ch1-16

THE SECRETS OF CUPBOARD 55
Chapter 1
[In Medias Res]
MONDAY 15TH SEPTEMBER 2003. I found her offices by a most circuitous route. In my stressed state I took several wrong turns. A wrong right at Marine Parade then a guess at a left into Nelson Road North. Then I came past the statue of Britannia that faces inland. Unkempt and shabby was the condition of the old town grey streets thereabouts- dulled dimmer by the heavy autumn morning cloud. Such decrepitude was no longer a fitting setting for a monument to our most illustrious naval hero.
Then by chance I took a turn at Wellesley Road, along a sharp right angle for Regent Road and parked the Benz opposite the Hollywood Cinema. Dashing up concrete steps I flapped suited and booted and with briefcase under my wing I noted the tarnished brass plaque marked, ‘ Punch, Deenan & Flynn.’
Puffing and panting I announced my arrival to the disdainful face of a prissy secretary whose curt frown was unmoved by any excuses for my tardiness.
“Mr Bloom? You’re almost half an hour late…you were scheduled for eleven…. I’ll see what I can do.”
Her long, bony arm she upraised dismissively gesturing that I should sit. Collapsing upon a soft pew I shuffled through a pack of tatty glossy magazines fanned out across a tired and chipped coffee table. I feigned unawareness of the disapproving gaze of Miss Prissy.
‘Hero to Zero?’ was the sub-heading that screamed out at me from amongst the pile. I settled back for a read.
Is society pressurising the young to be too thin? Is the media hype too much to handle for teenage girls? Pressures to fit into that tight little dress and be a size eight. Can you get to six? Try for a zero! Those ‘puppy fat’ love handles must go! We asked Kirsty MacKilt of TV’s, ‘You Are What you Eat!’ to fill our readers in. Kirsty was straight to point and says all down to the mentality of, "I want to look just like her. All the boys like her so much, she’s perfect, and she’s almost a zero!" And as for the boys, they never chase after plus twelve girls do they? So what do girls do? They make themselves vomit! “It wrecks the oesophagus, “ says Kirsty. Of course the alternative is to eat practically nothing, like low fat yoghurt or a crispbread, and then do a gym workout until you faint.
So how do we win the battle of ‘Hero to Zero?’ The final answer lies within you, and not what other people think. Kirsty’s wise words are, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
A buzzer sounds to break the still air.
“ Miss Kearney will see you now, Mr Bloom!”
Finally summoned I get a disdainful parting once over from the skinny Minnie sentinel.
I smiled nervously and nodded. She looked like she had serious oesophagus issues herself. I rapped my knuckles on the heavy oak door and entered into a darkened and musty smelling office where a read-headed scribe was hunched over some papers scratching busily.
“Good morning, Mr Bloom. Do please sit.”
Brigid Kearney LL.B looked up to strain a weary eye over me. Daring not to break the hushed air I nervously took a seat in front of a grand old desk and faced my newest inquisitor. She perched regally on her throne now teasing and rolling an exquisite fountain pen between fine-boned fingers.
Kearney, too, was now giving me that disquieting once over and I was starting to feel I was just another humdrum criminal passing across her desk. Kearney shuffled and sorted through papers looking reassuringly efficient and professional, just as my eccentric Irish blood brother and friend Mr Telemachus Johns BA PGCE had promised me she would.
I did not for one moment doubt the considered advice of Mrs Brigid Kearney LL.B for she came highly recommended. She had something of a godly a reputation hereabouts. I had been told she was originally from Holly Wells, County Kildare. The Old Country- the emerald green land of my forefathers.
Then my new solicitor handed me a three-page document entitled, ‘Crown v Leonard Odysseus Bloom. Formal admissions pursuant to section 10 the Criminal Justice Act 1967: Specimen Charges Under the Telecommunication Act (Amended) 2003’.
“We don’t normally get the full prosecution arguments laid out like this prior to trial. They’ve done a sterling job on this….as I suspected… they have a very good reason for it.”
Her steely blue eyes held mine fixed.
“Please read it carefully, Mr Bloom. I am sure you must now appreciate that securing a conviction against a teacher in a high profile case like this would be significant feathers in the caps of both the police and Crown Prosecution Service”
The muted conservative tones of her dress, the stern demeanour, the immaculately cut and coloured auburn locks all soberly tempered the wear of her middle years.
“I should also tell you. This is something the press will certainly lap up…so be warned.”
I could so desperately do with a worthy flame-haired Celtic Athena up for the battle. I clung onto that quietly self-assured Irish lilt in her voice I with every ounce of hope I still possessed in my gnawing, tortured mind. I quickly scanned the double-spaced words so neatly laid upon the pages. Then stuttered to interject.
“ But these are lies…all lies…just lies!”
I noted the band on her wedding finger. Her tone became somewhat clipped and unequivocal.
“Mr Bloom, the crux you should consider is this: shall we say- a sex scandal involving a teacher and a pupil? Every fictional event finds its locus in actuality.…. I’m not calling it a lost cause, not at all, not just yet…but please do think very hard on this. “

2
JOURNEY’S BEGINNING: APRIL 2002. I was never a natural step father. There was always something awry. Even from my first meeting with the child, deep down I just knew I was doomed to fail in my effort to bond with her. To Lita Limoncello I must have blown into her Catskill’s calm mountain wilderness like a sudden and unwanted whirlwind of flesh and bone, piss and wind, bearing down on her romantically deluded mother to sweep her off those lonely New York shelves.
From foolish wiles we determined to see a flower slowly developing from a bud, just as the bud had from its seed. But to be fair to Lita’s mother, the new Mrs Bloom gamely insisted that from now on my surname must be inscribed on every schoolbook.
I did my bloomful best. I spoke softly and fatherly to leery Lita. I told her I would from now on always be there for her,’ we’re all one big family now’ I would tell her. And ‘ you’re going to be as much my daughter as your mother is now my wife.’
But as hard as I tried and as hard as my wife tried Lita Limoncello did not come sweetly to the bosom of the Bloom household. She was most unhappy that her mother, Miss Balloon Climber was now World Wide Web wedded to her electronic wooer, Mister Bordello Moan.
She didn’t really approve of the Datingdads.com suitor who applied his Gold Membership with aplomb to secure his new bride and like many other limited thinkers in the late Nineteen-nineties Little Lim Lita was suspicious of love borne from twenty-four seven online wooing in binary flashes, delivered in packets, routed on networks and woven across continents and oceans.
Apart from my newly configured, freshly installed stepdaughter, there was many an uncle and aunt, parent and grandparent who shared those doubts about the nature of our foolish flush of mid-life Internet love. There were very few homespun palliatives that would hit the mark with that superfluous adolescent interloper.
But we were here now and domiciled in England for a different normal boodle of conjoined, delusional optimists, evolutionists of the electronic new age. But would it be a bed of roses? Our ports were docked come what may.
