With a week of work under his belt and ten years of sitting down and good food above his belt, he sits on the sofa in front of the television with his dinner on his lap. Usually, the Grays eat at the dining table squished up one end of a large kitchen, but for Fridays. On Fridays, the family eats at the television. It doesn't really matter what's on the television, because it's all largely the same, Mr. Gray tells them. Mrs. Gray happens to enjoy watching the television, but she enjoys watching the television a little bit less when Mr. Gray watches it because all he does is moan about it.
Elsie Gray is their daughter. She sits next to her mother. Elsie is seven.
Elsie glances around at a sound she hears often, coming from someplace over there, in the corner.
Click clack click clack. She frowns for a moment, and then she sees Nanny Bean. Maybe no one else does, or no one else remembers Nanny Bean. Nanny glances at Elsie and winks and Elsie beams a big seven-year old's smile. Then, a few moments later, Elsie forgets about Nanny once again.
'Where's Harley?' says Elsie.
Harley is her brother. A teenager and a smelly teenager and like most teenagers absent much of the time.
'Out, I suppose,' says Mrs. Gray.
Mr. Gray grunts and eats pasta with tomato sauce and a lot of cheddar cheese.
Friday night. Click clack. Harley comes home around eleven.
Mr. Gray's nodded off in his armchair while Mrs. Gray's taken herself off to bed. Elsie did nod off for a short time, but she wakes up when she hears him come home, because Harley failed ninja school and never uses door handles. Her older brother sniffs loudly on the way to his room. In about five minutes she hears a click sound she doesn't like. She likes click clack just fine, just doesn't like the click without the clack.
Click.
It's Harley's lighter, this thing he bought on a school trip to Calais. It's got a small knife that slides out of one side and it's painted so it looks like an army thing, with dark browns and blacks and greens all splodged. She wonders if he dropped it in a field, or the garden, how would he ever find it again? She's thought of taking it, and dropping it in the garden, but Elsie won't do that because it'd be stealing, sort of, and because she doesn't want to be anywhere near the lighter. That nasty waft of marijuana that reaches her room soon after the click isn't the lighter's fault. It's not Harley's fault. It's not the marijuana's fault, either. It's just a lighter, even if it is stupid.
The kids at school call marijuana weed or grass, and he told her it's just a plant, 'So what's the big deal?'
She imagined it was like those sticky plants, those things that get stuck to her when she helps Mummy (A.K.A. Mrs. Gray) do the weeding in the summer. They're plants. But they're sticky, too. Sticky plants, Elsie finds sort of funny. This other stinky one isn't, not really, and it's not sticky (maybe it's a little sticky) but mostly it's just stinky.
Harley's not the same as he was. He used to talk and laugh, but now all he wants to do is go out, and when he's in, he's not really there any more than Nanny Bean is. He's absent and thin, but he shouldn't be. Harley just a teenager. Nanny Bean's supposed to be thin, and largely forgotten, isn't she? Because when you're over a hundred years old and everyone's forgotten about you, that's kind of the way things go.
When you're a teenager and everyone's forgotten about you...that's not the same thing at all.
Mr. Gray sniffs, too, when she hears her Daddy and Mummy talking.
'He's just a teenager,' he says. 'They're supposed to be surly.'
Elsie, though, isn't sure that's quite right and she hasn't forgotten about Harley at all.
Nanny Bean doesn't forget anything, ever.
She's not exactly there, and she's really, really old, and she knits endlessly. Once, a long, long time ago, she knitted the entire world all together from one rather large ball of wool. She's never, not even once, tried to darn the world because things grow old, like her. Things you knit are supposed to get old. They fray, fall apart, fade in the wash and at some point you try to give them to a charity shop or just plop them in the bin.
But people aren't jumpers, whether they're old, or young, and even if they don't fit quite right and make you itch. So, from time-to-time, she'll darn a life.
