the words we cannot say

The woman drapes a blanket across my body like I am a dead thing. Rotting through her lounge and staining the pillows. The man’s voice is hushed when he speaks. Trying not to raise my corpse. They stare at each other when the mother returns to the kitchen, each cradling cups of coffee.

It’s late. I watch them through half-raised eyes. I don’t want them to know that I am awake and watching. I want to see what the quiet hour reveals.

My father and I quarrelled before I left for university. He wanted me to stay local. Living with the family and cleaning the bathroom instead of paying rent. I wanted to go to Melbourne. Our words spiralled at the dining table, drifting higher and higher until they hit the ceiling and shattered. He stood and shook his head, telling me to go if I wanted to abandon them so badly.

I didn’t think I was abandoning them. Not then. I dragged my belongings up two flights of stairs because there was no one to help me move, my mother’s hand stayed by my father’s anger. He never had a temper. He was always slow to speak and even slower to act. I didn’t know what raised his fury against me so strongly that day and I didn’t care to ask. Like most teenagers, I assumed it was about me.

My mother wanted to tell me. Her hand hovered over the phone on countless greying nights while my father coughed stripes of blood during his bed confinement. He didn’t want me to know. He wanted me to be happy in Melbourne, even if it meant leaving. His anger had dissipated. In the end, he was only tired.

I didn’t know what to do when my mother finally made the call. I spun in circles around my room like a dog chasing its own frenzied tail. I threw clothes into a bag and left the apartment twice, running back inside each time for a lost item. My toothbrush. My phone. I didn’t have friends in the city anymore, and there was no room in the house. Desperation forced my hand when I posted online for a place to stay the night. I didn’t have enough money for a hotel room, or even a stay in a hostel. I was too proud to ask my parents for money. I hadn’t wanted them to know of my financial struggles. We saw other in the mirror without ever really seeing; only ever viewing the reflection of something else. Distortions and ripples.

A couple reached out after seeing my post. We have a lounge, the woman said, moved more from pity than any true sympathy. It’s not much, but it’s yours for the night if you need. I don’t think she expected me to accept her offer, but I was desperate. I appeared outside their apartment block with a voice wrecked from crying and my bag sitting pathetically beside me. She buzzed me in. As promised, there was running water and a lounge. That was all I needed.

The man’s voice rises in volume. I can hear the electricity thrumming through the walls. I can hear the cars roaring outside the window. I can hear the acerbic edge to his words as he asks the woman what the fuck she was thinking in letting a stranger stay the night. I could be a scammer. A thief. A drug dealer running from the police.

I close my eyes properly this time and wish I could close my ears too. I don’t want to be here. I want to be at home drinking my mother’s home-brewed tea and listening to my father’s dramatic narration of the evening news. He used to turn the sound off and let us guess what the reporters were saying.

My chest aches. We always think we have more time. I hate myself for being young and foolish and leaving Melbourne without trying to fix things with my father. He was waiting to see me in person to apologise. When I didn’t call and didn’t visit, he let our relationship fade the way he thought I wanted.

There will never be another chance to apologise. I will never get to explain to him all the reasons why I left, and how leaving didn’t mean I loved him any less. He will never explain the reasons why his rage boiled over that day. We should have used an interpreter. Someone versed in both of our languages who could serve as the bridge between all the words we couldn’t say.

My father was dying, and he didn’t tell me because he didn’t want to become a burden. He knew I would have returned to Melbourne. Leaving behind what I told them was a highly successful career, don’t worry about me. He wouldn’t have been worried if I had been honest.

What does pride matter? I should have crawled back on my hands and knees and begged for forgiveness. I always told him that smoking is unhealthy. He said he was fine, that his smokes hadn’t killed him yet and it had been forty years. He thought cancer would have struck by then.

He was wrong. My father, the fool, developed terminal cancer at sixty. The woman explains all of this to the man in their too-clean kitchen. My cry for help. The home overflowing with grieving relatives, gathering in our house for lack of options. No one knows where to go after a tragedy. Like moths to dusty lampshades, they swarm around the location of the deceased as if expecting the corpse to sit up and wave. I have nowhere to go, the woman says on my behalf. I have no money and no friends to take me in.

The ice falls. Relenting beneath the force of pity. He clicks his tongue and shakes his head like watching a particularly wretched dog about to be put down. I am the dog but there is no one waiting with euthanasia. The misery stretches in an unbroken line. I wait for the pain to pass but it clings like a jealous lover. Holding me by the throat and refusing to leave.

I would give anything to see my father once more. I want to tell him I’m sorry. I want to clean the bathroom instead of paying rent and I want to attend local classes, retaining the friends who left the second I did. I want to crawl onto the lounge with him after a long day and listen to him bemoan the rising price of oranges. He only ever bought oranges because I liked them.

The couple goes to bed. In the morning, the woman will make me coffee and the man will put on toast, and they will slide it to me on a gleaming ceramic plate. I will eat none of it. Then I will take my small, weak bag with the weathered straps and take the tram to my mother’s house to bear witness to the funeral.

For tonight, I lay curled on the lounge of a stranger.