The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch Page B

board I’ll give you five marks. My brother climbed up to the three-metre board in a flash, but once there his courage deserted him, and he climbed back down again. My father turned ashen-faced from sheer disappointment – that was a bad sign – my brother started howling and my father said he’d even dived from the five-metre board, so my brother climbed back up, jumped finally and received the five marks after all; so, was it really that bad in the end, my father asked him; my brother was so proud that he replied, absolutely not, and I felt ashamed at being a coward so I climbed up, too, and dived in head first. It was terrible. My head and back just hurt, the pressure in my ears ached badly, too, because my ears are so useless and hurt even if I go under just two metres, and when I did that dive I must have gone three or four metres under; I thought I’d never get back to the surface. I was so overcome by earache – even as a child I had regular ear infections – I thought my ears were going to burst, and I could no longer tell what was above and what below, with the pain in my ears I completely lost my orientation underwater, and then all the air went out of me; I’m going to die, I thought, because I’m never going to get back up again. After an age I finally made it back to the surface. I was sick at the side of the pool due to the pain, and because the dive had been so terrible, and my father asked me the same question: was that really so bad; horrible, I said, really horrible, and my father said, do it again, you need to jump again straight away. But I didn’t, even though he said I had no strength of character. I didn’t want the five marks if it meant I had to dive again; my father didn’t want to pay me the five marks for the dive itself, rather – as I thought at the time – he wanted to pay me for having enjoyed it, or for me saying that I’d enjoyed it; I said I’d rather have no strength of character than jump again and say I enjoyed it, when in fact it’s horrible.
    We forfeited all our father’s sympathy, we said that evening, also saying that any sympathy we might have felt for our father had vanished; we even said that the sole reason our sympathy had vanished was because any sympathy he’d had for us had also vanished long ago; the fact that we were always there, ruining his life, had drained all sympathy from him, as he sometimes said; I wish you weren’t born, he once remarked, adding that he deeply regretted having fathered first me – by accident – and then my brother, who had been planned, but who he regarded as a mistake, a disastrous one when he looked at the result: his son a complete and utter failure, which he blamed on my mother and the school system which had relentlessly mollycoddled him in the most irresponsible way; while from the outset he’d hated my obduracy, my unappealing side; that evening my mother said that from the outset my father hadn’t shown the slightest sympathy for my unattractiveness. The first time he saw me, apparently, he cried out in horror, it’s a monkey, tearing his hair out because there was no way that ugly thing could be his daughter, let alone the son he was meant to have had. I was very ugly when I was born, my mother said, but that didn’t bother her; I didn’t notice, she said; she didn’t realize until the midwife consoled her by saying, don’t worry, it can all change; Mum found me exceptionally pretty all the same and loved me straight away, even though she could see what the midwife had meant when she said, don’t worry, it can all change. I was covered in hair from top to bottom, there was black hair over my entire body – apparently even my face was hairy like a monkey’s – my entire body right down to my toes; I was so plug-ugly when I was born that my father was disgusted by the sight of me; my mother always said she found me exceptionally lovely straight away, only later did she notice that I looked like a black