by Jay Bray
“So, what did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything. They’d both had a go on your sherbet dib dab, and you know what you hippy kids are like when you get a big of sugar.”
“I’m not a hippy kid.”
“You are hon. Anyway, they were both having a sugar rush and little K was on big K’s back and he was scratching all big K’s face and big K was trying to hit him but he couldn’t reach. It was really funny. I just picked up your sweets and went. Come and have a look they’re just around the corner.”
“Was Theo there?”
“No, I didn’t see him, anyway you haven’t apologized for thinking I flash people for sweets.”
“You flashed me twice on the bus last week for free.”
“Oh babe, you don’t count. If you were just a bit better looking, you’d be cute.”
We turned the corner and I saw Fritz, the elder elf/teacher/wannabe cult guru of the wood group. He had a Kaya by the scruff in each of his hands and Theo stood by his side but looked in our direction. Fritz clocked us and sent all three back up and marched towards us.
“What’s been going on?” he asked.
“It was those other boys,” said Mickey.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, I was asking the boy. Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“Shouldn’t we all be in school?” said Mickey, looking off and with a tone that indicated she knew exactly how this was going to go.
“Theodore said you fell in the water and that they rescued you.”
“I suppose so,” I said not looking up, ”Mickey helped me with my clothes though.”
“I’m sure she did,” said Fritz.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Mickey.
“Does your mother know you’re walking in the woods on your own?”
“No she doesn’t. She’s too busy working for a living,” said Mickey, “ and I’m not on my own, I’m with Alan.”
“Well Alan is not with you, he’s with us” and with that, Fritz walked away.
I turned around twice as we walked off. The first time Edie was flicking V’s with her tongue out. The second time she was waving a navy blue moon at us. I didn’t dare look back again.
I suppose I take some comfort in the knowledge that the two Kayas and Fritz will have all just copped it. Theo sadly passed away when he was eighteen (car crash). But it is no comfort at all as Mickey will have perished too.
My best friend. My only friend, first and last. I need to stop writing this for a bit.
***
Someone picked up! I think they did, if that stupid woman had just let me know, but oh no, she doesn’t bother to think. She isn’t grasping the reality of the situation.
00:00
I’m calm again. This is what happened next. I’d been sitting in the chair ignoring her puffing away on her cigarettes and filling in a word puzzle.
“I was right, wasn’t I?”
I ignore.
“I said to myself and I said to you, ‘never use a pen if you can use a pencil’ and see that I was right.”
She held the word-search book open and at me. I stared onwards but I could see that I’d been wrong. She hadn’t been filling it in, she’d been rubbing it out with a big green eraser.
“Now see, I can do it all again.”
She lit another cigarette and I continued looking straight through her.
“And another thing – you know how I always said how a word-search puzzle improves the mind, well it’s true. I’ve got much quicker. Look, I’ve nearly finished.”
She held it out again.
“Oh for Christ’s sake mother! You’re just retracing over it.”
“Well if you’re speaking again, I’d like you to refrain from that type of language, thank you very much. I ask that you do not take the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in vain, for tonight and for tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s our savior.”
“ Well, he’s doing a lousy job of it.”
“Alan! I don’t want any of that Satanist talk until after Boxing Day.”
“I’m not a Satanist.”
“Well, you certainly used to be a Satanist.”
“I was fifteen, and I was a Goth for a week.”
“Well that’s when you got all clever and started with all your ‘God is dog spelt backwards’ nonsense and I will not have it tonight Alan. And for your information he doesn’t save us in this world, he saves us in the other.”
“Which you don’t believe in.”
“Which I don’t believe in, except for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Oh that reminds me…” she walked over and picked up a Santa from the shelf. She flicked the switch in his back and placed him on the table between us. He had a radar in his stomach and a little red dot beeped across an ocean.
“He’s on his way,” she said and started rubbing out another page on the word-search. I closed my eyes and listened to the comforting beep of my childhood and I fell asleep.
I have to confess that some of the frustration I have been feeling has not been down to my mum or the end of the world. I’m going cold turkey. I smoke ‘cabbage’ to help with my asthma. Asthma caused by ‘you know who’. Well I left my cabbage outside when I dropped my rucksack. It had everything I had of use in it. My cabbage, my phone, my socks and pants. I was happy to drift off and miss the rest of coming down.
