Nearly Enid Blyton.
“How much longer?”
The young owner of the voice from behind didn’t really expect an answer, and settled back into his game boy.
“A few years ago our son would have said, ‘are we there yet?’” Shelley said to her husband instead, from the passenger seat of the huge people carrier that was originally purchased to transport a larger family than they could now afford. “There’s a subtle difference, I suppose. By the way, do you think we’re bad parents?”
Eamonn’s pensive look reassured his wife that he wasn’t dishing out the silent treatment they both reserved for Sean. But then Shelley was a grown up and she wasn’t engrossed in a computer game.
Eventually, after a time delay worthy of one of Eamonn and Sean’s favourite Doctor Who episodes, Shelley announced:
“About three-hundred-and-fifty-miles.”
“Cool,” Sean said. “Can we can stop for a burger?”
Sean’s twelve-year-old sister Siobhan did her obligatory one-woman-three-fingers-down-the-throat vegetarian protest but the pair’s parents sided with neither child by exercising their right to remain silent (again).
Sean sighed.
Then, after another three miles or so, he said, “Go on, Dad. You’re good at inventing games!”
“S’pose I am. But I thought you were already playing one?”
“Yeah – and I’m too old for I-spy, but if you come up with something really good I’ll put this away,” he sneered, holding up his Game Boy in a way that suggested torture instrument, rather than tool for negotiation. “And I won’t take the you-know-what out of Siobhan’s stupid salad.”
“And she can have the first go?” Eamonn bargained.
“Because I’m only twelve,” Siobhan said.
“Yes, Dad. She can have a false start.”
“It’s a fool’s start, son, you foo-“
“Takes one to know one,” said Sean.
The newish-but-dirty people carrier came to an unnatural halt outside a restaurant renowned for offering more than just a token-sized veggie option, then ruining the experience with surly staff, burly chefs – and copious dollops of compulsory mayonnaise.
Eamonn made a ‘sorry’ gesture that was a little too ambiguous when he kicked up some gravel dust with his huge tyres, obscuring the diners’ view to a certain extent. The customers hated his family already, he decided. When the waitress began staring through the window before they’d even got out he was finally convinced.
As the family trooped through, Eamonn’s loud-but-warm Irish brogue added heat to her day. “If it’s non-smoking you want, then there’s just one table in the middle,” she snapped, in a voice that matched her poodle hairdo perfectly.
“Look, love – my daughter might look like a fairy, but when everybody around her is lighting up do you imagine she could magic the smoke away? And it’s going to do to her lungs what my Renault nearly did to your window.”
The waitress tapped her pen impatiently while the children decided, and gave Eamonn a look that said, Why are you blaming the car for that?
“Omlette and Rocket Salad,” Siobhan said, sternly. “And NO mayonnaise.”
“Can’t do it without mayo,” the girl replied mechanically.
“Can’t – or won’t?” said Eamonn, sounding just like the teacher he is.
“We HAVE to bring it to you just like it is in the picture,” the waitress explained, ludicrously. “Otherwise, customers complain.”
Shelley gave her one of her silent stares. The rest of the family didn’t need to add anything as the girl went to phone the manager. Other customers were beginning to murmur, now, and Eamonn wasn’t sure whether they were being supportive or not. He could only make out certain words from the telephone conversation. Words like ‘awkward’, ‘obnoxious’ – and Irish.
Eamonn followed her behind her counter and placed an ironic hand on the girl’s shoulder, taking up the slack on his oversized sweatshirt with the other.
“I’ll give you Irish,” he growled, menacingly. “S’pose I had a gun strapped to me chest,” he went on, mimicking someone from Belfast, adapting his Dublin accent as best he could. “What use would yer manager be then? Noy, just give me leetle girl what it doesn’t say on da tin.”
The waitress tried to let out a non-existent scream but was too scared to move. “Bloody inflexible they are, in here,” he shouted to his would-be fellow diners.
“I’m proud of you for making half their customers walk out, Dad.”
Siobhan’s voice was echoing round the empty foyer. By the time her foot had hit the gravel outside she was still full of admiring daughterly gazes, nearly walking into one of the people carrier’s doors.
“See that sign there?” said Eamonn. “Services, indeed. And what sort of a service did Miss Stroppy Pants in there provide?”
“She’d be good on the front line,” offered Shelley, who’d done a stint in the WRACS.
“I’d hate to have her as a parent,” Siobhan added.
“That’s IT!” Eamonn said. “We’ll look for the nearest veggie place in the next town.” Siobhan reprised her admiring daughter face. “And afterwards we’ll play a game called The Person I’d Most Hate to be My Parent,” he added, the authority in his voice giving every impression that Waddingtons had been manufacturing his game since before Monopoly.
“Damn, I knew I shouldn’t have left my mobile in the car,” Shelley said, after they’d eaten at Restaurant Number Two. She was venting her anger on the buttons. “Must be Mum. Number withheld. She always does this.”
“Mar-see-err,” said Eamonn, demonstrating his dislike for his mother-in-law by enunciating her name coldly. “Marcia would be first on my list. How about you, son?”
“Enid Blyton,” said Shelley, when her son couldn’t immediately come up with one. “She’s just like Mum.”