But like any other age, electronic or otherwise, the one ineluctable truth that pervaded our hearts like all others was to find a harmonious marital union that would not be so witheringly replete with nagging vacillations between lonesome Laconic Leo and comely Curvaceous Carla.
I had my term of endearment. I called her my Cookie because she was sweet to me and a little kooky or crazy at times, too. All we both ever wanted was to safely secure a loving partnership with that sentient, caring and attentive special human being.
So what transpired of our tryst in the intervening married years from January 1998 until now? What flotsam and jetsam would be cast up from those treacherous eddies and Internet currents? Into that vacuum of electronic loneliness, into its centre- the desolate circle- the gods of the Web extracted their sacrifice, their pound of flesh and the wayfaring colonists began to flounder in turgid lustral waters. Sucked toward that cavity, our helpless bodies now subject to its action, fingers unable to clasp onto the usual practicabilities of courtship, these lovers hand’s torn from prudence in their lusty haste to make fateful decisions they shall come to rue in Poseidon’s vortex. Sex?
Of course that was the crux of it. Mums and dads don’t have sexual needs in the minds of their offspring. We held our very own germ of desire like anyone else. Just like our antecedents down and down from the beginning of time we all seek the seed in which lies hidden the flower of next summer’s golden flower. And that something magical that develops in the capsule of its parent bloom; the parent may be but slightly different, slightly changed.
And what of love?
Love is what we want. And as for sex and love? We reconciled to accept our differences and thereafter determined from those differences we arrange our blooms in our own form of domestic harmony. A new kind of sex and love! All pumped up and primed to go in synthesised nuclear family form only for it to appear to end it as a wavering kind of sex and love.
For the initial honeymoon period I had bravely ensconced myself at the Limoncello’s ranch home on a six acre spread just outside the small northern New York State town of Ithaca not a long drive from Cornell (42°41′00″N, 76°41′46″W). All told I spent a year there- as long as it took the United States Immigration and Naturalisation Service to rubber stamp my euphemistically named Alien Residency.
As much as I loved it at first I soon grew weary of the constant diet of trips to the yacht club or around the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge spotting Bald Eagles. And frankly, the Limon- juiced family suppers at sister-in-law, Mary’s and barbecues at Uncle Pete’s who overwhelmed us all with his crazed passion for anything ‘Guns’ and National Rifle Association and at the least expected time would exclaim ‘did you guys hear that lake fart?’ The man would shoot anything and everything that moved and became frightfully fraught with increased animus.
Brother-in-law, Steve was the only one I seemed to have a ‘normal’ buddy-style rapport with and he was almost always downstate working a laser surgeon’s hours unless he came up for a weekend’s spot of fishing in Cayuga Lake.
But in the end it was Aunt Mary’s xenophobia for anything non-American plus my own homesickness thrown in as seasoning all determined I should play my one trump card and solemnly declare that I could no longer bare not to see my own two kids, and off we all must jolly well go.
So it transpired for Bloom’s pair of lemons that they joined in a year’s problematic shenanigans of trying to settle a recalcitrant, geographically, culturally and emotionally disorientated adolescent only child in an alien, friendless, hostile and pitiless old world.
Lita Limoncello Bloom was the rubric, my conundrum, and our beast child and she often did her beastliest best to try our patience.
She hated English food, she disliked her teachers and peers, and she despised our television and music, what more counts in the mind of an adolescent American girl?
Only with fortitude and after some considerable passage of time would come any small blessing from the great ‘tamer of horses and saviour of ships’. Hail, Poseidon, Holder of the Earth, dark-haired lord! O blessed one, be kindly in heart and help those who voyage in blips.
Finally we had reason to thank all the gods for delivering tall mercies to North Haven. Lanky six-footer Claire Boylan was Leery Lita’s first true friend at Bishop Thomas Dupré School. It took many weeks of tears, squabbles, bedroom tornados, hugs and hankies. But finally the cataclysm was somehow averted. Kindly Claire’s Samaritan touch amongst the hordes of Levites gave Lita the compassion she desperately craved from local kids.
Being of such lofty construction Claire was certainly quite an Amazon of a child but who better to be a worthy sidekick cum guardian angel?
Spunky, confident Claire’s timely intervention was worth far more than two denarii to us and may well have averted a crisis of biblical proportions.
Of course, this was North Haven, ostensibly a sleepy antediluvian coastal town so typical of all those quaint, pretty-in-parts, moribund fishing towns you find all along the east coast of England. These were the rural flat plains of old East Mercia; so rural and well connected in parts with a sprinkling of musty heritage. You can stroll past dilapidated public housing estates one minute then alongside well-appointed town houses, wooded banks, sandy beaches and dry landing places soon after.
Here there are field after rolling field of gently sloping corn and lush green marshes that would spread on into infinity if it weren’t for the pebble seashores, low craggy cliffs and sandy estuary beaches to punctuate their contagious drift. Here was bar ideal holiday destination for the geriatric and life weary, a Mecca for tree huggers and twitchers.
As much as I loved the gently meandering, quiet reed banks lazily sloping seawards, as much as Mrs Bloom adored this life paced for slippers and cucumber sandwiches rather her boom boxing and hip hopping precious little child just didn’t get it.
For a shrewder insight into the prevailing demographics of North Haven then I say to anyone, just take a few minutes of your time to peruse the main crop of advertisements that those slick media-marketers pump out on our day time TV regional channels. Here we suffer a glut of ads for arthritis remedies, debt consolidators, ‘trip or fall’ ambulance chasers, disposable nappies, convenience microwave dinners, mobile phone ring tones and psychic hotlines at one pound a minute. Put the pieces of the puzzle together and you have an idea of your typical North Havener.
So perhaps now you could therefore understand why the other kids of Thomas Dupré High were bemused by the novelty of this insolent, gawky and rambunctious American kid.
But after a while the interest in any such uniqueness wears thin and Lita would remember her period in the Year Tens very well and never too pleasantly. You see even the older, larger, bolder Claire could not protect Lita forever from the jealous stinging ‘lemon’ taunts of the yobbish bullies.
It all just precipitated the whirlwind of our marital split. I calculated, what with intermittent episodes of residence in Florida added into the equation, between our two homes in New York and England we had in total lived together as a family for less that two of the five years of marriage.
By chance while browsing the classifieds in the local papers I happened upon an up-market rental in South Haven that came up unexpectedly from an oil contractor who had to dash off to Brazil on a twelve-month stint.
Both big and small lemon as well as wilting bloom thought it the ideal solution: new home new school, Part Two.
Teens don’t want to be mollycoddled but they still need a place where they can feel safe and have a sense of belonging.
But I felt no sorrow when their suitcases were packed once more and they moved but ten miles away from this unfortunate drag. South Haven was altogether more salubrious than North Haven.
