Annie Christie's Family Fictions:
Episode Two
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: The first day of the last holiday.
_____________________________________________________________________
This is a hard story to tell, Casey, wherever I try to begin because I feel like I’m delving into a lot of things that should be left undisturbed. But I suppose I should start with Alasdair’s 18th birthday. Like I said, it was August 1st 1996 and we were packing to go on holiday. It was dad’s idea and to say there was some family friction is an understatement. Normally my parents behaved in an almost scarily civilised way. They didn’t argue in front of us, they didn’t break ranks at all. They played ‘JVic’ to the max and most of the time we bought it.
I was fourteen then and I often reflected on how hard it was to live with such perfect parents. Most of my friends’ parents had either split up or wanted to and I envied them in a way. Their lives seemed a lot more real. Ours seemed like it was one big marshmallow fabrication but however hard you blew the cloud, it just shifted and more cloud came and took its place. I don’t know if that makes sense. And all the time we lived under this ever shifting cloud, my parents thought they were bringing us up in the blazing sun.
The argument – the first I remember hearing – was about Alasdair’s birthday. Of course listening at doors is a guaranteed way to find out something unpleasant and I heard enough to realise that my dad was taking us on holiday to get away from Alasdair’s birthday and that my mum wanted to make Alasdair’s birthday the centre point of everything we did.
I have to say I was on my dad’s side. I was sick fed up of perfect Alasdair. I couldn’t understand why my mum couldn’t just move on. She had three other children. Why was the dead one so much more important than the three live ones? Looking back, that was maybe the first time I ever felt sorry for Ollie. His name seemed to be coming up in the argument more than was reasonable. And it wasn’t his fault he wasn’t Alasdair, or goods to the equivalent.
I’d always thought Ollie was the odd one out because he made himself that way. But while I listened to my parents’ version of an argument, which admittedly was pretty low key, I began to wonder if it really was Ollie’s fault. Or if he was just reacting to something he didn’t even know about and couldn’t ever do anything to rectify.
Often when we were growing up I used to blame Alasdair for the fact that Ollie was such a bastard. Because he was, even when we were kids. Ollie seemed to pick on me constantly and tried to get me into trouble just for the fun of it. Just to take the heat off him. While I was busy blaming perfect Alasdair, it seemed Ollie was blaming me, because when I was born it seemed the deadlock between mum and dad was broken somehow. So underneath our comfortable lives, there was a very unhealthy blame culture going on somewhere. And it ate into all of us in its various ways. Apart from Ellie. She seemed to sail through it all, regardless.
Everyone says I’m the spit of my dad to look at, though I can’t really see it myself. And all I remember is mum trying to treat us fairly, treat us exactly the same, even to the point of dressing us in the same clothes. Of course neither of us could be Alasdair, but it seemed she wanted me and Ollie to be peas in a pod. If we were clouds in her sky we had to be identical clouds. And I always felt it was wrong. We were such different people.
Don’t get me wrong, of course I believe in treating kids fairly and people being equal. But you can’t just treat every kid the same because all kids are different. Certainly, Ollie and I were as different as you can get. Who knows if either of us would have been anything like Alasdair, because his cloud never got the chance to float around mum’s sun filled sky. He just left a gap like a hole in the ozone layer which burned her right into the core no matter what she did.
My youthful assessment of my siblings was fairly simplistic. I used to hate Ollie just for being Ollie. I used to think it was Alasdair who wrecked our family and I always knew it was Ellie who made us really shine. Ellie was the sunny day everyone had been looking for. She was the sun in the sky from the moment she was born. Mum adored her. Dad loved her. And we were all captivated by her. She was a girl. She was allowed to be different. She was free. She carried no baggage. Most of all, she could not be compared with Alasdair.
I was particularly close to Ellie, like I said. We weren’t that different in age and sometimes, when we were very small, people used to ask if we were twins. She was like a female version of me to look at I suppose and when we went out in the Botanic Gardens with the dual buggy – me and Ellie sitting in splendour and Ollie holding on to the handle with mum, scowling at everyone – I suppose it’s no wonder they thought that. Dressing kids the same is less impactful than kids looking the same after all.
Ellie and I are dark like my dad, always have been. Like I said, I’m the spit of my dad but Ellie was the spit of my mum in the face, with my dad’s colouring in the hair. As a baby, Ollie was fair, like Alasdair had been. As he grew up he became sort of mousey like my mum is naturally, though she hides it under blonde dye, and we can only suppose Alasdair would have been the same. Whatever the issue, Ollie was always too much of a reminder of the one who came –and went – before. Blond curls and dark memories. Somewhere, deep down, I think he knew it. So for all his blond hair, Ollie was the dark cloud on the horizon. I was a fluffy marshmallow and Ellie – Ellie was the sunniest sun in the sky. And we all loved her.
