The ecstasy of an unplanned morning session was tantamount to the real thing, and much like the real thing, over far too quickly. With more hours in his day, Steve decided that he would spend them in bed and promptly returned to the comforts of his sheets and fell asleep.
“Steve, STEVE! Get down here already. Can’t sleep all day!” Steve’s mother had good intentions but was of course incorrect, Steve could sleep all day, as is the case with most students, however, it was out of his own volition that he left his hibernation on occasion to consume the necessary supply of snacks and soda. Not because he had to of course. Steve didn’t want to disobey his mother, despite the many instances where he had in his adolescence, so he spun out of bed and suddenly found himself in the kitchen. Steve’s mother was busying herself doing the dishes and so didn’t flinch at the sudden arrival of her scantily clad son behind her. When she turned round to return another glass to its rightful place in the cupboard, she almost dropped it when she was caught by surprise at, well, the sudden arrival of her scantily clad son.
“You’re not at university now, Steve, put some clothes on and come back down when you’re properly dressed”
Steve hadn’t realised that he was still in his underwear from earlier, the crusty stain more noticeable given it had some time to solidify. And yet, Steve dismissed it as weariness, after all his mind was probably so used to walking down the stairs that it decided to skip that part of the day out entirely because ultimately, unless you fall down the stairs, who really remembers the journey. Steve rubbed the sleep from his eyes and headed for the stairs. Just as he turned the corner out of the kitchen, he found himself instantly in his bedroom again, sat on his bed. This time he was certain that he didn’t climb the stairs, turn the corner, open his bedroom door and sit on his bed, considering he had just woken up and was averse to having clocks in his room, Steve had no concept of time and so couldn’t use that to measure it against. Besides, he wasn’t quick enough to think of such things in his state. Once again, Steve dismissed this strange occurrence as his mind simply skipping the journey, as he was indeed sat on his bed he therefore must’ve climbed the stairs, turned the corner, opened his door, otherwise he couldn’t possibly be sat there at all.
Probably déja vu. He thought, despite déja vu being an entirely different concept involving short term memory entering one’s long term memory – or so they say. In his fugue state, Steve heard the rumble of the gravel driveway, a car was pulling up.
“Steve, your dad’s here!” His mother called out.
In an instant, Steve was downstairs at the front door. Not the common literary trope whereby writers write in an instant as a means of suggesting that the character performed something in a very short amount of time, I mean in an instant as literally one second later. As such, when Steve’s dad opened the door he was aghast to see his son standing right in front of him in his crusty underwear.
“Steve! What the hell are you doing!?”
“Christ, Steve, I told you to get dressed! Hi honey, how was work?” Steve’s dad worked the night shift and so was often coming and going at strange hours of the days. The parents embraced as Steve wandered back up the stairs into his room. This time, he felt every carpeted step under his bare feet as the weight of embarrassment was heavy on his shoulders. He felt his bedroom door handle too, not because of the weight of embarrassment on his shoulders, but because he was required to reach out and turn it in order to enter his room.
Steve had slipped on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt when his dad came knocking on his door. It is customary to knock on someone’s door and then wait until they are allowed entry by the person behind said door. Somehow, parents never got this memo, which is why children – especially teenagers – should have locks on their doors. Steve’s dad knocked once, then proceeded to open the door without waiting for Steve’s consent or permission to enter. As the man was Steve’s father, Steve couldn’t prosecute him for breaking and entering.
“Steve. I know it’s the summer, and you work hard with your studies. But don’t you think you could be doing more with your time off?”
Steve pondered on the question for a moment. There is more he could be doing. He could be doing more sleeping, could be doing more to level up his character on his game system, could be using more tissues.
“I’ve spoken to your grandparents, they could use some help in the garden. They might even give you a bit of money for doing so”
The promise of money caught Steve’s attention, the promise of labour, however, did not. He was weighing up a cost – benefit analysis in his mind when his father interrupted his thought process.
“I told them you’d be there tomorrow. It’s meant to be decent weather then, would be good to get out of the house more on a day like that”
WHAT?! Once again, parents not understanding the basic tenets of the real world and simply breaking and entering at a whim and signing contracts for people without their permission. Steve felt like it was a kind of slavery, but then realised that was probably too drastic a leap as he was being paid for the work he hadn’t signed up to do. Still, it appeared that he hadn’t much choice in the matter and so he resigned himself to doing manual labour, likely for a small amount of money. At least he got to see his grandparents he supposed, and would likely receive a feast for lunch, good old grandmas, always know how to fill a stomach.
