The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch Page A

all the important things, while my mother blabbed to him about all the other important things, and the unimportant things were too unimportant to talk about and that’s why we seldom or never talked with my father at home. Now, too, we talked about this and that, as the three of us sat around the table and he didn’t come home; we also wondered why we put up with it, just as my father wondered; I’m not going to put up with that, he’d often say when his mood was spoiled, it’s sheer tyranny, if that’s what a proper family’s like then no thank you, all three of us now said, and we said it one right after the other, so that nobody could blab. Mum sometimes said, you’ve got to see the good sides, too, I mean there are so many good sides to him, and then she said, have a little sympathy for him; but that evening our sympathy vanished and stayed away and never came back. We said, still all three of us, and who’ll show us some sympathy; we sounded childish and angry, and we were angry at our mother, too, because our mother always said, just have a little sympathy for him; we did what we could, but that evening, as I said, our sympathy vanished; my brother said, I could do with the odd ounce of sympathy, too, but in our family sympathy didn’t come your way for nothing, you had to earn it first. Our father would have given us short shrift if we’d gone and asked him for some cheap sympathy, sympathy for nothing. He’d had to battle his way through life, he didn’t get by on the cheap; he’d never once been guilty of the shirking he ascribed to us, not for a single moment, he said, only when you had to battle through life did you see who had real character; endless sympathy is no good, you need to achieve to make an impression. But apparently we weren’t cut out for achievement and making an impression; remember all those years ago when you didn’t fancy doing that dive, my father said, that would have been one minor achievement at least. We liked going swimming, but we didn’t like diving, we liked swimming and going underwater; we liked going to the pool because my father’s colleagues and sometimes his boss went too, with their families, and then my father wasn’t able to shout at us and could only say, we’ll have words later, which is what he said that day, too, when my brother and I were supposed to dive. My brother was slightly braver than me, I used to be a real chicken when it came to diving; even the idea of diving head first from the starting block struck fear and terror in me, though I wasn’t so cowardly in other ways; I climbed the highest trees and was always known as the monkey in our family. I was brave when it came to climbing trees – I certainly wasn’t a coward – but my father would often tell the story of the father who says to his son standing on a wall, jump, come on, jump, I’ll catch you, and the son becomes scared and says, I’m not going to jump, but the father says, don’t be scared, I’ll catch you, and finally the son does jump, the father steps aside, the son falls and hits the ground, hurting himself badly, and sobs, why didn’t you catch me; the father laughs and says, trust no one, remember that, not even your own father. I was never able to laugh at this joke as my father wanted me to, it was a cruel joke, the laughter stuck in my throat, and unfortunately I couldn’t help thinking of this very joke whenever I was about to jump into the water. And I was never able to bring myself to jump into the water, especially not head first, even when my father was already in the water and said, but I’m here, that didn’t help, the fact that he was there; he couldn’t have caught me in the water, and I was certain I would drown. I’ve only dived head first once in my entire life, once and never again, but my father couldn’t cope with the humiliation of having cowardly children, who failed the courage test miserably, and so he said, if you dive from the three-metre