Midnyte Madness (Part One Chapter 2)
Merry Meets Midnyte
INDEED, my mother to marry Barry, and then she would marry my father later!
My mind’s a ball of confusion.
But then, I might be fifteen years old at the time but I wasn’t exactly clueless as to what marriage meant.
Even if my mother and father did not represent the real meaning of marriage for me, I saw enough couples living under one roof with their kids and pets, with merriment and normalcy, which was alien to me.
My mother, as wife to my father and my father, as husband to my mother, meant that I saw them quite infrequently and only briefly.
The earliest memories of their being husband and wife, from my cobwebbed mind, consisted of sitting beside my mother, sometimes on her lap, at the front of a passenger jeepney driven by my father. I was probably seven years old then.
I remembered the traffic.
I remembered the other vehicles around us and all those people waiting for a ride. There were so many commuters that I got frightened once. I thought the jeepney would be engulfed by the throng. Rain was pouring in buckets.
My father, the driver, refused to take in any passengers, not even one because he said he was on a meal break. The back of his jeepney could accommodate twelve passengers. The exasperated, tired, and wet passengers howled in disgust.
They looked at my father with dark hatred in their eyes.
I also remembered the thick, suffocating smell of dust and car exhaust smoke. It sickened me at one time, vomiting all over my mother’s nice blue dress.
My father got mad as hell at me. “I’ve just had this jeepney washed, you, stupid girl!”
My mother was furious as well.
I thought it was because I soiled her new dress, but I was not sure.
They exchanged angry words in the jeepney after I got sick even when there were passengers at the back. I had no idea what the fight was about. I just heard my name mentioned many times.
Merry-this, Merry-the-stupid-girl should have used a sick bag.
Feeling ill, my head felt severed from my body. I must have looked like a rag doll from all that heaving of greenish goo.
Later, when my father dropped us home, my mother hurried me inside and pushed me roughly.
My body hit the wall with a thump. It hurt but I bit my lip. Then she pulled my hair and spanked me again and again. She did all these things without warning.
I didn’t ask why. I was used to it.
As usual, I was not allowed to wail. People would be disturbed from their sleep, my mother said, and so I must not make a sound when I cry. I believed her.
Our little house and the other little houses were attached to each other, and each was separated only by paper-thin walls.
A yelp from me when I get beaten up would be heard by the neighbors. The whack of the smack and my body crashing on the wall would be audible, of course, but I supposed that was all right with the neighbors?
Still, I did not learn that night why my mother got mad at me — until after many, many days — or should I count the nights, too?
My mother left me with a next-door neighbor, a laundrywoman. I forgot her name. Maybe she didn’t have a name, or it could be because my mother never called her name but addressed her as Friend.
But this friend was really ugly. She had beady eyes, a large nose, and stringy hair that was often tied with a rubber band on her nape.
I previously thought she was a witch. I heard the other kids in the neighborhood, those who were allowed to play outside their houses unlike me, taunting mother’s friend as a witch. The kids said it behind my ugly neighbor’s back.
I wasn’t happy being left in the care of the alleged witch so I cried. I was also fearful of her.
“Stop making faces, Merry,” mother’s friend said sharply to me.
I looked up quickly at her. She was not looking at me so how did she see what I was doing?
Her eyes were on her pet, a kitten, as she stroked it between its ears.
The kitten was not much to look at.
At first glance, I thought it was a sewer-soaked rat.
It had bald patches on its tiny and bony body, hair standing on ends like a taut wire.
It was on its mistress’s lap as she sat, legs crossed, on the bare floor.
I realized that she might be a witch after all. Why you might ask and I’d say because she was able to read my mind!
“Yes, I could see you making faces even if I’m not looking at you.”
“I was not making faces.” I tried not to show my fear.
That’s when the witch turned her head in my direction and eyed me sternly. “There! You’re contorting your face.”
“I was crying.” Then I told her why I could not make any sound when I wanted to weep.
“I have never known, until now, any child crying in total silence!” she exclaimed. “But why are you, er, crying?”
I stopped my facial contortions and lip twitching. I thought that would please the witch. It did not. The witch was insistent.
“Was it because your mother did not take you with her to wait for your father at the jeepney stop?”
I nodded.
“Do you want to know why she left you here with me?”
“Perhaps because I vomited the last time she took me to have a ride in my father’s jeepney?”
“Oh, did you?”
I nodded again, and said, “Then she beat me up when we got home. Did she do that because I got sick all over her dress?”
“How would I know? But, yes, maybe. She was upset that night when your father broke his promise. Your mother probably gave you hiding because she could not smack your father.”
“Why?”
“He was supposed to take you and your mother to dinner in his parents’ house, introduce you both to his family. For too long, your mother wanted to meet your father’s close relatives. Then he changed his mind just when your mother was feverish with excitement.”
“Why?” I asked again.
“Your father is an inveterate liar, that’s why. How many promises to your mother has he broken, do you know?”
I shook my head, eyes on the floor. I did not realize that I wasn’t meant to answer such kind of question.
The witch was saying, “Your mother is not supposed to wait for him and see him tonight. I just pushed her. She should catch him in his lies. And so, your mother left you with me. She does not want to see your father’s other girlfriends. I keep telling your mother about it. I often see him drive the Sangandaan route with a different slut each time, seated beside him, acting like a bitch in heat as if she owned him.”
I just stared at her. I did not understand what she said.
