‘How do you work that out?’
‘You, Harrybo, Timmy and Rodge,’
she said.
I thought for a moment…
‘Me, Harrybo, Timmy and Rodge?
… 4!’
I was just about to say,
‘But that makes 4 –’
when suddenly I thought,
‘She has halves – HALF boyfriends!…
… 2 halves make one? No. 3 halves plus 1… y
‘But, which ones are the halves?’ I thought…
‘and who’s The One –
THE One?’
I never dared ask her
so I never found out.
MAD MEALS
Grilled cork
Matchbox on toast
glass soup
roasted clock
ping-pong ball and chips
Acorn sandwich
fillet of calculator
trouser salad
grilled lamp-post
ice-cream(vanilla, soap or pepper)
MAD DRINKS
fizzy mouse
hot petrol
paint shake
MYSTERY
CRASH!!!
DAD: What was that noise?
SON: The bowl. I’ve broken the bowl.
MUM: What bowl?
SON: The one with lines on.
DAD: How did you break it?
SON: I was balancing it on my head.
DAD: The boy’s mad.
MUM: How else is he going to practise?
DAD: Why were you balancing it on your head?
SON: I was pretending it was a hat.
DAD: Why do you need to practise pretending a bowl is a hat?
SON: (NO ANSWER)
I KNOW SOMEONE
I know someone who can
take a mouthful of custard and blow it
down their nose.
I know someone who can
make their ears wiggle.
I know someone who can
shake their cheeks so it sounds
like ducks quacking.
I know someone who can
throw peanuts in the air and catch them
in their mouth.
I know someone who can
balance a pile of 12 2p pieces on his elbow
and snatch his elbow from under them
and catch them.
I know someone who can
bend her thumb back to touch her wrist.
I know someone who can
crack his nose.
I know someone who can
say the alphabet backwards.
I know someone who can put their hands in
their armpits and blow raspberries.
I know someone who can
wiggle her little toe.
I know someone who can
lick the bottom of her chin.
slide their top lip one way
and their bottom lip the other way.
and that someone is
ME.
THIRTY-TWO LENGTHS
One Tuesday when I was about
ten
I swam thirty-two lengths
which is one mile.
And when I climbed out of the
water
I felt like a big, fat lump of jelly
and my legs were like rubber
and there was this huge man
there
with tremendous muscles all
over him
and I went up to him and said,
‘I’ve just swum a mile.’
And he said,
‘How many lengths was that
then?’
‘Thirty-two,’ I said.
And the man looked into the
water and said,
‘I’ve got a lad here who can
do ninety.’
EDDIE IN BED
Sometimes I look really tired,
because you see
when most people are fast asleep
and I’m fast asleep
I hear,
‘waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’
That’s the baby, Eddie.
So I get out of bed and go into his room
and he’s sitting up in bed
and he has these nightmares.
Not nightmares like you have,
like Dracula biting your head off or something.
He has nightmares about people taking food away from him.
So one night I go in there
and he’s sitting up in bed
lifting his arms above his head
and banging them down
screaming,
‘I want my biscuits I want my biscuits.’
Now if you can imagine that,
you can also imagine
that at this time he was sleeping
in the same bed as his brother.
Who was six.
And you have to imagine his brother’s head
is right next to Eddie’s hip.
Think about it.
Eddie’s hands go above his head and
Wham
down by his side
right on Joe’s nut.
‘I want my biscuits I want my biscuits.’
So Joe lifts his head and he goes,
‘What’s going on?’
Wham
‘I want my biscuits.’
‘What’s going on?’
Wham
‘I want my biscuits.’
‘What’s going on?’
Wham
‘I want my biscuits.’
‘Stop it, Eddie’ – wham back
‘I want my biscuits.’
Wham.
‘OK, fellas,’I say,
‘Cut it out.’
And I lift Eddie up and I take him into our bed.
What a stupid thing to do.
You see
most people sleep with their head
on the pillow
and their feet at the other end of the bed.
