by Jay Bray
“These sacks are gigantic. They’re even bigger than the one you’ve got there!” I said.
“Oh, I picked this one up yesterday?”
“What? You’ve brought more sprouts after all these?”
She breathed out impatiently, “I bought these for supplies. And I bought those for Christmas. You wouldn’t want these for Christmas. They’re well past their best.”
I was stunned. I couldn’t help but continue to stare.
“Oh don’t look at me like that.
How was I to know that we’d be down here on Christmas Eve? It’s not like I put all these sprouts down here with the intention of us eating them. You should count yourself lucky I didn’t listen to you ‘Oh don’t buy that for the bunker I want a dinosaur’ or ‘I want a football’ or ballet shoes or a microscope. We’d be in here with a couple of buckets and a twelve pack of Evian if I’d bought everything you’d come begging for. All the times I’ve asked you for an opinion or a bit of help in the computer side of things. But no, you were too busy ‘living in the now’ and I was just a mad old woman waiting for the end of the world.
Well here we are at the end of the world and if you’ve got to spend the next six months eating sprouts and doing your business in plastic bags in the same room as your mother, well I’d start being a bit more grateful about it that’s all I can say.
“Six months? What do you mean six months?”
“That’s how long the whatsit takes to clear”
“The whatsit…? And why will I need to go in the same room as you?”
And then completely ignoring my fear of rats, she said “Well the rats will go through the bags in there and then we’ll be doing it in here.”
I could feel myself going faint and I passed out.
***
I woke up being gently rocked in the hammock. My mother was humming ‘We Will Rock You’ as she did.
“Mother that’s not helping. It’s making me more nauseous.”
“Oh and he’s back in the room! Wait there.”
I closed my eyes again and waited for the world to stop spinning.
“Here, take some of this. It’ll make you feel better.” She was offering a tablespoon of green liquid. I opened my mouth and prayed she didn’t make a train noise and she shoved it in.
“Choo! Choo!”
I swallowed and found it was warm and not medicine, but soup.
“That’s it. Have some more, it’s very good and full of nutrition and what not.”
I permitted her to dispense three more spoonfuls’. I felt the calming effect of the warmth spreading down my oesophagus and then a sudden release of noxious gas erupted within as the soup slopped into my stomach. There was bubbling. There was rumbling.
“What’s in the soup?”
I didn’t wait for an answer but grabbed the bag she was offering and ran into the bathroom.
1:42 PM
I really cannot believe that woman. To use your only son (and quite possibly the last man on the planet) as a guinea pig for her bloody sprouts. She said my insides might as well get used to them as soon as possible.
“But I won’t be eating sprouts mother, I’ll be eating my NutroFreeze. Don’t tell me you didn’t get the NutroFreeze?”
I rushed over to the freezer.
“Don’t open that.” she said, as I flung the lid up. Inside there should have been stacks of NutroFreeze (which is perfectly designed to supply my body with all the minerals, vitamins and electrolytes, needed for my constitution.) But there crammed into the freezer was a whacking great big turkey, various gateaux, a cake and some Christmas crackers. I pulled out the cake and the Christmas crackers.
“These don’t even need to go in the freezer,” I said “Now, where are my bloody NutroFreeze?”
“I accidently defrosted them when I was testing out the fairy lights last week. I didn’t like to re-freeze them.”
I looked into the freezer and saw right at the bottom, beneath where the cake had been there was one box of NutraSweet. I pulled it out – it was one of the old style boxes.
“Don’t open that!” she yelled.
I ignored her. Inside was my old budgie Roger.
***
“It’s Roger. You’ve killed Roger! You told me he’d flown away.”
“Oh for heavens sakes, I didn’t kill him. You didn’t feed him, that’s what did for him. I was going to stuff him when you realised he hadn’t flown home to Africa, I thought I’d wait until you were old enough to know the truth.”
“I’m twenty-bloody-four.”
“Well, now you bloody know!”
I put Roger back in the freezer. “What exactly is going in?” I asked.
“I had to move most of the stores upstairs so I could get all the Christmas grub in. I was going to bring it all back down on Boxing Day.”
“So what have we actually got to eat for the next six months?”
“Well, you’ve had you fry-up. There’s another one of them for tomorrow. Then it’s turkey with ‘all the trimmings’, Christmas pudding, Pavlova, sherry trifle and cheese and crackers.
