Pinko and Brownie

For starters I can’t even believe how this all happened, how we all ended up like this. You get used to things being a certain way – not necessarily perfect but then who lives any kind of perfect life? No one. Then out of the blue you find that the life you’ve been rubbing along with quite nicely thank you, it all gets chucked up in the air at a moment’s notice and lands all over the place.

To tell you the truth I don’t actually know if I could have done anything different even if I’d had a hundred years’ warning. I suppose there’s some kind of comfort to be drawn from the fact that it all happened so quickly, that no one was worrying about it all beforehand, coming up with half-assed plans and dopey ideas all day long. There’s probably nothing we could have done about any of it really, so at least we were spared all that futile hot air. But something had been brewing for a while – we all realised that with hindsight. I imagine family homes are kind of loud and boisterous places to be a lot of the time anyway. There always seems to be a lot of communication going on with the stairs in between, people yelling down them and bellowing up them. Stop that, pick that up, tea’s ready, that sort of stuff. But just recently, things had changed. A lot of the yelling was between the adults, the Mum and the Dad. And it wasn’t like the voices were raised because one of them was upstairs or in the toilet or something, they seemed to be in the same room with the door closed, yelling at each other like crazy people. And throwing things about.

I think the first I really got wind of it though; the first time anyone realised anything serious was going on, was when the Dad did this big talk to the kids. I suppose I was quite well placed to get the measure of it – I was right there next to the boy on the pillow. And I think the version I heard was probably a bit more detailed and less sugarcoated on account of the boy being older. I guess he thought the boy could understand a bit better on account of his age or something.

So there I was, in prime position on the pillow, about to get wind of this big announcement. The boy, Joseph his name is, was all toothpaste and tired as he cuddled me up under the Star Wars duvet, waiting for our nightly story. It might not sound like the most riveting routine you can imagine, but like I say, you get used to rubbing along a certain way. Kids like repetition, watching the same shows on TV over and over. One of them, I forget which, even used to have this ‘again, again!’ thing going on, where they’d show one film clip of kids mucking about with paint or something, and then show it right away over again. Anyway, I was lying there waiting for this story from the Dad, doing my job and being a good pillow bear.

I should point out, by the way, that this story was a bit of an odd one. I mean, for all I know Dads are telling this particular story all over the place, and for all I know it’s more or less true for everyone. But I can tell you, the first time he came up with it – must have been when the boy was more or less old enough to understand what he was going on about – everyone just froze. Well, that’s to say obviously we weren’t exactly moving about all over the place, with the Dad and the kids being there and everything, but for an apparently inanimate audience on and around the bed, we were kind of struck especially still. I mean, having the reality of our lives seemingly sussed like that was a bit of a tricky thing to negotiate.

So the Dad was sat there on the edge of the bed, and we all knew the drill pretty well by this point. The story itself, it was never that long. Always the same, too. It was the kind of story I guess kids like to hear about – their teddies all coming alive when the kids were asleep and stuff like that. The way this Dad told it, we’d all sneak off to this Teddy Club somewhere underground in the garden. The bit I always liked was the bit where I was leading all the other dopey lions and rabbits down to this secret slab of stone at the bottom of the lawn. I’d move this stone to one side and lead everyone down these steps to a little room deep underground, where we’d all hang out drinking milk and eating cookies and stuff. All very lovely, I’m sure you’ll agree. Anyway, since the kids always like to hear this stuff over and over, there was never really any variety to the story. Always the sneaking out, always the stone and the steps, always the milk and cookies. Some imagination that Dad had.

But this time, he seemed a bit preoccupied. Like I said, I was on the pillow with Joseph’s arms all clamped around me. Like in the story, I’ve always been a pillow bear since I was first bought for him. If you can imagine a hierarchy amongst plush toys, well I was pretty much top dog. Well, bear, but you get my drift. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I guess I was kind of expensive, bought in a New York department store before either of the kids were born by some forward-thinking relative. It was all to do with a kid’s random choice of bedtime companion and, for better for worse, he’d had good taste and foresight from the moment he had any sentient choice in the matter.

So the Dad’s sitting there, shifting about awkwardly like he’s got something important and probably quite awful to say. And instead of the Teddy Club story, he starts basically telling Joseph about how things with the Mum hadn’t been going so great and the basic upshot was that he and Esther were going to get these two new happy homes instead of one unhappy one, and how he himself wasn’t going to be living with the Mum anymore. I wasn’t at all averse to the Mum by the way, she seemed OK to me, but then there was that time when there was a lot of dangerous talk about me going in the washing machine. You can imagine I wasn’t too happy about this idea, I might have got a fair bit of Calpol and yoghurt in my fur over the years, but no one was ever the same again after that particular ordeal. I’d seen it before, with my own eyes. If I had a spine, it would have sent a chill right up it.

