Welcome to my blog which is spending the last hour of christmas day recovering from a fast drive on the empty M5 and waiting for the Australia-India Test Match to start. I generally support the Indian cricket team even when they play England which means that despite being an english born white I would have failed the Tebbit test of Britishness. These days we often hear political prattle about British values but fortunately no-one seems to listen. Tonight I was stopped by the police travelling at 63mph in a 30mph area. The policeman asked if I had any excuse. I said no. And then he let me go because it was Christmas night. Is that a British value?
I bet Australia win. What I want is Sehwag to get 200. Australia are batting. 0-0 after five balls. I'm tired, my head is spinning. No way can I stay up all night to watch this.
Here's a story, called EIGHT AND TEN. We'll catch up on the gossip next week.
I bet Australia win. What I want is Sehwag to get 200. Australia are batting. 0-0 after five balls. I'm tired, my head is spinning. No way can I stay up all night to watch this.
Here's a story, called EIGHT AND TEN. We'll catch up on the gossip next week.
1
“It’s your dad’s fault,” declared Ruth, supporting this firmness of opinion with a practised stance of aggression.
“What is?” enquired Matthew, still trying to tie a knot in his shoelaces.
“Everything. Fucking everything!”
Matthew blanched. “You shouldn’t say that word.”
“Why not? Nobody’s listening.”
“It isn’t nice.”
“What a sissy you are. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Sounds all right to me.”
It sounded all right to Matthew to as well, when Ruth said it. In his own mind he repeated her profanity but there it was all wrong.
“What’s my dad’s fault?”
“I told you, everything. Like the fact that you and I won’t have anything to do when we grow up. Like the fact there won’t be a world to grow up in. Like the fact that you’re stupid.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You are so. That’s why I have to tell you these things. If you knew already, I wouldn’t have to, would I? And if you had a brain you would be doing something about it.”
Knots accomplished, Matthew stood up. “I don’t know what you mean,” he muttered as he looked over to the beckoning woods to the west. “Shall we make a camp?”
Before he could move, or even breathe, Ruth shockingly reached out, grabbed his head in her hands and forced it up to meet her wrathful eyes. “Matthew Grimsley, would you please pay attention for once in your life? While you are playing cowboys and Indians in those ignorant woods there’s a real war going on out there in the world and your dad is to blame. Me and the others have decided that it is time for you to do something about it!
Releasing him with a rough dismissive shake, Ruth turned her back and marched off towards the road knowing full well that Matthew would have to call her back. For a few moments he tried to summon the will to have done with her but this he could not do for love already held sway in his heart.
“Ruth,” he shouted between sobs, “Ruth, tell me what you mean!”
Briefly Ruth pretended to hesitate then, with a glee hidden from Matthew, she recommenced her march, leaving him no choice but to follow.
With the boy in tow Ruth felt that she could walk for miles and miles. Bored with the road she returned to the fields, hedgerows and streams, all of which she conquered with easy strength whereas her smaller pursuer was often panting for breath or untangling the brambles that had greedily seized upon his skin. As the hours passed, however, Ruth relaxed her domination, slowed her pace and finally allowed Matthew to catch up.
“You’re tougher than you look,” she congratulated as they rested on an old tree trunk that lay in the centre of a beech copse.
“No I’m not,” replied Matthew, emboldened by his trial. “You just don’t look at me properly.”
Ruth, for once disinclined to argue, smiled. “Maybe it isn’t all your dad’s fault,” she conceded with flirtatious grace. “There are lots of people responsible really. Maybe he can’t even help it.”
“I still don’t…” began Matthew.
“But still he shouldn’t do it,” interrupted Ruth, her face full of sudden frown. “He’s got to be stopped.”
Bewildered, Matthew sucked his lips anxiously. Ruth continued. “Just think Matthew, what you will feel like if we all wake-up dead one morning because of what your dad has done. You will wish you stopped him, won’t you?”
“Yes,” said Matthew, uttering the only word his frozen mouth would come up with. “Yes.”
“Well, there you are then. You do understand.” Ruth looked at her watch. “Fuck. It’s teatime. Tell you what, I’ll pop round your place in the morning to see how you’re getting on. Just remember to be brave and then everything will be all right.”
