Life Lessons
by Jack O'Donnell
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: Some strong ones.
Description: When all communication breaks down.
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Life – you know, but you don’t. The phone rings. I check the number. It’s Doreen. I let it ring out. It starts ringing. Toss it away--
I work as a proof-reader. Perhaps I should use past tense here. Doreen tells lies better than a Tory politician. She makes out to our friends, well, her friends, what I do is glamorous. That I’m on the phone at night to Stephen King, and during the day I edit his novels. The real horror of my work never shows. Imagine chewing strips of cardboard; each year your teeth rot; you get paid less and need to chew more. I spent fifteen-and-a-quarter hours, almost the whole day, punctuated with cluster headaches, blurred vision, a computer-mouse that worked no better than my cramped fingers, reading and re-writing botched grammar and syntax on safety and the proper procedure to be used when exiting a multi-storey building when the fire alarm sounds. My pay amounted to £7.32. It’s one of life’s lessons in being fucked over and not knowing how, or what to do, about it.
In between those bouts of morbid excitement I take the kids to school, pick them up, and give them something to eat. Sophia is eight. Jake is six. They act like they hate each other, can’t be in the same room together, even though they share a bedroom. That’s my fault too. We need a bigger house.
‘Stop annoying me!’ Sophia shrieks. ‘That’s it I’m going to tell.’
I listen to them from downstairs, computer screen on the laptop flipped open in front of me on the kitchen table. A smear of spaghetti rings, blood-red on two plates, worms its way across the table, and waits to be cleaned up. Fast food clogs my nostrils. I need a cigarette, but remember, just as quickly, I don’t smoke.
‘Play nice!’ I holler, checking updates online, and knowing my comment will be as much use as flinging a bath sponge into The Towering Inferno. Solomon in his pomp couldn’t separate these two.
Doreen likes to think Sophia takes after her. I’m biased and I don’t want to go on about how beautiful my daughter actually is. Jake takes after me. He looks like a Tonka toy. He’s got no stop button. Even as a baby he never slept. He combined continual vomiting before and after feeding with a constant need to be picked up and carried. Bonding, the popular magazines call it.
‘You fuckin’ cunt,’ I hear him roar. He’s taken to swearing now for added effect.
Doreen thinks it’s just a phase and he picked up all those bad words from me. It’s true, but I’d like to add that when we argue she hits out, and it’s not just with the Jane Austen ripostes.
Sophia screams, feet stomping, working up into a tantrum. There’s a worrying silence. The kitchen door is open. I spot them wrestling at the top of the stairs. She’s got Jake by the hair and is bumping him down to meet me. It must hurt, but he doesn’t struggle and seems unfazed. They get to the bottom and she lets go of his hair and he stands up.
‘That’s it.’ I spring up, flinging the other kitchen chair out of my way, and stand in the hall waving my arms about. ‘No television. No games. Get to your room.’
‘He started it,’ Sophia pouts.
Jake blinks rapidly. A toothy grin consumes his face as he looks up at me. ‘It wasn’t my fault. It was hers. Hers! Hers!’ His foot lifts and playfully tests kicking out at his sister.
‘Dad!’ Sophia screams.
I warn Sophia, ‘I’m trying to work. You get up those stairs madame and I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.’
I guide Jake by the elbow into the living room and turn on the telly, flicking through the channels until the noise and bright colours tell me I’ve hit the right ones. ‘What do you want to watch?’
He shrugs one shoulder higher than the other. The screen blares. I lean over as he lifts his hands up to be lifted. He pats the side of the face, his fingers tracing the growth on my chin. We hear the front door opening at the same time and turn our heads. Sophia rattles down two steps at a time to meet their mother. And he’s squirming out of my arms and scooting out into the hall, leaving me with a battle of ballistic noise and a Power Avenger’s attack.
They stand obediently in the hallway, Doreen with a hand on each of their shoulders. She scrutinizes me with the remote in my hand. ‘So that’s what you’ve been doing all day.’ Doreen flicks her hair and laughs, turning her head as if there is an audience waiting to applaud over her shoulder, hiding with the brushes and junk in the stair cupboard.
‘I was just turning it down a bit.’ I turn off the cartoons, and stick the remote on the glass table.
‘Oh, I was watching that,’ says Sophia.
‘Have they had their bath yet?’ Doreen asks.
‘Not yet.’
