‘So, Derek, what do you think about my little girls new tits, huh? Aren’t they something?’
‘I liked them before but if she’s happy, I’m happy.’
‘She looks like Jessica Rabbit, I recon. That’s what I recon. Why she couldn’t have brought a pair for her mother as well, I don’t know. The stingy cow!’Beverley cawed loudly.
‘Perhaps because you couldn’t stay sober long enough,’ Derek whispered angrily under his breath.
‘What was that, sweetheart?’
Derek said nothing, but Beverley had already forgotten.
‘So what’s the story with you and Felicity? When are you going to make an honest woman of her? You spend enough bloody time together’
‘Felicity and I are just friends,’ Derek insisted.
‘But you must want her, just a little bit, a little ickle teeny bit?’
‘We’re just friends,’ Derek pressed.
‘Oh, in that case, sweetheart, you know you can always come to me with any needs that may need pressing, any troubles that you want me to squeeze out of you.’
Beverley had now wandered over to Derek and was stood over him, rubbing her hands over her upper body.
‘You look like you would appreciate my experience. You have no idea what a woman like me can do, Derek, no idea at all.’
‘Oh yeah, what can they do, Mum? Get so fucking drunk every day that they can’t look after themselves properly and thrust themselves shamelessly on their daughter’s friends. Wow, that’s really something to be proud of!’ Felicity responded from the doorway.
‘Just because you were born with small tits, darling, doesn’t mean you have to take it out on me.’
‘Get off him!’ Felicity demanded, trying to ignore her mother’s previous stab. ‘Derek, drink up, we’re going.’
Derek obliged and took a large gulp of his freshly made coffee. As he glugged it down, he coughed impulsively.
‘This is alcohol,’ he said, looking at Felicity for moral support.
‘Mum, did you put booze in Derek’s coffee?’
‘Darling, I would never...’
‘Mum!’
‘Oh relax, dear, he could do with a wind down, poor Derek.’
‘He’s driving!’
‘I know, dear, but one won’t kill him.’
Felicity grabbed Derek’s hand and pulled him out of the door, feeling the strain of her violently battered breasts as she did.
‘Aren’t you going to stay for a drink, dear?’ Beverley shouted after them.
But they were gone.
‘I can’t believe you live here, Derek,’ Felicity laughed, as they arrived at his new detached six bedroom property.
Derek grinned awkwardly. He couldn’t believe it either. His life had turned around so considerably in recent months that he couldn’t keep on top of it. He felt as though someone else’s fate had been dished onto his plate by mistake.
As Felicity entered the dark wood hallway, a feeling of unease came over her and she wondered how Derek was able to stay there on his own.
‘Is it not a bit creepy?’ she asked
‘Creepy?’ Derek responded confused. ‘No, not really. Do you want a drink?’ he continued, ever the gentleman.
‘Yeah, what have you got?’ Felicity replied, desperate to ease the tension.
‘Wine, gin, juice or water?’ Derek listed as he scurried to the kitchen, leaving Felicity alone.
‘Is it orange?’
‘Yes,’ Derek answered, head in the fridge.
‘Yes, please,’ Felicity confirmed.
She hadn’t yet realized that she was alone. She was running her finger over all the objects in the room, perusing the luxurious fabrics and textures. Her finger was now coated in a thick layer of dust and a line ran around the room like a slug trail. Looking at the disgusting state of her finger, Felicity began to notice the silence.
‘Derek?’ she called cautiously.
Derek didn’t answer.
‘Derek!’ she squealed, running to find him.
‘One orange juice,’ Derek smiled, placing it in front of her as she entered the kitchen.
‘Let me just wash my hand,’ Felicity responded, feeling as though she had been locked in a spooky charity shop for the past decade. ‘You proper need to clean, Derek.’
Derek gave a little nod of agreement but thought very little of it.
‘I would give you a hand but I’m not supposed to put myself under any kind of physical strain. Sorry,’ she said, more than satisfied with her foolproof excuse.