“Blyton would be cool,” contradicted Siobhan, unexpectedly. “We had those Noddy books at school,” she explained. “Only they had some bits about Big Ears taken out. Something about bullying, the teacher said. If she was my mum she could write a book just for me! ”
Her real mum put her straight. “Legend has it she used to shut herself away from her own children for weeks. Her study window used to look out on her neighbour’s bathroom, apparently. Siobhan, imagine how you’d feel if you didn’t see your mum from one day to the next and then you read one of her books that was based on the life of a little girl she saw every morning brushing her teeth. It’s a bit weird, don’t you think?”
“So, Shelley, was that really your mother trying to phone, d’you think?”
“Hmm, Eamonn - let’s consider the evidence. Withheld number, withheld affection… I’d say it’s a ‘Yes’.”
“Quit, you two,” said Siobhan, who couldn’t even stand mild aggression. “We’re on our way to see Grandma and all you can do is argue about Nan. Gran’s got some Enid Blyton books, I think. I might try the Secret Seven – or the Famous Five.”
“Gotta be better than S Club 7,” Eamonn offered.
“Or 5ive,” Sean chipped in. “And it’s just S Club now, Dad. Not that I care.”
“Peter Stringfellow,” said Dad, changing the subject.
“Who?” chorused the kids.
“Parents I’d hate. If he was my dad then my mum would be younger than you are,” Eamonn tried to explain and Shelley joined in with:
“And everyone would confuse your old man with Rod Stewart. Oh, yeah: Dolly the Sheep. Wouldn’t like to have her as a mum. I’d look like a carbon-copied younger version. And Clive Sinclair…” His wife was on a roll, now. “Imagine bringing your friends round to listen to your new Limahl single and there was your dad, falling off a C5 over piles of tiny televisions and toy computers.”
“Your mother’s in an Eighties timewarp,” offered Eamonn.
“The adults have hi-jacked our game,” said Sean, precociously.
“It’s Dad’s game anyway,” protested Siobhan (whose dad could do no wrong today).
“Bill Clinton,” said Dad.
“Ugh!”
“Thought you liked him, Shell?”
“I do, love. But it wouldn’t be worth it. Imagine those headlines ruining the rest of your life. ‘The ovaries and the orifice in the Oval Office.’ I saw that one just the other day. Imagine having the looks of Chelsea…”
“The Captain of the Titanic,” Siobhan suggested. “For obvious reasons.”
“Margaret Thatcher,” volunteered her mum. “For the same reason.”
“She sank the Belgrano,” Eamonn explained to the kids. They were all becoming so involved with all this that he nearly collided with another restaurant they didn’t want to eat in.
“It says Truro, 37 miles,” said an excitable Sean. “So how far till Crock’s End?”
“I’ll tell you when I see the signs,” said his mother as Sean buried his head in his miniature computer screen.
When he’d finished a game the boy looked up again and nearly peed himself when he saw a sign indicating the village that had had its ‘r’ surgically removed by humourous vandals.
They parked the car and the family marched almost militarily up the unevenly pebbled steps to the windswept cottage overlooking the unspoilt Cornish bay.
Eamonn was stealing himself for an unorthodox welcome and already planning his retreat in the pub across the water, once the niceties had been performed.
“Granny!” shouted Siobhan, throwing her arms around Margaret Thatcher.
The girl’s father almost didn’t recognise his own mother at the door.
“Welcome to our fancy dress party,” Thatcher bellowed back.
“Surprise, Surprise,” said Cilla Black.
Eamonn dutifully did the social rounds. He kept muttering “Mum’s so embarrassing” like a child, through clenched teeth, whenever he passed his wife. After the third time, Shelley asked him whether he’d come dressed as a bad ventriloquist.
It was an hour before he noticed that he hadn’t collided with his wife for sometime – and then only because he was seeking her permission to disappear to the inn across the bay.
But his instincts led him to a different watering hole in Marion’s pitch-black garden. The duck-pond was only a few feet in diameter but the silhouette of Shelley remained unusually still (and, in adult company, uncharacteristically silent).
Shelley’s silhouette seems suicidal enough, he was thinking, to jump right in.
“All those jokes about parents,” she sobbed eventually, letting it all out after some careful comforting.
This was the unambiguous cry that Eamonn knew could only mean sudden bereavement.
“All my put-downs about Mum ignoring us – being nearly like Enid Blyton. Maybe she was. Well, I wish she were Margaret bloody Thatcher instead of Marcia, enjoying her second adolescence inside the house with all her geriatric friends.”
Eamonn put his other arm around his wife, encapsulating her.
The couple listened for a while to his own mother prancing around to an old show tune with Nancy Reagan and Doris Day, then Shelley yelled:
“And you know what?”
“What?”
“All she is now is a bloody corpse lying somewhere…”
Once the tears had subsided, the couple silently recalled those caller-withheld numbers and they both thought ‘Hospital’.
Shelley drew a cross in the air and kissed it out towards the pond. “But she still withheld those affections, Eamonn. I can’t deny that.”
“How about a game,” he suggested, tentatively. “We could call it: ‘Parents we do want’!”
His wife’s smile of approval came from within her voice. “Eamonn - you go first!”
“The Pope,” he said, firmly. “If I nominated him as your father then life would be so much simpler because you wouldn’t be here!”
“Mother Theresa, then. For almost the same reason.”