‘I’ll do it.’ She sighs, smooths her palms down over her grey skirt. ‘And I’ve such a headache. Had it all day at work. But you know me, I never give into these things.’ She flounces away in her heels, the two children clamouring in her wake.
It’s fuzzy after that. I’m in the kitchen still working. I’ve checked on the kids. Sophia and Jake are sitting on the floor in the living room watching telly in their pyjamas, the door slightly ajar, their hair slick and wet, and they smell so clean you’d want to snuggle up close forever and never let them go.
Doreen has eaten dinner, some lettuce leaf with a dollop of cream cheese, called something fancy to make the price less eye-watering. She opens a bottle of wine to help her unwind. ‘Dirty bastards. All they care about is the money they get from renting. They probably get extra. They’ve moved him next door,’ Doreen says. ‘You know, the paedophile.’
‘Yeh.’ I stare at the screen.
The bottle clinks against the glass as she pours herself a re-fill. ‘We can’t let the kids out of our sight. Not for a minute. Until we do something.’
I’m drinking tea, but it’s gone cold. I touch the mug to my mouth, sip at it and nod my head.
‘Not for a minute.’ The chair scrapes and she leans on the table as she scrambles up. ‘I’m going to check on them.’
She comes back and flops down again across from me. ‘They’re ok.’
‘That’s good.’ The telly’s too noisy and the kids are too quiet for my liking, but I say no more.
‘It’s disgusting.’ Doreen’s face screws up like a brown-paper bag, and she lifts the glass to her lips.
‘What is?’ I whisper.
‘Oh, my God, we’ve got a pervert right next door and you don’t even care.’
I lean across the table. ‘Shshhh, the kids. You don’t want them to hear you.’ I pat her on the wrist as she reaches for the bottle. ‘And anyway, Doreen, as far as I know, he had sex with one of the fifth-form girls at his school. He’s hardly likely to break in and rape our kids.’
‘Oh, my God,’ she shrieks, knocking over the glass. Red wine dripping onto the unswept floor. ‘You know him!’
I put my finger to my lips, but it’s too late. Sophia is looking in at us. ‘What’s the matter Mum?’ she asks.
‘It’s late, darling. Time for your bed.’ I smile weakly at Sophia.
‘Your father knows a pervert, darling,’ says Doreen.
‘This is silly,’ I say. ‘I don’t know him, know him, but we did go to the same school and hang out for a while.’
‘What’s a pre-vert?’ asks Jake. He’s pushed into the kitchen in front of Sophia.
I use my serious voice when explaining stuff to Jake. ‘A pervert is somebody that does very bad things to children.’
He sniggers through his nose and turns towards Sophia and pushes her in the shoulder.
‘Are you a pervert?’ asks Sophia in her high childish voice, her lips pressed together, like her mother’s.
Doreen scrambles in behind me and pulls open the drawer. Then she’s swaying in front of me, waving a steak knife about in front of my face. ‘OUT! OUT!’ Cobalt-blue granular dots streak the corner of her eyes as she cries, backing off, waving the kids backwards with one hand.
Sophia crumples into sobbing. Jake looks from me, to his mum’s face, to mine, his shoulders hunch. He scrapes one foot across the top of the other.
I shut the file I’m working on and stand up. She has taken up a defensive position, my children ushered towards the living room. The knife tilts upwards at my face. She shifts from foot to foot.
‘If you don’t leave right now, I’m phoning the police.’
Her iPhone is on the table where she left it. I pick it up and hand it to her as I make my way into the hall. Jake waves at me as I shut the front door over and I’m standing outside when I hear him belatedly shouting, ‘Bye, Bye, Daddy.’
It’s pelting rain. Peeking through the living room window like a ghost, the telly’s still on, and everything seems just fine. I don’t know where to go. Then I do. It’s not far. I slap along in my slippers to the bridge. I turn on my phone. Fourteen missed calls. Stupid really, letting yourself go like that.
Swearwords: Some strong ones.
Description: When all communication breaks down.
