Talk-Back Daughter by Hayley Rata Heyes

1

He walks the slope of the hill with confidence. He is out for a walk with his daughter.

“Hi, I’m out for a walk with my daughter,” he announces to a neighbour. 

“Oh wow look at your cat! Your cat looks exactly like our cat Jessie! I have never seen a cat look so exactly like another cat! Doesn’t that cat look just like our Jessie?” he announces to his daughter. She nods, shy. Time to walk on, he thinks. “Right, time to walk on,” he announces.

Without a bell, without much of a message, off he goes: the self-appointed neighbourhood crier.

2

His mouth was a kinetic thing 

a syllable maker

it only shut to open.

I loved the way he gave the world 

his words

and when they happened beside my ears I always took them.

Sometimes his pronouncements were made of my being and my doing

they formed a word-mirror of me, in which I became him.

All of my happenings became his words,

which was his lattice of protection.

I grew tired of being this lattice for my father.

There were parts of me that he would not wordify because he did not have the words or did not like to use them.

I found these parts, and I grew them and I grew them.

I lived in the territory beyond my father’s tongue

of cunt, of care, of menstruation.

I would like to call her, though she’s sick of me

though she doesn’t want it 

I’d like to call her. 

Just to say hi and see what she is doing.

If she doesn’t want to hear from me she can always hang up.

Why don’t I just go ahead and call her?                             

Well that was an odd call…

Why did she tell me those things…

about her…. places……

She shouldn’t be talking like that with me

maybe with her mother or her sister….

What on earth am I supposed to say about that?

What does she expect me to say to that?

Maybe I should not have called her….

3

She shops at the supermarket across town. It’s a drive, but it’s cheap. Today she has a small trolley, slowly gathering the weight of her items. Scanning down the pharmacy aisle, she sees a figure bent at the knees. That person looks a little like Dad, she thinks. The figure stretches upright and feeling another’s eyes, turns and sees his daughter.

She looks well, he thinks, knowing the same could not be said of him. He has come straight from the dentist and his cheeks are swollen, blotched with red. He tries to smile with his eyes and makes some gestures around his face and towards the pain medication he has been hunting for. 

She smiles wide and slow — triumphant. She tells him a little about what she has been doing and what groceries she thinks are overpriced. He nods vigorously through all the moments he would usually interject. She knows this encounter will be wordified later, but that’s okay. For this moment at least, she enjoys the pleasure of his silence as a backdrop to her sound.

*

She is staging a show at a gallery near her father’s work. Because the show is so close to his work she feels obliged to invite him. Usually she wouldn’t bother. It’s irritating listening to a compulsive talker on a topic they don’t know anything about. One of the works in her show is a photograph she took of a forgotten corner in her suburb. The lens looks towards a courtyard between buildings. The sky is a soft blue and the grass is browned. There is an unused conservatory covered in lush climbing roses, red and white. There is a large store front sign along the bottom of the conservatory that reads CHEMIST. It is upside down. The image probably would not have been interesting if the sign was right way up. When she selected the image it made her think of accidental beauty and softness and age.

Now though, seeing it hung in the gallery, all she can imagine is her father’s voice and his pronouncements:  “Oh look at that! They’ve put the chemist sign upside down! Oh that’s not the right way round – someone’s made a mistake there! But hey, makes for an interesting picture, especially with those roses. That’s what they call contrast……” 

She knew he would lean in and whisper “contrast” to demonstrate that he was using a technical term and was therefore, being impressive and knowledgeable. 

She interrupted the gallery assistant, took the photograph, and hung it upside down so that now the only thing rightly orientated was the word CHEMIST. She did it just to stump her father. It looked stupid but she was sure it would shut him up.

She pursued this strategy of trying to exist outside of her father’s narration for a handful of years. Eventually she saw that it too was a type of being created by him — formed by the negative spaces of his imagination. She resented finding his voice constantly at work in her own self-creation. She could only allow herself to exist in the spaces where he could not venture, silent spaces that got stranger and stranger. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be all that strange anymore. She wanted some territory within language to roam, without the risk of running into her father there.

*

She attends a family brunch, one she couldn’t get out of. Her younger sister managed to though; her night-shift work at the hospital, once again, provided the necessary excuse. She wonders if her sister chose this nocturnal profession deliberately as an escape from their father. Clever move, to only be up and about when your predator is asleep. She thinks of the hedgehog that lives in the forsythia bush near her bedroom window, with its almost soundless shuffling through the night. There is a jealousy there if she stops to think about it. 

“What about this predictive text that’s coming up on my Gmail now?” her father begins.

“I go to write an email, and half-way through, when I’m not even finished, the bloody thing comes up with a sentence — just pops up — whoop! As if it knows what I’m going to say next! Ha, I don’t think so, buddy…”

Her mother is physically present for brunch, but inevitably a work colleague has found her from across the cafe and the two women are now chatting away, having formed a safe convivial bubble resistant to the father’s cant. So, it is left to her to provide the nods and mock horror. She feels a part of herself empty. She visualises a literal drain, water pouring down its pipe. What is left of her at the table with her father’s words, is whatever he can’t bear to be without. 

After the brunch she is exhausted. She vows not to attend anymore family events with her father present. But even as she makes this internal promise, she knows she won’t know how to keep it. The worst part is that the denial has worn off. He is keeping her in a word prison and she is painfully aware of it. The fact that he does so unconsciously and without malice, changes nothing for her. He has taken too much. She can no longer bear to be wordified by him. 

*

She dreams that she is her father’s dentist. In the dream she removes all of his teeth. And then his tongue. When she wakes from this dream, she decides to move. The country she lives in is made up of two islands. She decides to move to the island where her father is not. 

In the initial days of her leaving, she thinks, what if Dad dies without me? But mostly she reasons that he will find other people to make words at, and of. 

Time proves her right. In her wake, he becomes a regular talkback radio-caller. 

And then later, a host.