I dozed a while and then I heard a different beep. I opened my eyes and mum had finished her puzzle book and was sitting, smoking and watching me.
“Mum, why is Santa beeping like that?”
“Like what dear?”
“It’s a different beep.”
We waited and he beeped again.
“He’s always beeped like that.”
There was a second beep.
“That one’s different. It’s like when the battery is going to run out on my phone.”
“It’s probably your phone then isn’t it.”
“I can’t be. It’s in my bag outside.”
“It isn’t. I brought your bag in. It’s over there on the bottom shelf.”
“Mother! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Um, I just did Alan.”
I leapt up and started throwing out my pants and socks, making sure I didn’t get the cabbage out as I grabbed about for the phone, which was right at the bottom. “Oh fuck there’s no charger,” I pulled it out, “and it’s nearly dead, shit. There’s no signal anyway.”
“Why don’t you try it on the top of the step ladder,” said mum.
I looked confused.
“That wall is next doors basement, they had it all wired up proper, just before the zombies got them. Their booster is just the other side at the top.”
I don’t know how she knew this but I didn’t have much time and began to climb the rickety old ladder.
“Mother, come hold this steady.” Once she had hold of it, I found that I had to crouch to find the only place where there was any signal. I was really wobbling but mother stood firm.
I rang the emergency services.
“These services are no longer available.”
I rang the operator.
“This number is no longer in service.”
“Quick, what’s the number for the BBC?”
“I don’t know.”
I was panicking, I felt faint, I hit the number I always rang if I had a panic attack. I rang Mickey. It rang twice before sounding as though someone answered and then it died. My phone had died. I was sure that someone had picked up.
“I think Mickey might have answered. I think she might have picked up. She could be alive.”
“Oh she’ll be alright, that girl.”
“What do you mean?”
“She never gets her comeuppance, that one.”
“So you’re saving she deserves to be dead, nice.”
“No of course not, that’s a wicked thing to say. What I mean is, if anyone is going to be okay – it will be her. Com
e on, let’s play some cards.”
And mum and me played Pontoon and New Market, ate two packets of mince pies and finished off a whole bottle of sherry between the two of us. She’s taken my cabbage and I can’t say anything about it. It’s my fault for bringing it in the house. At least she hasn’t mentioned it.
My eyes felt heavy and I passed out, my mother picked me up and placed me in the hammock. I softly rocked to sleep with the sherry glow all around me and with mum’s words in my ear.
“She’ll be alright.”
CHRISTMAS MORNING
I woke up to find mum sleeping on the floor beneath me and a pair of tights at the end of the hammock stuffed full of presents. Mum always does me a stocking with monkey nuts and tangerines, sweets and little toys. I looked at her fast asleep, mouth wide open below. I always opened my stocking and kept quiet with it until she woke up. I pulled it towards me and looked inside. It was stuffed full of brussel sprouts. What goes through her mind? I took one out and dropped it through a hole in the hammock and straight into her open gob. Her eyes shot open and she spat it out.
“Merry Christmas mother! What’s for breakfast?”
I’m back in my hammock. I’ve got a gut full of pig, egg and beans.
“Just a piece of toast, mother.” I’d said. And a piece of toast was what I got. But, what I got heaped on top of it was sausage, bacon, fried egg, mushroom, black pudding, beans and a kidney (probably one of hers).
“I didn’t know what you wanted on it,” she handed over as an explanation. I wiped the steam off of my glasses as she walked away. She returned with a bottle of sauce and a plate of chips.
“Do you want chips with your toast?” she said and she went to her chair and lit a cigarette.
“Are you not eating, mother?”
“Oh no love, I had a piece of toast whilst I served yours up.”
Well it was Christmas morning after all, and God knows I deserved a treat and I do like to please my mum when I can so I ate it even though I’ve wheat, bean and pork allergies – there’s nothing that makes my mum happier than me cleaning up a plate of her scoff. In a way, you could say it was my Christmas present to her.
I licked the last of the plate clean (water preservation) and already bloated and belching, she asked me to get back in the hammock and face the wall so she could wrap my presents.
“It’s not more brussel sprouts is it?”
“Don’t be silly, Santa brought you all your sprouts.”
