inside the fishbowl, the astronaut she deserved to be with such a head away in space.
Image by 贝莉儿 NG.