The First True Lie: A Novel by Marina Mander

uncaring, with everything sliding right off its back, you don’t think it can ever change. When it’s sunny with a few clouds, that’s normal. When it’s stormy, it’s bad but also beautiful.
    With Mama, it’s like always living in the moment before the storm: You don’t know if it will come, but you know it could. Some nights you even hope it will, just so you don’t have to be on guard the whole time.
    Now the storm is here and we’re all about to drown, but Blue and I are still bobbing along. Cats don’t even like water. They don’t let cats into orphanages.
    I don’t like having baths. But I have to have them because if I stink they might say: “It’s a bit fishy when such a clean boy starts to smell.”
    When Blue fell into the bathtub, he looked as if he’d stuck one of his paws in an electric socket. Don’t put your paws in the socket or you’ll get electrocuted, don’t stick your fingers in your nose, don’t stick your nose in other people’s business—he won’t fall for it again.
    “Believe me, a hot bath always does you good. You soak a bit and then you feel like new.”
    I turn on the bath taps and sit on the toilet. I check down there to see if any lichen and moss are growing—there aren’t, but when I sniff my hand it smells like cheese. I pour bubble bath into the water, the one that makes lots of foam. I take off my clothes and realize that my feet have joined the Blackfoot Indian tribe. The mirror is all fogged up; with my finger I write
fucking shit
on it. I get into the bath. At first the water is hot, then it cools down. My willy floats up in the water, more like a sea anemone, those strange flowers you see in aquariums, than like the red thing Mama keeps hidden in her underwear drawer. I wonder if, as I grow up, it will become more like the red thing and make the same noise, or maybe just a faint hissing like it does now with the bath foam sizzling around it.
    I’ve been in the bath long enough now that my fingers are wrinkled.
    “Come on, get out of the water. Can’t you see that your fingers are all wrinkly? How many times do I have to tell you?”
    “I told you, dear, raising a boy is war.” Grandma would stand ready with the towel with the blue and white anchors on it, a ham sandwich, and some apricots that had been in the sun so long they were almost rotten.
    Grandma would always talk too loudly because she’s a bit deaf, especially in the right ear, which is enormous and sawed in two by a dangly earring that’s too heavy, and Mama would plead: “Please don’t talk like that in front of the child.”
    I pull out the plug. When the water has finished going down, the drain burps, telling us that’s that, I’m all done digesting: foam, pieces of skin, black bits from my feet, a little fart. I put on Mama’s bathrobe like a boxer all in a daze at the end of the first round, and, since I’m here, I brush my teeth. Not all of them, though, just the front ones. In the mirror you can’t see
fucking shit
anymore, just my face, and it’s hard to read what was written there. I make faces. I yawn, like a hippopotamus from the documentaries. I’m sleepy.
    Where’s my quilt with the baby-blue clouds?
    First I have to go and say good night to Mama.
    I don’t really want to.
    I’d prefer not to see her, and instead remember her more alive than dead, like with movie actors. When they die, the images we see are how they were when they were alive, not when they’re all pale and wasted. That way you’re happier to remember them.
    The most they give us are pictures of the smashed-up cars, if they died in a car crash, like Princess Diana, who in my opinion was a lot less pretty than Mama.
    The only picture I’ve got in my head of the famous vanishing Dad is of him and Mama smiling in front of a motorcycle, him with a red bandanna around his neck and her in a leather jacket, her long hair blown to one side by the wind. Behind them there’s a house like a hotel, I think, though