But Casey, I’m getting off the point. It was the day that would have been Alasdair’s 18th birthday and we were going on holiday. We were packed into the car and for the first time in a long time, dad was coming with us. He’d got a whole fortnight off work. It was going to be a real family holiday. It broke down at the point, before we’d even left when my mum mentioned Alasdair and Ollie said something unutterably stupid.
‘I hope Alasdair’s not coming with us,’ he said.
Mum just crumpled.
Dad took Ollie out round the back. Words were had and back they came, both scowling.
It was left to Ellie to create a diversion and ask mum to help her go pack the right things for a holiday on the Isle of Mull, which was where we were headed for. I don’t know why they chose Mull. No one had ever heard of it before. Maybe that was why. It could have no memories, no connections. It was a fresh start. As long as Alasdair stayed home, which of course he could never really do.
‘Please try, Vic,’ I remember dad saying to her quietly as they got into the front seats, leaving us to fight it out in the back. Ellie popped into the middle, not because she didn’t want the view, but because she knew that keeping me and Ollie apart was one of her roles in life. She was too big to sit on the booster seat in the middle, she was twelve now, after all, but she was maturing into an understanding of how to keep the peace without a word being spoken. She smiled at me so that I felt grateful to her because I could see Ollie winding himself up for a fight, even if I didn’t want to have one with him. Ollie was like that. Still is, for all I know.
I know my dad was wanting my mum to try and leave Alasdair, who, if he had lived, would after all have been a man now and probably not wanted to come on holiday with his lame family after all. He would have been planning an escape to Uni and he would be wanting to go abroad with his mates and… you see, we all still did it. We all gave Alasdair a life and a personality and couldn’t let him alone. Except dad. Maybe because dad found the body and had to face that most awful of realities, he could let go of Alasdair. And he just wished mum could too.
‘I will try,’ mum answered, but in the tone of voice that suggested the spirit had been kicked out of her.
‘There is no try, only do or not do,’ Ollie quipped, putting on a Yoda Star Wars voice which was desperately inappropriate at best and at worst seemed to demand confrontation. Everyone ignored him but it was clear it was going to be a long journey.
It was. Ellie tried to keep us entertained by demanding we all sing show tunes, but even that palled after a while. The journey was great and the scenery was everything that tourists rave about – as we passed Stirling Castle we all chanted ‘they can never take our freedom’. Ellie then went into a round of ‘paint yer face bright blue’ from Oliver. ‘I’d do anything’ was never one of Ollie’s favourite songs. He’d been bullied enough at school for being a little blond Oliver look-a-like and at fifteen he’d dyed his hair red – well, it turned ginger – to rebel. The school wouldn’t allow red hair (clashed with the blazer and the ‘ethos’) and so he had it cut shorter than was strictly allowed until it grew out. It was still growing out.
We stopped for something to eat at Tyndrum and dad bought us all clothes at the Green Welly Shop. Someone had told him it always rained on Mull and so even though it was August, he got us waterproofs – and of course – wellies. He neglected to get midge repellent. It was an unusual oversight from an otherwise totally risk averse man. But he thought he had it all covered. Everyone gets it wrong sometimes, right?
When we got to Oban we only had to wait a short while for the ferry – which was just as well – there didn’t seem to be much there and Ollie was moaning about being away from civilisation. It was before mobile phones and internet and all that, Casey, but Ollie was clearly feeling like a fish out of water away from Edinburgh in August. Some people consider the Festival a marker of civilisation. I don’t. Hordes of people acting like locusts and calling it culture, who needs it? I was glad to be away.
We took the Cal-Mac ferry to Craignure and then it was a drive right across the island for another half an hour till we arrived at Tiroran House Hotel.
We weren’t staying in the Hotel itself. As I remember we stayed in a cottage called ‘The Pink Cottage’ and it was very pink. But mostly I remember it was an upside-down house with the bedrooms on the ground floor and the living area and kitchen upstairs. In itself that was enough of a difference to appeal to Ellie. There were enough bedrooms for us to each have our own which was a blessing for me. Ollie and I hadn’t shared a room since we were small – the New Town House had enough bedrooms and to spare, but the memories of those days when we shared because we had to be ‘the same’ still haunt me.
It’d be a lie to say there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. We Olds carry clouds with us wherever we go, but it was a fine enough day for us to go out and explore the local area with strict instructions to be back by sunset, which we were. I hoped we were finally free of Alasdair. I just wished I could ditch Ollie too.
Swearwords: None.
Description: The first day of the last holiday.
