Eight Foot Blue - 4

“Argggghh,” was how my Dad went as he started to sit down at the breakfast table, near screaming, but half holding it in. He was like a stiff piece of cardboard being bent into shape, and I knew that once he was sat he’d find it hard to bend back.

Dad arrived at the table after the rest of us. I wasn’t as stupid as Mum sometimes made out, and had made it home safely from Lily and the night before. Now, we were back in the Pengelly’s breakfast room, the room in the bed and breakfast where everyone gathered at the start of the day.

And it was embarrassing really, how Dad could barely walk. When he woke in the mornings his knees would be swollen, the size and shape of small footballs, all because they’d filled with fluid. There was so much that every month Mum had to take him to the hospital, where a specialist doctor would take a huge syringe, ready to draw it all out. I hadn’t wanted to listen, but Dad told me about it once. The indignity, the mess, and the pain.

And then there were his hips. If he tried to stand say, or take a step, you could hear the bone grating like a bad driver crunching gears. Sometimes he got so bad, that his hands clamped into claws, or birds feet maybe. They were the opposite of his knees, all twisted bone that seemed to want to poke out of his skin.

I knew this was why we’d come on holiday and this was why we’d come here. To Cornwall. Because Mum said Dad used to come here when he was a boy. I mean Mum said too that we couldn’t really afford it, but three weeks before the end of term, half way through exams, with Chemistry the next day, Mum stood at the end of my bed and added, “But it will be a break for all of us and we need a break. Dad, me, you and especially Rah.”

Especially Rah.

Perfect Rah.

Poor little Rah, my sister with the stupid name, even though it was her own idea to call herself this, because her real name was Sarah. It started when she was littler, one or two, and though she could walk, we thought she was still learning to speak. Then one Sunday evening, she stopped in the middle of the lounge floor, and stood dribbling in front of the T.V. We’d been watching Songs of Praise, I think. Quite suddenly she said a whole sentence. Something like, I know what my name is, I just won’t be called that anymore.

As Dad was sitting down, I sat and watched Rah across the breakfast table as she dipped another solider into her egg. The head was still by the side of her plate, a white skull that was looking forlorn. The yolk was running down her chin and onto her chest, yellow streaks to later crust on her flower print dress.

So Rah wasn’t as old as she sometimes thought she was. She was still only eight, and it didn’t matter how intelligent she seemed when she spoke, it was really too young to understand all the bad stuff that was going on with Dad. And though I normally felt sorry for myself, sometimes I felt sorriest for her, especially say when I’d just woken up. After all, Rah couldn’t go off on her own. She couldn’t play on the machines. She couldn’t meet girls like Lily. And she wasn’t smiling.

Other people in the breakfast room were planning trips and things, and each table was covered with a red plastic cloth so it was easy to wipe off the spills. Also, in the middle of each table, neatly arranged, were pepper, salt, and red sauce and brown sauce, for those who like their food fried. It was sort of like the restaurant from the night before.

I pulled the sugar bowl toward me and started making a world in this bowl, with a spoon. I carved mountains and flatlands and fields, though Mum was looking daggers at me. “Please, George, stop,” she said. But I couldn’t stop because I was fiddling, and anyway I was thinking too. Lots of different things were bouncing around my head. Lily mainly, but also I was thinking how every table was the same, or nearly the same, with the table cloths and sauce bottles, with old sauce hard around the lids, and yet weren’t all the families different somehow?

The other tables had all been taken by the time we got to the breakfast room. Even though we arrived before Dad, we were still last on account of how long mornings took him. We couldn’t be seen to be waiting for him for too long.

Now, we had the table farthest away from the window, and it would have been nice to have the window seats one time. I’d have liked to have sat and watched the world walking by. I imagined children carrying buckets and spades, skipping down the road. Maybe I’d have caught a glimpse of Lily’s blue hair. Instead though, I had to imagine, because from where we were there was really nothing much to see, except the sugar bowl, and the room itself, and all the other people staring at Dad as he tried to sit down quietly.

Every time I looked up from the bowl, everyone was watching him. Then they’d see me watching them and they’d look away, back down at their plates of food. Bacon, tomatoes, toast and the thickness of their marmalade. They would pretend to talk in voices too loud to be true, it’s going to be a lovely day, or what shall we do today, or let’s not forget the sun hats that we wear.

They would say these things and jangle their cutlery, scraping fork prongs across their plates, but it didn’t make much difference because soon their eyes would be magnet drawn to Dad again. I knew why. It was because he was different, and because he could barely walk. Because he screamed when he sat down.

Or these other people, they would be looking at me, or at Rah, or at Mum, and I could hear their thoughts, like they were screaming them at me. Say I’d shrunk to the size of a flea, and I’d crawled through their eyes and got into their heads. Poor souls, they thought, poor dears with a sick Dad. Maybe even they were looking at Mum and thinking, gosh it must be hard for her.

But they didn’t understand and they didn’t want to understand. It was all too obvious, how they didn’t want to acknowledge how it could happen to them, that it could happen to anyone. There but for the grace of God. And this is when it came to me. It was sort of another inspiration, but also it was because of Lily, and what she said when we were standing on the beach. I mean my Dad was their shark. He was the flesh and worn bones of their fear. And he was unreal to them but very real to me.

Dad had finally settled in his chair. He clawed his cup and saucer to him with his right hand as this one had the better grip, but he didn’t really say very much. He never really said that much. He just sort of sat there catching his breath and waiting for Mrs Pengelly to come bouncing into the room, to ask him what he wanted to eat. A new morning holiday ritual.

Mum filled his cup with tea while we waited and I passed the sugar bowl. The silver style spoon that I’d been making worlds with before, was sticking out from the sugar itself. The end of the handle had been moulded in the shape of the Banjo pier, the kind of holiday gift you could buy for forty-nine pence in all the shops on the front.

Mum took the spoon and heaped three sugars in for Dad, and then holding the pier, she stirred his tea for him, making first waves, then a storm, so that it was almost splashing over the sides. Well that’s what saucers are for, Dad would have said if it had been about a year ago, and he’d have been doing this for himself. Now though, he just sat there frowning, right up until Mrs Pengelly appeared suddenly in the doorway.

She strode across the room. It annoyed me, the contrast, how she came to us jiggling and shaking in a huge fat bundle of health, with her red face and any number of chins, and her enormous beach ball breasts, that seemed always caught in a breeze. They were going this way and that, and I believed they must have been actually inflatable, multicoloured plastic, beneath her white blouse and dirty apron. Air valves for nipples. “Whassit gonna be then George,” she said in a voice that conjured up cream. She was speaking to Dad, not to me.

I knew who Mrs Pengelly was speaking to, though we shared a name and this had been my Dad’s idea. I never really understood why Mum had let it happen, but she did. And when Mrs Pengelly spoke the whole room had to listen because she spoke to us all like a friend would speak, although Dad had paid to stay here. “Ususal,” said Dad trying to smile his way out of his frown.

“Full English again, then,” said Mrs Pengelly, with a cartoon chuckle that made her breasts roll around even more. I hated her. I wanted to zap her like she was a part of the Quest game. “And why not, it’s your holiday,” she said, which was when Dad nodded and Mum smiled too.

Mum had long since given up on getting Dad to stick to the diet the Doctors prescribed. Little pleasures, she would sometimes say and I suppose they were, these bacon and eggs, but still it made me feel strange when the other families all looked at Dad as if to say his legs were his fault.