‘Poor you,’ Derek replied, genuinely concerned for her wellbeing.
‘When are you gonna do it? Cause I’m not being funny but at the moment it’s gross. There’s all these skin cells from a dead person floating around the house. You’ve got to admit that it’s minging, Derek.
‘I’ll clean it,’ he insisted, still unconvinced at its urgency.
‘It’ll take you weeks, Derek. Six fucking bedrooms! Rather you than me.’
Derek began to look worried.
‘I’d just get a cleaner if I were you, fuck that. We’ve got this girl called Diana who works for us. She’s really good, makes it like a hotel when it’s done, except for the room service and mini bar of course. I wish! I could give you her number if you wanted to give her a call.’
‘Oh, I’m not sure,’ Derek replied dubiously, ‘it’s awfully frivolous.’
‘Derek, you’re rich now.’
‘Not yet, I’m not yet.’
‘Yeah you are. You know you’re going to inherit everything. So you’ve got a mortgage free house, six bedrooms. That’s rich if you ask me. So I’m sure you can find enough to pay a cleaner twenty quid for a few hours cleaning.’
‘What? Every week?’ Derek asked, getting overwrought.
‘Uh, yeah, dirt comes back you know.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Felicity.’
‘Oh, okay. Well I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give Diana a call for you and see if she has a free day when she can come and give this place a major scrub down. Then, if you like having someone to clean for you, which you will cause it’s wicked, you can speak to her about coming regularly.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Derek repeated, entirely alien to the world of home help.
‘She does ironing too,’ Felicity added.
Derek’s ears pricked up. There was nothing he liked more than freshly ironed shirts and briefs.
‘Okay, let’s do it. Would you mind speaking to her for me?’
‘Ah, thank God!’ Felicity exhaled. ‘Otherwise I’m pretty sure I would never have come over here ever again!’
Thanks to Felicity’s persistent nagging, Derek had begun to clear out the remains of his grandmother’s belongings. That is when he had remembered about the safe in her closet. His grandmother had always told him, ‘You open it only in an emergency, and I had better be dead when you do it.’ Derek was sure, when he recalled the safe, that she was, in fact, dead.
Although he had no reason to creep suspiciously, he did anyway, all the way into his grandmother’s bedroom. He was high on his tip toes as he trotted into her musty, floral room and a chill came over him when he creaked open the wardrobe doors. Looking over his shoulder, he walked speedily in and submerged himself amongst her clothes. He vaguely recalled a light in the past and fumbled around to find the switch. When he could not, he poked his head back out and saw the switch sat gormlessly on the outside. He banged it violently, the light flickered on and he could just about make out the safe sat amongst her shoe boxes.
His grandmother was the sort of anally retentive woman who kept her shoes polished and stuffed in their boxes. She even went a step further and had them sorted into piles of day shoes, Sunday shoes and dress shoes, not that Derek could tell the difference.
Behind this clutter sat the safe. It was far from digital and had a turning dial from the beginning of the previous century. Derek was now on his hands and knees and his heart sank when he reali
zed that he didn’t know the code. He tried desperately to recall whether or not his grandmother had given him this key information. But he struggled to come up with anything. He stared intensely at the dial which was labelled zero to nine. His first thought was that it must be a maths thing, but luckily his second thought was the more realistic option; that it was a date.
It frustrated him enormously when he couldn’t remember his grandmother’s birthday. He knew it was spring because on numerous occasions he had picked daffodils. He suspected that it was March because he was sure that Easter day had fallen on it once because his grandmother had been angry about Agnes taking the day off. He tried to visualize the funeral programme and the date that was on that. But her neighbours had sorted all that out for him and so he hadn’t taken it in at all. And the last thing that he wanted to do was to go and speak to them. For some reason he thought it was the twenty-sixth, but it could well have been the twenty-ninth. So he tried it. He turned it to two, then six, then zero, then three and then he paused for a second and tried to work out whether she would use the full date or just the last two digits. Derek pondered this for an unnecessarily long time, before deciding that she was an old fashioned lady who would almost definitely have used the full four figures. So he continued. One, nine, three, five. He pulled the safe. But it didn’t open.