2
Rarely had Mrs Grimsley been disappointed by Matthew’s response to her speciality spaghetti and sweet corn dish.
“Are you feeling unwell Matthew?”
“Just not hungry Mum.”
“You’re always hungry.”
“Not tonight Mum.”
“Must be missing school,” teased Dad. “Shortening the holidays is a good idea if you ask me.”
Mrs Grimsley inspected Matthew more closely. “He is pale, you know.”
“I’m all right Mum, honest.” In fact Matthew felt terribly sick and had done ever since his father had come home from work. When the big man had bent down to give his son the customary hug a sudden twitch had developed in Matthew’s eye. Convinced that his dad would be able to read his thoughts, Matthew had run out of the room. The twitch returned as his parents inspected him.
“You want your brother back from Camp, don’t you?” said his father sympathetically. “It’s no fun without someone to play with.”
“He’s been out with that Ruth Williams most of the day,” reported Mrs Grimsley. “Maybe she’s run him into the ground.”
“Ah,” replied his father. “A bit of a hoyden but she’s a nice kid.” As Dad turned his attention back to the food there was a moment of stillness in the room and a feeling of relief began to sweep through Matthew. If he could just swallow some food then he’d be okay.
“Ruth Williams is a liar!” he heard himself shout.
Immediately his mother’s face tightened. “Really Matthew, I’m sure Ruth is no such thing.”
“She is, she is! I know she is.”
Dad sighed loudly, put down his knife and fork and adopted his ‘let’s be reasonable’ voice. “I think you will have to give us some examples, Matthew. Tell us, when has she lied?”
“Lots of times,” mumbled Matthew, bitterly regretting his outburst and, in vain, trying to hold back his tears.
“Shall we start with one lie? Maybe you could tell us one lie,” suggested Dad, his tone on the edge of mockery.
“I can’t.”
“There we are then.”
“I mean I can’t tell you,” wept Matthew.
“Why can’t you tell us?”
Matthew’s head was aflame. He could feel his scalp burning and his mind racing with thoughts that he couldn’t speak. In the distance he heard his father’s interrogation.
“Why can’t you tell us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know? You should know what you’re talking about when you start calling your friends liars.”
Fearing that the boy was on the point of collapse, Mrs Grimsley distracted her husband with chocolate pudding, then intervened. “He’s not well, probably feverish,” she declared. “Hard to make sense when there’s heat on the brain.”
“No excuse for lying,” complained Dad, spilling double-cream on the cloth.
“Of course not. But he’s sick and going to bed. Maybe he’ll be more coherent in the morning.”
3
The new day dawned behind dark cloud and seemed, wisely perhaps, hesitant to emerge at all from night’s timely cocoon. Matthew awoke, of a sudden, with a deep foreboding in his being. At first it was silent, brooding, menacing, then, as his eyes opened and the day became real, his disquiet erupted into an overwhelming torrent of threat, danger and despair. So torn was Matthew, so devastated, he thought for a moment that Ruth’s dire prophecy must have come true and during the night the world had ended. His limbs shook as he dressed and it was only the insistent calling of his mother from downstairs that dragged his dreading body to the kitchen.
The adults, he discovered, had put aside the tensions of the previous evening. Matthew heard his mother comment, “Matthew looks better,” and saw his father’s absent nod. Later when Dad left for work he gave his son a cheering wave. Instinctively Matthew waved back and for a good half an hour after that his mood lifted a fraction. Ironically it was Mrs Grimsley who rekindled his fear.
“Is Ruth coming around today?” she asked casually.
Matthew gulped. “I don’t think so,” he lied. “I was thinking of going out on my own.”
“Maybe I’ll give her a ring and ask her for tea. We’ve still got chocolate pudding.”
“It’d be better if you didn’t, Mum. Not today.”
“Why ever not? You’re not going to be making-up more stuff about her, are you Matthew? We had enough of that last night.”
Controlling himself, Matthew forced a pleasant smile. “Dad might be tired when he gets home from work, that’s all. Might not want two kids hanging about.”
Preoccupied by a malfunctioning washing machine, Mrs Grimsley failed to notice the squeaky insincerity of his son’s voice. “Dad’s lucky,” she said. “Enjoys his work. He’ll be happy you have someone to play with.”