_____________________________________________________________________
Life – you know, but you don’t. The phone rings. I check the number. It’s Doreen. I let it ring out. It starts ringing. Toss it away--
I work as a proof-reader. Perhaps I should use past tense here. Doreen tells lies better than a Tory politician. She makes out to our friends, well, her friends, what I do is glamorous. That I’m on the phone at night to Stephen King, and during the day I edit his novels. The real horror of my work never shows. Imagine chewing strips of cardboard; each year your teeth rot; you get paid less and need to chew more. I spent fifteen-and-a-quarter hours, almost the whole day, punctuated with cluster headaches, blurred vision, a computer-mouse that worked no better than my cramped fingers, reading and re-writing botched grammar and syntax on safety and the proper procedure to be used when exiting a multi-storey building when the fire alarm sounds. My pay amounted to £7.32. It’s one of life’s lessons in being fucked over and not knowing how, or what to do, about it.
In between those bouts of morbid excitement I take the kids to school, pick them up, and give them something to eat. Sophia is eight. Jake is six. They act like they hate each other, can’t be in the same room together, even though they share a bedroom. That’s my fault too. We need a bigger house.
‘Stop annoying me!’ Sophia shrieks. ‘That’s it I’m going to tell.’
I listen to them from downstairs, computer screen on the laptop flipped open in front of me on the kitchen table. A smear of spaghetti rings, blood-red on two plates, worms its way across the table, and waits to be cleaned up. Fast food clogs my nostrils. I need a cigarette, but remember, just as quickly, I don’t smoke.
‘Play nice!’ I holler, checking updates online, and knowing my comment will be as much use as flinging a bath sponge into The Towering Inferno. Solomon in his pomp couldn’t separate these two.
Doreen likes to think Sophia takes after her. I’m biased and I don’t want to go on about how beautiful my daughter actually is. Jake takes after me. He looks like a Tonka toy. He’s got no stop button. Even as a baby he never slept. He combined continual vomiting before and after feeding with a constant need to be picked up and carried. Bonding, the popular magazines call it.
‘You fuckin’ cunt,’ I hear him roar. He’s taken to swearing now for added effect.
Doreen thinks it’s just a phase and he picked up all those bad words from me. It’s true, but I’d like to add that when we argue she hits out, and it’s not just with the Jane Austen ripostes.
Sophia screams, feet stomping, working up into a tantrum. There’s a worrying silence. The kitchen door is open. I spot them wrestling at the top of the stairs. She’s got Jake by the hair and is bumping him down to meet me. It must hurt, but he doesn’t struggle and seems unfazed. They get to the bottom and she lets go of his hair and he stands up.
‘That’s it.’ I spring up, flinging the other kitchen chair out of my way, and stand in the hall waving my arms about. ‘No television. No games. Get to your room.’
‘He started it,’ Sophia pouts.
Jake blinks rapidly. A toothy grin consumes his face as he looks up at me. ‘It wasn’t my fault. It was hers. Hers! Hers!’ His foot lifts and playfully tests kicking out at his sister.
‘Dad!’ Sophia screams.
I warn Sophia, ‘I’m trying to work. You get up those stairs madame and I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.’
I guide Jake by the elbow into the living room and turn on the telly, flicking through the channels until the noise and bright colours tell me I’ve hit the right ones. ‘What do you want to watch?’
He shrugs one shoulder higher than the other. The screen blares. I lean over as he lifts his hands up to be lifted. He pats the side of the face, his fingers tracing the growth on my chin. We hear the front door opening at the same time and turn our heads. Sophia rattles down two steps at a time to meet their mother. And he’s squirming out of my arms and scooting out into the hall, leaving me with a battle of ballistic noise and a Power Avenger’s attack.
They stand obediently in the hallway, Doreen with a hand on each of their shoulders. She scrutinizes me with the remote in my hand. ‘So that’s what you’ve been doing all day.’ Doreen flicks her hair and laughs, turning her head as if there is an audience waiting to applaud over her shoulder, hiding with the brushes and junk in the stair cupboard.
‘I was just turning it down a bit.’ I turn off the cartoons, and stick the remote on the glass table.
‘Oh, I was watching that,’ says Sophia.
‘Have they had their bath yet?’ Doreen asks.
‘Not yet.’
‘I’ll do it.’ She sighs, smooths her palms down over her grey skirt. ‘And I’ve such a headache. Had it all day at work. But you know me, I never give into these things.’ She flounces away in her heels, the two children clamouring in her wake.
It’s fuzzy after that. I’m in the kitchen still working. I’ve checked on the kids. Sophia and Jake are sitting on the floor in the living room watching telly in their pyjamas, the door slightly ajar, their hair slick and wet, and they smell so clean you’d want to snuggle up close forever and never let them go.
