Aquamarine
Sometimes it seemed as if Eugene was bigger than his body. When he swept his wings past the shelves in the lounge, books fell to the floor and startled him. When he chuff-chuffed around the dining table, his foot caught on a chair leg and sent him sprawling. Sometimes, burning round the racetrack from the lounge to the hall to the kitchen, his elbow clipped the doorframe, shooting hot sparks of pain up his arm.
His mother would give him a rub, and soothe him more with exasperation than sympathy.
“Ah, ratbag, that’s got to hurt. But I’ve told you and told you, don’t run inside!”
Objects in the world were connected to each other, or to him, in unexpected ways. At the table, his spoon clattered to the floor, or his cup sluiced milk across the wood. The stickiness never stayed just on his toast, but found its way somehow onto his arms and legs, where all day it tugged at the tiny hairs.
“Am I too enormous?” Eugene asked his mother after his bath, his voice muffled through the towel.
“You’re exactly the right size,” she said, rubbing his hair till his teeth rattled. “Any smaller and your feet wouldn’t touch the ground. Honestly, how did that bathmat get so wet?”
Maybe there was something inside him that was too big: a force that radiated beyond the edges of his body. A superpower he hadn’t yet learnt to control. Sometimes he just forgot how small the flat was, or how long his cardboard-tube lightsaber was. Eventually, after a day of sighing and scolding, his mother would relent.
“Come on, roister-doister, you need to let off some steam.” And they would put on their jackets and go down the stairs, where the sound of his locomotive engine echoed like a real railway tunnel, until his mother shushed him because of the neighbours.
They would walk to the little park at the end of the street, stepping on all the cracks, counting in twos by looking at the letterboxes. She sat on the bench, a fizz of colour against the grey fence, her bright mouth and scarf and tangle of hair, which she called auburn or ginger depending on her mood.
“Get it all out!” she would call to him as he whooped and hollered. He ran up the slide and jumped off the ladder, his cape flying behind him. “All that havoc and mayhem!”
His mother was full of words. She rolled them around in her mouth like sweets, tasting them on her tongue. Many of her words were for him: scallywag, ragamuffin, cherub. Bothersome, adorable, vile.
“Let’s put this out of your way, my little dervish of destruction,” she would say, standing on tiptoe to place something precious safely out of reach.
There was a vase that lived on the top of the bookshelf: glass, clear and curved. Sometimes his mother bought herself flowers, tulips or gerberas, and the vase would be lifted down from the shelf and placed in the centre of the table. He would look and look at it, his mind filling up with the colour, as if he was drowning in it.
“Aquamarine,” said his mother. “Water of the sea.” But the vase was far more beautiful than the real sea, which up close was dull and greenish, and turned his legs ghostly beneath the surface.
The vase made Eugene think of heaven, mermaids, something delicious dissolving on his tongue. Sherbet. Nectar.
“Your father might have been a deadbeat and a disaster, but he had exquisite taste,” his mother said.
Exquisite, which meant exceptionally beautiful. His finger traced the vase’s curves, its slender neck, the swell of its belly. The shape sang in his head like music; he couldn’t see how it could be more perfect.
“The only good thing to come out of that whole debacle. Apart from you, of course, guttersnipe.”
She said she called him Eugene because it was a beautiful name, the name of composers, playwrights, four popes and a handful of saints. “It means well born, and you, urchin, are extremely well born. Just look at your mother!” All the same, she used his name mostly when she was cross.
“Eugene!” she would say, in the same voice she used to say, “Goddammit!”, when something was jammed or broken or spilt.
He heard “Eugene!” often. When he poured the milk to the brim of his cereal bowl to see how much would fit, or when he forgot to hold his burger with two hands and the insides fell into his lap. Disaster meant terrible mistake or failure.
“Oh, Eugene,” she said, when she saw the tray of eggs, the top of each one poked in with the handle of a spoon. He’d been looking for the one with the chicken in it. “It’s a chicken in egg situation,” he’d heard her say, as she unpacked the groceries. A moment ago she’d been talking about his star chart, which still had only two gold stars on it. “I need you to behave yourself first, and then I can dish out the positive reinforcement.”
But it was hard to be good, when the badness was bigger than he was. Sometimes he broke things on purpose, when his rage dizzied him and sent his arms and legs lashing. The time his mother confiscated his rugby cards he had kicked his Lego rocketship to smithereens, when it had taken him days and days to make.
Once he pushed a breakfast bowl off the kitchen bench on purpose. He can’t remember why; maybe he hadn’t been allowed a biscuit. The crash had been awful.
“You little…” For once, she didn’t have a word for him. “You can spend the rest of the morning in your bedroom.” She had lifted him painfully by the arms and dumped him just inside his bedroom door, and slammed it, even though slamming doors wasn’t allowed.