‘Damn,’ he cursed, before hushing himself, then feeling naughty for swearing in his grandmother’s closet.
Collecting himself together, he tried again, substituting the six with a nine. But this didn’t work either. He started trying her telephone number and Christmas day, but to no avail. It was after his fifty-sixth attempt that Derek finally gave up.
Pulling himself angrily out of the wardrobe, he was hugely frustrated. He knew that there was something inside that safe, there must have been because she had as good as told him that there was. And he was kicking himself for not knowing how to get into it. Emerging from her clothes and coated in a thin layer of dust with two handprints on his thighs, Derek sat down on the bed. He looked at his mother’s face, placed neatly on the bedside table and wondered if she had ever known the answer.
Giving up entirely, Derek got up, turned off the light and shut the door behind him. For the rest of the day he paced, calculating and racking his brain for any clue as to how to get in. By the time ten-o-clock came, Derek had been almost entirely eaten up. He was a mess. He got himself into bed early in order to rid himself of the constant guessing game. He was sure that the code would be a date, it must have been, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure it out.
The next morning, Derek awoke to find that his back had been awkwardly deformed in the night, leaving him to stumble to the bathroom with about as much elegance as Uma Thurman’s foot. He had awoken on the hour, every hour because he was still unable to get the thought of his grandmother’s safe out of his head.
Nevertheless, he had an important day ahead of him at work. He had been put in charge of training up the new starters. When asked, Derek had been proud as punch and a rush of chuftness had run through him. Then the realization had dawned on him that he barely knew how to do a capable job himself, let alone tell others how to do theirs.
The new bunch of starters seemed like they were straight out of school and treated Derek like a clueless supply teacher that spat when he talked. So as Derek walked down the street after work, the last thing he wanted to hear was, ‘Stoner! Stoner! Oi, Derek!’
Derek’s face sank deeper than the Titanic as he slowly turned around.
‘Hi, Richard, how are you?’ he replied, standing awkwardly.
‘I thought you’d never ask. I’m fucking awesome, Derek. Fucking awesome.’
‘Good. Good,’ Derek nodded, turning to leave.
‘I met this girl, you see. Well I say girl, but I mean woman, like right proper woman, if you know what I mean?’
‘Good, I’m glad for you,’ Derek responded attempting to leave again.
‘Yeah, met her on one of those dating websites. You ever been on one?’
‘No, no I haven’t,’ Derek replied, desperate to remove himself from the conversation.
‘Ah, you need to, mate, it’s fucking awesome. Hundreds of girls all gagging for it and all you’ve got to do is send them a few emails and take them out for a drink and they are putty in your hands.’
Derek highly doubted it.
‘Well, good luck with that, but I must dash,’ he said, going to move.
‘Her name’s Donna. Tits built by the Egyptians. Honestly, mate, you’ve no idea. I’m seeing her tonight.’
‘Donna? Donna who?’ Derek panicked.
‘Oh, I don’t bloody know. Tella Versace, for all I care. She runs the chip shop by the train station, has a permanent waft of grease about her, but goes at it like a Duracell nympho. I can’t wait to get my hands on her filthy body tonight.’
‘Donna? Donna Bean? Donna Bean from the chip shop?’ Derek squeaked.
‘Yeah, you know her?’
‘Yes...but no...well...not well,’ Derek grimaced.
‘Well, you should, mate, cause she’s gagging for it. Anyway I’d better go, I’m already late back to work and I don’t want my balls cut off. I’m gonna need them for the lovely Donna. But we need to meet for a pint. You’ve got my number, haven’t you?’
Derek nodded overwhelmed.
‘Cool, well call me,’ Richard said as he strolled away, Derek’s pumping heart in hand.
