Murd
They call me Murd. Murd come in for dinner. Murd clean your teeth. Murd clean the bedroom. Murd this. Murd that. Pity I’m only a child or I might truly know they hate me. Despite the atmospheres, I always believe it when they say they love me. Children do. For ever and ever.
The trouble with me is that I can sometimes see into the future and what love means, and what hate means. I don’t actually live in the future, however. Only in this present tense atmosphere of the house I call home. I can’t use the word ‘shall’ or ‘will’, though I do own plenty of will power. I stare at my Mum and Dad and Sister and will them to submit to my wishes – and they do, invariably. They give me everything I want without realising that the things they give me are what I really want. They indeed think the things they give me I don’t want at all and that’s why they are perverse enough to give them to me in the first place.
One day, in the past… Wait a minute. I can’t talk about the past in the same way as I can’t talk about the future. I can’t say the words ‘would’ or ‘should’ or put the letters ‘-ed’ on verbs or any of those strangely fangled past participles. I only know words today. I only learn words, in fact, today. The words I once…. See, I easily fall into the traps they lay for me, tempting me into the past or the future. Mum and Dad are clever at enticing me into all manner of time zones. Today, I know lots of clever words, even if I’m just a small child, because I see the future where I know lots of clever words and, at the same time, I see the past, too, where I know no words at all.
“Murd! Are you cleaning your bedroom with a fine tooth comb?” shouts Mum, one day.
She knows how clever she’s being in keeping the tense clean. Keeping the tense clean is keeping it in the present tense. No fooling her. No fooling her that she is or she is not fooling me. I never fall into her trap. She never falls into mine.
“Yes, Mum”, I sing-song to her from the garden, which surely gives her a clue that I’m lying about cleaning my bedroom at the present moment.
She humours me, though. She laughs and coughs. Reminding me that I have a bad cough and cold and I shouldn’t be in the cold garden tempting fate with its own germs and feverous gusts of wind. Except I haven’t got the cough and cold … quite yet. It waits in the wings of the wind. And I hasten to my bedroom to make all well with world … or, rather, make all true with the world.
Dad’s in there with my Sister. Glinting eyes. Glinting knife.
“We are always telling you to keep your bedroom clean…” they sing-song in deadly unison.
I outwill them with my stares, or so I think.
All in keeping with the present tense atmosphere of the only house I can call home, I soon find out why they call me Murd; it’s short for Murdered Child.
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