_____________________________________________________________________
This is a hard story to tell, Casey, wherever I try to begin because I feel like I’m delving into a lot of things that should be left undisturbed. But I suppose I should start with Alasdair’s 18th birthday. Like I said, it was August 1st 1996 and we were packing to go on holiday. It was dad’s idea and to say there was some family friction is an understatement. Normally my parents behaved in an almost scarily civilised way. They didn’t argue in front of us, they didn’t break ranks at all. They played ‘JVic’ to the max and most of the time we bought it.
I was fourteen then and I often reflected on how hard it was to live with such perfect parents. Most of my friends’ parents had either split up or wanted to and I envied them in a way. Their lives seemed a lot more real. Ours seemed like it was one big marshmallow fabrication but however hard you blew the cloud, it just shifted and more cloud came and took its place. I don’t know if that makes sense. And all the time we lived under this ever shifting cloud, my parents thought they were bringing us up in the blazing sun.
The argument – the first I remember hearing – was about Alasdair’s birthday. Of course listening at doors is a guaranteed way to find out something unpleasant and I heard enough to realise that my dad was taking us on holiday to get away from Alasdair’s birthday and that my mum wanted to make Alasdair’s birthday the centre point of everything we did.
I have to say I was on my dad’s side. I was sick fed up of perfect Alasdair. I couldn’t understand why my mum couldn’t just move on. She had three other children. Why was the dead one so much more important than the three live ones? Looking back, that was maybe the first time I ever felt sorry for Ollie. His name seemed to be coming up in the argument more than was reasonable. And it wasn’t his fault he wasn’t Alasdair, or goods to the equivalent.
I’d always thought Ollie was the odd one out because he made himself that way. But while I listened to my parents’ version of an argument, which admittedly was pretty low key, I began to wonder if it really was Ollie’s fault. Or if he was just reacting to something he didn’t even know about and couldn’t ever do anything to rectify.
Often when we were growing up I used to blame Alasdair for the fact that Ollie was such a bastard. Because he was, even when we were kids. Ollie seemed to pick on me constantly and tried to get me into trouble just for the fun of it. Just to take the heat off him. While I was busy blaming perfect Alasdair, it seemed Ollie was blaming me, because when I was born it seemed the deadlock between mum and dad was broken somehow. So underneath our comfortable lives, there was a very unhealthy blame culture going on somewhere. And it ate into all of us in its various ways. Apart from Ellie. She seemed to sail through it all, regardless.
Everyone says I’m the spit of my dad to look at, though I can’t really see it myself. And all I remember is mum trying to treat us fairly, treat us exactly the same, even to the point of dressing us in the same clothes. Of course neither of us could be Alasdair, but it seemed she wanted me and Ollie to be peas in a pod. If we were clouds in her sky we had to be identical clouds. And I always felt it was wrong. We were such different people.
Don’t get me wrong, of course I believe in treating kids fairly and people being equal. But you can’t just treat every kid the same because all kids are different. Certainly, Ollie and I were as different as you can get. Who knows if either of us would have been anything like Alasdair, because his cloud never got the chance to float around mum’s sun filled sky. He just left a gap like a hole in the ozone layer which burned her right into the core no matter what she did.
My youthful assessment of my siblings was fairly simplistic. I used to hate Ollie just for being Ollie. I used to think it was Alasdair who wrecked our family and I always knew it was Ellie who made us really shine. Ellie was the sunny day everyone had been looking for. She was the sun in the sky from the moment she was born. Mum adored her. Dad loved her. And we were all captivated by her. She was a girl. She was allowed to be different. She was free. She carried no baggage. Most of all, she could not be compared with Alasdair.
I was particularly close to Ellie, like I said. We weren’t that different in age and sometimes, when we were very small, people used to ask if we were twins. She was like a female version of me to look at I suppose and when we went out in the Botanic Gardens with the dual buggy – me and Ellie sitting in splendour and Ollie holding on to the handle with mum, scowling at everyone – I suppose it’s no wonder they thought that. Dressing kids the same is less impactful than kids looking the same after all.
Ellie and I are dark like my dad, always have been. Like I said, I’m the spit of my dad but Ellie was the spit of my mum in the face, with my dad’s colouring in the hair. As a baby, Ollie was fair, like Alasdair had been. As he grew up he became sort of mousey like my mum is naturally, though she hides it under blonde dye, and we can only suppose Alasdair would have been the same. Whatever the issue, Ollie was always too much of a reminder of the one who came –and went – before. Blond curls and dark memories. Somewhere, deep down, I think he knew it. So for all his blond hair, Ollie was the dark cloud on the horizon. I was a fluffy marshmallow and Ellie – Ellie was the sunniest sun in the sky. And we all loved her.