Deflated and destroyed, Derek stood in the street and watched as Richard plodded happily away. Richard didn’t surprise Derek, but Donna did. She was a grown woman so she could do what she liked, but Richard? Richard? Derek was gutted. The only people that he could trust were his family. But he had none left.
Then, like a bomb in a busy street, it suddenly came to him. He ran to his car and pounced on the steering wheel and accelerated out of the car park. The usual fifteen minute drive took nine minutes and a couple of sweat beads emerged and sat juicily on his hair line. On arrival, he dove through the door, up the stairs and scurried along the landing to his grandmother’s room.
Derek felt as though a ghost had set up camp inside him as he turned on the light and swung open the wardrobe. He opened the door so dramatically that it wouldn’t have felt out of place for a family of bats to gush out. The light flashed brightly and he pounced on the safe below him. Feeling the fatness of his fingers, he fumbled the dial to two, then seven, then one, then one, then one, then nine, then five, and finally six. He tugged on it a little and the door swung heavily open.
Derek was shocked. February the twenty-seventh, nineteen fifty-six was his mother’s birthday.
‘She really did love her,’ Derek muttered.
Gobsmacked, he looked inside and found a large A4 envelope with a smaller envelope on top.
Derek picked up the smaller one and opened it. Inside was an elegantly written note. It read:
Dear Derek,
I know we have not always seen eye to eye. I’m afraid to say that I have lived my life in fear and in doing so I have lost both my beloved daughter and my wonderful grandson. For that, I will always have regrets. I will forever be grateful for the short number of years my daughter had, and I hope, if you are reading this, that I will finally be with her again in heaven. As for you, I wish you all the love and happiness in the world. I hope the enclosed will help you towards the life you deserve.
Eternally sorry,
Grandma
Derek shut his eyes and desperately tried to prevent himself from crying, whilst lifting the large envelope from the safe. He wiped his nose, before bringing it over to the bed and sitting down heavily.
He felt as though the blood had been sucked from his body as he tentatively looked inside. Bandaged in elastic bands, probably saved from the postman, were numerous fat bundles of fifty pound notes. Derek felt like Indiana Jones having just discovered a treasure filled tomb, so he was glad that he had chosen to sit. Almost reluctant, he pulled out the money and stared at
the massive amount cautiously. He wondered whether to count it, but decided to leave it until he had the time to properly take it all in.
So he poured a pair of shoes from their box, completely disrupting the wardrobes military line up and pushed the money from the bed into it, bustling what wouldn’t fit into his pockets. He carried it all through to his bedroom, placing the box under his bed, before sitting down to read the note again. He read it a few more times that night before falling asleep, crumpling the page in his hand.
24
CLEANING PORN
It was the following Saturday. Diana, Felicity’s cleaning lady, had been fully booked, but she had recommended a girl called Janka to her and so Derek and Felicity had just come back from an emergency dash to get cleaning products because she was due to arrive any minute. Felicity’s breasts had now shrunk and so she no longer looked like a swollen prune and was beginning to look more and more like a ginger page-three girl every day.
They were having a coffee in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. Derek hurried to the door. He struggled with the bolt, before swinging it open to reveal a petite, yet curvaceous, brunette. She was probably about Felicity’s age, with a shiny bob and dramatic eye makeup. She was wearing a tight pair of jeans and a pink vest top that held her boobs high and her cleavage deep.
‘Uh...hello, I’m Derek,’ he said boldly, reaching out his hand.
‘Hallo, my name is Janka. I am coming to clean,’
Janka replied, whilst shaking Derek’s hand.
‘Yes, that’s it. Do come in,’ Derek gestured holding the door for Janka as she shimmied in with all the confidence of a Bond girl.
Looking around, her eyes were alight.
‘Beautiful, it’s beautiful, you have beautiful house. Big,’ she commented brazenly.
‘Ah, thank you,’ Derek responded proudly.
The Coming of Derek (a quirky comedy) Page 16