There they struck good fortune right off the bat, as new neighbours on Cedar Drive were Carlton Clover and his mother, Harriet. Harriet and Carlton befriended Lita and Carla almost straight away. The Clover family also made up of dad, who was Hector and youngest sibling sister, Faye, seemed kindly, protective and unassuming. Most of all pizza-faced Carlton promised to look out for Lita at the new high school.
But frankly, behind my stoical smiles I wondered how much time I had left before my wife and stepdaughter would give up on this Internet experiment completely and head back to the Big Apple. Feeling like I was living on borrowed time the die was now cast and from the wreckage of that abortive beginning the seeds were sown for that ‘trial separation’ and we all took a punt at less withered flowerings in more fertile soil better fitting my wife’s middle class aspirations.
Oh, how it promised so much more at the start when my luscious lemons first arrived on these shores. In happier days we had travelled to many a fine port in our excursions but to finally tie up at the Havens had been my doing. I had owned the little house in North Haven for a handful of years since my first wife divorced me. But Carla, being the inquisitive anglophile wanted to explore many a fine Albion dock before making her choice of harbour. Seeing the different places along our journeys, Plymouth, Falmouth, Southampton and so on culminating in an instructive tour of the sights of the great metropolis, the spectacle of our modern Babylon where she absorbed the greatest of icons-the Tower, Abbey, the wealth of Park Lane, perhaps to renew acquaintance with again sometime. Every place considered but ruled out for one reason or another. The thing which often struck her as a by no means a bad notion was she might have a gaze around to see about trying to make arrangements for summer music concerts, family stop-overs et al. then to embrace the notion of the most prominent coastal resorts: Margate was one such stop then Eastbourne, Scarborough and so on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel islands and similar bijou spots, which might prove highly recuperative for the my troubled American honey’s soul. Lower on the list came North Haven-still scenic along the coast and just about alive and quaint in its own idiosyncratic way with the trawler man’s scent if a big catch was landed. But here, too, there were the sea breezes, paddling pools, deck chairs, binocular-waving coastal twitchers, telescopes and young women in bikinis for me to ogle as I sketch or doodle a ditty in my pocket book. Take a seat! Ah! Lido peep!
South Haven was altogether different. Ten miles inland, more ‘upscale’ with narrow lanes, small traditional shops, fine restaurants and grander homes. I really did like the Limoncello’s new home. It was much larger and more spacious, better equipped, lighter, airier and more welcoming than my modest abode back in dull old Eccles Drive.
Carla was especially glad that she had all the wall space she needed to hang her fine collection of impressive Katsushika Hokusai prints. We had been collecting for some years now. It was my idea, naturally. Refinement and culture was what upwardly mobile persons seek today. The’ Great Wave’ print being my favourite.
I felt a bit jealous of it, perhaps. But I needed a break from all the bickering and tensions. I couldn’t face living with them right then night and day. I needed my own private space: some quality time away from the marriage. Let’s be honest- I’ve always been a persistent, natural loner.
Although we had hoped for more before Lita had gone to that first dreadful school Bishop Thomas Dupré had just sucked big time. But now things seemed a tad better. They settled quickly without me. Of course, we’d have days out as a family and they would sometimes still want to come visit me in my minimalist little suburban semi. Semi-married and back to those seminal games once more for Leo the lad.
I always put on the appropriate airs and graces when my visitors came a calling. I impeccably went with the flow in my usual laid- back manner. But even so, I wasn’t too keen on surprise visits-just in case. Whenever they did call on me they would often and to my great annoyance, pop in next door for a chat with my neighbour, Cilla Karibdis. She was the resident karaoke disco queen at the ‘Sunken Ship’ and some other out of town smoky alehouse. She was a vaguely handsome but often stone-faced women in her mid thirties, overly jewelled, heavily made up and past her prime already. From the greying roots of her bottle-blonde locks to those cheap plastic nails she possessed a quirky ordinariness for which Carla held an odd fascination.
Wife and neighbour first became good friends a year or so back when they found they shared a penchant for a diet of prying and tittle-tattle. Cookie got it served up by the plateful at the doorstep. Cilla, a divorcee of Turkish descent had an eye for the men. I confessed. I regrettably had the briefest of flings after my first wife divorced me. Thank Thetis for rescuing me from a darker fate. But those brief waves of passion had long ebbed away (or so I believed). Cilla was clearly ‘not upscale’ as my wife would term it. She feigned prudishness over nude statues I kept in my garden, held superstitious fear black cats and had truly indescribable talent as a singer-songwriter. My cookie Carla often queried what on earth I had ever seen in a woman who offered little apart from a structurally fulsome silhouette. I suspected the friendship thing was all a clever ruse. I held a deep suspicion Karibdis was my wife’s paid informant and I was the target. I was sure the Turkish One was told everything about our past; how we met, what brought us together, what my foibles were, etc, etc. Oh. God I hated her having to people all our ins and outs!
I was sure my wife told every Tom, Dick and Mary that same joyous story. Of how like a golden gift from the gods the World Wide Web had first transported Carla to me. We were part of that first flush of transatlantic Internet daters in the late 1990’s. There wasn’t the same cynicism back then. She said she loved the English for their polite sincerity and manners. We were both children of immigrant parents. An Italian-American now conjoined to the Anglo-Irish. I always encouraged her to nurture a wistful romanticism about my country and it’s people. So what did happen about Cilla? It was a foolish fling. Like my father always told me in his strong southern Dublin accent, “ Never shit on your own doorstep, son. “ Like father, like son. He had his jars and I rode the women. Scoundrels both.

3
Over the months I became more adept at engineering social arrangements so that we held all family gatherings at my wife’s new place at thirteen Cedar Drive. This left me nicely residing free and easy, without my tangle of thorns to ponder, in my princedom by the sea. But what the Limoncello’s did have for themselves was really quite a fetching and salubrious suburb of South Haven and certainly appropriate for a woman of my wife’s means. After a while even my own two kids automatically accepted my wishes on that score. With her own new neighbourhood to meet and greet Cookie soon found an element she deemed more appropriate to her social needs. With her unique style of American hospitality Cedar Drive welcomed her absolutely. Harriet Clover was another of the breed of gossipers and peered over the garden fence always seeking a natter. Carlton would take his cue without prompting and tag along into the house aside Lita on a raiding mission to scoff her sickly- sweet chocolate home bakes or rifle the over-sized American fridge. I did warn the boy-it does nothing for those angry looking pustules attacking the corners of his mouth. Cookie would scold them for tramping their muddy shoes across her plush carpets but they were lotus-eaters one and the same- gathered round the kitchen table. And so the mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eater did come came like branches borne of that enchanted stem and laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave to each, but whoso did receive of them.
I’d often be there, too, or at least my physical me was. I wandered otherwise in spirit passing elsewhere to places more solipsistic than theirs. For eons, it seemed, my playground had been cyber space in a cocktail of comfort with a therapist and Prozac - sinecure for the stale prosaic pedant.