Doreen has eaten dinner, some lettuce leaf with a dollop of cream cheese, called something fancy to make the price less eye-watering. She opens a bottle of wine to help her unwind. ‘Dirty bastards. All they care about is the money they get from renting. They probably get extra. They’ve moved him next door,’ Doreen says. ‘You know, the paedophile.’
‘Yeh.’ I stare at the screen.
The bottle clinks against the glass as she pours herself a re-fill. ‘We can’t let the kids out of our sight. Not for a minute. Until we do something.’
I’m drinking tea, but it’s gone cold. I touch the mug to my mouth, sip at it and nod my head.
‘Not for a minute.’ The chair scrapes and she leans on the table as she scrambles up. ‘I’m going to check on them.’
She comes back and flops down again across from me. ‘They’re ok.’
‘That’s good.’ The telly’s too noisy and the kids are too quiet for my liking, but I say no more.
‘It’s disgusting.’ Doreen’s face screws up like a brown-paper bag, and she lifts the glass to her lips.
‘What is?’ I whisper.
‘Oh, my God, we’ve got a pervert right next door and you don’t even care.’
I lean across the table. ‘Shshhh, the kids. You don’t want them to hear you.’ I pat her on the wrist as she reaches for the bottle. ‘And anyway, Doreen, as far as I know, he had sex with one of the fifth-form girls at his school. He’s hardly likely to break in and rape our kids.’
‘Oh, my God,’ she shrieks, knocking over the glass. Red wine dripping onto the unswept floor. ‘You know him!’
I put my finger to my lips, but it’s too late. Sophia is looking in at us. ‘What’s the matter Mum?’ she asks.
‘It’s late, darling. Time for your bed.’ I smile weakly at Sophia.
‘Your father knows a pervert, darling,’ says Doreen.
‘This is silly,’ I say. ‘I don’t know him, know him, but we did go to the same school and hang out for a while.’
‘What’s a pre-vert?’ asks Jake. He’s pushed into the kitchen in front of Sophia.
I use my serious voice when explaining stuff to Jake. ‘A pervert is somebody that does very bad things to children.’
He sniggers through his nose and turns towards Sophia and pushes her in the shoulder.
‘Are you a pervert?’ asks Sophia in her high childish voice, her lips pressed together, like her mother’s.
Doreen scrambles in behind me and pulls open the drawer. Then she’s swaying in front of me, waving a steak knife about in front of my face. ‘OUT! OUT!’ Cobalt-blue granular dots streak the corner of her eyes as she cries, backing off, waving the kids backwards with one hand.
Sophia crumples into sobbing. Jake looks from me, to his mum’s face, to mine, his shoulders hunch. He scrapes one foot across the top of the other.
I shut the file I’m working on and stand up. She has taken up a defensive position, my children ushered towards the living room. The knife tilts upwards at my face. She shifts from foot to foot.
‘If you don’t leave right now, I’m phoning the police.’
Her iPhone is on the table where she left it. I pick it up and hand it to her as I make my way into the hall. Jake waves at me as I shut the front door over and I’m standing outside when I hear him belatedly shouting, ‘Bye, Bye, Daddy.’
It’s pelting rain. Peeking through the living room window like a ghost, the telly’s still on, and everything seems just fine. I don’t know where to go. Then I do. It’s not far. I slap along in my slippers to the bridge. I turn on my phone. Fourteen missed calls. Stupid really, letting yourself go like that.
About the Author
Jack O'Donnell is from Dalmuir. Over the years, he's tried his hand at just about everything, from washing dishes to mental health care, monitoring elections to joining floorboards, editing to surveying traffic, care work to lugging bricks. And while accumulating all that life experience, Jack has also been pursuing a love for the written word on ABCtales.com, where he's a generous contributor to the community, a competition winner and a prized editor.
Jack has also written a book. Called Lily Poole, it’s described as a ground-breaking blend of ghost story, murder mystery and Scottish social drama. You can read a synopsis and an excerpt at this link: http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole. And, if you like what you read, you might be inclined to make a pledge towards the book’s publication. Jack would be eternally grateful for any support.
Jack has also written a book. Called Lily Poole, it’s described as a ground-breaking blend of ghost story, murder mystery and Scottish social drama. You can read a synopsis and an excerpt at this link: http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole. And, if you like what you read, you might be inclined to make a pledge towards the book’s publication. Jack would be eternally grateful for any support.