From Jester To King LI
By Simon Barget
- 141 reads
When I was young I was abused by my uncle and never had a chance to protect myself. I mean we’ve all had our fair share of pain. But there was this time when he was round at our house in the evening and my parents were getting ready to go out and I of course didn’t want them to, and I remember my mother preparing this big cheese plate and setting out the special challah bread that she used to make and cutting it up in these rough asymmetrical slices and then putting it out in this funny-shaped wicker bread basket which she’d line with a serviette, and I just thought it was plain weird that my parents were going to entertain people as a sort of preparation for going out themselves. Anyway we were waiting for my grandparents to come over, and my other uncle was there too, the good uncle, well at least the better one, and I was not happy and any chance I got, I tried to get my parents’ attention to try and get them to stay, to change their mind about going out, and I do remember picking up one of the pieces of bread in anger and pointing to the rest of the things that my mother had laid out and accusing her saying that she was only going to go some other place to have bread and cheese like this, to be entertained, so why bother, why not just stay in and have it, plus it was late. But I think what was really at odds here with me, the thing I couldn’t deal with and was skirting around, was that my uncle was there, and I didn’t want him there at all, him moving freely about and into the garden and back, --it was a warm spring or summer evening -- and I was angry that they’d not only let him into the house like they always always did but that they’d also seen fit to feed him bread and cheese and other nice things to entertain him and talk to him and appease him and say normal nice adult human things to him like he was such a thing.
There was a strange thing on at the time as well in our town, our branch of the Sapporo flower festival was taking place, and we had Korean tourists in our back garden admiring all the multi-coloured sunflowers that were just starting to bloom. I remember looking out into our garden and seeing them kneeling before the flowers as if in prayer me feeling like we had something to admire. Anyway we were still waiting for my grandparents and I was still objecting to my uncle’s presence and being ignored by my mother, again my father had just absented himself and so there was no point addressing him, and I don’t really even remember him being there although he must have been, well I got worked up and I can’t remember exactly how it panned out or started or how I built up the courage but I faced off to my uncle and went right up to him, I told him didn’t he get it but we didn’t want him there, somehow I got the idea that I was speaking for the whole rather than myself, even though everyone else seemed to show him politeness and respect, and I went right up to him and motioned for him to get out, I remember I was standing in the living room facing the kitchen table and he was facing me with his back to the table with his hips almost touching the table; I remember him going from his usual smug condescending face to suddenly looking challenged and ill-at-ease, and I must have asked him why he was always always rude and disparaging why he had been for all those years and why he still was now, he had always been one to put people down, one for curt remarks, and I had certainly been the butt of his humour, he constantly picked on me, told me my ears were too big, my nose also, told me I was stupid, and to my great surprise he made off as if to storm out of the house, not without defending himself of course, hurling abuse at me, telling me and the rest of us why he did it, why he was justified etc. And then to my even greater surprise, as my uncle was actually about to leave our house at my behest, my other uncle pipes up. And I will always remember the words he spoke, as they were the first to have ever validated my position, to have confirmed what I had thought, to have given my fear some space, some room to breathe, and to have gone some way to explaining other uncle’s behaviour towards me, my good uncle softly and calmly said ‘he has a rage inside’ as if having made a declaration from now unto eternity. And these words seemed to have this magic ring to them, a force-field, because I had never seen my uncle as being angry before, but now it had been said, the adult me -- I mean I must have been about twenty-one at the time but a big part of me hadn’t grown up -- this adult me could see that my uncle was angry and had been angry and that he taken out this anger on me. But the even weirder thing was the way my good uncle explained it; he went on to say that when my other uncle had done this psychometric test to test his personality, the test was to say what colour T-shirt you wanted, and my uncle had replied crimson, and apparently crimson is the colour of rage, of psychopaths, of troubled people and this had been a real warning sign to those who had known it. For sure was some sort of liberation, and my uncle walked out of that house for the first time ever following the precept of a hurt and angry twenty-one year old, but I still didn’t manage stop my parents from going out to their dinner party and my uncle and the rest of the family stayed on to wait for my grandparents to arrive before they went out.
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