When Eddie comes into our bed
he sleeps with his head next to Susanna’s head
and his feet in my ear.
And you have to imagine those feet
sticking in my ear.
And the toes.
Those toes are going
wiggle wiggly wiggly
Down my ear.
All night.
So by the time I get up
in the morning
I’m very tired
and very cross.
But I can always get my own back on him
in the morning
cos he hates having his nappy done…
GOING THROUGE THE OLD PHOTOS
Me, my dad
and my brother
we were looking through the old photos.
Pictures of my dad with a broken leg
and my mum with big flappy shorts on
and me on a tricycle
when we got to one of my mum
with a baby on her knee,
and I go,
‘Is that me or Brian?’
And my dad says,
‘Let’s have a look.
It isn’t you or Brian,’ he says.
‘It’s Alan.
He died.
He would have been
two years younger than Brian
and two years older than you.
He was a lovely baby.’
‘How did he die?’
‘Whooping cough.
I was away at the time.
He coughed himself to death in Connie’s arms.
The terrible thing is,
it wouldn’t happen today,
but it was during the war, you see,
and they didn’t have the medicines.
That must be the only photo
of him we’ve got.’
Me and Brian
looked at the photo.
We couldn’t say anything.
It was the
first time we had ever heard about Alan.
For a moment I felt ashamed
like as if I had done something wrong.
I looked at the baby trying to work out
who he looked like.
I wanted to know what another brother
would have been like.
No way of saying.
And Mum looked so happy.
Of course she didn’t know
when they took the photo
that he would die, did she?
Funny thing is,
though my father mentioned it every now and then
over the years,
Mum – never.
And he never said anything in front of her
about it
and we never let on that we knew.
What I’ve never figured out
was whether
her silence was because
she was more upset about it
than my dad –
or less.
EDDIE AND THE WALLPAPER
Eddie’s always asking me to sing to him
and I’m hopeless at singing.
He’ll find that out one day.
So he goes,
‘Song. More.’
So I go, ‘What song?’
So he goes,
‘Song er man.’
So I have to sing,
‘There was an old man called Michael Finnegan
He grew whiskers on his chinnegan
the wind came out and blew them in again
poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again.’
The bit that he likes best is that bit about
whiskers on his chinnegan.
If you could see my beard you’d know why.
So I go?
‘There was an old man called…’
and up come the fingers…
‘And he grew whiskers…’
and he grabs hold of my beard
and hangs on to it.
It really hurts you know.
‘Stop it stop it. I won’t go on.’
Then he lets go.
I carry on
and when I get to,
‘The wind came out and blew them in again…’
he blows in my face with a great big
‘PHOOOOOR’.
And you know babies are, all dribbly…
DIS
gusting.
So the other day he says
he wants a song about wallpaper.
Now you may think
why does he want a song about wallpaper?
There’s a story behind it.
You see, not long ago we did some decorating.
When I say we did some
I’m lying.
Susanna did it and I just stood
at the bottom of the ladder.
Anyway, we were very pleased,
we came downstairs to have a cup of tea.
Eddie is off somewhere round the house
he roams round the house on his own
like a free-range gorilla.
Sometimes you hear this huge crashing noise upstairs
And you know that’s him jumping up and down
on the settee.
He doesn’t think it’s a settee
He thinks it’s a trampoline.
“Yippee yippee yippee.”
Anyway,
so we were there having tea
and Susanna says,
‘Let’s go and look at the wallpaper upstairs.’
So we go up there,
open the door,
and there’s Eddie,
big smile on his face,
and he goes, ‘Eddie helping.’
Oh no.
You know what that means…
TROUBLE.
It’s like when you’re putting tomato sauce
on his chips and he goes, ‘Eddie helping,’
and next minute he’s got hold of the sauce bottle
splodge splodge splodge
and you’ve got tomato sauce all over the table.
Well I’m looking at Eddie
and you know
when you do the decorating
you start at the top and you put the wallpaper on.
Well, Eddie started at the bottom
and took it off.
