Present and accounted for
Deborah Chu
In 2023, the Alasdair Gray Archive, in partnership with Gutter, commissioned the freelance arts journalist and writer Deborah Chu to creatively respond to the AGA collection. Deborah produced this work of fiction, called ‘Present and accounted for’, in which she explores the meaning of objects, the memories they hold and the complications of organising them when someone you love dies.
By the time our father was dead, he’d battened down the hatches of his life with every copy of The Post since 2009. He had not become a hoarder in the charming immigrant way of saving up the good takeaway containers, but in all the rooms of our childhood home had constructed ancient stalagmites of chipped plates and books; of old bills bundled together by gummy rubber bands. Our ancient game consoles, our incompleted hobbycraft kits. Several sealed boxes of women’s multivitamins.
In the backyard, humped mountains of coats and duvets grew higher and higher like mounds of dirty snow left behind by the plow, which in the spring became brown and saggy with the thaw.
We had not gone to see him in many years. He would not have welcomed it. There was nowhere left to sit comfortably, for one. And when we did visit, he would inevitably accuse us afterwards of having stolen from him. The good pillows. The pickle jar. The piranha behind the glass of the curio cabinet. No matter how hard we tried, we could not convince him of our indifference, that we had no need of his lapidary tools in our full and busy adult lives. But by then he had become impossible to reach. And so, assuming we ever had him at all, we let him go.
Growing up every paper napkin was torn between two. The new couch immediately zipped into its clear plastic suit. The time our father screamed at Sange when he did not scoop the residual goo from an eggshell. Birthday cupcakes, no balloons.
There is no telling where the first shoots of meanness emerged, though we laboured under certain theories for some time. Erge, a floor manager at the Pets&co and the most scientifically minded of us all, once texted us a long treatise/screed about how our father’s early deprivations had irreparably shrunk his amygdala. And so if we accept that our father is disabled, and that this disability makes him physiologically incapable of caring for others, then being angry about it is a waste of our energy. Can you blame an infant that has not yet achieved object permanence for not attending to your emotional needs when it barely remembers you exist when you leave a room?
And yet out of all of us, Erge had remained closest to home. He stood outside and divined our father’s moods through the position of his window shades. When our father broke his hip and was forced to retire, Erge moved out of his apartment and into the caravan down the road. He nursed our father through the first surgery, and then the one after that. Our brother, the prickly pear. The one who used to goad us about the jam being poison, and then cry furious tears when we retaliated and smeared it over his toast. Who was now driving our father to endless appointments and helping him to the toilet; blitzing him smoothies of avocado and milk when he refused water through his sippy cup, fearful of endangering his dignity.
We watched on with awe/shame/gratitude, but also suspicion. When Dage was ten, he had come home from school one day with a slightly stiff neck, and by the afternoon was hospitalised for suspected meningitis. A nurse had held his hand during the spinal tap, while our father sat outside reading a biography on John Maynard Keynes. And now here Erge was, studding this man’s porridge with goji berries and sweet red dates.
But it did not matter, because soon after our father recovered from his second surgery, he and Erge fought over a bit of dirt on the staircase. Erge wanted our father to take greater responsibility over the cleaning of the house. Our father did not appreciate being accused of slovenly habits. And so they never spoke to one another again.
In his later years, Erge would reflect on that time as his great experiment. I did everything as I ought to have, and it didn’t make a difference, he’d say. At least now I know for a fact that I was not the problem.
We had wondered this ourselves, of course, many times, but had not possessed Erge’s courage to test this hypothesis. However, we allowed ourselves to share in the light of his findings and said many grateful and admiring things to him.
But the problem is that the knowing did not set Erge free. He stayed on living in that caravan for years, marking the growing height of the piles in the backyard and making his deductions, and that was how we knew without a doubt that being clever only got you so far.
Decades ago, when our parents first separated, our allegiances lay at once with our free and liberated mother, who immediately left to hike the Appenzell and the Santiago, and then the Karakoram. Eventually it no longer mattered where she was going, only that she remained a force in motion, onward forever, like the river rushing past our ankles.
But she did write, to all of us—even our father, it turned out, who printed her emails and kept them in an Adidas shoebox, along with a photo of them maybe on their wedding day. Our mother was holding flowers, at least. They married before he went abroad for his education. The plan was that he would come back to fetch her when he was settled. Which he did, only to discover upon his return that she had moved to another province with some friends. She had not left a forwarding address, or even a note. He had to ask around her insalubrious neighbourhood (the worst thing she could have made him do), get on a train, go find her and bring her back, so that their life could begin.
