Bubbles and Wasps

Every summer William and his mother set off from Brighton to stay with his grandmother in South Wales. William had packed the night before as he always did, making sure he had a good stock of war comics and an airfix kit. It was a sunny day but he knew it would probably be raining by the time they reached his grandmothers’ bungalow – it always rained for at least half the time on the three week holiday – that’s why they called it ‘wet Wales’.

He was at the top of the front steps and the taxi was purring, waiting to take them to the coach station.

“Mum,” he yelled “taxi’s here, come on.” He shifted from foot to foot in agitation, she always did this, packing last minute stuff they didn’t need. It had become a sort of ritual.

“Stop shouting, William, I’m here.” And now because of her arthritis the taxi man would have to help with the bags. Sometimes they did it with no fuss but this one just sat staring ahead as if there was something really interesting happening on the road in front of him.

“Go and ask him to help, go on.” His mother nudged him, he could feel her suppressed anger so he went, without complaint, down the steps and stood awkwardly by the taxi window. He didn’t have much experience of grown men. The driver didn’t turn his head so William tapped gently on the window until the driver looked at him and raised his thick eyebrows. William pointed to his mother standing with all the bags at the top of the steps. She seemed suddenly very faraway.

The driver got out of the taxi, sighing heavily, and plodded up the steps.

When they got to the bus station the coach driver was one of those chirpy, helpful types, much to William’s relief and, as they rolled out on to the seafront, William felt very happy. It would be fine now, people in Wales were always more helpful and friendly and they would have no trouble the other end.
He turned to his mother and said, as he always did, “I’m hungry, Mum.”
And she laughed and said, as he knew she would, “You’re always hungry William.”

Six hours barrelling down the motorway, over the Severn Bridge and they were in Wales. William read the familiar sign out loud 'Welcome to Wales' and 'Croeso y Cymru'. And then in no time they were outside the bungalow. It looked just the same, nothing about it ever changed and William was grateful for that. These summer holidays were the one pleasurable certainty in his life as he changed and grew. One of his older sisters had already left home and the other lived her own life in the basement and had no time for him. So now it was just him and his mother and he ached to be older so that he could look after her and at the same time wanted to get away from her. These difficult opposing feelings were not clear to him, were more a sense of unease like worms in his stomach, a sense he had grown used to - a part of him like a distant background noise.

He lifted the latch on the little iron gate, noting that it was a bit more rusty than last time, and they crunched up the cinder path to the back door. And now he was excited - he loved the moment of stepping over the worn threshold straight into his grandmothers’ kitchen, as if he were journeying back in time, as if the bungalow was his own Tardis.

The kitchen had its’ own particular smell of cooked meat and detergent with a slight undertone of leaking gas.
“There you are my darlings”, said his grandmother, a tiny lady with a face and gestures that reminded him of a mouse. She ushered them in and lit the gas for tea.

William watched her fill the old chipped enamel kettle at the sink and quickly checked for the jars on the window sill. Yes, they were there! A jar of bubbles and a jar of wasps. She saved bubbles from the washing up hoping to re-use them and set a jar of sugar water out to trap any wasps that dared to enter through the window. He counted six dead wasps like little yellow husks. He smiled to himself, half embarrassed, thinking of how stupid his friends at school would think him, looking for these pathetic things and making them so important. They wouldn’t understand those jars at all, maybe they’d think his grandmother was a bit loopy. Well, she was a bit but he loved her.

His mother sat down at the old scarred table while Grandma bustled with tea and cake, cherry cake with white icing from the WI stall on the market. Grandma would take him to market the next day because it was Friday and she’d buy him too many sweets, then, at the butchers, he would stare at a landscape of red meat cuts and check them off on the animal wall chart while she bought mince and a bristling pigs head.

He offered to get the lump sugar from the pantry so that he could check the bowl of eggs, yes, it was there and full of brown eggs that the ‘egg lady’ brought every Wednesday. She lived on a wild hill side and smelled of rain and animals and had fierce eyes. Once he had been to her farm cottage to see the stream running through her kitchen. It hadn’t surprised him, she was the sort of person who would have a stream running through her kitchen.

He sat at the table for his piece of cake, as close to Grandma as he could get without actually touching her. He wanted to smell her face powder and her Lilly of the Valley scent that she kept on her dressing table in a little bottle with a squeezy bulb called an ‘atomiser’.

“Now then, William, how you’ve grown! You’ll be my big man soon. Have some more cake, go on.” She patted his hand with her own small, soft one. “I’ve got moussaka for supper, you like my mousssaka don’t you?”
William nodded, he did like it, oozing with cheese and lamb mince and he knew she was proud of it –such an exotic dish. So all was in order but something was missing.

“Mama, mama?” There it was, the ghostly voice of his aunt.

William’s mother smiled at him and raised her eyebrows. He smiled quickly back at her, with delicious complicity, usually she ignored his grins when her sister called like that.

“She’ll be wanting her tea.” Grandma said and busied herself setting a tray with a cloth, tea cup and a slice of cake.

“Tell her we’re here Mother, won’t you?” William heard the dry note in his mother’s voice and looked again, hoping for more secret smiles but she just sighed and poured herself some more tea. “Why don’t you go and unpack Will, have a wash, dinner time soon.”

He went willingly hoping to catch sight of the source of that ‘ghostly voice’ in her dimly lit room like a scary cave. The cave was full to bursting with odd extravagant clothes – props she called them, for the theatre, piles of folders, books and a dusty, cluttered dressing table with a three leaved mirror. She would be on her single sagging bed weighed down with many eiderdowns and lit by the glow of a bedside lamp with its’ pink tasselled shade. Somewhere in that heap of bedding Ringo, her snappy old dachshund, would be nestling with his smooth black patches of skin showing though his short brown fur. You had to be careful, in the narrow dark hall, not to step in his droppings.