“What does he actually do, Mum?” asked Matthew, suddenly swept to the brink of an abyss inside of himself.
“You know what he does, he works for the government,” replied Mrs Grimsley.
“But what does he actually do?” Matthew heard his voice go even higher. Simultaneously he became aware of a dreadful thirst. His mother, maddeningly, tinkered with the failed machine then, sadly, shook her head. “I’ll have to get the man in.”
“But Dad, what does he do?” begged Matthew.
Mrs Grimsley looked at him in surprise. “He advises them on things,” she answered vaguely. Now run off and play outside before the rain comes.”
4
“You’ll have to use your brain,” said Ruth as she threw yet another stone into the stream. “If you think about things hard enough you can usually work out what to do.”
“I can’t,” confessed Matthew. “I just get more and more stuck.”
“Maybe you’re what they call simple-minded,” damned Ruth carelessly.
“I’m not Ruth, I’m not. I do very well in school.”
“Reading, writing, anyone can do that. “For thinking you need a sharp brain.”
Angry with Ruth, furious with himself, Matthew let the water cover his shoes and soak his socks. “I still don’t know what my dad has done wrong,” he protested. “When he comes home at night he doesn’t look like he’s been bad all day. Maybe you should stay for tea and see for yourself.”
Patiently Ruth sighed – the accentuated heave of her shoulders being sufficient to convey just how much tolerance she was having to call upon. “People get misguided sometimes,” she declared. “Haven’t you ever been doing something which you think okay then along comes a brother or a teacher or a mum and they tell you that you’ve been naughty and now you’re in trouble?”
“All the time,” acknowledged Matthew, grateful to have at last heard something that almost made sense to him.
“Maybe your dad is the same. Maybe he doesn’t know he’s being naughty.”
Matthew almost burst with disappointment as the brief glimpse of comprehension disappeared. “But what does he do, Ruth? What’s he doing that is so naughty?”
“You told me yourself.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes you did. You said he advises the government. That means he tells them what to do so when they go round being horrible it is your dad’s fault. I can’t see why you’re being so dense about it.”
“But how do you know all this Ruth? Who told you?”
“I heard my mum and dad talking.”
“About the government?”
“No silly. Everybody knows about the government. Don’t you watch the telly? They’re always on about what the government is up to. My dad says it’s the governments that cause all the trouble in the world, telling people what they have to do and taking all their money away, then fighting wars and getting all the common people killed off.”
As the chill from his damp feet brought a cough to his chest, Matthew climbed out of the stream and sat on the rock next to Ruth. “What did your mum and dad say about my dad?” he asked quietly. “I thought they liked him.”
“Liking has nothing to do with it,” revealed Ruth. “I bet lots of people liked Hitler but that didn’t stop him gassing the Jews.”
“But what did they say about my dad?” repeated Matthew, feeling as if he’d been asking the same question all his life without ever receiving a straight answer.
“I need to pee,” said Ruth, already running toward the bracken. “Keep guard and don’t look.” So Matthew kept guard, didn’t look and didn’t find out what he wanted to know.
The nightmare that awoke him that night had culminated with images of his father rounding up the local children and herding them into a barn to spray them with poisonous gas. Among the crowd he’d seen Ruth and her little sister calling him to help but there was nothing he could do. Terrified Matthew must have cried out because there was his father patting him fondly on the head.
“I had a horrible dream,” trembled Matthew.
“Never mind, it’s over now.”
Matthew found himself unable to respond to a hug from his father. “No it isn’t,” he whispered.
“It is, of course it is.”
“No,” insisted Matthew sleepily. “Ruth won’t let it be.”
5
Nor would she. Matthew’s brother was still away at Camp when, three days late,r Ruth caught Matthew unawares playing pooh-sticks on Snaggle Bridge.
“How’s it going?” she asked, as one comrade to another.
“I’m winning,” grinned Matthew. “Do you want to play?”
“All right.”
Ruth won, constantly. Matthew became bored with the game and took to sneaking admiring looks at Ruth’s coal black straight hair that bobbed energetically as she raced from side to side of the bridge. His love for her almost took his breath away. Nevertheless he attempted the ploy that had developed in his mind since their last meeting.