The next morning, Steve’s phone rudely awakened him with the infuriating sound known as an alarm. He had to wake up early today as he was employed to do gardening at his grandparents. Steve’s father wasn’t set to return for another couple of hours and his mother was already in the kitchen laying out the breakfast.
“Steve, breakfast is ready!” Steve’s family were of the variety where they would shout to one another from different sides of the house, not typically in an aggressive way, but as a means of communicating without putting in the effort to physically move to the other’s location to speak to them face-to-face. It was effective most of the time, but made it difficult for Steve to concentrate on his “hobby” when he was frequently hearing the voices of his parents calling to one another about whatever menial and tedious task they were performing at the time. By the time Steve’s mother had summoned him to breakfast, Steve was already fully clothed and semi-ready for the day of work. Which was convenient considering he suddenly appeared in the kitchen, much to the shock of his mother.
“Please stop sneaking up on me like that!” As far as Steve could tell, he hadn’t sneaked up on her, he had simply appeared in the kitchen. There was no sneakily opening the door, nor sneakily turning the corner, nor sneakily going down the stairs in order to sneakily enter the kitchen. He had simply appeared there. Steve’s mother placed a bowl in front of him laden with porridge and little blueberries drowning in the oaty broth. He looked at the contents of the bowl and imagined that the blueberries were involved in a tragic sinking of a large vessel. There were some survivors bobbing to the surface of the oats and some whose juices had flowed out of them leaving pools of blue ‘blood’. As he spooned a spoonful into his mouth, pretending the spoon was a lifeboat condemning the survivors to the trials of mastication, he could see other blueberries sunken beneath the tides of oats, unfortunate drownings from HMS Quaker.
“Your grandparents called earlier” Of course they did, the elderly have a nasty habit of waking up earlier than non-elderly people and assuming that because they are awake at 5am, everyone else must be too. “They’re looking forward to your visit, the garden has become quite the jungle they say” Terrific.
Steve had rather hoped that the gardening task simply involved pulling up weeds from their natural habitat and putting them in a compost heap to die and return to the earth from whence they came. Now it dawned on him that it may require more strenuous efforts. I wonder if I’ll need a machete…
“They’re expecting you at 11, so you should probably be getting the 10:15 bus to their house in time” There was no probably about it, it was simply his mothe
r’s way of saying I’ve made you breakfast now you should do as I say. You will get that bus or there will be hell to pay upon your return.
Leaving no time for second breakfast, Steve’s mother had no concept of second breakfast, he hurried out of the door and was almost instantaneously at the bus stop which is normally a five minute walk from his house. I say almost instantaneously because of course Steve had to close and lock the door behind him, hence almost.
The other slaves to public transport felt a sudden gust as Steve appeared, fluttering their newspapers and causing one person’s ticket to fly out of his hand and for him to chase after it and almost collide with oncoming traffic. They looked at him in amazement for a brief moment and then resumed their patient wait, likely regarding the sudden appearance of a young man as a simple trick of the light. Funny how the mind fills in the blanks when confronted by the incomprehensible. The bus arrived at 10:15 on the dot, which was bizarre because it was public transport after all. Steve boarded along with the other patrons of the elongated vehicle, took a free newspaper that he had no intention of reading and then sat down. With each stop, more and more elderly people boarded, resulting in a cacophony of When I last saw him he was this big, Oh it’s not like it was back in my day, and the frequently heard Young people these days! When I was their age I was working in the mines with three kids and a second job delivering newspapers despite the orator referring to a toddler as he spoke. Must’ve been hard times indeed when he was aged three.
Steve’s stop was rapidly approaching, rapidly in the sense of the limited top speed of a bus ferrying people from their homes to the shops to wander about aimlessly looking for a single item and then return home with bags full of shopping they didn’t intend to buy when they set off, nor did they truly need or want. He put his unread free newspaper on the seat and headed to the door as the bus made a stop. There was still a way to go, approximately ten minutes according to Steve’s map app which suddenly froze and had to be restarted. Upon its restart, the map’s indicator was on Steve’s grandparents’ house. Must be showing the destination and not the journey Steve thought. Yet, when he turned his head he noticed that he was indeed at his grandparents’ house. A lovely little bungalow in the suburbs on a quiet, lovely little cul-de-sac. Steve’s legs did feel a little exhausted so he must’ve walked the ten minutes, disregarding the fact that standing up for any longer than thirty seconds usually resulted in Steve’s legs becoming tired. No, must’ve been the walk.