Anyway, he told Joseph all this, told him not to worry and all that, and left, presumably to give Esther the news next door. As I lay there all gathered up to the kid’s chest, I was kind of waiting for some reaction from him, I don’t know what. He didn’t really speak to me in the way you see some kids doing on TV. I wasn’t any kind of confidant or anything. I was a pillow bear, and my responsibilities in that respect were kind of limited to being on the pillow pretty much most of the time and in general just being the one he slept with. I guess if the rest of the bears ever stopped to think about it, the ones who really got played with – all sat in circles and served imaginary tea from toy cups and that – they might get to thinking they ought to be a little more respected in the order of things. But pillow bears are best bears, always have been, despite their general non-contributory role in a kid’s waking life. I wasn’t exactly about to launch some revolution over it.

So I was lying there, all pinned down by the kid’s arm, and I waited until his breathing slowed and he started this light snore that he does. Like in the uncanny nightly story, once he was asleep for sure I did indeed wriggle myself free and flop down off the bed onto the carpet. A few of the others were lying around the place, seemingly unconcerned about what was going on here. I spied Pinko, slumped against the wardrobe door and tiptoed over to give him a nudge.

”Pinko,” I whispered, nudging his arm. “Pinko!” a bit louder, as he slowly entered the land of the living.

He rolled over onto his side, if anything quite so round and plump can really be described as having a side as such. “Brownie,” he acknowledged sleepily, as if he deserved a whole lot more rest. “What? Stop poking me.”

I roundly ignored him, which is the right and proper way to ignore someone who is round, and poked him some more until he hauled himself up onto his ample behind and shook some synthetic filling back into his arm where it had gone baggy.

“Did you hear what the Dad was saying?” I asked him. I didn’t think he had, though; Pinko never heard anything.

He scratched his newly plumped arm. “What?” He looked up at me through his tiny sewn eyes. “What?”

“The Dad,” I patiently repeated. Pinko usually took around a year to wake himself up, which left him with a fairly tranquillised air about him most of the time. It used to quite annoy me to be honest. He looked at me like I was explaining something very complicated.

“No, what? The Dad? What? Er, no. What’d he say?” He really was quite the dumbest bear in the house sometimes. I know being cuddly and fat makes a kid love a bear, but to other bears it makes for a very challenging relationship sometimes.

I recounted the whole detail of the information I’d been privy to from my pillow vantage point. I’ll admit, there was seldom actually anything of any importance to report from this supposedly hallowed ground for all bears, but this was potentially a very big deal. Things kept popping into my head about how this change of circumstance could all affect us all, and perhaps most importantly me, before anyone else knew a thing about any of it.

Pinko was properly awake now, or as awake as he ever got. “So what you’re saying is, there are going to be two houses now, two places that the kids live in. So that’s good, right? I mean, if they’re not here half the time we’ll have less to worry about, less wear and tear, right?”

I was beginning to wish I’d left my dim pink companion asleep and spoken to someone a little more predisposed to information ingestion. “Pinko, think about it for a minute. You really think that this new house the Dad’s moving to is going to miraculously get kitted out with a whole new load of stuff? You think the kids are going to get whole new rooms full of toys?“

He frowned. I could almost hear his tiny mind working. What a great choice I’d made in selecting this fine specimen of bearhood to first break the news to.

”Look, Pinko. This is what will happen, as sure as I’m stuffed with fire-retardant material. The new house will get bought, the Dad will paint it up all lovely, he’ll move all his crap in, all the records and the Bowie pictures, he’ll move the kids in. They’ll have new rooms, new beds, probably new pictures on the walls. Lots of new stuff, in fact. But most of us have been with those kids their whole lives. Do you really think we’ll all stay here? Don’t you think some of us will end up there, wherever that ends up being?”

A gradual realisation dawned on Pinko’s face, not unlike an overcast winter sunrise in its urgency and clarity. “So, what? We’re going to move, you reckon?”

I sighed, ”Some of us, I’d imagine, yes. Some of us are going to end up going. Some of us will stay. The Dad’s going to want the kids to feel at home in the new place, with some familiar items around them. If it means we end up staying and the carnies going for instance, well that’s not so bad. They can go and live in a damn landfill for all I care.”

I leaned into him and lowered my voice even further than the cautious whisper I’d been employing.