*
In his room, joint on the go, Harley sighs and lays back on his bed with his headphones on and the entire house stinks of weed when Mr. Gray drags himself up to bed. Mr. Gray is tired from screwing on toothpaste caps, or hitting a keyboard, or whatever it is he does. He's had three bottles of pretty good bitter in his favourite glass, though, and he really doesn't want to talk to his teenage son about the perils of drugs at half past eleven on a Friday night.
Sometimes things shouldn't wait, though.
Like love.
Nanny knows that. She's old, really old. But her mind's just about as spry as those clever fingers of hers.
*
Elsie gets up in the morning and knocks on Harley's door. It's six o'clock in the morning. He's fifteen years old and she's done this for the last four and some years. Sometimes he just grunts, and now she's a little older she lets him get away with grunting, because at seven she's a little wiser, too.
She knocks again and this time he does grunt, but like he's under a big blanket and everything's a bit muffled.
'Harley?' she says.
'Mmmph,' he says.
He doesn't sound grouchy-Harley, though, so she pushes open his door. Calling his name and receiving a muffled grunt in reply is exactly the same thing as her knocking and him calling out, 'Come in!'
Harley's on the bed, like a teenager seems to be about ninety percent of the time. He can't get out though, because there's a quilt Elsie's never seen before, and beneath that there's only the shape of her big brother and nothing else and all he can say is, 'mmmph.'
'Harley?'
Click clack, say Nanny Bean's knitting needles.
'MUM! DAD!'
When parents hear that tone of voice, they run.
Unfortunately, sometimes children only think in that tone of voice and then no one really hears it at all. It's rather like a teenager's thoughts are just the same as thin people in a classroom or in a workplace or in a corner of a living room clacking away with knitting needles, or maybe clacking away with knitting needles all through the night and trapping a teenager who feels just a bit rubbish to the bed so tightly that he can't get out at all.
*
Click clack, say Nanny Bean's knitting needles from a corner of the living room where she is and watches Mrs. Gray run to the kitchen for a pair of scissors.
Nanny Bean sniffs, disapproving.
Woman's got fabric scissors, she thinks, and she doesn't even know how to use 'em.
*
'Mmmph,' says Harley.
Mrs. Gray cuts away and cuts and cuts, but the wool just grows back.
'What the hell?' says Mr. Gray.
'Daddy,' says Elsie, sternly. Daddy's not suppose to swear in front of the children.
He shakes his head.
'What is this?' he says.
'Wool,' says Mrs. Gray.
'No, I mean...' Mr. Gray sighs. 'Nevermind. Harley? Can you hear me?'
'Mmmph,' says Harley.
'Should've known,' says Mr. Gray. 'It's drugs, isn't it?'
'What? It's not. It's wool,' says Mrs. Gray. She doesn't want to talk about it.
'It smells,' says Elsie.
'Mmmph,' says Harley.
No one really wants to talk about it, no one really wants to listen, and that quilt just won't go away. Downstairs, her hearing perfectly fine no matter how old or thin she might be, Nanny Bean listens.
It's Elsie that says what they've been thinking, in the end.
'It's not that it smells,' she says. 'It's that you're not here anymore,' she says. 'And we miss you. I miss you.'
Mr. and Mrs. Gray realised that was the truth of it. But sometimes complicated things are too simple to see through.
'Where's he gone?' said Mr. Gray. 'I
can't see him at all anymore,' he said.
'He's gone!' said Mrs. Gray. 'Harley?'
'Mum, Dad, stop being...stupid. He's right there. It's just a quilt.'
Elsie reached down and pulled the quilt back. A beautiful thing, it was. Not fancy and golden like it came from a fabled fleece, or soft and expensive like it came from Tesco. Just plain old wool, but dyed, and knitted in such a way. Not a patchwork quilt, with embroidered panels, but the entire thing from different balls of yarn, different colours, all knitted together, like Nanny Bean stitched just what was needed, dropped that which was not.
'He's right there,' said Elsie, exasperated with her parents, who were being stupid and dim.
