How long has it been, Pretty Girl, since you emptied the house of your secrets, its secrets, packed them all into your backpacks and Tesco plastic bags with their stretched out handles tied in bows, and left? Left without a so much as a goodbye, without a wave, without so much as a second’s look back? Left me empty. Left the house empty. How long?
Although, I guess, you’ll neither ever hear or read, or care to listen to yet another stale anecdote of mine, let me tell you one last story.
When I was eight or nine, or thereabouts, I had an exam at Cheam Common Junior School, mathematics, and mathematics was from some other infectious dimension as far as I was concerned. It was an infectious Monday. When Mum came into my back bedroom to wake me for breakfast and drew the curtains back, I looked pained, told her I had a pain in my stomach and didn’t feel at all well. In reply to her “Where does it hurt dear?” To her warm fingers on my tummy, I simply yelped. “I can’t go to school today!” I whimpered. “Wait there in bed a moment my love.” And she tucked me in cosily and went padding down the carpeted stairs.
I felt cosy warm and safe. I heard the front door slam. I felt slightly less warm and safe, for we had no telephone in those days and, in emergencies, calls were made from Shirley and Angela Parry’s parents place at number eighty seven, from next door. I felt uncomfortably warm. A slamming door was an emergency.
Into my bedroom marched Dr Goodliff, all black pinstriped three piece suit, an enormous golden fob watch on its chain tucked in his waistcoat pocket. I know it was enormous because of when he took it out to check my pulse instants later. “Well, what have we got here then my young man?” He asked in a voice that suggested there’d be no mucking about here, but I didn’t have to answer because my mother already had so he was already staring at his watch, moving his lips to some soundless rhythm, his fingers on my wrist. It was right off the scale! Wouldn’t yours have been? What I really wanted to know was, “Is it a Timex like the watch daddy’s just bought me all shiny and new?” But I was stunned into silence by it all. Goodliff, wirey grey hair combed severely back over ruddy ears like a plastic tar wave rushing a rock on Bognor beach, dug his fingers into my tummy so I yelped again, a little louder this time, more because I was surprised than because I was acting. “Mmmm....”
He opened his little doctor’s bag. I hoped he wasn’t going to cut me all up right there and then. He opened his little black leather doctor’s bag and fished out a sort of rubbery contraption with a boring black watch dial and a bulb thing at the end of a rosy pink tube. “Right then young man, let’s take your blood pressure, just for good measure!” It was right off the scale! Wouldn’t yours have been? The room was beginning to smell of, distinctly of disinfectant and you simply do not argue with disinfectant, do you? Or mothers. Or doctors, but especially your Mummy and, I’d get a couple of days off school at this rate, wouldn’t I? You go that far and there’s no turning back, is there? With these infections there’s no turning back, is there?
Mummy, but especially Daddy too, a tube of Acriflex antiseptic in his hand, was fond of saying,“You don’t mess about with infections, my lad!” Acriflex wafted on the still, stuffy bedroom air. I was crying quietly. And Mummy tucked me in cosily and Mummy and Dr Goodliff both went thumping down the carpeted stairs, holding a muffled conversation I could make nothing of. No maths, no school! Phew! And, gradually, my heart was thumping less than they had thumped down the stairs to the front door, which slammed shut. And so I thought about Dan Dare and days in bed with my books and comics and I didn’t remember about slamming doors.
Suspected appendicitis was the diagnosis and I had been too distraught to even remember the ambulance ride to the hospital, which I should, by all rights, being a toy car boy, have enjoyed to the full. At least no school, but that was before the cutbacks and there were teachers and maths classes on the children’s ward, but these teachers smelt of disinfectant, not of mothballs and Mummy wasn’t there and there were too many kids who wanted to offer consolation, to touch me softly, to talk and play, even to read me things and leave their Beano comics on the starched pillow and I couldn’t swallow the food, except, of course, for the ice cream, so I cried my eyes out because I was no Dennis the Menace, I cried bitterly, solidly for the first two days ‘till I ran out of energy to cry anymore and slowly began to be able to look everyone in the eye, specially the little girls, who all seemed to want to play at being my mummy.
I was about a week under observation but, of course, I was never wheeled out of the ward to be returned hours later with all sorts of transparent tubes and bags and gear stuck and bandaged to my arms and legs.
I never told my mother about my lie. I had never told my mother about my secret, my Pretty Girl, never. Nothing about my secret life, my secret lives, never.
My mother, as I’ve so often bored you silly with, was a writer. After she died I inherited a box of her unpublished work, notes, rough drafts, some plays and short stories, poems I could never bring myself to read. Now you’ve left, and my wife is gone too, I’ve been browsing.
To my astonishment, one of her short stories began thus, “When my first son was eight or nine, or thereabouts, he had an exam at Cheam Common Junior School, mathematics....”
Pretty Girl, please come home, if only for a moment, and fill our house with secrets again.
