Huts37

The deckchair wasn’t up to much. Dad had tried darning it with copper wire, and faulty pliers, but he’d put the knots on the wrong side. One bit of the seat was ok. But a leg movement onto the repaired bit of canvas was like sitting in a hot sun, on barbed wire, which could have caused me some kind of serious injury. A week off work, was a week off work, just like a week off school, only you got paid for it. No wonder James Munn was moaning about student attendances.

The unopened envelope sat propped up on the mantelpiece for a day, stewing, like hot tea. But, despite the impressive official hospital paper, the information it contained was tepid stuff. The meeting with my student supervisor and my student tutor was detailed in full. There was just no escaping it, and the pregnant feeling of depression that entailed, as my life ebbed away from me.

Cigarettes and loud music was the only answer. But Mum, banged like a drum, on my bedroom door, and told me to turn it down. She was old and didn’t understand. Lying on my bed, Bettye Swann’s husky ‘Cover Me ‘spread all your love all over me,’ bounced on the record player, and on again, and went round and round in my head. Norean Kilean popped up naked, just the way she should be. And, for old times sake, the virginal Maureen Hargreaves. Even Gillian Ambrose got a look-see. I’d wanking fever. And it was all, little tits, Mary Russell’s fault. Out of the one and half women I’d made love to, she was the biggest fuck up.

I couldn’t even go downstairs into the living room to watch telly and relieve myself. From all the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ from mum you’d have thought she’d given birth to the new suite and not just bought it. Her excitement was understandable. Dad gave her little of his wages. And, apart from a few quid at the beginning, she only got grief from me.

It’s not that anybody was attached to the old suite. It had a few broken springs, which, in a reflex action, my bum avoided. The material was like something left over from a kid’s teddy bear, after it had been well chewed, and the colour was yukky brown. But I didn’t think anything about it. I just sat on it.

But although mum had saved pennies and paid pounds for the new suite outright, Dad took charge of it. He decided to leave the plastic on, because that way it would last longer, so that sitting was akin to sliding on your own sweat.

‘It’s a lovely tan colour,’ I’d said to mum, and when I’d first sat down on it I’d lowered myself onto the seat cushions as if they were made of air, and my bum touching them, would make the suite disappear.

‘It’s leather, isn’t it mum?’ And she’d been pleased, positively beaming, when I’d said that.

Dad, overseeing the moment, had spoiled it a bit by adding his own snide comment:

‘Plastic-leather.’

After a day I’d didn’t think that’s a new couch, that’s a new chair. I just sat on them.

Dad thought differently.

‘What do you think that is,’ he said, pointing to the couch I’d just sat on, ‘a trampoline’?

Hiding in my room, like a lodger, only worked for a while. I was glad when Dad went out to work. The living room, with the curtains closed, to keep the sun off the suite, was like a funeral parlour. The only programme worth venturing out of my room for was Ready Steady Go. But it was ready steady, no-go. I’d run down the stairs and sat down without thinking and Dad had pounced.

‘What do you think you are a kangaroo?’

We stood toe to toe, but his breathing had more of the heavy weight about it. So that when mum stepped between us and said, ‘for goodness sake,’ that was enough, I was light enough on my toes to disappear.

But that was nothing compared to dad finding the letter from the hospital. He didn’t usually bother with mail. He left that to mum. But the letter had been lying on the mantelpiece that long he just picked it up. I heard him bounding up the stairs. He flung my bedroom door open.

‘What’s this,’ he asked? He had the letter from James Munn scrunched up in his enormous hand.

I thought Dad already knew I was off work sick and now he was mad because he didn’t. I mumbled, 'it's a letter from the hospital and…'.

‘I know that,’ said Dad, ‘but why are they writing to you if you’re sick?’ ‘And arranging meetings?’ He shook his head as if the letter had announced the apocalypse, ‘when you’re sick!’ He said it again, to convince himself that it was true.

‘That’s women for you,’ said Dad, grouping all nursing staff together, ‘you think my gaffer would write to me and tell me to come to a meeting when I was sick?’ Dad didn’t need an answer. He already had one. ‘Cause see if he did. I’d get up out of my sick bed and put one on him.’

‘That’s it,’ said Dad, his rage almost petered out, ‘you’re coming to work on the roads with me on Monday. You’ll not get any of that crap. And it’s good money and a job for life.

Dad banged my room door on the way out, my future settled, without me.