”But what about you and me? What about Rabbie, Bugsy and PJ? What about Sarah, for God’s sake? What if she stays and I go or something? What about you and, well, anyone you care a damn about?”

Before Pinko could answer, or even confirm that the conundrum had even vaguely resonated within his feeble mind, he was unceremoniously tumbled over as the wardrobe door creaked open. If he’d been slow on the uptake there was a small contingent loitering among the shoes who were not.

A small, stocky bear poked his head round the door. “What’s this? Moving? Who’s moving?”

Brighton pushed his way through the gap, brushing un-vacuumed wardrobe fluff from his embroidered Albion football strip. Pinko sat himself up again and looked expectantly in my direction, presumably unconfident in recounting this important information himself with any degree of accuracy. Brighton was followed by Zeddy, a small zebra whose disproportionate leg rendering made unassisted pedestrian progress either a valiant challenge or comedic spectacle, depending on your individual point of view.

“Look,” I said, as they appeared from their dusty sanctuary. “I don’t know who’s moving, or even if anyone’s moving. Well, any of us in any case.”

”Tell them what you heard, Brownie. Tell them,” Pinko gesticulated as wildly and wide-eyed as his form allowed, indicating perhaps erroneously that he was full up to speed with developments.

“OK, look, “ I said, surveying the hubbub of expectant faces now surrounding me. “I heard the Dad telling Joseph some sob story, blah blah blah… The upshot is that he’s moving out, some kind of shared custody thing with the kids. He’ll have a new house. Now I don’t know what this means for us – possibly nothing. Pinko reckons it could mean the kids just aren’t here for a few days at a time, which is obviously good for us. Less wear and tear, more awake time for everyone. That’s the upside. Possibly. But there could be a downside. Now, I’m only speculating here, but I reckon it could mean a split. Some of us staying here, some of us moving there, in this new house he’s talking about.”

There were a few moments as the news sunk in through variously dense fur and denser minds. The faces remained expectant, like I obviously hadn’t finished.

“…and that’s all I really know. I don’t know what kind of plans we can make to deal with this. I don’t know any more than that at the moment. But it’s safe to say that those of us in Esther’s room won’t have got as much detail from the Dad. She’s younger, and he’s probably given her some old flannel to soft soap the news. We need to get everyone together to make sure everyone’s up to speed.”

Brighton spoke up, “Right, I’ll sweep through to Esther’s room. Get a team huddle together. Go through the tactics. Formulate a plan of defence.” He warmed up for this five-yard dash by running vigorously on the spot for a moment or two, then he high-tailed it out of the room onto the landing.

The main bears from the boy’s room were all accounted for. Along with Pinko, Brighton and Zeddy, there were usually a few others littered about the place – carnies mostly. Won on the pier, carried triumphantly home, then chucked in a corner, at the bottom of the toy box or under the bed, never to be picked up again. To be quite honest I didn’t bother to attempt any kind of roll call for them – for one thing the carnies were a mostly transient part of the bear community, certainly in this house, not sure about in others. They came and they went, always the first to go in school fair teddy bear sales, always the first to bust a seam, lose a limb, get chucked out.

It might sound snobbish or racist or something, or at least unkind to exclude them from these important developments, but you have to believe me, these carnies were usually more trouble than they were worth. I don’t know if it was their backgrounds – I mean, I know it’s meant to be a question of where you’re at rather than where you’re from – but being a prize in a hoopla or one of those grabbing claw machines or something did seem to give them a bit of an attitude. Maybe it was some sort of live fast, die young thing they had going on. But they were always a massive pain to be quite honest – they never really tried to fit in with the rest of us shop-boughts, and frankly the more of them I ended up separated from the better, which is why I didn’t exactly bend over backwards to fill them in on what was going on.

One such character, if I can stretch the definition, was Hulk. He was recognisable from his green fur and torn trousers, but that was about the extent of it. I’m not an expert in copyright law but I’d imagine the good people of Marvel or DC or whoever would have a heart attack if they saw how their trademark and safety requirements were being wilfully flouted, probably by some Chinese sweatshop worker who’d never even heard of the Hulk. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was stuffed with bloody bandages.

Anyway, Hulk was there taking in all this potentially unsettling information. He was kind of standing, kind of leaning on account of the lack of movement in his shoddily crafted limbs. He was standing diagonally with his head against the louver doors of the wardrobe. It didn’t look too comfortable but I doubt he had a great deal of sensitivity about him. Now, I’ll admit I had a little bit of time for Hulk, unlike the crappy Smurfs, Bart Simpsons and Picachus who variously littered the place. Hulk was kind of OK, in a dumb way. I mean, you can’t necessarily have a downer on all bears who happen to be dumb. Pinko’s one of the dumbest bears I ever knew, but he’s dumb in quite a charming way. Not ignorant or bullish, just a bit hard of thinking. Hulk had all that going on in spades, but he supplemented it with a puppyish enthusiasm that was impossible to find too offensive.