But Casey, I’m getting off the point. It was the day that would have been Alasdair’s 18th birthday and we were going on holiday. We were packed into the car and for the first time in a long time, dad was coming with us. He’d got a whole fortnight off work. It was going to be a real family holiday. It broke down at the point, before we’d even left when my mum mentioned Alasdair and Ollie said something unutterably stupid.
‘I hope Alasdair’s not coming with us,’ he said.
Mum just crumpled.
Dad took Ollie out round the back. Words were had and back they came, both scowling.
It was left to Ellie to create a diversion and ask mum to help her go pack the right things for a holiday on the Isle of Mull, which was where we were headed for. I don’t know why they chose Mull. No one had ever heard of it before. Maybe that was why. It could have no memories, no connections. It was a fresh start. As long as Alasdair stayed home, which of course he could never really do.
‘Please try, Vic,’ I remember dad saying to her quietly as they got into the front seats, leaving us to fight it out in the back. Ellie popped into the middle, not because she didn’t want the view, but because she knew that keeping me and Ollie apart was one of her roles in life. She was too big to sit on the booster seat in the middle, she was twelve now, after all, but she was maturing into an understanding of how to keep the peace without a word being spoken. She smiled at me so that I felt grateful to her because I could see Ollie winding himself up for a fight, even if I didn’t want to have one with him. Ollie was like that. Still is, for all I know.
I know my dad was wanting my mum to try and leave Alasdair, who, if he had lived, would after all have been a man now and probably not wanted to come on holiday with his lame family after all. He would have been planning an escape to Uni and he would be wanting to go abroad with his mates and… you see, we all still did it. We all gave Alasdair a life and a personality and couldn’t let him alone. Except dad. Maybe because dad found the body and had to face that most awful of realities, he could let go of Alasdair. And he just wished mum could too.
‘I will try,’ mum answered, but in the tone of voice that suggested the spirit had been kicked out of her.
‘There is no try, only do or not do,’ Ollie quipped, putting on a Yoda Star Wars voice which was desperately inappropriate at best and at worst seemed to demand confrontation. Everyone ignored him but it was clear it was going to be a long journey.
It was. Ellie tried to keep us entertained by demanding we all sing show tunes, but even that palled after a while. The journey was great and the scenery was everything that tourists rave about – as we passed Stirling Castle we all chanted ‘they can never take our freedom’. Ellie then went into a round of ‘paint yer face bright blue’ from Oliver. ‘I’d do anything’ was never one of Ollie’s favourite songs. He’d been bullied enough at school for being a little blond Oliver look-a-like and at fifteen he’d dyed his hair red – well, it turned ginger – to rebel. The school wouldn’t allow red hair (clashed with the blazer and the ‘ethos’) and so he had it cut shorter than was strictly allowed until it grew out. It was still growing out.
We stopped for something to eat at Tyndrum and dad bought us all clothes at the Green Welly Shop. Someone had told him it always rained on Mull and so even though it was August, he got us waterproofs – and of course – wellies. He neglected to get midge repellent. It was an unusual oversight from an otherwise totally risk averse man. But he thought he had it all covered. Everyone gets it wrong sometimes, right?
When we got to Oban we only had to wait a short while for the ferry – which was just as well – there didn’t seem to be much there and Ollie was moaning about being away from civilisation. It was before mobile phones and internet and all that, Casey, but Ollie was clearly feeling like a fish out of water away from Edinburgh in August. Some people consider the Festival a marker of civilisation. I don’t. Hordes of people acting like locusts and calling it culture, who needs it? I was glad to be away.
We took the Cal-Mac ferry to Craignure and then it was a drive right across the island for another half an hour till we arrived at Tiroran House Hotel.
We weren’t staying in the Hotel itself. As I remember we stayed in a cottage called ‘The Pink Cottage’ and it was very pink. But mostly I remember it was an upside-down house with the bedrooms on the ground floor and the living area and kitchen upstairs. In itself that was enough of a difference to appeal to Ellie. There were enough bedrooms for us to each have our own which was a blessing for me. Ollie and I hadn’t shared a room since we were small – the New Town House had enough bedrooms and to spare, but the memories of those days when we shared because we had to be ‘the same’ still haunt me.
It’d be a lie to say there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. We Olds carry clouds with us wherever we go, but it was a fine enough day for us to go out and explore the local area with strict instructions to be back by sunset, which we were. I hoped we were finally free of Alasdair. I just wished I could ditch Ollie too.
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project and is now happy to be welcomed into McStorytellers with her first published serial, Family Fictions.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project and is now happy to be welcomed into McStorytellers with her first published serial, Family Fictions.