My mother and my dad and I had put our suitcases down in the family room in the guest house in the small coastal town. The furniture was chocolate brown and heavy. The wardrobe gave me nightmares that week as I imagined all kinds of long-legged nastinesses dragging me in, accompanied by the sound of laughter.
There was a fold-up bed for me in the corner near a vast chest of drawers; I opened one of the drawers and there was a sock in it, and a set of playing cards. ‘We should report that sock’ my dad said, half joking because he was on holiday and out of office-mode. There was a TV with a screen as big as a tabloid newspaper and there was a gleaming white sink. I was eleven and I was on the verge of bodily changes that meant that my voice was breaking and a single dark piano wire of hair had started growing on my chest. I had a moustache that seemed to have been crocheted from limp wool and if I saw the corsets in my mother’s Grattan catalogue I felt a prickling of sweat. Funny how the catalogue always seemed to fall open at that page.
Because my body was pummelling me on to the runway of adulthood, I was sulking most of the time and I found my parents to be the most embarrassing human beings in the world. Sometimes the old me would surface, gasping for air, and I would laugh at my dad’s gags, but most of the time, I’m very sorry to say, I was spiky and abrasive. The gulls outside the room took the mickey out of me relentlessly and I don’t blame them.
I was reading (please don’t judge me) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, having seen the film on a Saturday afternoon on TV. To be honest, I found it hard going and I confess that by the middle of the week I would abandon it and go back to Biggles and indeed spend a couple of book tokens on new Biggles books at the WH Smith in town, but for now, stubborn as a glacier, I was reading (performatively, if I’d known what the word meant at the time) The Grapes of Wrath, my brow furrowed so dramatically that it hurt. We were full of fish and chips and so we had an early night, mine punctuated by vivid dream-dioramas of Tom Joad being dragged into the wardrobe in the room by tall women in stockings and suspenders. The gulls screeched me awake at the break of dawn and I read the book under the covers.
We went down for breakfast and we were served by a girl in late teenage in one of those uniforms they used to wear in Lyons’ Corner Houses and of course I thought she was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. The white pinny over the black pinny. The black tights that of course, given my wardrobe dreams, I hoped were stockings. The gulls wheeled outside like animations. We all had a full English breakfast and I tried to eat the bacon in a way that showed I was a sophisticated man of the world. Well, boy of the world. She smiled at us but I was convinced that she was smiling at me. I smiled back but this was a mistake because I was just lifting a forkful of fried egg towards my pre-teen mouth and the effort of the smile was so gargantuan that I spilled yolk down the stripy polo shirt my mam had bought for the holiday, along with four more like it, from Smith’s of West Melton. The yolk spread all over the canvas of the shirt, adding explosions and indoor fireworks to the stripes. My face went puce with embarrassment and I fought back tears. The waitress smiled but didn’t laugh, which I saw as a good sign that we might one day meet up and get married after all.
My mother made my embarrassment even worse by grabbing the serviette and wiping my shirt, spreading the egg further and wider. We stood up and went back to the room, the breakfasts half-eaten; still, there was plenty on my clothes to fill us up later. The waitress smiled again as we left the room and my heart leaped like a goalkeeper saving a tricky free kick. Later, just before we went out, she knocked on our door; it turned out she was also a cleaner and now she was wearing a smock. There was (I’m not lying) a connection between us, and I saw her glance admiringly at The Grapes of Wrath on the bed, the Tufty Club bookmark sticking out like a tongue.
There was a joke shop in this small coastal town and I was allowed to go into it and spend some pocket money, the bit of pocket money I’d got left from buying books and comics. I considered a false moustache and some fake dog poo; I toyed with the idea of some soap that made you dirty; but eventually I settled on a realistic-looking plastic snake because I had an idea. An idea that Sigmund Freud could have written a book about.
My plan was to hide the plastic snake under the pillow with the head sticking out and then when the waitress who was also the cleaner saw it she’d scream but then laugh affectionately. I put the snake in my pocket and we went for a walk along the seafront. I smiled to myself; I hoped that the smile might look somehow seductive to passers-by although I guess that in reality it looked like a crack on a side plate.
Then I saw the young woman from the guest house walking in front of us; she wasn’t alone. She was walking hand in hand with a lad who was obviously her boyfriend. He was, it seemed to me, the fattest and ugliest man I’d ever seen. ‘There’s the wee lassie from the guest house with her sweetheart,’ said my dad. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell her about your snake.’
What was that sound? Ah yes, the ground opening up and swallowing me whole. Like a mole. A mole with a chest hair. And a young boy choking back a sob.