CHAP. 1
BURNT TURKEY AND FAIRGROUND MEMORIES
I hear the birds chirping in the garden as I
wake up, with rays of sunshine bursting through the room. I look at my alarm
clock, it’s half past eight. I don’t know it yet but today my life is going to
change. Things kick off in a calm and relaxed way, just as you would expect
from a Sunday morning. In my family we don’t go to church so I can take all the
time I want to get dressed and go downstairs for breakfast. As I descend the
stairs I hear whistling coming from the kitchen, ‘That’s Dad’ I think. I live with
him and my little sister Em from when my Mum left us to go and work in
ecological society in an island the Pacific.
I was eight when Mum left us and Em was a few months old, so she doesn’t
remember her at all, I try to tell her who she was by showing her pictures and
telling her stories, but it’s no use. I kind of do blame Mum for having walked
out on us, leaving Dad to cope with a baby and an five-year-old child, I don’t
think that even if she was to come here and beg me to go and live with her, I would
give up living with Dad to go with her. Dad is the best. Even though he had to
cope with raising two young children on his own, he did a very good job and me
and Em never complained. He always has this way of making Sundays special. Once
for lunch he told us that we could order whichever takeaway we wanted and we
chose Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Thai and pizza. We had leftovers for days! I
remember of the one time when he took us to ‘The Cheese Melter’, a fantastic
place where you can eat as much melted cheese as you want. It was fantastic!
Dad is great, he makes me and Em feel special and compared to Mum, who on the
other hand stopped sending us presents when I was twelve and sends us one email
per year, he’s always been there for us and I wouldn’t change my life one tiny
bit. Unfourtunatley life decided to change itself. I arrive in the kitchen and
Em comes to greet me, dressed in a fairy frock with a tiara, a wand and wings.
I pick her up and whirl her around, the advantage I have, with her being eight
and me thirteen, I can look at her and relive my childhood and I also have
something to cheer me up when I’m down. If I have to be honest, Em’s life has
been much better than mine, she’s popular and nice and she has tons of friends,
while I became so shell shocked when mum left us, that I closed up and now I
get picked on every day at school and I don’t have any friends. Dad greets me
through the kitchen window with a big smile. I hear the sizzling sausages in
the pan and the eggs frying. He hauls Em up and she pats him on his baldhead
with her wand, saying: “You are a fwog and
I’ll make you my pwince”. She always
talks like that because her teeth fell out a month ago and they still haven’t
grown back yet causing her to not pronounce the ‘’r’’s. He plates up two dishes
of ‘’smiley’’ eggs and bacon and hands them to Em and me. We eat up cheerfully
and that’s when Dad announces that we’ll be going to the fairground in the
afternoon, Em squeals excitedly and I smile too because I have already been
there a few times when I was little but I still love to go to there and smell
the candied apples and hear the excited screams, it reminds me of when I used
to go there with Mum and Dad, when we were still a happy and normal family.
I return to my room to wait until lunch, I
turn on my Mp3 player, put in my earplugs and turn the volume up to maximum, Tonight Tonight by Hot Chelle Rae pumps in my ears and fills my head with rhythm, I let it carry my thoughts in the
strangest and most obscure places in my head. It’s a bit weird when I close my
eyes because I see some precise moments of my life flash by: first my tenth
birthday when Brian Cooslings, my best friend then, bought me a copy of The Chronicles of Narnia, which I never
read and I still feel guilty about. Then my kiss with Evelyn Sparks in 6th
grade, I remember that her lips tasted of cherry and her breath smelt of
bubblegum. The night that I went to see fireworks with Dad and Em by the beach
and had a butterscotch ice cream with sparkles and felt the milkyness of it on
my tongue and felt the sparkles pop and explode in my mouth, just like the
fireworks I was watching. And last of them all, when three week ago Rosy
Witherspoon ruffled my brown bangs, re-tied my tie and looked at me with her
golden brown eyes and swished her red hair right in front of my nose. I don’t
know if I have a crush on Rosy, but I do have a weak spot for red hair. It all
started when I was about three or four and Mum had brought me to the park and
while I was in my pram I saw a gorgeous red haired woman walking by, wearing a
green dress and high heels and sunglasses. And since I was just a little kid
with a snotty nose used to seeing middle aged women all the time, I fell in
love with her and since then every red haired woman I saw I hoped that it was
her. Of course now I am too old to believe that, but I still get shivers when
Rosy swishes her hair.
