‘Eddy. Get yourself ready, it’s shower day.’
Grandma Daisy punctuated her authority with a short, sharp rap on Eddy’s bedroom door.
Eddy obediently got out of his chair, the one by the old wooden desk, and proceeded to undress. He knew the routine. T-shirt, trousers, undies, socks. Always socks last. Always.
Within two minutes of Grandma Daisy’s knock he was standing on his side of the closed bedroom door, old clothes in his arms ready for washing, and as naked as he’d been that fateful day his mother had snuck out of the hospital, never to be seen again.
The bedroom door flung open and Grandma Daisy seemed almost to touch both sides and the top of the doorjamb. Eddy knew well enough to stand back because that was the way she always opened his door.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now go get under the water. I want half that soap gone by the time I come to get you out.’ Grandma Daisy reached down and took the old clothes out of Eddy’s hands. There’d be a new set waiting on his bed when he got back. There always was and there always would be. ‘Now get going before you miss the warm water.’
Shower days were all right as far as Eddy was concerned. It gave him a chance to see new stuff. Had Grandma Daisy changed one of the pictures in the hall? If one of the other doors was open, he could get a glimpse of another room, a whole different room than his own. He also got to walk past the top of the stairs, and if he walked slow enough and craned his neck just right, he could actually see the front door. The white front door with windows in it. Windows that showed the big, wide world on the outside.
But there were no doors open today. Grandma Daisy had changed no pictures and she chose today to tail him all the way to the bathroom. There was no dawdling at the top of the stairs. That was okay though. He still liked shower day.
As per usual, the shower was already running by the time he stepped into the small upstairs bathroom. Eddy pulled the shower curtain aside, stepped under the lukewarm water and felt the wetness cover his body like a new idea. He knew Grandma Daisy was off doing her own thing by now and she wouldn’t be back until well after the water had turned ice cold, cold enough so that he had to squeeze into the back corner of the shower cubicle where only the odd drip could reach him.
‘Make hay while the sun shines.’ That’s what Grandma Daisy would say. ‘Make hay while the sun shines.’
So he grabbed hold of the slippery soap from the little shelf beside him and began rubbing it all over before the water turned nasty. You had to do it quick because it wasn’t just a matter of getting it on, you had to get it off as well. Grandma Daisy didn’t like it at all if he still had soap in his hair when she came to dry him off. Not only that. She always did a load of washing at the same time as his shower and that made it like Russian roulette. He never quite knew when that rush of cold water would come with each new washing cycle downstairs.
What Grandma Daisy didn’t know, however, was that while she was downstairs doing her thing, Eddy played a trick on her. Yes, he washed himself good and well, but he’d learned to do that real quick. When he’d finished though, he’d pull the shower curtain ever so slightly aside, hop up on to the little step that divided the shower cubicle from the bathroom floor and look at himself in the mirror on the opposite wall. He’d have to be careful though. Good thing that Grandma Daisy’s stairs were creaky. Two of them always creaked and most times three or even four.
But the mirror, well, that was magical.
He could actually see himself looking back at him.
Eddy had always known he was different. Grandma Daisy was forever reminding him of that in one way or another. But what he didn’t understand until he was tall enough to see in the mirror was what exactly ‘different’ was.
And she was right. He was different. He wasn’t like Grandma Daisy or the lady that came to visit him sometimes (he could never remember her name for more than half a day after each visit). He was different too from the people in the photos on the hallway table. The ones he’d never make the mistake of asking about again. And last but not least, he was different from all the other people he watched going about their lives from his bedroom window.
His eyes were different. That was the easy part to see. But the rest of his face was different too. He couldn’t exactly explain what was different about it but it definitely wasn’t the same as all the others. When he’d asked Grandma Daisy she’d told him that was simply what ‘dumb’ looked like. So maybe that’s just what it was. Dumb people were given different faces just like the runners in his Guinness Book of World Records book were given long legs.
So for as long as his courage held out, Eddy stood on tippy-toes and made faces at the dumb boy in the mirror. And when he smiled, somebody smiled right back at him and that was the most marvellous thing in the world.