He had ripped the wallpaper off the wall.
I think he thought it was like toilet paper.
He sometimes goes into the toilet
and he sees the toilet roll there
and he thinks,
well, that toilet roll looks dead boring
all rolled up there.
So he gets hold of one end of it
and he starts pulling it.
A bit more a bit more
and he’s pulling and pulling the paper off the roll.
‘Yippee yippee yippeee,’
until he’s pulled the whole toilet roll out
all over the floor
and you go in there ten minutes later
and he’s up to his neck in toilet paper
with his little head poking out the top.
Swimming.
So that was why he wanted a song about wallpaper.
Maybe he thought wallpaper was a kind of
coloured toilet paper you stick to the wall.
THE WATCH
My mum and dad gave me a watch.
Not a posh watch
Good enough to tell the time by, though.
And it went well enough
until one day at a camp
we were playing smugglers and customs
over the sand dunes.
I was a smuggler
and I had to get £20,000
through the customs
for us to win the game.
£20,000 written on a piece of paper.
There were three ways to get past
the customs.
One – by running so fast
the customs couldn’t catch you.
Two – by going creepy-crawly so they couldn’t see you.
Three – going through the customs
with it hidden somewhere.
I chose three.
I chose to hide it on me somewhere.
But where?
‘I know,’ I said,
‘I’ll stuff it in my watch,’
and I took the back off my watch
folded up the piece of paper
with £20,000 written on it
and clipped the back of my watch on.
So then I went creepy-crawly over the sand dunes.
They saw me
they grabbed me
and they searched me.
They looked in my pockets
they looked in my shoes
they looked in my socks
they looked up my jumper
down my jumper
down my shirt
in my armpits.
They even looked under my watch
but they never thought to look
in my watch, did they?
So they let me go –
and when I got to the other end
where the other smugglers were
I said,
‘Hooray, I got through.’
I opened up the back of my watch
and there it was –
£20,000.
I took it out – handed it over
and we had won the game.
I snapped the back of my watch on –
looked at the time and –
my watch. It had stopped.
It was broken.
I had broken it.
That evening I told my brother all about it
and I said,
‘Don’t tell Mum or Dad about it
or I’ll get into trouble.
I’ll get it mended secretly.’
So there we were, tea-time
and my brother suddenly goes,
‘What’s the time, Mick?’
an
d I went all red and flustered
and I go,
‘er er,’
and I look at my watch
and I go,
‘er er about six o’clock.’
‘No it’s not,’ says my dad.
‘It’s seven o’clock,’
and he sees me going red.
‘Is your watch going wrong?’
‘Er – no.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
‘No, it’s all right.’
‘Let me have a look. It’s stopped,
it’s broken. How did it get broken?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean you don’t know.’
My brother was laughing all over his big face
without making a sound.
So then I told my dad
all about the smugglers and customs
and hiding the money in my watch.
He was furious.
‘We gave you the watch
so you could tell the time
not for you to use as part of a secret agent’s
smuggling outfit.
Well, don’t expect us to buy you
presents like that again.’
I was so angry with my brother
for getting me into trouble.
Inside I was bubbling.
So –
as soon as tea was over
I went down to our backyard
where there was an old cherry tree
and I broke a twig off it.
It was all prickly and flakey
and covered in a kind of grey slimy muck.
So then I took this twig back upstairs
into our bedroom
and I’ll tell you what I did with it.
I shoved it into his bed.
And as I shoved it into his bed
I thought
‘This’ll pay him back.
This’ll pay him back.
This’ll pay him back.
He’s going to get into bed tonight
after I’m asleep
and his feet
are going to get all
prickled up
and covered in grey mucky slimy stuff.’
Well, later that evening
I was doing some homework
and I had some really hard sums to do.
I couldn’t do them.
I was stuck
and my brother – he sees me
scribbling out all these numbers
and the page is a mess
so my brother, he says,
‘What’s up? Do you want a bit of help
with your sums?’
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