William was sure there would be some kind of treasure in his aunt’s room, some interesting object that you would never find anywhere else in a million years. He had never been in there, not once, only hovered in the doorway if she called to him. But he planned to one day, he just needed to be alone in the house for a short while. He wanted to poke through all the stuff and leave her a little surprise, nothing too bad, just something to worry her a bit like she worried him with her questions that made him feel she was pulling something out of him. When this happened he imagined he was a British spy being interrogated by Germans. Also, she didn’t like his mother and she was often rude to his grandmother. But her door was firmly shut.

He ran his hands along the books that lined the walls as he went down the hall. Aunt Olive loved horror and crime stories, there were rows and rows of them with lurid covers, beautiful women with flimsy dresses half ripped by dark hook-nosed murderers or sleek vampires with bloody teeth.

In the spare room where he always slept, he lifted his case on to the high bed with the horse hair mattress and slippery satin bed cover and unpacked his clothes and comics. Then he went to the bathroom that smelled of coal tar soap and played with the bath rack for a while, bombing it with the duck shaped head of the old back scrubber until his mother called him for supper.

“Had a wash?” He nodded at her, still pleased with this little deceit, she never knew if he had or hadn’t and sat down at the table.

“And how was your journey?” said his aunt who had a trick of appearing suddenly from the darkness of the hall as if she somehow materialised there from her cave without having to make any effort.

“The usual. How are you?” Williams mother asked dutifully.

The conversation always became stilted when his aunt was in the room and they raised their voices as if talking to each other over a great distance or like bad actresses on a stage. William usually had to stifle a terrible urge to laugh. But now he felt suddenly tired, this was always the worst part, his mother and his aunt having to talk to each other. Really, he didn’t know why they bothered, they never said anything important, just talked at each other because they had to.

Aunt Olive limped into the room (she had a bad hip) and now it was his turn. She sat next to him, taking her time getting comfortable and then turned the full glow of the interrogation lamp on him. She peered closely in the direction of his face, but seemed to be looking over his shoulder with her treacly brown eyes.

“William.” She announced his name as if it were something unusual. “ ‘Just William’ do you still like those books? I love Violet Elizabeth - ‘I’ll scweem and scween ‘til I’m thick!’”,she quoted. “Oh yes, if there were ever a Just William play written and I was younger I’d love to play her. What about you William, who would you play?”

Always she asked these silly questions and he squirmed in his seat. The British spy act wasn't working. Nobody he wanted to say, I wouldn’t play anybody. But he only shrugged and she carried on talking about how she would play Violet Elizabeth until Grandma set down the plates of moussaka.

“Moussaka. Is it still your favourite meal, William?” Aunt Olive said.

“Yes it is,” he managed to say quite firmly and thought, You’ll never get it out of me, whatever it is you want.

Still she peered and smiled in that creepy way, with one side of her mouth, which always made him think she didn’t believe anything he said. He could see the hairgrips in her dark bush of wiry hair, long with a strange dark rusty colour and funny nubbed ends. A tendril of that wiry hair escaped and she was so close that it tickled his cheek. He felt breathless, closed-in and looked to his mother for help but she was listening to Grandma.

“Oof, it’s terrible Lillian, the dizziness sometimes. I have to sit down when it comes on, Duw,duw, you wouldn’t believe it.” Grandma said.

Suddenly Aunt Olive stood up, her hands curved into claws, flexing in front of her, a strange clicking noise coming from the back of her throat, her mouth wide and grimacing.

“If I have to hear about the dizziness once more, I won’t be responsible for my actions,” she said in a sort of roar. She picked up the bread knife and waved it around. She was like something from one of her horror stories. William leaned far away from her in case he got caught in her ‘evil vortex.’

“You’ve no idea, you really haven’t.” She turned on her sister and William wanted to shield his Mother who seemed suddenly faraway again.
“You come down here for holidays but you’ve no idea. Still there you are, what’s to be done?” She sat down again smiling crookedly at William. “What’s to be done my darling?” She crooned.

On the last day William seized his moment. Aunt Olive had gone shopping and his mother and grandmother were in the garden talking to the neighbours over the fence. He slipped into the kitchen and got the jars, then went to his aunt’s bedroom where he pulled back the eiderdowns from her bed (tipping Ringo on to the floor, where he whined and snapped) and emptied the jar of bubbles with its’ inch or so of sludge and the jar, now nearly full of wasp husks, into her bed.
*
William came home after his first day of the new term to find his mother in the kitchen with her face in her hands and a letter open in front of her on the table.

“Mum, what’s the matter?”
“It’s nothing, well, nothing for you to worry about.”
But he could feel a pain in his chest which meant his mother was upset.

“Is it your arthritis, is it hurting? D’you have to go for another operation?”
“No, darling, it’s not that. Your Grandma might be coming to live here for while. Would you like that?”
“Yes,” said William, thinking, that’s the end of the holidays at Grandma’s, is that my punishment?
“Good, then she’ll be coming soon.”
“Is she ill?”
“No, just getting old and your aunt is a bit tired.” Again the dry tone but no complicit smile or raising of her eyebrows.
Late that night William crept downstairs and found the letter. It was hard to read her spidery scrawl but he managed it.

‘Dear Lillian,

‘I have committed Mother to a nearby mental institution for her own safety and my sanity. You can contact her there. (address and telephone number overleaf)

Olive.’