He walked up the little paved passage to the front door, passing the tree adorned with an entire eco-system’s worth of plastic animals, and reached out to press the doorbell. Before the chime had chimed, the door was open leading Steve to believe that the elderly were merely feigning to walk slowly in order to infuriate those trying to get to where they’re going. How else could they get to the door so fast unless they were eagerly anticipating their grandson’s arrival and had waited by the door for hours in keen anticipation like a child waiting by the Christmas tree on Christmas morning waiting for their parents to down their shots of whiskey so that they could open their presents.
“Ah!” Steve’s grandfather liked to start every sentence with a loud Ah! As if he was constantly surprised. “Steven, I fear it’s become quite the jungle out there. I hope you’re ready for a trip to the Amazon!” What the online marketplace had to do with gardening was beyond Steve, but he knew it was best to go along with it.
“Oh” Steve’s grandmother, like his grandfather, also liked to start every sentence with a resounding blast of onomatopoeia. It was no surprise the two fell in love. “Richmond, he couldn’t possibly go out there without the necessary supplies”
“Ah! Quite right there, my dear, quite right indeed! What say you to a spot of lunch, Steven?”
Before Steve had a chance to respond, he was ushered inside and set before a table laden with dishes of all shapes and sizes, bread with various seeds attached to it, seasoned fish, fruit, cakes, preservatives, salad (grown from their vegetable patch of course). Steve couldn’t determine whether this illustrious spread was laid out exclusively for his arrival or whether his grandparents feasted like this every lunch. It would go a little way to explaining his grandfather’s waistband.
“Ah! Steven, I gather you’re almost finished with your studies?”
“Oh, yes, Steven. Very proud of you we are, university student and what!”
“Ah! Lots of clever-clogs in our family of course, like my old great-grandfather Reginald, inventor of laminate flooring I’ll have you know!” He wasn’t.
“Oh and what about great-great-auntie Phyllis, once removed on my mother’s side and then reattached on my auntie’s side, she was a pioneering nurse during the war, you bet she was”
“Ah! Yes, great-great-auntie Phyllis, once removed on your mother’s side and then reattached on your auntie’s side. Quite the knockout she was. Ha! Guffaw! Great Scott!”
“Oh, Richmond, you hardly knew the woman!” Which was no surprise when considering Richmond wasn’t born until many decades after the great-great-auntie Phyllis died. Regardless, the conversation continued in a similar vein throughout the meal, with Steve not being able to get a word in edgeways. He was very full though and could feel his stomach was bulging more so than before but not so much as that of his grandfather.
“Ah! My sugarplum fairy, a grandiose meal indeed!”
“Oh, Richmond, there’s hardly any left”
“Ah! I battled the beetroot on the beaches of my plate and vanquished the bread hastily. Was almost defeated by the cakes but then I got the better of them in one fell swoop”
“Oh, Richmond, you are silly”
“Ah! That is why you love me so” Steve didn’t want to see his grandparents kiss but unfortunately had a front row seat to the passionate display that unfolded before him. When the pair had finished acting like hormonal teenagers, his grandfather decided that it was time for Steve to tackle the garden while the couple tackled a wholly different task upstairs.
“Ah! Steven, are you ready to brave the wilds and emerge victorious? Go into the garden and see what you can do about the rainforest it has become”
Steve’s grandparents hurried away, further enforcing the fact that their slow pace in public is but a ruse. He opened the patio door and was astonished to find the garden in the state that it was. Astonished in the sense that it wasn’t at all like the jungle his grandfather had described, but a neatly trimmed lawn with a small trickling pond in the corner and the vegetable patch in full swing with tomato vines healthy reaching for the sky. There really didn’t seem to be much to do and so Steve was confused as to why he had been employed to tidy up the jungle that never was. He stood gazing out over the almost perfect garden as his grandmother hastily closed the curtains upstairs.
Steve, in his infinite wisdom, came to the conclusion that as there wasn’t anything apparent to do, he could simply laze in the garden. His grandparents must be going senile and so when they return to see that the garden is in perfect shape they would likely assume that it was because Steve and done a wonderful job and not because they had employed a professional gardener a couple of days before to spruce up the garden. Steve dared not to go back inside the house and so found himself rapidly getting somewhat bored. It had only been a minute.
It really was a nice day with the sun shining and so Steve lay on the grass and stared at the clouds, seeing all kinds of shapes. He saw one cloud that looked like a unicorn and another that resembled a buxom young lady. As the clouds moved along the sky, the unicorn’s horn pierced the buxom young lady and held her aloft above its head as smaller clouds sprayed out from it. The cloud then transformed into an old timey steam boat until a genuine airplane thrust through it. Steve considered it to be the perfect representation of the evolution of personal travel, satisfied by the pseudo-philosophical interpretation he must’ve dozed off under the not-so-intense heat.
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