So here I am with my back to her, letting it all hang out and catching up with my writing to you. God knows what bit of old toot she’ll be wrapping up. I’ve told her she’s a hoarder and look what it’s left us with. I haven’t dared look at the crap she’s got stacked up on her shelves. I daren’t ask what we’ve got and not got down here. I know we haven’t got a clock, that’s for sure. Every time I ask her what time it is she’s bending over that Santa and working it out from whatever country Santa is flying over.
I asked her how we were going to get by once he was back at the North Pole. If we don’t know the time, we could be down here for years instead of six months. She said, “Every time I wake I add a day.”
“But you fall asleep two or three times a day…”
“No, I don’t.”
“You bloody do. That’ll be even worse if you start adding on days. Every time you nod off. We could end up going out there in a couple of weeks. Lord knows a fortnight in here with you will feel like six months.”
She said we’d be able to check each month when ‘Peter Paintpot’ came round to paint the spare room.
BOXING DAY
I’m going to kill that evil witch. I am so out of my tree, I don’t know what is real and what’s not anymore. But I do know that she’s a witch and I’ve finally got her to admit that she’s the reason I’m so claustrophobic. She knowingly thrust me into a life crippled by claustrophobia. She’s responsible for my asthmas as she might as well of put a cigarette in my mouth at a day old. She’s a feeder too, without a doubt. Don’t think I’ve been carrying all of this ‘spare’ like I’ve had a choice in the matter. Oh I will be giving a full account of this don’t you worry. I need to, just to see if I can calm down from this.
Now I’m not knocking the food. I still possess some objectivity and you can’t knock my Mother when it comes to putting on a ‘spread’. We had the lot and besides her insistence on starting it all off with a slice of honeydew melon to cleanse the palette. (I’m absolutely ravished and before I get some grub, I have to eat chunks of what is essentially water on a cocktail stick?). But after that she didn’t put a foot wrong. Or so I thought at the time.
Next up was the prawn cocktail (don’t you scoff – what’s wrong with prawn cocktail? Nothing, that’s what. When did anyone eat a prawn cocktail and think ‘Oh, I didn’t enjoy that.” Bloody never!) You’re just all food snobs if you ask me. Prawn cocktails are class. I’ll have you know that the Queen has one with her Christmas dinner. (Well, maybe not this year since she was vaporized last summer!) It wasn’t all roast swan around hers make no mistake about it. And mother hadn’t overdone the Tabasco sauce in her ‘special thousand (and one) Island dressing’. Then came the main event.
She backed out of the oven, her elbows almost giving way and the baking tray scraping the sides as she heaved out the bird from inside.
“Mind the parsnips, Mum,” I advised and I moved the chair out from the table. A Yorkshire pudding rolled off and across the floor and I scooped it up and munched into it.
She’d certainly delivered, it was all proper traditional, not one of her experiments of pheasant in a cheese and courgette sauce. Roast turkey, roasties, plenty of parsnips, mashed swede, honey glazed carrots, peas and sprouts. And Yorkshire pud. Best of all, and in my opinion the four most important, extras were present; pigs in blankets, cranberry sauce, gravy and big balls of stuffing. When you eat at someone else’s you can best they’ll forget at least one of them. I was very surprised to see the stuffing because she’d ask me to get that in and I’d been too busy joining the army and leaving for London that I’d forgotten all about it. “You’ve done me proud here, mother.” I said as the first parsnip melted on my tongue.
It was heaven. There’s nothing more guilt free then Christmas dinner and I started drifting away in the steam from the plate as I wolfed it all down. Halfway through my second helpings, Mum got up, opened another bottle of wine and put on Del Shannon singing ‘Run, Run, Runaway’. She always calls this ‘our song’ as we were always running out on the rent when I was young. She always has to mention this so I swiped a ball off stuffing from her plate as compensation, whilst her back was turned.
Except for once, she didn’t say anything at all and after an extra Yorkshire pud I turned to look at her. She was facing the wall and swaying to our tune, curving her arms up and down like the Turkish used to do.
“Have you ever noticed how your arms are like snakes?” she said; she’d never been one to hold her drink. “Come and sit down, Mum.” She refilled my glass and sat herself down.
“I think this is the best Christmas dinner I’ve ever had.”
“Well I couldn’t of finished it off without your help.”