Her first letters to us from the road were written in streams of consciousness, before finally reverting to pure landscape. A river valley of tilde and circumflex, a complex interchange of ampersands. Her last missive to us was just a blank page of stars.
* **** * * * * *
By then we were mostly grown men, men who were too old to need their mother, and so we behaved as though for all intents and purposes that she was dead. It was easier this way as we did not know how else to miss her.
Even years later we would sometimes find ourselves tearing up at the grocery store, or when passing through a town where she had once made us stop for lunch. It was painful to be reminded of a time when we wanted nothing more than to be pressed up against someone else’s animal life; someone who, nevertheless, resisted, remained apart from us—in other words, a time when we felt real.
As he was still in high school when our mother left/died, Xiaoge was the only one of us who experienced living with our father on his own. And we pitied him, gleefully, from afar. We imagined the unmitigated shadow passing over the darkened frill of the sateen pillows, the print of the Renoir girls. The slotted spoons in the speckled milk jug. We lay in our different beds, alone or next to sleeping lovers, and cast these familiar objects in our mind, relishing in their sadness because they hurt us so badly, like the thornbird and its chosen spine.
Only much later, of course, would we learn that this was the longest stretch of peace Xiaoge would ever know, suffering as he had all his life from us. From being trammelled by his older brothers wrestling and belching and trying to knee each other in the groin. Now he could read in the living room quite unmolested, while our father watched his YouTube videos in the chair opposite. Our father no longer our father, but just a fellow bachelor eating a sandwich over the sink. Suddenly he had nothing to say about exams or curfews, or anything to do with Xiaoge’s life at all.
One night they even played a perfectly collegiate game of Go. That was when our father told Xiaoge that there were more legal board placements in Go than there were observable atoms in the universe. Xiaoge did not believe him and had dismissed it as his usual patriotic guff. But in the following months, he felt a kind of change within himself. Things that had always felt muddled and overwhelming became clear, like wide ponds settling after the rain, and all you could smell were green stems in water. Or the final stroke on a canvas, around which the vision coheres. The shining line that ran through it. If he put in the effort, the desired result would yield itself.
And to this moment we now trace our cynicism towards institutions, our votes for populists, our investments in crypto, our burgeoning body dysmorphia. For we had this early understanding. How power and all its emanations could overnight and seemingly without struggle be transformed into a small man in a big house, standing bowlegged in his slippers. Or a young boy sitting by a poolside, thinking: here it was, the beginning of life; when actually, it just was. It just was what it was.
As a boy, our father had watched soldiers steal his uncle’s bike. They beat him—the uncle—badly for it, but it was the theft itself that he could never recover from. The uncle had to watch them ride his bike through town every day, his prize, his joy. This drove the uncle crazy, which got him sent away to a re-education camp in the countryside, which produced inconclusive results as he ended up dying instead.
This poor ‘uncle’, we thought. Our father was constantly killing and resurrecting him in new and twisted ways. The uncle was a loyal party member felled by overzealous cadres. Now the uncle was born with an aptitude for music and a degenerative disease. Either our father really did grow up in some kind of uncle abattoir, or he was trying to tell us something. But what, exactly, we were never certain of. To him, the moral of the story was probably too obvious to mention. That was how our father made us feel in the wake of him, constantly: irritated and grasping.
What we did understand from these sad uncle stories was that clearly, to our father, these other young men deserved to be alive, and we did not. Which was annoying as everything else in our lives back then felt like signs portending the opposite. Like the night our mother drove us out to the baseball diamond to watch the mega moon. Or the re-release of the Spicy McRib.
But now, standing in his house as old men ourselves, we cannot help the flicker of irritation we feel towards our past selves. We breathe in the lingering peppery armpit smell in our former bedrooms. The drug paraphernalia still smuggled away beneath our beds. The day-glo cheese in a can that we squirted unquestioningly into our mouths. Our own initials carved into the plasterwork, as if we were someone. Monsters, we think, with a new viciousness. Hellish little twerps.
*
Dage is the only one of us that remembers being told this story; he insists we heard it from our mother. Anyway, the point is, we didn’t hear this one from our father.
Before our father left to go abroad, his school raised some money to help him through his first year, as the fancy scholarship he’d received only covered his tuition. The money was converted into an envelope of traveller’s cheques, which were put in a book and slid into the front flap of his suitcase. The night before his departure, our father went out drinking with his classmates; when he returned to his dormitory, the envelope was gone.
What’re travellers’ cheques, we’d asked as children, flocking around him, hanging off his trouser legs and the back of his shirt. And then: who else knew about the money? Where you had hidden it? What kind of thief zips the case back up the way they found it?