Other times, though, her anger seemed to come from nowhere, a crack of lightning from a clear sky. He hadn’t even noticed the glue bottle sideways on the floor, leaking its yoghurty insides onto the carpet. Or the noises escaping out of him, the engine revs or the police sirens, when he thought he was playing quietly.
“Eugene,” she said, and her voice sent a squirm of cold through his tummy. “You need to shut up. If I can’t get this essay done I’m going to lose the effing plot.” When she was in a hurry she was angry non-stop. “Come on!” she would say, seizing the spoon and clashing it against his teeth. “It’s like shovelling the proverbial uphill.”
But in between the storms there was sunshine. Sometimes they went out together, to the pool or the museum, or the cafe where they put a tiny chocolate fish on his spoon. She would listen to everything he said, and laugh and call him a marvel and a wonder. When her essays were finished there were Friday nights on the couch, with pizza and a movie and bottles of ginger beer to clink together. “Cheers!” they said, “Cin cin!”
On Sunday mornings he would crawl into the milky cave of her bed, careful not to touch her with his cold feet.
“Hello, horrible,” she would say, her voice creaky with sleep. He would ease in against the solid warmth of her back and curl there, barely breathing, until she was ready to roll over and tickle him and kiss him good morning, her breath almondy on his face.
She would bring a cup of tea back to bed and they would watch cartoons, their knees making mountains under the duvet, two big and two small. He turned the pages of the art books she brought home from the library, listening to the names of the colours: ochre, cerulean, vermilion, umber. They sounded like the jewels she wore when she dressed up, on her fingers and dangling from her ears. Periwinkle, amethyst, peridot.
When his mother was happy with him, she called him anything other than his name. “Come here, monster,” she would say outside his classroom, enfolding him in her lunch-shift smell of cooking and coffee. “Ooh, I could eat you up.” Or “Night night, sugarsnap,” pressing the covers tight across his chest, planting quick kisses, smooch smooch smooch, on her favourite spot just below his eye.
On her birthday, the blue vase was brought down from its shelf and filled with flowers. Eugene looked at it, his chin on the table. Below the skin of the water the stems were fatter. Where the water met the air the bright-green stalks were sheared off and reappeared further along, like a magic trick with a lady in a box. Optical illusion.
His mother spent a long time in the kitchen making afternoon tea for her friends. There were sandwiches and baby cheese muffins, a tray of tiny salmon tarts and a cake, which Eugene was allowed to decorate with icing sugar. He shook the sieve and watched drifts of white cover the golden surface. When he asked, she let him put in candles, the ones left over from his birthday.
“Like dog years,” she said. “One of yours is worth seven of mine.”
The plates stood covered in cling film on the table. His mother fetched plates and serviettes, a bottle of wine. She came out of the kitchen with a fan of wineglasses in each hand, the bases threaded and stacked between her fingers, the way she did at work.
“Whoops!” she said, looking at the full table. The glasses rayed like stars from her hands. “Darling, can you move those flowers? Careful, they’re going to be heavy.”
Eugene looked at her in surprise. She nodded, smiling, and he put his hands around the widest part of the vase. Its outsides were still dewed from the tap. He was braced for the heft of it, but not the slick of wet, the cold slipping weight of its sides.
He heard her suck of breath, and the crash.
A smashed-up disaster of vermilion and peridot and aquamarine lay at his feet. He felt a thud inside him, the knowledge, landing like a stone, of the thing that can’t be undone.
He raised his eyes to her face.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, clattering the wineglasses down. “Are you all right? It’s okay, it’s okay, it was an accident.”
She pulled him away from the puddle and the vicious blue shards and the sad tangle of stalks and petals. She turned him so he didn’t have to look, and sat him on the tall stool in the kitchen, and made him a cup of hot chocolate.
He sucked the slimy salt from his top lip and listened to cupboards opening and closing. He curled his hands around the warm mug and heard the swish and clink of the dustpan, the crunch of the newspaper bundle being squashed into the bin. Then she got out the vacuum cleaner and for a while he couldn’t hear anything.
“Finish up, soldier,” she said, in the sudden silence. “Our visitors will be here soon!”
She lifted down from a cupboard a big glass jar, and threaded into it a handful of rescued tulips, red and green. His mother looked at him and smiled. He saw her earrings, swinging against the bright mass of her hair, a beautiful singing blue, like sunlight on the water of the sea.
Nicki Judkins has had short fiction published in Headland, Ingenio, and Mslexia. She has been shortlisted for the Sargeson Prize, runner-up and highly commended for the Katherine Mansfield Award, and was the winner of the Sir James Wallace Master of Creative Writing Prize for the first draft of her first novel.