looked for our number in the telephone directory but it wasn’t listed because of our mother being female and he thought we were fobbing him off with false identities. Then he realized we were claiming to be the children of Edward Vogel of H. Vogel & Company and he obtained our telephone number a different way via Charles Street and rang our home. We heard his side of the conversation with our mother.
‘I’ve got two juveniles here going off to London by train. Are you aware of this, madam? … I see, and you’re consensual with that, are you, madam?’
While this conversation dragged on, the clock ticked and time went by and I realized our train was on the platform. I pointed to the clock on the office wall and then to the doorway but the policeman closed the door with his toe.
He frowned, phone to his ear, listening to our mother.
‘Well, that is curious, madam. The older one has stated to me that they’re meeting with their father at St Pancras station in London.’
I tapped his arm. He looked away. ‘I see, madam.’
We missed the train. I heard it pull away and I began to cry.
The policeman said, ‘Your mum wants a word.’
My sister took the phone.
‘Yes. We’ve missed it,’ she said. ‘Sorry. OK, so shall we come home?’
We caught the next train but had to skip the zoo.
My high hopes for the pills were eventually dashed and I had to agree with my sister that all the pills in the world couldn’t stop our mother from being sad and writing her play. To be honest, it seemed as though the more pills we got, the more acts appeared.
So it was time for the next man on the list. We’d set our hearts on a very nice man called Phil Oliphant who lived in the village and loved horses, whom I may have mentioned before. My sister had met him by accident when looking for a new pony for herself, and he’d been the perfect mix of nice, handsome and horse-loving and even had wrought-iron gates on his driveway with a horse-head motif.
But we were stalling on Phil Oliphant because (
a
) he was too good to mess up and (
b
) his name was Phil, but mainly (
c
) our mother wasn’t ready for a new man encounter with it being spring, her worst season bar winter, and a time when she hardly wanted to leave the house, let alone have sex with a horse-lover.
We resorted to interacting with the play, listening to new scenes, listening again to old scenes, listening to edited scenes and acting it out. We even wrote some poems to sprinkle in amongst the drama. One of mine was a true story about a lost guinea pig who had run down a rat hole and hadn’t come out again, even with a parsley lure. It was awful, awful, awful. Three awfuls.
Our mother knew how bad I felt because I was usually very brave and good at dusting myself down and marching on, but this guinea pig thing had made me feel dreadful because I blamed myself. Our mother said that bad things of our own doing are the hardest type of bad thing to get over. She knew this – most of the bad things in her life having been her own fault.
Our mother said that writing a poem about it might help. It didn’t help because it got me thinking about what might have happened (inside the rat hole), whereas before writing the poem I was just sad to have lost the guinea pig and blamed myself for letting him run away. And that showed me how powerful poems can be. In a bad way. And I suppose, if I’m being fair, in a good way too.
Our mother called poems ‘pomes’, whereas we said ‘po-ims’. That irritated me almost as much as the sadness they caused. Anyway, we soon got sick of the plays and the poems and we became reckless. We’d always said we’d avoid inviting our schoolteachers to have sex with our mother because it could get awkward – in fact it was one of our two golden rules. But in desperation to break the play cycle my sister sent an invitation to a young man called Mr Dodd, Little Jack’s teacher.
He was young. So young, he wasn’t even married –
‘I’ve got two juveniles here going off to London by train. Are you aware of this, madam? … I see, and you’re consensual with that, are you, madam?’
While this conversation dragged on, the clock ticked and time went by and I realized our train was on the platform. I pointed to the clock on the office wall and then to the doorway but the policeman closed the door with his toe.
He frowned, phone to his ear, listening to our mother.
‘Well, that is curious, madam. The older one has stated to me that they’re meeting with their father at St Pancras station in London.’
I tapped his arm. He looked away. ‘I see, madam.’
We missed the train. I heard it pull away and I began to cry.
The policeman said, ‘Your mum wants a word.’
My sister took the phone.
‘Yes. We’ve missed it,’ she said. ‘Sorry. OK, so shall we come home?’
We caught the next train but had to skip the zoo.
My high hopes for the pills were eventually dashed and I had to agree with my sister that all the pills in the world couldn’t stop our mother from being sad and writing her play. To be honest, it seemed as though the more pills we got, the more acts appeared.
So it was time for the next man on the list. We’d set our hearts on a very nice man called Phil Oliphant who lived in the village and loved horses, whom I may have mentioned before. My sister had met him by accident when looking for a new pony for herself, and he’d been the perfect mix of nice, handsome and horse-loving and even had wrought-iron gates on his driveway with a horse-head motif.
But we were stalling on Phil Oliphant because (
a
) he was too good to mess up and (
b
) his name was Phil, but mainly (
c
) our mother wasn’t ready for a new man encounter with it being spring, her worst season bar winter, and a time when she hardly wanted to leave the house, let alone have sex with a horse-lover.
We resorted to interacting with the play, listening to new scenes, listening again to old scenes, listening to edited scenes and acting it out. We even wrote some poems to sprinkle in amongst the drama. One of mine was a true story about a lost guinea pig who had run down a rat hole and hadn’t come out again, even with a parsley lure. It was awful, awful, awful. Three awfuls.
Our mother knew how bad I felt because I was usually very brave and good at dusting myself down and marching on, but this guinea pig thing had made me feel dreadful because I blamed myself. Our mother said that bad things of our own doing are the hardest type of bad thing to get over. She knew this – most of the bad things in her life having been her own fault.
Our mother said that writing a poem about it might help. It didn’t help because it got me thinking about what might have happened (inside the rat hole), whereas before writing the poem I was just sad to have lost the guinea pig and blamed myself for letting him run away. And that showed me how powerful poems can be. In a bad way. And I suppose, if I’m being fair, in a good way too.
Our mother called poems ‘pomes’, whereas we said ‘po-ims’. That irritated me almost as much as the sadness they caused. Anyway, we soon got sick of the plays and the poems and we became reckless. We’d always said we’d avoid inviting our schoolteachers to have sex with our mother because it could get awkward – in fact it was one of our two golden rules. But in desperation to break the play cycle my sister sent an invitation to a young man called Mr Dodd, Little Jack’s teacher.
He was young. So young, he wasn’t even married –
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