She reached out and pulled back the quilt, a beautiful thing with all the wonders of a person's life, one that starts and ends but somehow carries on, even when it does end, like a memory of an old lady that sits in a corner of a room and watches over her family. An old woman who might be there, might not. Might be that she knitted the entire world once, a long, long time ago. And it might only be that once in a while there's still an old lady around, a thin one that no one notices, who comes along to do a little darning on those things that sometimes get just a little broke, but maybe not quite broke enough to throw away.
Downstairs, smiling, all Nanny Bean said was click clack click clack. But she did smile, and she thought about things, too.
Knitting's easy-peasy, she thought. Darning, now...that's the trick of it.
The End
Bonus Material: 1
The Unlisted Track at the End of the Album
Sadie sat in her Grandfather's old chair, staring out of the window at the things in the garden. There were birds on the birdfeeder, and in the bath. The trees were about halfway through budding. Probably slow, as it was near the end of April, but before today the sun had barely shone. Sometimes the bluebells and daffodils are out even in February, and the trees think it's spring when there's still snow to come. Not this year. This year, winter was long.
Sadie's mother walked into the living room, and quietly sat on the edge of the sofa. The sofa faced the armchair. Sadie could look at the garden, or her mother. Her mother didn't have any choice but to look to her daughter.
'Sadie. Honey? You've got to eat.'
Sadie glanced at her mother, then looked away. She knew some of the birds in the garden, because her grandfather had told her. He told her which birds made which sounds, and the names of trees and plants in the garden.
The house would be sold. The things in it would be gone. There would be nothing left of him but maybe a few pictures, some memories, an old watch, maybe. She only had a child's room, and not a house.
I'd take the furniture, she thought. If I could.
She knew she couldn't, though. She could barely fit her bed in her room.
Sadie sat that way for a few more minutes, aware of her mother not looking at her, but kind of waiting. Waiting for Sadie to acknowledge her mother, or to speak, or for her gaze to shift.
Don't look.
If she looked, she'd have to talk. If she spoke, her mother would say something and she'd hate her for it, no matter what it was. Sadie knew why she'd hate her mother. Because her mother was the only one of them left.
Her dad, her granny, now her grandfather. All she got out of the deal was her mother.
And I don't like her.
It was mean, but it was true.
'Mother?'
'Sadie?'
'I just want to be alone for a while. Before they come and clear it out.'
Her mother wasn't an idiot, and she didn't have a mean bone in her body, but she always, always said the wrong thing.
Today, though, she's different. Maybe.
'Dad had a favourite record, you know. He used to listen to it before he started to lose his hearing.'
She got up, walked toward Sadie and Sadie forced herself to be still, in case she flinched away. Sadie didn't want her mother near her, but she didn't want to upset her, either. Her mother called grandfather 'Dad', of course. She'd lost her dad.
In the end, he'd been stone deaf. The last five years she'd watched him wither away in an old people's home. They said he had dementia, but Sadie thought they were just lazy. He laughed all the time, and whenever she visited he always had a sly wink for her. They thought he was demented because all he did was laugh.
She thought maybe they just didn't get the joke.
'This was the last thing he listened to. He told me, about a year after he went in the home. That was before he started laughing and stopped...'
Sadie's mum sniffed, and put the needle down on the record, then left the room. She thought she could hear her in the kitchen, sniffing and crying and trying not to sob.
Sadie couldn't cry at all.
She listened for the music, and heard nothing, but there was a pair of old headphones plugged into the socket. She picked the headphones up. Stereo, but with a jack rather than a USB or smaller, like she was used to. A big jack, too. The headphones had leather rests at the ears, brown leather, like someone though these things were a fancy armchair. She imagined they cost a fortune.
She put them on, over her ears, and thought that they were still warm, like her grandfather had only just worn them. Of course, he hadn't. He hadn't even seen this house for five years.
The record was scratched, and she saw that beneath the clear plastic lid it went round like a drunk UFO. Warped, with heat and cold and being left on the turntable, maybe. She thought about craning over to see who it was she listened to, but she didn't want to know. When it was finished would be soon enough.
