Elephants and Castles

by John Patrick

He was never supposed to have been called Elvis.

  He'd been conceived on the back seat of a car, a few hours and many drinks after his parents first met. You wouldn't have known it back then, through the plastered, monochrome make-up and the ripped punk clothes, but his mother, Monica, was just sixteen years old the night it all started.

  The name was to have been Mini Cooper; a tribute by his father Steve to his favourite car and in recognition of the feat of agility required to make a baby on the Mini's tiny back seat. But the Registrar of Births and Marriages wasn't impressed; he told Steve it was silly. So Steve flattened his nose, the Registrar called the police and Monica was put on the spot. With her episiotomy wound throbbing, her head humming with codeine and Elvis Costello growling from the headphones around her neck, she said the first thing that came to mind. By the time Steve telephoned from the cells with the compromise suggestion of Austin Healey Sprite, it was too late. He was Elvis.

  Steve, Monica and Elvis made home in a grim little flat above a fish and chip shop in the outskirts of Bolton. Life was tough, cash was scarce, but at least Monica had a baby to love and was away from her father's drunken attention. What they lacked in money, they made up for with ingenuity. Steve was an accomplished shop-lifter, so baby-clothes and alcohol were freely provided. The takeaway downstairs let them have the closing time left-over food in exchange for Steve providing an on-call security service. Three knocks on the ceiling with the broom handle would bring Steve charging downstairs ready to punch anyone that looked him in the eye. So by the time Elvis was three months old, his diet was supplemented by a tasty blended mush of battered cod, chips and ketchup. With time though, Steve found himself a proper a job and Monica finally had a little money in her purse. Life was looking up.

  But she knew it was too good to last. It was just a year later, whilst singing along in the car to Elvis Costello's 'Accidents will happen', that Monica did just that and drove into a tree. Elvis was badly hurt. Before setting out, his car seat had been hurriedly shoved into the back of the car, and in her usual never-on-time haste, Monica failed to click the seatbelt into place. When the car was stopped by the tree, Elvis kept going. He was launched from the back seat, flew past his mother as she was being consumed by her air-bag, and exploded though the front windscreen. He sailed over the hedge of the house in front, through the dining room window and landed in the middle of Sunday lunch. As luck would have it, that particular Sunday lunch was being eaten by Tiffany, a nurse from the local hospital emergency department. She knew what to do. She quickly doused the hot gravy stains, did the necessary first aid and called for the ambulance.

  How Monica wished she'd crashed somewhere else that day and sent Elvis through a different window.

  Tiffany took a keen interest in Elvis’s recovery. Working in the same hospital it was easy for her to make regular visits to the ward. Steve took an even keener interest in Tiffany, and before long his occasional visits to the hospital became longer and more frequent. Eventually Monica's suspicions were confirmed when she followed him back to Tiffany’s house. She confronted him with the evidence; Steve never came home again.

  Meanwhile poor Elvis was still recovering from two broken legs, full thickness gravy burns and head injuries. He didn’t walk until he was four years old and then it was with callipers and crutches. Until he went to school at the age of six, he thought all children were like him; in and out of hospital having operations, blood tests, brain scans, skin grafts and struggling to learn to walk. That was his life and the only other children he knew were the same. It was only when his mother finally let him start school and he began to mix with other kids of the same age that he realised life had short-changed him. And the ‘normal’ kids could be very cruel.

  Monica never actually said that her miserable life was all Elvis's fault. She didn’t say that the endless nights spent on her own dreaming of travel and romance, the hours and days wasted in hospital waiting rooms and the poverty of being a full-time stay-at-home carer were all caused by Elvis. Not in so many words at least, but Elvis could read between the lines. Even when the house caught fire, it was the doctor, not Monica, who pointed out that she dropped the cigarette down the settee because she was drunk, and she was drunk because she was stressed, and she was stressed because of Elvis. She would never have been the one to make such a comment. But she did repeat it, quite often.

  For years Monica kept the clothes from her past life hidden away in a suitcase, the tiny leopard skin mini-skirts, the thigh length red PVC boots, the low cut tartan tops complete with huge safety pins and carefully placed rips. But most of it was too small now, and even if it had still fitted, she wouldn't have worn it. The flame had long since gone out. When Steve left her to be with Tiffany he took away the car, the TV, the microwave, the entire Elvis Costello music collection (even though he hated it) and somewhere in amongst all of the debris crammed onto the back seat of the battered old Mini, he took away the last remaining fragments of Monica's self-esteem.

  So it was through the internet and in a haze of white wine that she eventually met Morris Klatzmann. He seemed too good to be true and an almost perfect match to the boxes she’d clicked on the computer dating site. She was a little disappointed when she found out his work in television was actually selling them from his small London shop, and that his house in Las Vegas was really a caravan at the Las Vegas Holiday Resort in Southend-on-Sea. It was also a shame he’d used a photograph that was at least fifteen years old and possibly not of him - but what the heck? He seemed kind, he had his own business and a beautiful if under-maintained historic old home in London. And his ugliness would probably stop him from straying like her last man. Life could only get better.

  So shortly after his eleventh birthday, Elvis packed his things into a couple of Tesco carrier bags and set off with Monica to Bolton coach station. Six dreary hours later, they finally arrived in London to be met by Morris. Up until then, Monica had only seen Morris in the flesh once. But even that hadn't discouraged her; ugly or not, his offer of a new life in London had to be an improvement on her current existence. As for Morris, he was just pleasantly surprised that at long last an internet relationship was going beyond first visual contact.

  Chapter 2