4
Carlton Clover was a lad of fourteen, ruddy complexion comprised of papular eruptions, gangly limbed but arriving in the throes of burgeoning adolescence. He sported a weak and wiry Shaggy goatee that was ever so slightly evidenced upon his chin. But he was affable and like me, loved those cute toothy grins that helped Lita shine on her new throne. No more school taunts of lemons for her- now pealed I hope. They liked to walk to and from school together. He introduced her to a whole different crowd including one new person who caused an equally eventful stir by her arrival about the same time. We first became aware of Rebecca van Hiller when Lita first told us she had made a wonderful new friend. The girl who had been through the toughest times so awfully mistreated by her parents and we were properly shocked at her story. Lita told us she was frequently locked in her bedroom, denied food and bathroom privileges; beaten and bullied by her older brother at the behest of the father. She ran away many times fleeing to uncles, aunts and grandparents for sanctuary, anyone who would save her. The child came to tea one afternoon. She acted coyly but we were warned about that-she was ever so self-conscious about her lazy right eye. So much so that she would always cover it with a hanging flop of her long dark hair. O me it was only a mild imperfection but it made her appear ever so much more charming and vulnerable. She made an instant impression. Charismatic! She spoke in a finical sweet voice, showing white teeth and blinking her eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Yes, I agree, too. Most attractive.
The tale she told profoundly touched my wife’s heart. In sympathy she was given centre stage before us. Her eyes were languid pools so dreamy. Carla’s kindly soul warmed to the lost child in wont of the second Lita she could never had.

So whether to stay or not to stay? Fostering was the question. There were such ruminations on the prospect. It was a subject of much regret and so absurd as well on the face of it. With no small blame to our vaunted society that the children were trudging our streets, when the welfare system really needed toning up and kids given some hopeful colour to their cheeks. All for the matter of a few pounds a child could be tragically debarred from thriving in the world in which they lived in- always and ever cooped up.
After all, damn it-too many humdrum months and now she merited a radical change of venue after a closeted life. Better for the child to be out in the summertime when Mother Nature is at her spectacular best for a new lease of life. The Limoncellos spoke of a room being made up for her in this delightful sylvan spot. Give the girl her rejuvenation; offer her wealth of opportunity and a more wholesome lifestyle in and around these picturesque environs. So it was to pass. Within the week a new resident was taken in at number thirteen Cedar Drive. Miss Rebecca van Hiller was rescued from her torments. Hallelujah!
‘Gaunt and pale,
Cute and nice,
Sweet vanilla
Come be my vice’
My baying American Cookieie still demanded of me a certain measure of husbandly duties. Today such was required of me and now my task was more gadding about post- Spring Bank holiday as I sleekly zipped to Cedar Drive in the new Merc. I was sporting my tight black pectoral-posing t-shirt, black boots and pants. The sleek black wrap around shades was the finishing touch. I wanted to accentuate my rediscovered manly physique chiselled by daily gym my workouts and I wanted to show it off. From the knowing looks I got now I felt the gym was enhancing most profitably my new preoccupation. But today courtesy and financial necessity put me at my estranged wife’s disposal yet again. I could not rebel against these impositions while I was on her payroll but her presence cramped my style. Today my queen had summoned me as yet more shop returns she had to deposit in the city. The woman had her own fixation and consumerism it was.
“ Oh, Leo honey bun! So Arnold Schwarzenstrudel has finally come dressed like a nightclub doorman-you stupid old pie heap! What on earth are you after? More brainless gawky chickadees?”
I was often scolded for my late arrival. It was my failing, I confess-always late, and never reliable. I hissed at the woman when she slammed the car door shut. I quickly chauffeured her from the house. Just her and me again, thank the gods. Normally, on a good day when I visited the South Haven residence I rarely saw those jeunes demoiselles. Whenever I chauffeured all three on a shopping trip the cackles and clucks would be such a cacophony it would drive any man to drink. Must be out and about with their street mates, I guess. Perhaps I may twist that pliant arm of hers into purchasing something more to my own tastes?
“ What’s in the carrier bags today? More unwanted nick-knacks? I get sick of these pointless shopping expeditions!” I scowled.
“ Drive on and don’t be mean! God! Where is my purse? You want to check up on some old prints don’t you? The girls need things, too! Drive on! Careful- you nearly hit that car!”
Returns made, windows browsed and coffees quaffed so imagine my surprise when we finally happened upon a fine antique shop and I saw some enchanting original and rare Japanese Kunisadas. To be frank I just adored and would collect any type of waraie and pore over it in raptures of delight. The dealer had acquired some remarkable woodblock prints. But madam was more swayed by my effusive description of the fineness of the pieces as I schmoozed her into buying one fine Shunga. I enlightened her on the artist’s wonderful use of gauffrage, lacquer, and burnishing and metallic pigment. She bought my eloquent patter and soon she saw it like me-all about the wonderful design. It was a charming rendition of an intimate couple-the woman relaxed drinking sake while the man saw to his duty and did all the work. She was slowly developing a taste we both could share. Bagged, bought and paid for my duty done and pleasures remain intact.

5
Perhaps like a lot of re-marrying men I found it difficult to adjust to living in a makeshift family. Is there any wisdom in setting up in someone else’s nest of problems? Flocks of these women habituate their preening grounds on the World Wide Web. They were all so monotonous and dreary in their ambitions: they had to find a husband. I so yearn for my surreptitious nights.
My cookie-crunching Carla wouldn’t come to the gym any more. I had given up trying to coax her. She piled on the weight in our first year together. You just can’t make a peach from a lemon. In the beginning we had Florida. Those pretences were now long over. Call me a private man- bookish, self-disciplined, obsessively clean and tidy. Perhaps. Obsessive, compulsive and emotionally disordered she would say. You laugh, I tell her and are frivolous and I ask who cleans your mess? These differences you don’t always pick up so quickly when you meet someone over the Internet. Keep your spontaneous, emotionally excitable, disorganised chaos. It takes time. I was making better use of mine now.
A trill sound broke my line of thought. Phone. “ Hi, Leo, Steve here-Cookie asked me to call. She’s been worried about you….says you’re not yourself lately-withdrawn and detached-how’s it been, chum?”
I liked Steve-her younger brother. But Cookie would always talk about me to other people behind my back. He was a good ten years younger than me- Yale Med high-flier. Ha! I peopled, too.
“ I don’t like playing doctor to family, Leo, no reward and little thanks. You’re no different from me- always busy with other things. Us men are the worst for neglecting our health- wanted to touch base and satisfy myself you’re all ok-you don’t mind? How is the gout by the way?” He spoke of tremors, nausea, sweats, or mood disturbance. In the muscles and joints; any night sweats; dry skin; hair loss or weight gain?
“ Come on, Steve, I’m not a boozer, my friend.” Carnival beer lech.