So Hulk was leaning there, taking in all this new information with his cursory features furrowed in thought, sifting it all through his big dumb green head.

”Hulk get new house,” he explained. “Hulk move house. Hulk live on bed in new house.”

You had to admire his optimism. The only way he was ever going to achieve even temporary bed status was if one of the kids accidentally threw him there, missing the bin or the open window or something.

“Yeah, well we’ll have to see what happens, Hulk,” I replied. “At the moment I think we just need to figure out how we deal with this.”

Hulk nodded, reconfirming his idea. “Hulk move house.” He elaborated on this statement, in case anyone remained in any doubt. “Hulk get new house.”

It was quite all right to just ignore him by this point, I thought. Nothing good ever came of trying to progress the conversation beyond this basic level of to and fro. At least I spoke to him, the other bears just pretended he didn’t exist, reacting to his cheery conversational gambits like one would to a talking doll - yes, technically it speaks, in that there’s some synthesized squawk box in its belly, but when it says “Mama, mama” but you kind of know that’s about as much as you’re going to get,

“Pinko, Zeddy, come on, “ I said. “We’d better see what Brighton’s up to before he’s got everyone in a 4-4-2 formation by the back door. Come on, follow me and keep close.”

Esther’s room was right next to Joseph’s, separated by a couple of feet of landing. Once the kids were asleep the Dad didn’t really came back upstairs unless he was going for a slash or something, but we had to be careful nonetheless. I mean, the kids would stay asleep if you threw a bucket of water over them but they weren’t really such a problem anyway. We figured this out long ago - kids see imaginary things all the time. A walking talking teddy bear isn’t going to raise any eyebrows when breathlessly announced to parents – “Did he darling? That’s nice.” But a grown man tripping over a striding bear might be a little harder to bluff your way out of, however wasted he might be at the time. So with a familiar caution, I edged round the bedroom door onto the no-man’s land of the landing.

The way I did it, the way I kind of always liked to do it, was like in the films I suppose. Many times I’d been on the sofa with the boy and the Dad, lapping up films – I knew the drill. You stand with your back right up against the door, you peep around just enough to see but not enough for someone to level a shot at you. I know, I do realise that no one was about to unload a firearm into a small bear. Apart from anything else, I’m like ten inches tall, and somewhat out of the eye line of your average passing fugitive or rogue government agent. But still, you’ve got the pass the time somehow, right? And I felt responsible for those bears. Like I said, some of them were dumb as bricks.

The Dad was downstairs. I could hear the muffled sounds of music through the closed door of the front room. I wasn’t sure where the Mum was; we hadn’t seen her for a couple of days. When she was last here, the Dad wasn’t here. The last time I remember then both being around the place together there was some fairly alarming shouting going on, and I think that was when the telephone got busted. At least, we all heard this crash and the sound of something plastic shattering into a thousand bits and bouncing all over the wooden floor. So maybe this separation thing he’s been talking to Joseph about was already underway, in a rotation rota of never being at home at the same time or something. I didn’t know, I’m only a bear after all. A pillow bear obviously, but still just a bear at the end of the day.

“Pinko, keep close. Follow me, the coast’s clear.” Pinko didn’t need reminding to keep close. Some of the others would usually wander off, like mental patients on a day trip, But Pinko was like my big fat shadow or something, to the point where if I stepped back, hearing a noise or seeing a shadow, I’d damn well near fall over his big leg or lose an elbow in his belly. As usual he was right behind me, closely followed by Zeddy, whose miniature moving frame would probably go undetected even if every person in the street was training searchlights all up the stairs.

Esther’s door was ajar – there was a pile of dirty laundry preventing it from fully shutting. I don’t need to remind you what a pain a closed door is for creatures of our stature. We’ve had to make some quite impressive bear pyramid formations in the past, let me tell you. I edged it open a couple of inches and sashayed inside, looking over my shoulder and beckoning the others to follow. Like I say, I was quite the fan of the films.

