My Mysterious Uncle

By the time he was eight years old, Danny had reluctantly concluded that his Uncle Trevor was probably not a vampire. Just after his ninth birthday, he’d given up on the all-consuming idea that Trevor was an evil spy mastermind. But Danny was still unsure. And his mother wasn’t exactly helping.

“I just don’t see why you need to make a fuss about it all the time,” she sighed as she turned away from the dinner table and, laden with gravy-stained dishes, walked towards the sink.

His mother was a woman of near-infinite patience. This was a very useful quality in anyone, thought Danny. He was aware that he pushed the boundaries from time to time. But he needed to make her see.

“But mom...”

“Daniel. I’m not going to discuss this with you any more tonight.”

Danny knew at that point not to push it. Any further argument was just going to be futile. She’d called him ‘Daniel’. Normally he was ‘Danny’, although in recent weeks he’d tried, with limited success, to propose ‘Dan’. Dropping the Daniel-bomb, however, was a true sign that the conversation was not going to go his way. In fact, he knew from bitter experience that if he wasn’t extremely careful, full names would be involved. This would not only mean an end to civil negotiation but probably the curtailment of X-Box privileges.

His mother was now scraping the remains of dinner into the kitchen bin. He could tell by the underlying rhythm that she was still irritated.

“I don’t see...” scrape scrape scrape “why your father and I...” scrape scrape scrape “can’t have a weekend away on our own once in a while...”scrape scrape scrape.

Danny half expected to see the pattern itself slide off the plates and into the bin. He regarded his feet morosely as she continued.

“Anyway, I don’t see what the problem is this time. You’ve got a lovely weekend in front of you. Kimberly and Trevor hardly ever get to see their only nephew these days. Trevor was telling us only last night what they’ve got planned for you.”

Danny’s heart sank. It was worse than he’d imagined. There really seemed to be no way out this time. Then his mother delivered the hammer blow.

“Your Uncle Trevor will be picking you up himself. Isn’t that good of him?”

Danny had always been slightly jealous of other boys at school. Occasionally the conversation in the playground would move away from football and onto the subject of families. In many ways, Danny reflected, he was quite lucky. Having two parents was by no means guaranteed these days. But it was when the discussion broadened to wider family members that Danny found himself struggling.

Other boys had uncles who they saw at Christmas and birthdays. Other boys had uncles who embarrassed everyone at family get-togethers. Martin Simpson had an uncle who was in prison for doing something unthinkable in a branch of Waitrose on a Wednesday afternoon.

Oh how Danny wished his uncle could have been the Great Supermarket Defiler of Tamworth.

But Uncle Trevor was none of these things. He was just, well, odd. Not odd as in a ‘wearing your pants outside of your trousers’ kind of way. He didn’t seem to have any odd pastimes, like steam traction engines or Morris-dancing. If anything, the occasional ‘hey-nonny-no’ from time to time would have been a blessed relief, thought Danny.
But there was something mysterious about Trevor. And, try as he might, Danny couldn’t quite put his gravy-stained finger on it.

He’d first been concerned about Trevor when he was about four or five, not long after he’d learned that there are adults who are parents and adults that are other family and adults that are everyone else. He’d had a slightly confusing afternoon as his father gently explained the whole concept of brothers and sisters, grannies and grand-dads, aunts and uncles. Danny got the impression that there was more detail to the story his dad was keeping from him, but at that time he was more interested in the characters than the plot.

“So Uncle Trevor is your brother?” he’d asked.

“No, not quite, son. Auntie Kim is my sister. And the year before you were born, she got married to Trevor. That’s what makes him your uncle.”

The fact that some random ceremony somehow made Trevor his uncle - before Danny even existed - was mind-blowing enough. But then he began to pay more attention to the man in question, and he wasn’t certain he liked what he saw. There was the facial hair, for starters. Oh, Danny had seen moustaches before, just not in such close proximity. Against Trevor’s pale skin, the jet black face-fuzz was a little disconcerting.

That’s probably where the vampire thing originally came from, thought Danny. He’d seen vampires in his comic book. He was quite an expert on the subject. But a distinct lack of punctured victims had eventually made him doubtful. On one of his rare visits to his aunt and uncle, he’d sneaked into the main bedroom to see if Trevor had a perch from which he would sleep upside-down. The drawer-divan didn’t look particularly Transylvanian.

The spy mastermind theory came about after another wet Saturday afternoon watching James Bond films on the family television. Didn’t Uncle Trevor have one of those furry hats, too, just like a SMERSH agent? Where did he work? Dad said it was something to do with double-entry book-keeping, but for all Danny knew that might involve an underground lair and pointy rockets. He’d pored over the A-Z map of the West Midlands for hours, but couldn’t find any hollowed-out dormant volcanoes.

His mother’s voice broke the daydream. “Danny, get your shoes on. Trevor’s just pulling up outside.”

Danny stared wide-eyed as he watched his uncle go to the boot of his odd little car, take out a mackintosh and unfold it.

“Mom! I know what it is! Trevor’s an alien, or something.”

“What? Oh Danny, I thought you’d grown out of this nonsense.”

He could hear Trevor’s footsteps on the gravel outside. Scrunch. Scrunch. Scrunch.

“Look!” hissed Danny. “He doesn’t have an engine in his car. I saw it! He just opened the bonnet and there was nothing there! He’s some sort of alien from the future. They have all sorts of stuff like that, mom. I read about it.”

His mother let out another sigh as she went to open the door. “Danny. Your Uncle Trevor is not an alien. He drives an old Volkswagen Beetle. The engine’s in the back. Put your shoes on.”

Danny looked pleadingly at his mother, but she rolled her eyes and propelled him towards the doorway. This was so unfair. He was going to be abducted for sure, and his own mother was in on it. There was nothing he could do to prevent himself being flown off to Mars. In a deep sulk, Danny pulled on his rucksack as Trevor came through the door.

“Hullo Jane. How’s my favourite nephew?”

“He’s being a little silly again, Trevor. Thank you so much for taking him off our hands for the weekend.”

“No problem. Right then. Come on champ, we’ve got a full weekend for you.”

Danny narrowed his eyes and checked his uncle’s face closely for tentacles. They often had tentacle-y faces in his comics.

“Right then, we’ll be off,” said Trevor. “You and Mark have a good time, and don’t worry about young Danny here. He’ll be fine with us.”

And as he winked at him, Danny was sure, as sure as a ten-year-old could be, that he saw a second and third eyelid.