Erectile dysfunction? I assured him it was ok. Some stiffness. An occasional semi-lob on taking surreptitious peeks at forbidden fruits. Crisis? Crisis? What crisis?
“ You know my sister, Leo…..always Florence Nightingale on steroids. Only you to worry about now Lita’s back here with us.”
My diet, as you know, in my past life, had been atrocious. Offal meats and the lovely thick giblet soups, nutty gizzards I ate. You can’t beat a fine a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all I liked grilled mutton kidneys. But to my dismay that often left me smelling of scented urine, I joked. Goutish! Steve was educated and liked a literary laugh or two. He had helped me like I had helped him (a nasty scrape at a house of ill repute in Newark, NJ one time but we won’t go there!) and he fixed my gout with Allopurinol. Can’t keep off the red wine though, just like Telemachus. Plenty of exercise, a good varied diet and fresh air were what the doctor ordered. I particularly loved my fruits, ripened and peachy always looking for a bite of that five times a day if I could. Thanks for that, Stevie boy! I’m on the up and feeling good.
I so adored this warmer weather. More gadding about now like with my own two kids, driving off to see the family down in Berkshire, Cookieecues at every opportunity. And me there laughing, relaxing, and watching the village cricket. Heavenly skies really. If life was always like that. Proper cricket weather. Sit like lords under a parasol for both innings. Out! They can't play it here. Followed on and lost the ball to the running dog that scampered over the boundary ropes after the finest of slogs. Heat waves never last but the globules are warming. Saving the planet for a greener peace. Global. No gentle street jogging on tonight on this glorious balmy summer’s evenings. Another day I shall feel that intoxicating noradrenaline rush at the end. Showered and dressed for seven and tanned and glowing in summer whites. Or shorts not slacks? Mahogany knees as trophies. Wet shaved and scrubbed up fresh. Dinner at the Mansion House. Driven to the park. Brother and sister in law’s treat. Lovely- topped it off with a cool drink or two in the red and amber glow of sunset. What a tasty tipple.
6
JULY 12TH 2002. Then one fine afternoon it started to change forever. No more Glückliche Zeiten. The phone call marked the end of the happy times. It came as I was sunning myself in my balmy English garden.
I had an assignation planned for that evening and I wanted to perk up my tan. But plans suddenly changed. Cookie’s voice was agitated; she spoke very fast, so fast in fact that all I could make out was that she felt alone and at her wits end. She went on about missing Lita who packed her suitcases and had gone back to the States. Shit. I kind of overlooked how that must have felt. I was being rather self-indulgent and insensitive really. I should have rallied round her a bit more. Cookie’s confidence must have been dented at Lita’s departure at the end of the school summer term. Her moods would swing one-way or the other. I had kept out of her way until she got used to it. She was prone to some awful rants from time to time. Her voice rattled at me through the phone. She had her own distinct New York vernacular. Of Queens. Always things were ‘going down the pan’. I put it down to the fact Lita had chose to stay with the older sister cranky Carla detested. Mary had a swanky place in the country an hour or so from Albany. I never liked the snotty cow. Mary called England, “ That third world country.”
It wasn’t just Lita leaving that upset Cookie. She still had the other little problem on her hands-someone else’s kid and no one else wanted to help. My ear was buzzing from the pounding she was giving me down the phone. What compounded my wife’s rancour was that Social Services had done nothing to sort out finances or other accommodation in the six months since Rebecca came into her care. I couldn’t fathom out how this state of affairs could run indefinitely. To top it all this kid just wasn’t right. The girl was now behaving oddly. The longer Cookie kept me on the phone the clearer it became. With no Lita around this Rebecca had suddenly become a right pain. Clearly life had gotten bleaker all round.
She kept me on the phone for what seemed like an age. She jabbered on.
“Leo, this week’s been an absolute hell! Tuesday she came back late stinking of booze-Carlton says he saw her climbing out of the back of a busted up old Ford! She stumbles in the house and falls down and a white package fell out of her handbag…drugs, Leo!”
Cookie said when she questioned her she denied the drugs but admitted to having unprotected sex. The drugs she was holding for a friend. On Wednesday she spoke with the neighbours, Harriet and Carlton, on Cedar Drive who were picking up on things and showing concern.
“I’ve tried grounding her, Leo. I even taking away Lita’s old mobile phone she lent her. When I did that-god! She was almost up at me like ready for a fight!”
In desperation my wife now wanted my input. If I couldn’t be bothered to help then she, too, was going to be on the next flight out. She had had a gut full, she spluttered. I took her seriously. We agreed a crisis meeting for the next day. Maybe the kid needed a father figure in her life to put her straight.
The following day I cruised over in the Mercedes and I weighed it all up. I couldn’t have my wife packing it all her scratching of the arms and elbows thing she always did when she was strung out.
“Ah, I’m so glad you’re here! I could have throttled the little slut. I just don’t know what goes on in her head-I threatened to throw her out last night and she just smiled back at me- can you believe it?”
“That’s just the drugs, Cookie just put that down to drugs”
But she retorted, “ No, Leo, it was much more than just drugs, she was a different person, like she was possessed!”
I put my arm around her and gave her one of those manly hugs that she liked. It had often been a soothing antidote but today not much more than a sop. I felt her tear on my cheek and she took a deep, slow breath.
She began to calm somewhat and she made us both a nice cup of tea. We sat out on the patio. A warm, soothing breeze fluttered through the manicured garden borders bathed in full summer sun. She made me promise to help make some telephone calls. First, I phoned Social Services: just an answering machine. No luck there. I then tried phoning the mother who only once telephoned us about her child. That, ominously, was to warn off Rebecca who had been round her younger sister’s primary school upsetting her on and off for months. When I asked if she would help she just gave me the number of the grandparents then hung up: most curt! I thought. I tried that number but no answer.
Over the next few days we explored all the avenues we could. Rebecca was often out of the house most of the day off doing her thing. Cookie had got beyond caring for now. Just having her away from the house was a blessing. Apparently she was spending a lot more time either at the Clover’s next door or hanging out with the skater crowd. Apparently the South Haven ‘crew’ were better at ‘grinding’ than North Haven skaters. We busied ourselves but were just not coming up with the goods. Crucially, Social Services had no suitable alternative accommodation at the moment for this kid. The parents obstinately refused to take her back citing the needs of the other siblings as their first priority. I felt like saying I’d take the kid to the police station and dump her there with her packed bags but I knew that wouldn’t help things. This kid was playing on Cookie’s conscience and her sympathy most cleverly. Cookie called it ‘reverse psychology’ and Rebecca was running rings round her.
In the end I surrendered to the inevitable. It wasn’t just a case of me having to be a nobler chap although I am not averse to playing the part of hero. But I knew I had to give it a go. Frankly, I wised up, I knew my wife was funding my lifestyle and I felt guilty seeing her go under. And the bottom line was I had to consider what would happen to me if she cracked and took off back to America. She was clearly desperate and I would have been, too, if I suddenly lost her financial support. So I made a promise to her to keep her from breaking. From now on I was going to get actively involved in the matter.
