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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. SPIKE by Peta Alexander
Uncle Spike could never resist a bargain. His home was always full -- and I mean really full -- of stuff. Stuff was an important, all encompassing word. It was the word used by his long-suffering wife to describe the otherwise indescribable. Mind you, Aunty Maureen was not a lot better than Uncle Spike. She could fall prey to the beckoning charms of a bargain herself --- worse, she was a hoarder, too. String, elastic bands, paper bags, plastic bags, carrier bags, cardboard, bubble-wrap, tissue paper, gift wrapping paper (birthdays, weddings, christenings, Christmas; I swear that, if any was ever made, she could have produced some funereal gift wrap!) Uncle Spike, who was my Dad's brother, and Aunty Maureen shared a tiny two-up/two-down in Jubilee Street, which was just around the corner from our house. My Mum and Dad are gone now, and the little house where my three brothers and I grew up is gone too, and in place of the houses there is now an Aldi. However, Uncle Spike never moved; he stayed on, refusing to move in with me, even after he lost Maureen a few years ago; she was coming out of the Aldi and got knocked down by a car. For a while, as she lay in intensive care, we thought that she was going to pull through, but after a couple of days she relapsed and died quite suddenly. I suppose that it might seem a bit callous, but I couldn't help secretly wishing that I could sneak round to Uncle's and see if I could find some of that mythical funeral gift wrap. Of course, I did no such thing. For one thing, I am a mum with two kids of my own to look after; besides, I had no ideas as to what might be a suitable funeral present! I suppose that's what I am like really. All head-in-the-clouds with fanciful notions and no practical ideas. Whatever it was that made Uncle Spike the way that he is must also have come through to me. It certainly missed my Dad entirely. He was always very sensible, only there was that time he knocked over a tin of paint as he prepared to decorate our bathroom. He told us afterwards that he hadn't wanted to waste the paint. Now that I stop to think about it, that paint had been the awful dun-coloured result of combining the left-over paint from a dozen previous jobs into one large gallon-sized container. Anyway, what he did was to work with frantic, slapdash, haste. Using the floor as his paint kettle, he coated every wall, then the ceiling, then the doors and window-frame and skirting. In the end there was still a significant puddle left so he spread that out in a thick coat on the floorboards. The floor took a week to dry, during which time we were all reduced to stand-up scrub-downs at the kitchen sink and peeing in buckets; we saved the more serious toiletary activity for school, or in Dad's case, work. We were too proud to confess our predicament to the neighbours. Now I think about it, I never did find out how Mum managed during that time; now, I suppose I will never know. I'll never forget the expression on Dad's face though on the day of the official grand re-opening ceremony, which was a Sunday. Dad had placed a ribbon across the bathroom door and his Mum, who always came to our house for tea on Sundays, was to cut the ribbon. He never missed the chance for a ceremony. The ribbon was cut and Nanny Wilcox uttered the immortal words that made me and Barry giggle with surprise, at her indelicacy. "I declare this facility well and truly open," she said. Snip went the scissors. "May god bless it and all who piss in it." She then opened the door, went straight in, and was seen to be hitching up her skirt even before she had pushed the door to. For some reason we all stood there waiting for her to re-emerge. Eventually we heard the cistern flushing and the door opened. "I reckon it could've done with a few more days, drying, son," she said, without a trace of guilt or sympathy. Behind her, we could see the terrible tracks of her spike heels in the new paint. Poor old Dad looked as though he didn't know whether to throttle his mother or just burst into tears. For a moment, we thought that he might shout at her but in the end he just gulped mightily and agreed. "I think you're right there, Mum." His face, though, took hours to completely lose that sad and doleful expression which had formed in the instant he saw the heel-ravaged floor. So I suppose, looking back, that he wasn't as much of a practical chap, at least not in the conventional sense, as my childish eyes perceived him. I can't say that we were a close-knit family; with four men to run around after, and care for, I suppose that Mum thought she was being kind to me, as the youngest, by not imposing upon me a share of the domestic chores. Needless to say the boys were never coerced. Kindly meant, or not, the result of Mum's largesse was to leave me often feeling a little left out of things. I always felt as though I was neither one thing nor the other. By the time I was ten, I had formed a strong link with Uncle Spike and Aunty Maureen. Although their house was always filled to the rafters with all sorts of junk it was always, in spite of everything else, a place of peace and quiet. Uncle Spike's house became a second home for me. Theirs was the place I tended to finish up at after school. It was a place where I could at least attempt my homework without the interruptions and mayhem caused by living in a house where my three elder brothers constantly vied for attention. Bob was the eldest, twelve years my senior, he was a pipe fitter with the gas board. His pride and joy was his Ariel Square Four motorbike which spent more of its time in pieces in our kitchen that it ever did on the road. When it was running, Bob would roar around the streets with the girlfriend of the week on the pillion, or else he would park it outside Franco's Cafe, whilst he would sit inside with his mates drinking frothy coffee and feeding the juke box, listening to old Elvis records. Next was Brian, two years younger than Bob and just as wild. As soon as he was sixteen he bought himself a Vespa motor scooter, a parka and lots of chromium-plated rear view mirrors and became a dedicated Who fan and a Mod. The last brother was Barry -- my brothers were a right load of "B's" -- who was just five years older than me. He was too young to join in the Mods and Rockers era and not interested in the Love and Peace age of Hippies and Flower Power. He dallied briefly with being a skinhead whilst he was doing his CSE's, before amazing everyone and passing all his exams. At sixteen he changed schools to join the sixth form and started on his A Levels, telling us all that he was going to be a Doctor. He made it, too; he's got a PhD in biochemistry for something or other too deep for mortals like you and me to understand. Nowadays he teaches at Birmingham University and serves as a Labour councillor on the Birmingham City Council. The last time I spoke him was on the phone last Christmas. I remember that he spent most of the call questioning Tony Blair's credentials as a socialist. Anyway by the time I left the junior school and started at the comprehensive, Barry was starting the sixth form, so of course he had all the privileges. You know the kind of thing; "Now come on lads," we were always lads, to Mum and Dad, even me. "Barry needs some peace and quiet if he's going to study." So we would all be barred from entering the boys bedroom for two hours or so every night from seven o'clock until around nine. This was a problem for me as, although our house had three bedrooms, and I had a room to myself; about the only concession to my gender ever made during my formative years -- the only way into my room was through the boys' room. It goes without saying that the idea that Barry and I could study, quietly, together, was one which failed utterly to germinate. After all, I was only a girl! I don't think Mum and Dad had quite expected me. Oh, I was never made to feel not wanted and I always felt loved, happy, and so on. There just never seemed to be a family agenda with me figuring high on the priorities. I was just Littl'un or else Titch. Sometimes I was Minnie the Minx which did at least recognise my gender. I had a lot of sympathy for Roger Daltrey, when Brian brought home I'm A Boy by the Who. Sometimes I would sing along with the song: I'm a Girl, I'm a Girl But my Ma won't admit it I'm a Girl, I'm a Girl, I'M A GIRL! but no one ever seemed to notice. At least when I went around to Uncle Spike's I was noticed. "Hello, little lady", he would invariably say as I walked in through their back door. He and Maureen never had kids of their own, and the rest of our family tended to overlook them. Mind you, Maureen was a bit of a formidable woman, she towered over Uncle Spike, but he was a forceful enough personality on his own account, and he was by no means weedy himself. Aunty Maureen was never anything but passively meek in Spike's presence. They sort of adopted me as I passed through that strange wilderness of life between childhood and adulthood. For instance, it was to Aunty Maureen that I turned, on the day I first found spots of blood in my knickers. |