Tongue-wags

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

The little boy sat on the special green and yellow Dave sized chair that his older brother had made for him. It was his pride and joy, that chair, he carried it all over the house and he was allowed to take it into the garden when the weather was fine. He was watching Barbara, his big sister, who sat on a comparatively gigantic chair before a walnut veneer dressing table as she rubbed moisturiser into her face. Dave couldn't remember what the moisturiser was for. Sometimes, instead of moisturiser she applied a pale pink powder from a flat, gold coloured tin, which she dabbed on with a tiny sponge. It was foundation, she had told him a number of times, and it covered skin imperfections, but he could never remember what skin imperfections were either, or why they needed covering up. He had watched raptly for a long time while his sister dried her hair and combed it up into an odd shape that she called a beehive, which was arranged around a wire frame and held in place by countless tiny metal clips and clouds of hairspray that made his eyes water. Just as he expected she sent him out of her room. “Just while I get dressed,” she promised. “I won't be long.”

“How long?”

“Oh, I dunno; ten, twenty minutes I suppose while I decide what I'm going to wear and get changed, then you can come back in.” Dave had no idea why he was always chucked out of the room while big people got dressed or undressed. 'It's not decent,' that was the standard response to his questions, but big folk refused to explain why it wasn't decent. It didn't make sense, because the whole family marched into the room while he was dressing or even into the bathroom while he was sitting naked in the bath. When big folk took a bath they bolted the bathroom door, but children weren't allowed to do that - for some reason children had to bathe with the door wide open. Big folk had things they wanted to hide under their clothes, he mused, weird things, things they were probably ashamed of - he wasn't supposed to know that, but he did know.

Dave sat on his bed in the room that he shared with Raymond, his big brother, idly looking through the window at the traffic on the road that ran just beyond the bottom of the garden. It was going dark outside, all of the shops were closed except for the off licence and there was hardly anyone around. He could see the hardware store that sold bowls and buckets, mops and brushes and lots of things that he didn't know the names of, a betting shop where his dad sometimes 'bet on the horses' (whatever that meant), and a little café, but there was also a newsagents and a fish and chip shop just around the corner. 'Ratty Salmonella,' the fish and chip shop owner was called – he had heard his mum, and dad say so, and he wondered why the man had such a funny name. For some undisclosed reason the family bought their fish and chips from a shop a mile or more away.....

Occasionally Dave glanced at the little handle on the bedroom door three feet or so from the ground, a handle that Ray had fitted especially for him, hoping that Barbara would soon call him back into her sweetly scented boudoir. He didn't want to do anything else right now because he loved watching his sister getting ready to go out. One day, she promised, when she wasn't planning on visiting pubs and clubs where kids weren't allowed, she would take him with her, but that promise never seemed to materialise.

He could take a sneaky look in Ray's chest of drawers, he supposed, but he probably wouldn't have time for a proper search. Besides, the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, which was far more interesting, was always locked (well, nearly always), so there was no point mooching. For a while he flicked through an old Dan Dare annual in an attempt to take his mind off the flood of disappointment that washed over him, but he was bored to tears with that – he had read most of the tales in the book a hundred times and he knew the best ones off by heart.

“You can come back in now, Davey,” Barb called from her room, and the boy didn't waste any time. He was was as quick off the mark as a randy whippet - that was one of his dad's sayings, and though he didn't understand its full meaning (and for reasons beyond his comprehension no one was prepared to explain it to him), but he did know that it meant moving pretty swiftly. Before long he was back on his perch in the little Dave chair watching his sister applying her make-up, which was by far his favourite part of her evening preparations.

“What is that thing?” he said, unable to contain his curiosity. He pointed at a brownish, roughly spherical object about the size of a grapefruit at the back of his sister's dressing table, an object that fascinated him largely because of its unknown provenance.

“I've told you what that is before, and I'm not going to tell you again,” Barbara replied. “You have to develop your growing brain and improve your memory.”

“I know what it's called, but you won't tell me what it is or what it's for. It's called a gloggabyat.”

“That's right, little man, it's a gloggabyat. I can't tell you what it is or what it's for because that's a closely guarded secret – and if I tell you it won't be a secret any more, will it? You'll blab, I know you will, you won't be able to resist it. Soon the whole neighbourhood will know, and once the nosey Parkers around here find out it won't be long before the entire world knows – that's what happens to secrets that get whispered about. If that happens the gloggabyat will curl up and die, just because a little kid with a big mouth revealed its magical mystery to the unworthy.”

Dave wouldn't learn for another several years that when he was a little boy his sister worked at a factory that manufactured darts, and one of her jobs was applying feathers to the flights in the days before they were replaced by plastic. Gloggabyat was a word that Barbara made up on the spur of the moment as part of the mental games she enjoyed playing with her kid brother. The gloggabyat was actually a sticky ball of waste glue that she had been adding to a little at a time for many months, but telling Dave the truth would have spoiled her fun.....

“I won't tell anyone, I promise!” the boy yelled.

“Let's just say that the gloggabyat is a very special thing, and the only one of its many purposes I can possibly tell you about is that it's there to make children's tongues wag.”

“You're just like mum and dad and all other grown-ups,” Dave grumbled. “Mum says that the little fluffy things on the mattresses, the things that won't come off, are tongue-wags. Tongue-wag is just a word that adults use to describe things that they don't want kids to know about. Raymond has tongue-wags hidden in our room, but his tongue-wags are books full of photos of men and ladies doing funny things with no clothes on.”

“What are you rabbiting on about? What books, and where are they?”

“I can't tell you, you'll blab - then the whole world will know and the tongue-wags will curl up and die, and then I won't be able to look at the pictures any more.”

“Aah, I see,” Barbara said as she applied her mascara. “I think enough's been said about that subject, young man. People are entitled to have private belongings, you know, and it's best not to mess with things that aren't yours. You'll have stuff that you don't want other people nosing through when you're older, Davey, you wait and see. I wouldn't mention Ray's tongue-wags to mum if I were you, because you might get him into trouble. Shit, perhaps I shouldn't have said that.....” Dave was staring at her cleavage through the mirror as she leaned forwards, Barbara realised. She had caught him doing that before and never thought much of it, it was just childish curiosity, she told herself – after all he was only four years old. The fact that he had covertly been ogling his brother's porn stash put a different perspective on the matter, though, so perhaps in future she ought to dress more modestly, at least when he was around.

Dave didn't utter another sound for a while, and it wasn't like him to be quiet for longer than a couple of minutes. “Can I come with you when you go out?” he said as his sister scrunched up her lips and put on her lipstick. “You said I could one day.”

“Not tonight, sweetie, we're going to a nightclub in Stafford, and kids aren't allowed in. Besides, it's Friday night and I won't be back home until two or three in the morning, which is way past your bedtime.” Dave's reply was a loud, prolonged wail that began somewhere in his belly and echoed ominously through the house as he fled from the room in tears.

“What is it?” his mother shouted from the foot of the stairs a moment later. “What's the matter?”

“It's her!” Dave yelled, his face buried deep in his pillow. “Just because she's got two big bumps on her belly she thinks she's everybody!”