Dad calling me for lunch wakes me from my
daydreams, I fly downstairs and sit down on my usual chair, Dad today has
prepared turkey, it smells kind of burnt and it doesn’t taste of anything in
particular, but me and Em don’t say anything, we eat and smile and laugh
because we know that Dad always tries his best and we appreciate his work. The
rest of the meal flashes by and before I know it, we’re out of the door, ready
to go to the fairground and it’s already 2.30. When we arrive at the
fairground, everything is already in full swing and you can feel the happiness
buzzing in the air. For a few minutes we just observe the chaos, like watching
a storm from on top of the clouds, the quiet before the storm, then we dive
into it. We jump from attraction to attraction, we buy candy floss, ice cream
and candied apples, and Em actually sticks one in my hair! We go on the
merry-go-round, because Em begs us to go, we try winning at one of those “throw
the darts game” and “try taking down the tower”, but we fail, then just as we
are about to go and buy a teddy for Em, the speaker announces that a new fire
show has just opened up in the main tent and Em shouts that she wants to go and
see fiwe so we head to the main tent
not realizing that we are making the biggest mistake of our lives. The show
isn’t really interesting, there’s a guy dressed up as a wizard who lights fire
using some petrol and a few combustible materials, but all the little kids, Em
included, are attracted to the fire and surround him. After a while Dad’s phone
rings and since it’s his sister, Aunty Barbara, he goes outside to take it and
I go with him, because I’ve seen enough of this silly show. We are going to
realize it just in a few minutes, but Aunty Barbara saved our lives that day.
Just as Dad hangs up the call screams start rising for them tent and he races
back inside because he wants to find Em. I stay outside but from a little hole
in the tent I observe what goes on.
And I see it all happen.
The guy who was doing tricks accidentally
drops his fireball on the ground, which is covered in petrol, which spreads the
fire and since the tent is inflated with gas, it takes a few seconds for the
whole thing to blow up. Thankfully Dad doesn’t manage to get in, even though
maybe then he would have saved Em, because the flames have already spread too
much, but before running away from the tent, I see my sister screaming in the
flames, I see her burn.
When I realize about the gas in the tent I
run as fast as I can away from it, leaving the most precious thing I have in
there to die, and then I hear the blast, then my mind goes blank.
When I wake up I hear sirens wailing, for a
few seconds the world is out of my focus, and then I identify Dad near a
policemen and remember… Em, the blast, the blankness of my mind. Just to think
that this morning I twirled her around and just now I had to watch her die. Dad
comes near me and says:” Thank God you’re all right, I though that I’d lost you
too. Listen the policemen say that they don’t know when they will give us
results, but, as you can see” and with his hand he shows me the blankness where
the tent stood not just long ago, it’s always there, the blankness, right in
the middle of my heart, there where Em had been, he continues “ Don’t get your
hopes up. Come on, let’s go home”. I nod and he helps me get up, at first my
legs feel sore but then I get used to it, lots of journalists want to interview
us on what happened, but Dad pushes them away.
Finally when we get home Dad goes to the
bathroom, he doesn’t say anything but I know that he’s going to get drunk from
the collection of beers that he has under the washbasin which me and Em found
three years ago but said nothing about because we knew of the hard times my Dad
had had. Just like now.
I go to my room, have a good cry and I don’t
even open my schoolbooks to revise because I know that I’m not going to school
tomorrow, instead I listen to Wherever
you will go by The Calling and
fall asleep early.
Just as predicted I don’t go to school
Monday, nor the next day, nor the rest of the week. Mostly I stay in my room,
sometimes I go downstairs to eat something and find Dad sitting at the kitchen
table with red bloodshot eyes and bottle of beer in his hands. I don’t say
anything to him. I don’t know what to say to him, I don’t blame him for
anything and I know that if I were in his position, having lost almost
everything and losing something else, I would behave the same way, but I don’t
feel like talking.
On Friday afternoon two policemen arrive on
our doorstep, they look sad, but I know that they’re just doing their jobs.
They tell us that Em has been proved dead and the reports have entered the
national system. Then they ask us how we are coping and that’s when Dad drops
the bomb on me. “ I’ve had a good think these past few days” he said “And I was
beginning to think that maybe I need some time on my own, after everything
that’s happened, I need to think and I need to contact relatives and Josh and
Emily’s mother and I need to decide whether to give info on this to the
newspapers and I don’t know if I could manage caring for another kid, so I’ve
decided: Josh tonight you are flying out to go and live with your mother, I’ll
phone her later to tell her what’s happened and to inform her of you arrival so
you can go and pack your bags”
“ But Dad I’m not a kid anymore, I can look
after myself! Please let me stay I don’t want to go with Mum!” I cry. But he
just says: “Josh it out of discussion, go and pack your stuff, I need to cope
myself I can’t manage to look after someone else, look maybe in six moths, one
year I’ll be ready but for now you are going to live with your Mum.”
And that’s the end of it, the policemen leave
I go upstairs to back my most precious things, even if there is one that I
can’t pack because she’s not here anymore, wit the words six months one year ringing in my head. At 6.30 Aunty Barbara comes
to pick me up for my 9.00 flight. She leaves to travel alone, she hugs me tight
and we say our goodbyes. The flight is quite long, 21 hours long because I have
to go to the Cook Islands in the Pacific. I arrive there the next day with a
massive jet lag and a taxi comes to pick me up from the airport and I arrive in
this rural resort. A woman is out front, ready to greet me: “Hi Josh” she says,
“I’m your Mum”.
Just to note, this work is entirely fictional, any refer to actual facts is just coincidental.
S.V.