For the day after, a cold meat platter with coleslaw and dips. Mince pies, black forest and Vienetta.
After that it’s brussel sprouts until June.”
I chose to ignore her, deny her the attention. I need to get to the very important task of recording what has happened to the human race. Thankfully history has been very lucky in having me as the scribe for this, as unlike some people around here, I’ve been paying attention to what’s been happening outside in the real world.
I don’t mind telling you it took some catching up to become so worldly wise due to her home schooling me. This consisted mainly of poncing around in the woods with all the other weirdo kids at the forest sprite group.
All the parents would sit around getting stoned whilst the ‘teacher’ searched for mushrooms. And the weirdo kids were left to chase and pick on the fattest child (and we all know who that was). There’s nothing more humiliating then fleeing for your life through the undergrowth, whilst the bullies stroll along behind, with their hands in their pockets. They’d snigger as I tripped and sprawled, and they’d stop and wait for me to pick myself up and throw myself forwards. I can still hear the whizz and whistle in my chest and the ‘thwack’ of the tops of my wellies as they branded my calves with welts (my mother had brought them for me to ‘grow into’).
I had nowhere to run to, even if I could have outpaced them. Shame, prevented me from circling back round towards the grown ups and nettles and brambles on either side steered me down the track towards the stream. I sped up and leapt into the air landing in the middle of the stream. The water came up to just above my boots and the right one got stuck in the mud. I didn’t know this until I started running again and I left the boot, and took a dive straight into the bank.
The bony boys behind (three pale vegans) all jabbie elbows and knobbly knuckles) made like hyenas.
The eldest of the three (they were all somehow related) was called Kaya, he would have been 14 back then, about two years older than me, he was the leader, and he said “let’s save him.”
They all jumped in and the two younger ones (Theodore and little Kaya, both a year junior to me) grabbed hold and dragged me back over to the other side.
They laid me out on my back and I kept my eyes closed as my lungs pounded in and out.
“Is he dying?” asked Theodore
“No, he’s just crying,” said Big Kaya “What a baby.”
“Maybe he’s got hypothermia,” said Theodore (who was alright when he was on his own.)
“Yeah… maybe he has. We need to get those wet clothes off of him,” said Big K.
I’d like to tell you I fought them off. Or I put up a struggle. I wish I could lie about it. But you know me Diary; I’m a martyr to the truth.
Instead, I pretended I’d passed out, (which wasn’t too convincing what with all the panting I was still doing and my eyes and mouth all grimaced up
like). The only form of resistance I put up was to hook a thumb into the waist of my underpants, in the hope of keeping them on.
Oh dear Diary I wish you could see me now as I’m smudging these words with my tears. I have never felt so pathetic; so worthy of hatred and contempt. I lay there pretending to be unconscious as they removed my top and my camos; too scared to even move my other thumb in to secure the other side of my pants.
“Just kill me now” I remember thinking as one of them jeered, “Look at his pants! What’s he got on them?” I scrambled through the panic in my mind trying to recall what pants I had put on this morning.
“I think they’re seahorses, yeah they’re seahorses.” Said Theo.
(“Thank God” I thought, that could have been so much worse.)
“Them’s bummers pants,” said Big K.
“Alan’s a bummer!” said little Kaya.
Theo knelt down besides me and rolled me over onto my side,
“What you doing?” asked Kaya.
“Are you bumming him?” said little Kaya.
Theo warned him with his fist, “Do you want some of this? I’m putting him in the recovery position. Just in case”
As Theo said this, I pulled my knees up and bent my head down, slowly, hoping they wouldn’t notice. Big K’s snort indicated I hadn’t been slow enough.
I felt Theo stand up “What do we do now?” he asked,
“We’ll hang his clothes up to dry and go and get the adults.” They ran off and I could hear little Kaya laughing and shouting “Bummer” as they went.
I got up, put on my wellies and started making my way back. I was praying again, this time that they had left my clothes nearby. Not just because I didn’t want everyone to see me in my pants, but I needed my inhaler.
As I went around the first bend, I found that the bastards had thrown them up in a tree (I don’t know exactly what type of tree it was, (we learnt fuck all about woodcraft in these woodcraft lessons) but it might have been a birch). It was a young slender tree and although it was big enough for me to climb, the branch that held my clothes was not and would snap if I tried to climb along and rescue them.