For now, she felt closer to the last man left in their family than she had since he'd gone away.
She closed her eyes, forgot about the birds in the garden, and let the sound drift over her for what must have been around twenty or thirty minutes. It was the silence that woke her.
She opened her eyes and stretched, having fallen asleep somewhere toward the end. The headphones were still on her head.
It wasn't the silence that woke me, she thought.
It wasn't silent, inside the record. There was that scratching, repetitive noise. But something else, too.
Sadie, the voice said.
Not music, just voice. Like a spoken word thing, like an audiobook, or a recording. It took her a while to place it.
It was her grandfather's voice.
'Grandfather?'
Sadie. I've got a joke to tell you. But you've got to listen to the end. You've got to listen to the end. You've got to...
'Sadie? Honey?'
Sadie turned her eyes away from the garden, and the birds, and stared at her mother.
'You've got to eat.'
Sadie couldn't hear the words, but she could see her mother's mouth moving.
'Funny,' said Sadie. 'Funny.'
'Honey? What's funny?'
Sadie laughed.
'Can't hear,' she said, moving to take the headphones off. She wasn't wearing the headphones. They were right back where they'd started - on top of the plastic cover of the turntable, with a warped record long-forgotten and collecting dust beneath and the power, off.
*
Bonus Material: 2
There. That's it, pretty much. I cunningly didn't add an introduction to the last story, so you'd get to this point thinking, 'Yeah! No more intros!'
...but you were wrong.
Now, I don't want you to feel obligated to read this, the absolutely final tale, but I hate to leave an audience on a downer. What follows is basically just a showtune to see us to the credits. It's certainly not horror. I think it might be 'bizarro', should you need a genre. Bizarro tends to have a bit of poop in there somewhere.
I wrote this a while back, and the idea of Stephen Hawking's Wheelchair as a sentient ass-kicking hero stuck with me. It germinated, and when it was all growed up it became the basis for 'Spiggot, Too.'
Told you. No more than a curio.
Shakira’s Butt and Stephe
n Hawking’s Wheelchair
When Shakira's Butt began to threaten the very existence of our world Nano Boy and his sidekick, Bum Curry, lounged in front of the television, surfing for something to watch.
'Bum Curry,' said Nano Boy as he hit upon the news. 'There’s something afoot.'
'No,' said Bum Curry, 'I always smells like that.'
'No, my trusty sidekick,' said Nano Boy. 'Look at the news. Pay attention, eh?'
'As you says, boss,' said the noxious fluids which had taken on sentience as a result of a wicked Jalfrezi on a night out in Cardiff.
Bum Curry looked, as bid.
'Cor,' he said.
'To the Nano Mobile!' shouted Nano Boy as Bum Curry was hard of hearing.
The news was full of it: Turkey was the sole remaining fanbase for Shakira's Butt, but she weighed fifteen-thousand-hundred kilos and her booty did not mix with the notoriously seismic Turkish tectonics. It set off a slew of rockets while it danced and gyrated seductively. It seemed NATO's automated systems interpreted the shockwaves as a first strike, and retaliatory rockets were headed for the Pan-American continent.
Shakira herself was never in any danger - she lived a quiet life, incognito, on the Isle of Wight where she worked in a chip van.
*
If Nano Boy and Bum Curry hadn’t known about Stephen Hawking’s Wheelchair, they never would have saved the world.
Sqqquurp shhhckkks (said the radio)...
'In unrelated news, it appears as though Stephen Hawking's Wheelchair has taken on a life of its own and is RAMPAGING!!! through sleepy Oxford Town, where it refused to pay for a cream scone. Eyewitness reports indicate that the wheelchair didn't even eat the cream scone. PANIC!!! has hit the streets...'
'Is this what the world's coming to, Bum Curry? Terrifying. Truly terrifying.'
The Cold Inside (Horror Short Stories) Page 9