“Your father is a scoundrel. He’s a womanizer, a gambler, a drunkard, a vile human being in other words. He’d have sex with just about anyone who has the hots for him. He does not deserve your mother’s love — HEY!”
The kitten suddenly leaped from the witch’s lap.
I was startled as it flew — well, that was how it seemed to me as I also sat on the floor across from my minder.
The kitten flew past me as it caught an equally startled cockroach. I was agape with shock as I watched the kitten play and manipulate the cockroach with its paws.
“Will your kitten eat the cockroach?” I asked, half-mesmerized with the playful ferocity of the kitten with its hapless victim.
“Just watch, Merry,” she hissed, “just watch.”
I did. I sat there with the witch and watched as the kitten dismembered the still-alive cockroach shudder with each dismemberment, but I thought that the kitten was so clever. How could it mutilate the pest so carefully?
And the kitten was very patient. It waited for endless minutes between dismemberment, watching its victim with its catty green eyes blazing in concentration.
The nearly-dead cockroach played fully dead, but the kitten knew better.
The witch did not allow me to speak when I wanted to ask a question. She bade me be quiet and just watch the kitten.
When the cockroach was completely torn apart, totally dead, the witch got up. She went to her larder and fetched her kitten the head of a small fried fish.
“Good job, Midnyte,” she said in a loving tone to her kitten that hungrily ate the fish. To me, the witch said:
“Your father deserves something like that, Merry. He is a pest like that roach.”
I looked at the scattered remains of the cockroach on the floor.
I could not imagine why my father was called a pest, or how he could be mutilated even when Midnyte, the kitten, turned into a fully grown cat.
Having witnessed such an unusual show, more interesting than anything on the neighbor’s TV, I then spent more time in the house of the witch.
This pleased my mother. She went to work during the day in a nearby garment factory.
In the evening, after giving me dinner bought from the street vendor, she would usually proceed to the jeepney stop. It was only a few blocks away. There, she would wait for the passenger jeepney driven by my father to pass by.
It was often a long and tedious wait. I should know.
Occasionally, she returned with him to where we lived. They would then spend all the hours of the evening — it seemed to me — moaning and grunting and thrashing about on the thin mattress on the squeaky bed.
Often, however, my mother would return very late, in tears, without him. I did not much care. It meant that I would not have to sleep on the floor, and instead sleep on the bed with my mother.
I started to not care at all when Midnyte and I became the best of friends.
We liked and understood each other, a truth that impressed me hard the first time we did something together.
It happened in our house. The witch brought her pet along and asked me to look after it while she went to her new client several blocks away, near the public cemetery. I did not refuse. In fact, I liked the idea of shielding the kitten from harm.
You see, the other kids in the neighborhood were a cruel bunch. They liked to torture stray animals. They would throw anything at these strays, like what happened to Midnyte as a kitten. They threw stuff at it like stones, rusty nails, broken shoes, and even a rotting banana peel picked off the overflowing rubbish bin on the street.
One particularly wicked kid, the eldest of the neighborhood hooligans, splashed boiling water on the kitten. Then they all laughed as they watched the kitten writhe and cry in pain.
They probably wanted it to die to disprove the saying that cats have nine lives.
It was then that my mother’s friend appeared on the scene. She had come from work. When she saw what happened, she cursed and shooed the kids for their vileness.
She picked up the tortured stray kitten, took it home, and nursed it back to health. Since then, she has tried to restrict her pet inside her house.
And Midnyte seemed to love just being inside the house. Or, perhaps, it enjoyed being in our house because like in the witch’s house, there were also a number of roaches to catch and play within our unkempt house. There were also one or two lizards, ants, and the occasional centipede.
The ants were quickly dismissed by the kitten. The lizard and the centipede were dismissed with a single strike of its paw.
But the cockroach was really its favorite pest and object of fun. And fun we had on its first day inside our house.
As soon as the kitten stepped inside, I thought it went berserk.
It zipped to the kitchen area and sniffed at the edge of the dilapidated door of the cabinet below the sink. Behind that cabinet was a trash can that was always filled with household refuse. The cabinet smelled of permanent decay and I hated opening it.
However, opening it for Midnyte was another matter. I thought it was akin to opening a treasure trove for the witch’s pet.
And I was right.
I had the most fun as I watched the kitten catch and lacerate all half-dozen roaches residing underneath our sink. But unlike the witch, I did not sweep the sometimes still shuddering roaches into the dustpan. I swept the dismembered roaches in the middle of the living room. Then, using a small knife, I minced the dead roaches and mixed it with a handful of left-over cooked rice.
I coaxed the kitten to eat it when I knew it was hungry at the end of the day. It didn’t look very pleased doing so but, oh boy, was I ever so happy as I imagined my dismembered father, a pest, in the mince mixture!
It was a thought that I took with me to bed, and I went to sleep merrily, merrily…
(to be continued)
Thank you for reading. I hope that you will follow through reading the next chapters of this novel until its end.
If you wish to read the introduction and the other chapters, the links are provided below.
Introduction
Part One, Chapter 1 Midnyte Madness: A Tale of Two Terrors
Part One Chapter 3 Midnyte Madness — Merry’s Tangerine Thoughts in Angeles City
Part One Chapter 4 Midnyte Madness — Merry + Barry = Happy Together?
This is what inspired me to create Midnyte in this non-fiction piece: Midnyte’s My Madness
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