The new school term was coming up: early September. The first day soon arrived and I dutifully drove to the house. I got there about 3pm and was met at the door by the somewhat forlorn figure of my wife. She was still pale and sick of it all, like she was in some kind of mourning. But she offered up a smile then gave me an almost apologetic peck on the cheek.
She went to make some tea while I made myself comfortable on the sofa. She had left open one of her slushy romantic novels on the coffee table. I read a line from the top of a page, 'that insidious tyrant of the female heart, who soothes us with the hope of happiness, only to plunge us into the certainty of disappointment.' I told myself I had to deliver the goods or my own lifestyle was going to suffer. I was never sure whether I would turn out the hero or the villain in her story. I did my best to cheer her up.
We sat and drank tea. My mother was also an avid drinker of tea. Tea was the panacea to a whole day of trials and tribulations. But Mrs Bloom was a tea-drinker extraordinaire. This was odd, I thought for a good old -fashioned New York girl raised on percolated coffee grinding. Out would come the cake and biscuit tin (always full of fresh, delicious, home-made goodies). My wife would have the choicest Ceylon leaves never the fanciest of Earl Greys but a sound mix nonetheless. Not your common or garden tea bags stew either.She made hers in a large pot, a good, stout English big brown teapot with a knitted tea cosy over it that connoisseurs would recognise. I think it was partly the ritual of the tea-making ceremony she adored. It was that quintessential ceremony of warming the pot, letting it draw and finally pouring the infusion through the strainer to mix most satisfyingly with the splash of milk in the china cup. I guess we all loved the chink of the silver spoon, too, as we stirred the mix. Reassuringly this mundane of domestic acts making us all feel at home and so safe.
“This is my game plan, Cookie. I’ll come over and get her sorted on her schoolwork and we can build a daily routine round that-an hour or so each day after school. Just to keep her occupied until social services get her a proper foster place sorted. I’ll just muddle through with my supply teaching until the colder months arrive so it’s no big deal.”
The tea and biscuits was most agreeable, as husband and wife were we in the new stratagem. Each day after a light tea it was going to be like this. Our wayward charge would receive her gentle instruction from me in the upstairs study. At the desk I would peruse all her assignments, work diary and textbooks and files and set about my task to adorn little Miss Rough Diamond with a finer veneer. No more after school waywardness, no more of the repellant distractions of boys, psychedelics, alcohol and tomfoolery.
Just before four o’clock the front door sounded in a jarring fulmination. I was sat at the computer in the makeshift bedroom cum study. I heard the mumble of voices from the kitchen followed instantly by the clump clump of footsteps on the stairway and I turned to see her at the door.
” Hi Leo, Cookie says you and me will be doing a few good things together?” She smirked.
Before I could open my mouth and make my pitch she nonchalantly undone the top few buttons of her school blouse giving me the glad eye. A large lock of shiny black hair flopped down to mask most of the other, less perfect, side of her pretty face while, conversely, her full black brassiere thrust into view. My gaze fell fixed upon her most ample cleavage. I felt the challenge. She was taunting me and tempting me at the same moment. She acted as if possessed with a great confidence not typical of other sixteen year-old schoolgirls I had known. I tried to avert my stare as I dertemined it was in her to be “porne.” Her good eye locked onto me and I withered before her.
Incongruously, she posed before me theatrically and waited for a few seconds. But then her confidence ebbed and a look of puzzlement came over her. She hadn’t elicited from me the response she craved. I truly doubt she understood the real nature of my momentary indecision.Undecided as to whether I should display vexation or flirtation she dallied no more and made a tactical withdrawal.
“ I’ll just get changed.” she said in what I took as a tone of disappointment. She turned and slowly sloped off to her bedroom tugging up her blouse from her skirt and exposing her perfect soft white midriff. I watched her closely as she tossed a bulging schoolbag over her shoulder and walked launguidly through the picture frame of her open bedroom door.
Then I saw it on her lower side, just above her womanly-ripe hip, a three-inch scar blemishing her otherwise flawless beauty. That’s a shame, I thought.
But no matter, still those perfect hips. Well within the divine ratio. I had registered her signal of fertility loud and clear. Our dear Rebecca had fine childbearing hips-smack on the money and plain to see perfectly proportioned for perfect health, fecundity and above all, lust.
If I were of a mind to measure I would say hers was that sublime waist to hip ratio 0.7. Not your prepubescent, straight up and down nought point nines or so but a winning nought point seven. A woman needs those luscious hips to win her man and our Miss van Hiller was certainly not one for losing hers.
As I gaze longingly at that slinky seductress I seem to palpitate; in contemplating her my modesty takes alarm, desire begins to awake, and imagination to kindle and I am smitten with a mad passion for the voluptuous and the commiseration my state of mind inspired set aside all idea of ridicule.
I would be like those men of far-distant centuries who were so given over to the pleasures of the senses that they built a temple to Venus Callipyge. This was how it happened then. A countryman had two fair daughters; they were contending one day with each other about the beauty of their hips, each declaring that hers were the most beautiful, and so disputing they came upon the highway. A young man happening to pass that way whose father was already well in years, they at once submitted themselves to the judgment of his eyes, and he pronounced in favour of the eldest. But at the same time he fell so deeply in love with her, that he had hardly arrived at the town before he fell ill, kept his bed, and told his young brother what had happened to him. The latter hastened to the fields to look at the young girls, and fell in love with the youngest. Their father sought in vain to persuade them to unite themselves with better families. So, being obliged to yield, he obtained the consent of the father of the two sisters, whom he sent for immediately from the fields, and married his sons with them. This event caused the name of Callipyge to be given to the two wives among their fellow-citizens, as Cercidas of Megalopolis relates in his iambics. Now you, my own curvaceous van Hiller Venus, smite me with your magical iambic angle to your force to break blow and make me new.

7
TUESDAY 10TH SEPTEMBER 2002. A routine was now being tentatively built and most days I would arrive at the house in the afternoon. First Carla and I would enjoy tea and cake on the garden patio and then strictly by four Rebecca would be home for our study session.
All the time I coached the miscreant my wife would occupy herself with her head buried in one of her turgid romantic novels. Somehow, over time, I was even able to fit in my secret passions without consternation.
I tried to introduce some class and culture into the house. Tatty old copies of books from my college days I would surreptitiously leave on the coffee table as bait to see if either of them would bite. Rebecca did once said she especially enjoyed the short stories of F Scott Fitzgerald. But when it came to James Joyce it was an altogether different matter. Cookie had no time for the inaccessible or demanding, “ Oh, Joyce! Why bother with him! His books should come with a health warning: ‘likely to cause serious indigestion of the mind’!” She’d lament for a nice dinner,’ help do a pie?’ she’d say, me not being one for cooking so we’d go out for dejeuner depending on the fineness of the evening.
