Short Fiction

Getting Noticed.

What Grandad MacArthur said was that whenever you have a bad day a good one should usually follow. If it doesn’t then the day after that is all you can hope for. A week of bad days, you should consider ending it, cut it short. Something has noticed you and is unlikely to stop bothering you until you’re gone. Don’t prolong the agony, don’t get bogged down in trying to make it better. You did all you could but you got noticed. “The best thing you can ever do, Comrade,” my grandfather said, “is to not get noticed.”

When I told this to Johnny Haircut, he disagreed. With respect, he said, that’s BS. If Grandad MacArthur had still been alive I don’t know if he’d have said ‘with respect’. Johnny Haircut’s own Gramps told him that every day above ground is a good day. The next day after the service for Uncle Pete, fourteen of my family boarded a plane to Almeria in Spain, paid for by cousin Stevie’s lottery win. We don’t talk to that side of the family so we didn’t go. I don’t know how much cousin Stevie won but it must have been a lot. My dad and step-mum spent one evening discussing it. It was a discussion some of the neighbours heard. Rita, my step-mum, didn’t speak to my dad for about a day after. She couldn’t understand, and said so, why he had to be so pig-headed all the time. He told her if she had any family of her own to speak of, she would realise that ninety percent of them were idiots. My iPod volume went up pretty high that night.

Anyhow, something noticed them. They were having a good day above ground and then they weren’t. The plane went down in a field near Valencia, killing all on board. That was when I began to wish the voice hadn’t spoken. I spent an hour worrying about whether that constituted being noticed or not, but the fact I was still alive and not on the news being circled by a helicopter meant that it probably didn’t. This time.

Sometimes I forget things. The person sitting next to me at the service was aunt Philippa. I should have remembered that. Hers was the dark lapel the flower had been pinned to. Hers was the smell of rose granati and tobacco. After the service ended she moved to the end of the pew then stopped to mouth something at me. She pointed at my left ear with a delicate smile, and as I turned, the cord tickled my neck. I lurched up, crying out, batting at it. I thought it was Uncle Pete coming back as a spider or wasp. Fortunately, the music had already begun and the gatherers stopped sniffling and were filing out. It was Dire Straits, uncle Pete’s favourite. One of the slow ones, though. About Brothers not deserting each other.

The wire draped my shoulder like a white worm, the sort you see doctors pulling out of African children’s legs. If I’d moved my head at any point during the service I would have seen it. There had been this worry of it still sitting snug in the well of my ear, but I’d dismissed it as one of those phantom feelings, like when you take off a baseball cap you’d been wearing all day. I listen to my iPod all day. All night sometimes.

It must have looked bad. This white splash on my Dad’s black suit jacket like something a seagull did. I popped out the bud with a tug, turning hot and cold, thinking about the voice and what it had said.  Nothing like that ever came from my iPod before. It was supposed to be Green Day.

“I know you weren’t being disrespectful, Toby, it’s an easy mistake to make. I noticed it earlier but thought it might be a piece of cotton. My eyes aren’t what they were.”

I took off my thick glasses and cleaned them. Outside the rain had slackened off. Uncle Pete’s widow, Aunt Do, waved a Berkeley menthol at me and thanked me for coming.

“You’re a good lad. Your uncle Pete always said that. He had a soft spot for you.”

I felt it was the least I could do. When I was small Uncle Pete used to take me fishing with his two sons, Alfie and Pete Jr, who were both in their thirties now. I snagged him in the cheek once with a fly barb but once the bleeding stopped he laughed it off. That’s how he was.

My dad didn’t come because Rita had a thing about funerals. You couldn’t even have flowers in the house. When Princess Diana was carted down to that island on live TV we watched Carry On Up the Khyber instead. Nobody mentioned it, but I kept getting little looks from clumps of people who fell silent when I came near.

We got to the Colliery and I was having a pee in one of the stalls and heard someone say. “It’s not the kid’s fault, having parents like that. It’s up to Tom to be stronger. Barbara would have made sure of a proper turn-out on their side.”

Barbara was my real mum, Tom my dad. She got cancer and died. I don’t know what she did to get noticed and probably neither did she. That was the thing about it, like winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. There wasn’t much you could do except keep your head down and hope.

In the pub the atmosphere grew lighter with each pint and the lucky ones remembered they were alive and going on holiday and got excited. Cousin Stevie was buying all the drinks, although his cheque hadn’t cleared yet. “We’re good for it, though,” he winked. The last time he had his name in the paper it was for ‘importuning’ sex from a schoolgirl. That was all forgotten now, he had a conditional discharge and moved house. There was a picture of him inside Old Trafford holding a big cheque and saying he couldn’t understand these people who said winning it wouldn’t change them. Cousin Stevie definitely planned for it to change him. He’d already taken a limousine to the haulage company he worked for and told them to stick it. Everyone in the room looked on him like a celebrity, even the ones not going to Spain. They still needed loans paying off and their cars changed.

They remembered Uncle Pete and some of the silly things he did. Like when Aunt Do was making a pot casserole and they were in Tesco and Uncle Pete yelled “Where’s the Dill, Do?” down the fruit and veg aisle.

The pasties and pints and punchlines were part of what Grandad MacArthur would call ‘cameraderie’. A fellow feeling in the midst of hard times, like when the Chinese had no grain and had to eat their own shoes. I bet they had a right laugh about that. Grandad MacArthur became a Communist after the war and had the Morning Star delivered to his warden-controlled bungalow every morning until 1997, when he died after a milk float noticed him wobbling up Park Street in the fog after a lock-in at Houlihans.

It made me think that maybe funerals were for the living after all. But something about agreeing with the voice didn’t feel right. I didn’t want the fear of death controlling me like it did Rita, but I wasn’t crazy about speaking to it directly either. That’s why I decided the voice had been an accident, a crossed wire. Having my earphone in made it plausible. I’d probably played an accidental podcast that I’d also downloaded accidentally. It was an iPod Touch, and if you weren’t careful you could touch something that wasn’t meant to be touched, like the time Johnny Haircut wiped off all the game saves from my Playstation. Accidents like that happen all the time.

Pete Jr. touched me on the  shoulder and I jumped, spilling the unmade roll-up tobacco from the Rizla paper. He was half-sloshed, ruffling my hair as though I were ten again. “Have a pint, LP. Go on, have a pint.”

“I’m alright, thanks. Driving.” I had to admit that the rare temporary ownership of Dad’s Fiesta was one of the reasons I came to see off Uncle Pete. Not the only reason, of course. That would be selfish. And I’ve always worn specs, even when we used to go fishing all those years ago. I’d ask precocious questions too, like why don’t the fish get wise and not eat any maggots, just to be on the safe side. At five in the morning, when the first flask of coffee hadn’t even been unscrewed yet, these were deep considerations, especially from a seven year old with a lazy eye. For this reason, Uncle Pete and his sons used to call me the Little Professor or LP for short.

Outside two men were arguing in the car park. “I know I’m not disabled, but my wife is. We’re just waiting for the badge.”

“Your wife’s not even with you!”

“So?”

I drove off in the blue Fiesta, wondering whether the clutch might be slipping or if I was just rusty from lack of practice. If I hurried I could just catch How do they do it? on Discovery. They were going to show how they put the stripes in toothpaste.