Dig offered me his hand. “Come on Princess, I didn’t say you were allowed die.”
I fainted.
22
Dig Graves
Dig Graves was nine years old when he saw his father impaled by a spear.
He was not supposed to creep down the staircase and slip through the shadows of the convent and scamper to where the nun’s watched their boxed TV in the sitting room. Peeking through the door he caught a glimpse of the screen flashing with interminable tales of death.
The orphaned children at the convent were not allowed to watch TV. They were only allowed to scrub floors and wash dishes and be whacked by the cane. However, Dig Graves was not very good at doing what he was supposed to be doing as evidenced by the skin on his arms that held the zebra pattern of scars from all the cane lashings he had tolerated. After a while, he could barely feel it and so he decided that watching the Execution Battle was worth more walloping.
Through the flake of the door and past the nun’s smoking their cigarettes leaning over in their slouchy armchairs, Dig Graves searched desperately for his father on the TV.
Dig Graves had never met the man who he had come from, but he had seen a photograph of him in his personal file. That had been from another night of mischievous creeping around the convent, breaking into the nun’s office in search for his family.
Most children with Soulless parentage never discovered who their mothers and fathers were. They were not supposed to know, just as they were not supposed to watch TV. However, again, nine-year-old Dig Graves had not given much of a shit about that. After studying his father’s photograph and absorbing the shape of his face, Dig Graves smiled with delight finding they had the same eyes. He waited for the Execution Battle to meet him.
As he stood outside of the door where night chill climbed his small bones, he looked through the crack of the rusted hinge, holding onto the splintered wood frame and beamed.
His father appeared on screen.
Running through the tempest of the Battle, donning a jacket and a blade and a dump of fear smattered across his face. Dig Graves leaned forward, pure happiness lifting him up on his tip toes. He almost extended out his hand as if to stroke the screen, as if to know what his father would feel like.
His father looked up at the camera and Dig Graves looked at the screen and there, father and son met across time and space. Their eyes the same.
And then a spear sunk into his father’s gut.
The nun’s cheered.
Dig Graves let out a cry.
The nuns heaved off their chairs, found Dig Graves stitched to the door, and beat him while his father died.
When Dig Graves was eighteen years old, he watched his mother cry.
He was not supposed to find her, but on the day he was jostled out of the convent and told he was no longer a child orphan but now a displaced adult, he had decided to find his home.
He knew only her appearance from the photograph he had looked at in his file and her name typed under it. Those inked words had sunk into his brain until his mind was tattooed with them. It had been his mother’s name he had sung over and over like a favourite song. It had been his mother’s name he had spoken each night into his pillow before he closed his eyes. It had been his mother’s name that kept him comfort when a nun’s boot kicked into his side.And it had been his mother’s name he had cuddled when no one else had opened their arms for him.
He took himself and the treasure of his mother’s name with him on his journey through Uandra in search for her. After months of a hungry stomach, of bruises from meeting cruel hands along the way, and feet that were bleeding from holes in his shoes, he found a little house tucked into the suburbs.
It was yellow brick with a red mailbox and a tyre swing under a shaded oak. The driveway held a car for a family of four and handprints of the parents and their children that lived there were pressed into stepping stones.
He knocked on the door.
She answered.
He looked at his mother.
She looked back at him. She looked at his eyes.
It was not a cry that heaved from her throat, it was a scream. So loud and piercing, she frightened herself with it and tumbled back into the neat, vacuumed carpet, clutching at her chest, her eyes wide with terror.
He called her the name that was hers. The name that he cradled like a pearl, the name that he savoured.
She called him devil, she called him demon, she called him wicked.