I spotted a discarded vodka bottle and in anger I flung it with such precision that it knocked my inhaler straight out of the pocket and into my palm. I shoved it into my mouth and sucked in the vapor.
“Good shot” said a voice behind me. I spun around to discover an alien dressed as a schoolgirl who was leaning against an adjacent tree smoking a cigarette. The alien had gone to some effort with their disguise but had got the colouring all wrong. The skin was orange, the hair yellow (not blonde, I mean yellow). The nails were too long and too white. This alien had obviously only had a cartoon to work with. I turned my back and stuffed my inhaler down the front of my pants and then turned around again.
“You pleased to see me?” said the alien, nodding at my inhaler and I removed my hands from my nipples and covered my crotch as the alien approached. As she came closer (of course this was years before my mother got my eyes tested). I suddenly realized it wasn’t an alien but Mickey. She’d helpfully carved ‘Mickey’ into the bark of the tree she’d been leaning against as the yellow and orange apparition in front of me would’ve still been unrecognizable to me.
“What have you done to your skin?”
“It’s my new toner babe, it’s called Kurious Orange. Are they seahorses?” she asked and pointed.
“Stop pointing and stop looking,” I said.
“Oh babe, I’ve seen them now. I like them. His tail curls around like a little winkie.”
“I don’t know what you’ve been looking at, but ‘winkies’ do not curl. Now kindly look away.”
“Oh babe, don’t be like that. Here I know…” Mickey lifted up her skirt and I got a flash of thigh and navy blue.
“There we go, now we’re even. Now how did you get your clothes up there?”
I told her what had happened and she called them bastards and shits. Then she said “I can help you, that branch won’t break if I go up. I reckon I could bend it down and you could grab them.”
I started to pick the idea apart, but besides injury to Mickey I couldn’t see any drawbacks for me, so I said, “That’s a genius idea” and gave her a leg up the first branch and went and stood beneath my clothes. Mickey backed out arse first onto the branch and her skirt rode up a little.
“Can you see my knickers?” she asked.
“No, no,” I said, as I couldn’t.
“What about now? Can you see them now?”
“I’m not looking – I’ve already seen them, Can you just get on with it please.”
The branch was bending down as Mickey shifted along almost to the end and the branch sank to within my grasp.
“Got them!” I yelled and I started putting on my camos. I looked up as I started putting my shirt on and saw that Mickey hadn’t moved.
“Babe, I’m stuck.”
Mickey’s weight, (not a lot less than mine, if we’re honest) meant she didn’t have the strength to pull herself back up.
“Hang on,” I said coming over, “sling ya’ legs over.” I reached up and supported the back of her knees.
“Right, swing your bum, so you’re sitting on my head.”
Once she’d done that I said “Now get ready, I’m gonna drop us.” And we fell and rolled over and didn’t do ourselves any damage.
We both got up grinning.
“Thanks Mickey”
“Don’t mention it, babe.”
“Here, are you hungry?”
“I’m always hungry, babes.”
“Well have some of my sweets.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and found that the bloody swine’s had swiped the lot.
“Bastards!” I suddenly realised that that was what those sugar barred buggers had been after all along.
“What did you have?” said Mickey.
“I had the lot, I had fizz bombs, I had cola bottles, space dust…”
“I love space dust,” said Mickey.
“I had freddo, a curly-wurly and a dib-dab”
“Well they wont have gone back to your parents with that lot. They’ll be around here somewhere divvying it out.”
“Theo won’t be. He’s diabetic.”
“Well, the other two then. They won’t be far.”she got up.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to find them. You wait here, I know how to get sweets from boys.”
I didn’t like the sound of this at all, but I did like the idea of getting my sweets back so I sat and said nothing.
“What colour knickers have I got on?”
“Navy blue.”
“I knew you looked,” she said as she wandered off.
She was back in two minutes chomping on the curly-wurly, (which seemed fair). She handed over what looked like almost all of my sweets.
“What? They gave you all that, to see your knickers?”
“What babe? What kind of girl do you think I am?”
“But you said…”
“I was joking. Anyway I’ve got my hockey knickers on, even I wouldn’t get all this with them on.”
“So how did you get them?”
“I was going to tell them you were my friend and I’d get one of the sisters to beat them up if they didn’t hand them back over.”
“Would your sisters do that?”
“Would they heck. I’d get a cuff just for asking, but they didn’t know that.”