“My dad says that your mum and dad have got it wrong,” he announced. “It isn’t true what they said he did.”
“Ah, but I never told you what they said, did I?” countered Ruth.
“Not exactly,” admitted Matthew. “Near enough.”
“No such thing!” replied Ruth, strongly. “It so happens that all they actually said was that your dad was chief advisor at the Waverly Government Research Centre. I worked the rest out for myself didn’t I? Some people don’t have to be told everything to work out what’s what. If you know how to use your brain you can go a long way in this world and I don’t want anyone taking the world away before I get to it. Tell your dad that!”
Having brought herself to a passion she hadn’t expected, Ruth stormed off. For once Matthew didn’t follow her. Instead he sorted himself two sticks of equal length, threw them over the low stone wall of the bridge and then hurried to see which emerged first. Both of them, however, ran aground in the weeds. “Fuck,” said Matthew out aloud. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
That night it was Ruth’s turn to manifest as a blood thirsty tyrant in Matthew’s haywire psyche. He knew it was Ruth from the hair which, although streaked with blood, bounced recognizably as her alter-ego declared war on an unsuspecting world. A gory hell of murder and mayhem filled his brain until finally there was only he and she left alive. Brandishing the two harmless sticks he had earlier used in the game, Ruth charged him. Realizing he could defend himself, but deciding not to, Matthew knelt on the ground and accepted the blows which, although harmless, woke him up.
This time he did not cry out but wept softly to himself, more in pity than in fright. Even so his father heard him and came quickly to the bed.
“Nightmares again?” he asked quietly.
Matthew nodded.
“Do you want to tell me all about it?”
Again Matthew nodded. “I want to but I don’t know if I can.”
“Try,” whispered his father. “Try. See what happens.”
For a long while Matthew said nothing. His father’s warm hand stroked his forehead while his own uneasy fingers fiddled with the edge of his pillowcase. Various words formed in his mind but they were strangled by his doubt about this man who had always been his friend and protector. What if Ruth’s accusations were true and his dad confessed to evil-doing? Would they still be able to love one another, father and son, like before? Better perhaps, thought Matthew, to say nothing, to keep what remained rather than lose it completely for the sake of truth.
Matthew’s dad had got to his feet and was leaving the room when Matthew suddenly thought of Ruth worldly ambitions and of the thousands of people who could be hurt if his father were guilty of some inexplicable malevolence. Who would speak up for them if Matthew wouldn’t? And who would his father listen to if not the son who loved him so much?
“Dad,” he called.
“Yes?” answered his father gently.
“Could you turn the light on? I’m going to try and tell you about it, about my nightmare.”
6
It didn’t take Matthew long to find Ruth when he set out to find her quite early the following day. In truth she had been hanging out by the woods hoping he would turn up, though this, of course, she tried to conceal when he gave her a hearty greeting.
“Won the lotto or something?” she enquired sarcastically on seeing his broad smiles.
“Just feel good, that’s all.”
“Gone back to your toy world of let’s pretend, I bet,” sneered Ruth. “Go on, tell me. I know something’s up. I’m not stupid.”
From the moment his father had left the bedroom, Matthew had been preparing his statement to Ruth about how his dad was an innocent administrator in a department concerned only with barley production and that Ruth was totally wrong because he had nothing at all to do with what the government did. Just as he began to speak, however, Matthew’s love, like an explosion of light, suddenly revealed the girl’s heart and her fears for the course of her life. The pity he’d felt after his nightmare again overwhelmed him and he knew that he had to help her.
“I’ve spoken to my dad,” he told her. “I let him know what we feel about what he’s doing. You needn’t worry any more, Ruth. My dad’s going to tell the government that they shouldn’t do bad things that will make life more difficult for us. I know he means it Ruth. You can always tell when parents really mean things, can’t you?”
Ruth nodded, then hugged Matthew awkwardly. “Thank you, “she said.
Matthew hunched his shoulders in embarrassment. “It was you that did it really,” he told her. “Without you I wouldn’t have known what was going on.”
Suddenly Ruth was off. “See if you can catch me,” she called as she ran. Knowing that even if he could, he wouldn’t, Matthew chased after her.
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