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The room is submerged in technicolour; sunlight treads tentatively through makeshift curtains - ripped shirts tacked up to the windows, hand-dyed this morning - and illuminates them both.
It has been two weeks since the departure of James Hamilton Senior. Today, they decide to exile the last remnant of him from their home. They banish his memory, of course, by vandalising his clothes.
In the morning, when his mother wakes him up, Alexander's father's shirts still smell like him.
Alexander picks up a shirt - off white, a little stained, with holes in the cuffs and elbows and two buttons missing - and holds his breath because if he holds his breath he can't smell the musky, coffee-stained scent salted with sweat and seawater that is a slap in the face harder than any James had given him.
He breathes out, slowly, and submerges the shirt in the vat of water his mother has prepared. Water and salt and soda ash will eradicate any lingering particles of a lost man. He soaks out the smell, watches it diffuse like a toxin, dissolve and disappear. For the first time in two weeks, he smiles. He meets his mother's gaze and responds to her raised brow and conspiratorial grin with a shrug.
Together, they pull all of James' shirts out of the closet. They are cheap, threadbare things - hardly the symbols of professionalism James made them out to be - and Alexander and his mother pile them up beside the vat. The plain, ugly, foul neutrals blend together until they are soaked -cleansed - one by one, voluptuously and intimately, in the warm wet vat. Water and salt and soda ash and persistent, wrinkled fingers scour the hard bitterness from them.
They take great pleasure in wringing the shirts out. Alexander squeezes so hard he fears he may break his fingers. His knuckles become the same shade of white as the shirt he twists in his hands but, surely, this is how he expunges a man's soul from cloth. He thinks that his mother thinks the same; her red nail polish has stained the shirts she ravenously sinks her fingers into like fruit juice, or blood. Perhaps the soda ash helped remove it. Caustic and cleansing.
James said to Alexander, once, when he begged to be allowed to go trick-or-treating, that the trick-or-treating and crudely carved jack-o'-lanterns which so characterised Halloween nowadays were nothing but a distraction, a bastardisation of an ancient Celtic festival in which people attempted to scare away the evil spirits, to purge them from the land of the living. That swindling strangers out of their food was nothing if not inviting those spirits back, that Alexander should be more careful, should be old enough to know not to indulge in such childish activities - tantalising amorality - as trick-or-treating.
Alexander realises with a slanted smile that himself and his mother are hosting their own Halloween, purging a soul from their home. A reclamation. They are condemning James Hamilton's cruelty and coarse avarice to victimlessness.
His mother reveals an array of dyes, seizes a frayed beige shirt, dips her hands into the thick dye with a sensual, indulgent, carnal avidity, and grabs the shirt. And stains it. Alexander senses in her actions not only release but long-sought revenge, and remembers that his father stained his mother, too. She closes her eyes now, and rips the magenta shirt.
Alexander dyes a paper-thin, pale yellow shirt blue. The dye is dark, and he watches it infuse into the shirt, branching out as though through capillaries. At first, he is transfixed. Frozen. Then, he grabs a handful of fabric from the pile, and smears it. Within seconds, it has branded on it an inky network of blood vessels. His mother puts a hand on his shoulder and says it looks like the trees in winter.
He is unspeakably and viscerally grateful for her; his heart dyed a deep, paradisaical, sunlit green.
They have smudged with sage and they have sprinkled their salt; their house is cleansed. They breathe in the brightness and the Sun probes her long, light fingers into their very beings. Decadently, sybaritically heals.
So, as the Sun sets and strokes their glowing outlines reverently, they tie the arms of the shirts together to create bright, bright, bright patchwork curtains.
The room is submerged in technicolour; sunlight strides enchantingly through these curtains - vibrant shirts adorning the windows, hand-dyed this morning - and illuminates them.