Matchstick Man
by Jem Nash
‘Her eye’s been eaten,’ Mum calls from the loft. ‘The mice have eaten the doll’s eye.’
I climb back up the ladder to watch as she digs through an old suitcase. Remnants of cuddly toys and plastic nonsense we’ve accumulated as a family over the years litter the garage floor. My mother pulls out the old plastic doll, decimated by age and rodents. She passes it to me, and I take a brief, ghoulish look at its gnawed-on face before I drop it down to the floor below. Onto the bin liner that is slowly receiving our past, piece by piece.
‘Oh no!’
I look up; she has a shower cap on her head, my mother, to protect her hair from the dust and cobwebs and our combined history. My own head is already thick with paint from the upstairs landing. I didn’t know what colour ‘Calico’ was this morning, but now I have it in highlights. We are renovating again, and we are having as much success as we usually do.
‘My grandmother made these.’
My mother holds up some lacy knitted pieces. They may once have been clothes for real babies, now hand-me-downs to China children that will never grow out of them. Once white, and puce, and other colours we associate with infancy, they now bear sludge-like stains. Their delicacy ruined by age and abandon and urine.
‘All of them are like this.’ Mum turns them over in her hands, not touching the soiled areas. ‘I don’t know how a mouse got in here. There’ll probably be a whole dead family at the bottom when I get to it.’ She roots out more outfits and lightly tosses them into the small pile. ‘I don’t know how they got in there.’
I look at the suitcase. I don’t know either. But I think about how mice can get through any hole their head fits through. How rot can set into almost anything. How everything changes, even and especially us.
‘I’ll have to throw them away. Even if we wash them they’ll be full of salmonella and the like.’ She takes one last look at the case that has served as crib to these dolls since before we even moved in. ‘No, we have to be ruthless.’
‘I suppose that makes the decision for us.’ As though the fact it is misfortune, rather than anything else, relegating your family heirlooms to the scrap pile means it won’t hurt. The removal of choice is not the removal of grief.
We both know I’m only saying it to make her feel better, so we say nothing more on the subject. The clothes are four generations old. The world is full of plastic now. Wipe-clean and immortal and will haunt us long after we are dead. But never as much as throwing away hand-knitted, hand-loved items that can never be replaced. That will likely be forgotten-fancies of a by-gone age by the time I’m old enough to be a parent. Though I suppose I am now. Old enough. My father had three children when he was my age. I don’t intend to have any. I suspect my parents have come to accept this as a truism even if they don’t want to believe it. An opposite kind of faith. I see them cling to it as they silently mourn for grandchildren that don’t exist and likely never will. Despite a collection of sons, their best laid plans for grandchildren, like the contents of the garage, are ruined. Mice and men.
I haven’t told my parents I don’t want to get married, don’t want children. They just assumed when I told them I was a man. At first there was no discussion. If I can’t see it, it can’t see me. Then, after a year of almost nothing, they started talking. Not about it. But they would at least speak to me. We talked about everything else and nothing of consequence. The talking is back but the touching isn’t.
My parents used to be quite affectionate. I was their only daughter and therefore the only child it was acceptable to let hang off them, hug them, rest a hand on their arm without worrying they were turning their son into a fairy. It didn’t work. But now other than a brief embrace at arrivals and departures, my parents no longer hold me. The previous morning, I had walked to the shower in the vest I’d slept in and run into my mother coming out of my parents’ room. She had turned and gone back in, shutting the door. For some reason the absence of my breasts was ignorable in a shirt but offensively apparent one layer down.
I have been trying not to feel guilty. For some reason I don’t feel as bad for my father. But now my mother... now it’s just her. Her and her husband and a handful of sons. It feels worse to take away her belief in a daughter in retrospect—better if that hope had never existed. I have to remind myself that I haven’t done anything wrong. That I couldn’t have been the daughter she wanted even if I hadn’t told her I wasn’t one. That she’d never had one to begin with.