Rebecca also took an interest in the wall mounted Japanese woodblock prints displayed around the house. She coyly asked me to explain them seeing there was something there to arouse her curiosity, as they seemed to her to depict scenes of romantic male and female entanglements. I was glad she was absorbing a little of the culture of the world, expanding her horizons and re-evaluating her sensibilities. I found the dealer’s catalogue of works that was given to us from our recent successful shopping expedition. More to impress me than anything she told me she much admired the depiction of bishōnen and oyaji masculine forms. I explained my wife was more into the Shōjo-ai style. While I could see much beauty in it all.
At first Saturdays were the gathering times. Family days were the melting pot. A fondue. Into the equation came my own offspring, Lee and Annabel. The neighbour’s kid and Becky’s new school pal, Carlton showed up, too. Becky and Carlton seemed a little wary of my two at first but give it time and they would gel. I let them get on with it. They had all seemed to congregate around the large 47-inch projection television that filled the corner of the lounge and jutted awkwardly in front of the patio doors. Petulant Annabel swiped the remote first and was flicking through music channels while Becky weighed up the scene. Annabel screeched at the boys that it was her turn first!
“ Thirty minutes each-take it in turns-that’s fair! Or I’ll tell!”
At first Becky kept quiet, watched and learned- listening to the schwa, schwa sounds of middle-class Anglo-American speech as my wife came through from the kitchen and tried to orchestrate some game plan for a lunchtime menu.
I flitted back and forth from kitchen to lounge quietly in my own laid back way, taking an overview. I noted how shrewdly Rebecca found a useful prop as an easy shoe-in with Annabel. She had hastily raided the kitchen and from a mass of plastic grocery bags found the ideal emollient.
“What’s your name? Asked my inquisitive little girl as she spooned the tasty gobfulls of ice cream. “That’s a funny name- Rebecca Vanilla!” My daughter howled out in fits of laughter and let slip a mushy brown dollop of goop from her open mouth.

“ No, no its van- HILLER! Not like ice cream!” Rebecca countered trying her best not to look annoyed. But lots of people have said that. Actually I do love the smell of vanilla perfume. I wear it all the time. Annabel wants to know why she has such a strange name like a food.
“ It’s a Dutch name. My grandfather was a sailor and my family came over after the big floods of 1953”.
“Darling” I interjected, “The world is shrinking. You’re going to meet lots of people with different names-some will sound strange but you should just be polite, please. You children are the generation spawned in the melting pot of the world.”
Her innocent, fresh eyes looked back at me unknowing and innocent. Somehow in her childlike mind a switch flicked on and with wisdom all of her own she took the hand of van Hiller and led her to the drawing room. There, with reverence, she opened a leather-bound photo album and displayed the captured memories of her own antecedents.
Theirs was the generation of the broken family, the absent father, migration, global economic pressure, financial selfishness and the dissolution of tribal values, diversity and opposition. Farewell to extended families and social bonds, indigenous culture and any sense of responsibility to others. Values and morals that did not fit neatly into consumerism will be redundant. In this incipient new age of globalisation each anodyne metropolis will be peopled by trolls under the tutelage of mass marketers who help orchestrate mass-produced everything. Everything will be infected by the pandemic of compliance, conformity and niceness to all. Welcome to the hegemony of the One, of the Supreme Being preaching a culture of assimilation and homogenisation into the corporate driven way. Moneymakers, Wall Street, traded stocks and bonds and simple vanilla options. Our role models shall be the bland, mid tone, middle of the road, and hermaphrodite, asexual polymorphs of glossy magazines and electronic media. Be everyman to every woman and be politically correct and lovely. Don’t offend, don’t have opinion and don’t speak out of turn. Conform.
My opportunistic little bean was of that moment and of that ilk. Her talent appeared quickly fast-talking sound bites of glib, shallow, glossy eye-catching truisms. She had a winning flavour to encompass all. Bland or subtle: a qualitative measure borne of quantitative supremacy. Miss Love Pod fell upon her next target and I, uneasily but helplessly welcomed the charm offensive and subliminal bonding. Annabel got it right first time: Rebecca Vanilla.
Just at that moment my wife came in to the dining room brandishing cutlery looking to set the table.
“Ah, Annabel….you and Becky found some wedding photos? Ah, look, Leo! Some of the three of us.” They all peer at the fuzzy snaps betraying the informality if not the hastiness of the ceremony.
I wore my caring face and interjected informatively.
“yes, you see-there’s Cookie, Lita and me….that’s the preacher’s log cabin…..see how deep the snow was-right up over the porch? That’s the Catskill Mountains, Annabel, where I told you…that’s the place where we took our vows.”
Rebecca squeezed herself slowly in between my wife and daughter and me for a better view as she brushed softly across my torso I felt that tingle again.
But that second I also felt a brush of coarse, cold skin on the back of my mind. And then came the smile and a glad hand from my wife. I checked myself and pulled away from the huddle not to let the savour merge unobtrusively into the dish. No ice cream for me. ‘Ail van Gril’
“Tea anyone, I’m just putting the kettle on.” I made my escape to the sanctuary of the kitchen. There I again pondered my conundrum and my growing sense of ill ease. My disillusionment with my life she had brought it all into sharper focus. But this was her way. She was the Vanilla Girl and he was everything to everyone and she enjoyed being ubiquitous in her game. Perhaps it was merely her defence mechanism, a survivalist’s ploy when you are vulnerable in a foreign setting and you feel that you are totally unlike the people around you. Not at all a pleasant predicament.
“ Daddy! Daddy! Come see- look at us! Isn’t this good?”
I trudged with my tea into the lounge where they all were now. There were wires and a box rigged up to the television. Annabel had brought her dancing pad video game and wanted to try it out. It wasn’t new, just some unwanted gift given to her mother by a work colleague at the police station. Lee and Carlton’s bony backsides were poking out from the side of the TV as they sorted the tangle of connections and plugged the device in. Becky and Annabel were sifting through shiny game disks. I caught the joy in my daughter’s eyes as the older girl pandered to her. Some family responsibility, I determined, some bonding child to child, might make her feel less the lost little sheep.
For now I was her shepherd. All would be well as long as there were no more men or drugs. It was the bad company she kept that got her in that mess. A better sort around her would bring out the best in her. We all needed to be watchful over her. That was why we enlisted Carlton Clover. We knew his parents. We knew the Clovers were a decent sort. Carlton would be watchful. He needed no prompting. For he had long been following her around home and school like a loyal lap dog just like he did before with Lita. Always a good kid and trustworthy, Carlton could be relied upon to warn of the first sign of danger. Sentinels watch and pedagogues do teach. I let them dally in their amusements and I took to the study to read awhile. Those days were soon to become shorter and colder. But I determined then I should remain diligent and dutiful to my task as mentor and liberator.