The way he shrugged us off and the obvious facts of the crime suggested to us that he had known who had taken the money and moreover that his burglar’s identity was a source of enduring shame. Could it have been a duplicitous friend? An arch-rival?
Or had he actually taken the money out with him that night, and had it burned a hole in his coat pocket all night long? More wealth than he’d ever conceived of; almost too big for his (certifiably) big brain; suddenly gripped by hatred/terror of his own promise, the debt that can never ever be repaid. Did he start buying rounds?
Or: abortion for a hometown girlfriend that went terribly wrong.
There was a time when we used to imagine our father. We stopped doing that pretty quickly, once the reality of him became more than we could handle. Now in his home without him, surrounded by snowdrifts of his favourite Kirkland’s Signature white ribbed vests, something has opened. There is an invitation to at least speculate.
So Xiaoge adds, or: he left the money to his sister. Blank stares. The one that was sick. And we say no, there was no sister, it was the uncle who died, it was always uncles. But Xiaoge insists, he told me when we lived together, the sister who played the guitar—and we interrupt, no it was the uncle who was musical, the uncle, keep up.
We do not believe him and make fun of his failing memory until he squeezes past the leaning tower of laserdiscs into another part of the house.
There’s a saying: 肉包子打狗. It’s like hitting a dog with a meat bun. You’ll never get back what you once gave away. It can be issued as a warning not to apply the wrong method to approach a problem. Or, don’t hurt someone with something that could hurt you right back.
*
During Sange’s lost years, the ones after he dropped out of college, he lived out of a van doing nothing very much at all. Mostly he climbed mountains and filmed other climbers abseiling down cliff faces, feeling his overheated brain go cool and clear with the plunge.
A friend of his during this period—an artist—made an edition of screen prints from a frame in one of his movies. Sange had been filming slightly below the climbers, so you couldn’t see their faces. In the moment captured in the print, they are not climbing; they are taking a break, leaning back into the mid-air and letting their arms dangle. The artist printed their silhouettes over an inky blue swirl, so it looked like they were hovering over a whirlpool.
She titled it I and the Floater Brothers. Sange thought it made an exquisite kind of sense.
The friend had gifted a print to Sange, as thanks for letting her use his work. He propped it up behind the passenger’s seat of his van, and looked at it as he brushed his teeth and before he went to bed every night. He never tired of looking at it. It had disturbed him, pleasantly, to think that something he had made (that was the first time he thought of his films that way; as something made with serious deliberateness, real choices—not just playing around) had existed in someone else’s head. That through its transference from one mind to another it had become something fuller, more complete.
When the van had to go in for repairs, he had the print shipped to our father’s house for safekeeping. Sange’s plan was pick it up when he was in town, on his way to wherever he was going next. Maybe this place had a wall where he’d hang it up. Maybe the wall was a corridor by the front door, where he’d greet his guests as they came in. Hello, hello, he imagined himself saying as he’d never said before, full of expansive munificence. His guests would exclaim over the delicious and inviting smells as he took their coats. It’s just the onions and garlic, he practiced saying to the roof of the van. We’re keeping it simple tonight.
When I and the Floater Brothers arrived, Sange got a call, our father breathing heavily down the line: Our language is five thousand years old. There is no word for what it is you do.
Now, when we find the print up in the attic, we are bemused/irritated. How else was he meant to react when this weird picture of dead bodies showed up at his door, we say to Sange. You know what he’s like. He must’ve been really freaked out by you.
Sange turns away. I’d forgotten all about it. It’s stupid. Just forget it.
*
Gone are the bottles of sand. Gone are the undeveloped camera, the Tiffany lamp, the cases of Mountain Valley Spring, the standing fan. Gone are the greying legal pads, the stuffed bear holding its red heart, the puzzle boxes, the world maps, the laminated sheet of intact fall leaves. Gone are the curio cabinet and the wicker chair. Gone are the holiday clothes, the Sunday best.
As we pull away from the house and the black garbage bags that we’ve left by the side of the road, we notice that the wind is warm and the birds are in uproar.
Gone are the paint tins, the palette knives, the ashtray shaped like the island of Guam. Gone are the shoeboxes and the sleep apnea mask. Gone are the glasses and the books with the taped-up spines. Gone are his soft slippers. Gone is his quilted coat.
The clouds shift and the light falls in at a slant. We might never come back here again. We have the sense that, finally, we might be living through something very rare.
Deborah Chu is a Taiwanese-Canadian journalist and author, currently based in Edinburgh. Her bylines have appeared in the Observer, the Scotsman, gal-dem, Fringe of Colour, Fest and The Skinny.