Unfortunately, a gay son isn’t a consolation prize to them; it’s just another kind loss. It’s bad enough I shame them once. My mother isn’t reassured, isn’t kept company by a son that bakes and sews and reads the same books as her. It’s an affront. I’m an affront. I was a wrong girl and now I’m a wrong man. They want me regular. And they want it by default.
We take the dollhouse my grandfather laboured over round to the side of the garage. We had already agreed that it needed to go before we even began. It, like the dolls that don’t fit inside it, is saturated with remnants of vermin life. Destructive, furry little monsters whose broken little bodies we cringe at when we empty the traps. Necessary evil surrounds us. It has to be burnt. There are no two ways about it.
The house was made specifically for me. For my grandfather’s first granddaughter. He doesn’t know. Know that we are burning it, know that he made it for the wrong child.
‘It’s too confusing for them.’ This is the argument Mum gives for not telling the rest of the family. I don’t know who, if any of them, knows but definitely not my grandparents. So rather than risking it, I haven’t seen any of my extended family for years.
‘We never see you,’ my aunt informed me a few months before I stopped fighting the boy-shaped truth inside me. The pain of denial a gingerbread-shaped space cut out of me. I hadn’t known what to say to her then and now I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again. The birthday cards stopped coming the following year.
Path of least resistance. If I don’t rock the boat, my parents will let me stay aboard. The life-raft of familial contentment is held together by unspoken realities and undeserved forgiveness. I let the pronouns slide every other time and they still answer my calls. But I don’t tell them where I met my closest friend or the name of my favourite book, and they don’t ask.
‘It’s been well-used; it’s had a good life.’ Mum reconciles with herself as we look down at the damp plywood world that we are preparing to destroy. Oppenheimer in the driveway.
I suggest we break it up at first, to make it easier to burn. There’s an axe around here somewhere. But I dismiss the idea myself before she has the chance. No, it doesn’t seem right at all to take such a blunt instrument to such an elegant treasure. And yet we are going to burn it. Burn our childhood home. We have emptied our souls along with our garage.
I press a foot to one of the walls to see if there might be some give. There isn’t. At least, not enough to make embarrassing myself worth it. My boots are a half-size too big, my Christmas gift from Mum and Dad. I had been too relieved to see the word MEN’S printed on the shoebox to ask them to exchange for a better fit. Instead, I wear insoles and two pairs of socks and blisters. Gratitude weeps from my heels in thick, yellow tears.
We build a fire on both floors. The wallpaper is faded and peeling but still beautiful. Better than anything we ever had on the walls of our real home. I rarely played with this properly. I would fill the rooms with Playmobil furniture but never people. Never the dolls it was named for. Every now and again, throughout my childhood, Mum would pull it out and suggest I play with it. ‘Since your grandfather went to all that trouble.’ Every time I would do the same thing. Fill the same small rooms with the same layout. Occasionally trying a bookcase against a different wall or swap the bedrooms. As a teenager, I would often rearrange my own room in this way. Not yet realising the problem wasn’t that the pink lamp was on the desk rather than the bedside table. That the desk was under the window rather than facing the wall. The discomfort was within me. And that was a much more complicated form of interior design. Though the remoulding would still cost me thousands.
Once we have sufficient kindling and bits of old newspaper tucked into the corners, we light the funeral pyres. Throw the paper ballerina onto the flames; keep the tin solider. Put an end to the fairy-tales. There is a brief moment of catharsis, similar to the way I feel whenever I leave this place. When the train passes through the outskirts of the city I now call home. It’s a weird, unfriendly place but it saved me. It lets me be the man I was born, if not raised, to be. After a few days of homebrew Stockholm Syndrome starts to tell me not to be so bloody silly and that I’m just doing this to hurt them, the grey towers are a sight for sore eyes. I almost wept with relief the last time I saw them from the train. Seeing this emblem of my childhood die elicits a similar response. The physical manifestation of how many people loved me the wrong way—loved the wrong me—goes up in flames. I’m glad to see it go, but I’m also sad that it had to exist in the first place.
The dollhouse burns. My mother’s eyes are glassy, but I know better than to put an arm around her, to comfort her. Instead, I stand beside her and watch another of her dreams go up in smoke.