The weeks seemed to pass seamlessly and trouble free, it seemed. My cream girl graciously attended our daily post-school tutorials. My wife smiled and had her controls back. She had her dominions and her place back in the world. Each day she witnesses insipid and compliant vanilla pod dutifully acquiesce along with a bland and observant husband. The pedagogue shall draw out of the errant student’s innate talents and abilities by imparting his own hard -won knowledge of the arts, literature, philosophy, history, scientific reasoning and mathematics. But, more subtly, the good teacher shall reveal to the student an array of ‘meaningful’ experiences so as to ensure the reaction from her he desires. This was the wonderful theory. This was to be how any situation encountered could be turned to a learning experience, the tender, young neurons shall be receptive, follow logical sequences in time for my own satisfying consequences.
Each day Rebecca Vanilla took the books from my hand and acted as if they were gifts from the gods. I liked it best when she sat as good as gold beside me in her school greys, obedient, compliant and sweet for one old scholar who doted on plenty of pleat. In stony silence she dutifully read as I watched her then I tested her comprehension. English literature she had to pass. My sweet bland-acting bean worked her affectation and stagecraft. She possessed the outward appearance of knowing and understanding but she lacked insight. It wasn’t absorbed. I struggled to fathom it and blurted out my frustrations.
“ I’m sorry-forgive me- I don’t mean to snap or unsettle you. I don't try to be a gadfly, but I do think that this is troublesome” I wanted her to understand the book. “The writer wants his work to leave the reader unsettled-he intends that. Plead I hope-do you see?”
Her shoulders slumps in disappointment at my outward impatience as I frantically scratch away disapprovingly at her notes with my red ink pen and give to her bluntly.
“The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Writers do not provide examples of how to live!”
I try to tell her about how mixed up some people are. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for us.
“But would we want to become Virginia Woolf? I think not!” I decry.
Progress with Becky Bean soon becomes wearisome and slow. She is an easily distracted child. She flits about in her mind from anorexia to hair straighteners from hip-hop to bulimia all covered in each daily from homespun seminar.
I let her change the subject like I am often led to. More often that not her preferred chitchat was about Lita’s wardrobe of conjure up some new and even more disgusting food concoction even grosser and more sickly than yesterday’s fantasy. Given the chance she would feed herself if she were allowed her own household budget. My sweet twisting white vine became fidgety and dropped her notebook onto her school bag beside the desk and wriggled her pert little behind. Then uprooting her self from beside me she shot off.
“ I gotta take a pee, Leo.”
I pondered the shabby canvas shoulder bag with its frayed edges and noted the ballpoint pen scrawl somewhat faded but revealing the legend, “ SkAtEr bOyZ dO iT sTaNdInG.” That’s South Haven grinding for you. Give me strength! A doodled pocket size volume peaked out slightly from under two dogged-eared maths textbooks. It was screaming at me to pick it up. I released it from its straitjacket and the pages fell open at September 4th 2002. First anniversary of the death of Hank ‘the Angry Drunken Dwarf,’ American radio personality, birthday of Beyoncé Knowles, singer [1981], 247th day of the year (248th in leap years). There are 118 days remaining. A spidery blue-black entry read;
‘ I talked to my bestest friend today. She is my rock, my sissa and I love her. She makes me smile and is just so sweet to me. I know someone is mistreating her. Some peeps are cruel that way. Saw her in school and she is getting smarter. She is going to go far and be happy. It’s hard being here. No friends to visit or call. Lots of things are different now. I am not as happy here as I let on to be. I got those voices in my head again. They told me I am useless and unlovable.’
A distant flush of water signals me to hurriedly replace my find. Quickly composed I simply smile at my precious little vanilla pod and humour her inanely just as I would with any other little self-centred missy you get every day of the week buzzing around teacher’s desk at school. My blossom sits aside me again now smelling of orchids in nymphetland: awkward and fey and dimly depraved, the lower button of her shirt unfastened. Then she gave me that wounded doe look.
“Is there anything special you two would like for tea? Harriet and Hector will drop in later.” Came the howl from downstairs. I gave a chuntering answer and ushered off my sweet cream.
Scurry off now simple soul. What’s the use? I thought. All too often I reach my own boredom threshold with kids. The three of us sat around the dinner table. Miss buttoned top now had headphones clamped over her petite skull. Go back to your hip-hop raps and your misogynistic urban ghetto gangstas. Over that evening meal new plans were laid. Weekends would be better balanced, I declared, once we consent to an alternative viewpoint into our miscreant’s home curriculum. To shake off the prison mentality we shall let Becky go off with Cilla Karibdis to her pub Karaoke sessions at weekends.
As I munched and masticated on our chef’s over-cooked linguini and baked tomatoes a la carte it amused me to ponder women in terms of food metaphors. That way you can entertain yourself when you’re in one of those blue funks. This was a well-worked strategy often employed while covering long, dull exam invigilation at Bishop Thomas Dupré High School. On those occasions when I sought to withdraw to my interior solipsistic self I would sit like Rodin’s statue of the ‘Poet’ or as some say, the ‘Thinker.’ Make yourself look highbrow, Leo. Super-intellectually perched centre-stage in an assembly hall of one hundred and seventy-four aspirant examinees ordered in a column of twelve and fifteen rows with six absentee examinees, busy bees out to please. Stomach growls and hunger pangs. Don’t speak, don’t move, don’t fidget, and don’t fart. Just be.
For afters let’s squirt that trifling Turkish flavour into the dish. Or my wife’s over-ripe melons? No? Maybe I should throw the monkey some bananas? A dash. Vanilla and bananas? Now there’s a tasty kitchen concoction we could whip up one fine Saturday. Or is that sundae? In an expensive and expanding (think wifey’s waistline!) multi- trillion-dollar global food industry Turkish delight was always in the picture. Get our Limoncello Lady to splash the cash. Lemon Bella, baby! (I hope pealed). For the tempting concoction of chocolate sauce: add 110grammes (or four ounces) of dark chocolate then to that mix two tablespoons of golden syrup. Then throw in seventy-five millilitres (or two fluid ounces) of water. For the banana split take two bananas, one can of whipped cream (always a bedroom buzz), one tub of vanilla (van Hiller) ice cream, one chocolate coated honey comb bar, thirty grammes, that’s one ounce, of chocolate coated peanut sweets and zest of lemon. Then you’ve got yourself a delicious taste sensation. Slap me out a few dollops. Eyes down row five, no peeking. More paper in column three and prissy penny has her hand up for a toilet break so no full house. The statue thinks on. What astounding memories I am collecting for the scrapbook of my geriatric mind. Oh, how I shall enjoy reliving these golden days.
Memories of silly Cilla visiting Cookie more and more just to keep tabs on me. She hasn’t let go I know she wants me. Anyway, play your game Cilla. Come on by to thirteen Cedar Drive on the way to work make it your weekly routine. Every once in a while you can keep my little hillerpod for