To Become a Man

To Become a Man

I can vividly remember the sight of his crimson face, engorged with rage in front of my own, meek, and pale.

‘Be a man!’ he screamed, as my mother tried to pull him off me, struggling against his heavy frame. As a child of only eight years old, these are the moments that last. The ones that fundamentally shape you into who you become. Sometimes I try to convince myself that

I had a normal upbringing and I even let myself begin to feel a touch of sentimentality – there had been good times, hadn’t there? I had felt loved, hadn’t I?

I can uphold this charade for a little while, but something – a voice, a fragment of a sentence, a certain look – will inevitably trigger me, and the memories will flash through my mind as if on a rolodex, and then I will feel them tighten their cold hands around me once more.

Be a man. If only he could see me now. The man I had become. Would he be proud?

It had been almost two years since his death. Not one to exit gracefully, his end had been drawn out, and full of suffering. I had been at his bedside during the very moment, when his last breath concluded with a drawn-out exhale, and his withered body went slack. Even after the finality of this, his eyes had remained open, and I saw this as a sign of his will; that he was still watching. That he would always be watching. I had not held his hand through this moment, as they do in the films. And yet I had felt a slight stinging behind my eyes, as though I were storing tears that were threatening to fall. I regained my composure quickly enough though, and left the hospital soon afterwards, not keen on hanging around. The sick and the dying made me feel uneasy, and to be honest I was glad that the old bastard had finally entered the next phase. I was free.

I had gone straight from the hospital to the closest bar. I knew that I should be feeling something, anything, and yet my mind remained empty, void of any emotion. I ordered a stiff drink. And then another. The whisky burned my throat, and I was glad to finally feel again. After another round or two, I decided to go to the restroom. The mirror was grimy, and another man was at the basin when I entered, drying his hands. I held the door open for him, and at the very last moment he made eye contact with me, and what I saw sent a wave of fear into my bloodstream. His eyes, shrewd and small and walnut brown, were the same shape and colour of my now-deceased father’s. I had a flashback to the hospital. His frail body almost limpid, stiff with pain. The eyes that had never closed. The door swung shut behind him.

I tripped over to the mirror, and stared deeply into my own face, looking for evidence. Was I like him? My own eyes, a murky blue like my mother’s, blinked rapidly.

Be a man. A voice in my head whispered.

Be a man.

A strong gush of adrenaline suddenly coursed through my body, electrifying every sense. A new alertness eclipsed the drowsiness that the alcohol had imbued.

My fist met the mirror before I had willed it to. A trickle of crimson danced down my arm across veins, thick like ropes, that protruded from my pale skin. My eyes bulged in their sockets, and although their colour and shape were different to my father’s, the emotion that blazed across them was not.

I was becoming him.

My nostrils flared and I clung onto the basin, my blood dripping into the bowl mingling with the water, turning it into a faded pink.

I made a low, guttural noise. The door behind me swung open, causing me to swivel abruptly. A man stood at the threshold. I could tell in an instant that he was inebriated; he barely registered my presence, let alone the fragments of glass that now glittered on the dirty linoleum.

He squeezed past me and muttered under his breath; an empty threat littered with profanities.

The words met my ear, accompanied by an acrid and foul smell that lingered in the air as the man stood in front of a urinal. Get out of the way. You are worthless. Do you hear me? There they echoed in my mind, becoming distorted and mangled. You will never be a man. You will never be a man. You will never be a man. I looked into the shattered mirror and locked eyes with the man at the urinal. His mouth was moving, his eyes on mine. You will never be a man.

I could feel my muscles rippling under my skin, tight with tension. I picked up a shard of glass that had fallen into the basin. It shimmered in my hand, ragged and sharp to the touch. The voices continued incessantly, swelling to a crescendo. Fragments of sentences jumbled together and his voice; and it was his voice, clear and menacing, the same as it had always been. I tightened my grip on the glass. I could hear the man at the urinal zip his trousers and pull the flush. It was time.

I spun around as he approached the basin. One step closer. Two steps.

His mouth moved, uttering words that melted into each other, indecipherable to my ears. I had been taken over by a greater force. I was no longer myself. I was him.

Three steps closer. Four.

I squeezed the shard of glass in my hand until I could feel it cutting through my flesh, a trickle of blood oozing out of the wound.

I raised the shard; he was in close enough range now.

And yet as I did, I caught sight of my own eye in its reflection. Murky blue and terrified. And it was my mother’s eye, staring back at me. I saw her face, creased with anguish as her husband lunged at their son. She moves her body between them; she separates son and father. They are not the same. They will never be the same.

The shard dropped to the linoleum, joining the other fragments as though that is where it had always intended to lay. And I collapsed with it. The tears came, then. And suddenly I was a child; curled into foetal position, helpless, exposed.

A hand pressed into my shoulder. Two worried eyes stared into mine.

‘It’s going to be ok,’ the voice told me.

And I could finally hear again.