Brighton was on the bed at the foot of the gently undulating duvet, whispering animatedly to a few of Esther’s bears. I should maybe explain at this juncture that the notion of bears, while traditionally fairly specific in their genetic make-up, is kind of a colloquial term we use. It can and does include Zeddy, who although isn’t any kind of textbook rendition of the creature is still quite clearly a zebra, it includes various rabbits, a sheep and of course monkeys. Sarah - that is to say, my Sarah - and Sarah Junior were both monkeys, cut from similar stylistic synthetic cloth but not, as Esther would insistently have it, mother and daughter. That was just the way she liked to pretend it, I guess. Kids have some imagination sometimes, I can tell you.

In the dim half-light from the landing, I could see Brighton’s audience included both these monkeys as well as Rabby and Bugsy, Clowny and The Lamb That Nobody Loved. All self-explanatory beasts obviously, but OK, I do realise I can’t really just let that last one go without some sort of explanation. There’s quite a story attached to that old lamb, and while he doesn’t really form any major part in the unfolding events, he was there and in the interests of accuracy I don’t feel like I can totally ignore the miserable little sheep.

The story goes, and believe me I’ve heard this a million times, that the Dad used to live with this other woman years ago. I think they might even have been engaged or something. Anyhow, they split up – do you see a pattern emerging here? – and they were dividing up all their gear. You know, that’s my bread knife, that’s your Audrey Hepburn box set, that kind of heartbreaker. So they get down to these bin bags full of old bears – bin bags I ask you – on account of how they’re all grown up these days and don’t want their bed littered with such childish trifles. So they get to this lamb and he says to her, Naomi her name was apparently, is this yours? No, she says, I’ve never seen it before. Nor me, he says, and she shrugs. On account of it not being the most important thing they have to resolve or something, I’d imagine. So the Dad takes this lamb saying that one day at least he’ll have kids of his own – and the inference here would seem to be that this Naomi wasn’t so keen on the idea – and he’d make sure this lonely lamb was well loved and stuff. What a sensitive guy.

Anyway, I don’t know it it’s true or just the sort of old crap Dads tell their daughters to make them sound all caring and lovely, but that’s the story with The Lamb That Nobody Loved. Esther will drop this lamb down the side of the bed or something and the Dad will say, where’s The Lamb That Nobody Loved, and make out that this lamb has had a terribly sad life of abandonment and how Esther needs to take extra special care of it. Well, if you ask me the lamb got it easy – at least he’s out of the bin bag. There were plenty more still bagged up in the loft or somewhere, most even as old as the Dad, whom we were yet to even meet.

So anyway, Brighton’s holding court based on his half-heard rendition of the facts. Now you might think that given her age and everything, Esther’s bears might not be quite so, shall we say, intellectually advanced as Joseph’s. But a bear’s a bear after all, and some of them were sharp as a tack, I tell you. I could tell from their faces that they certainly understood the potential gravity of what was going on here.

Sarah, my Sarah, was on her pillow, spooned by Esther and in turn spooning Sarah Junior. She lifted a paw and blew me a sweet kiss. I responded in kind, beckoning her towards me as I clambered up onto the garish pink Barbie bedclothes and carefully inched my way over to them, followed by Pinko who’d tucked Zeddy under his arm.

”What are you all doing up here?” I whispered. “Don’t you think this is a bit risky?”

Brighton turned towards me. “This is an emergency, I know I don’t want to be playing for the reserves in some new house. We need to make sure we’re all together.”

“Look,” I said. “Let’s just get out of here and we can discuss it properly. We can’t all be in here like this.” I gestured to the assembled bears. “Sarah, Junior, Rabbie, Bugs, Clowny, Lamb, all of you – come on, let’s take this outside. We need to be able to talk properly if we’re going to make any sense of all this.”

With that there was some shoulder shrugging, but they all shuffled to the edge of the bed and slid themselves over the edge onto the floor. Sarah and Sarah Junior extricated themselves from their pillowy embrace and, with characteristic simian agility, silently appropriated the curtain as a kind of domestic jungle vine. Back in my Bruce Willis mode, I led the way out of the room with something akin to military precision. When we could hear stuff going on downstairs it was usually a breeze negotiating the landing, but the stairs was always a potential discovery hazard. Back in the day it was easier as the Mum and Dad went to bed at a reasonable hour, but now the Dad seemed to be here on his own he was up all night, playing God awful maudlin music and wandering around the kitchen bashing the ice tray into a glass.

The door to the lounge was closed, which meant that statistically we had at least a few seconds to get past it without this lumbering mope stumbling out and breaking his neck tripping over some misplaced monkey. One by one we negotiated each stair on our bellies, until the whole gang was at the bottom. We always had to kind of stick together in plausible groups on these manoeuvres, in case we were actually discovered. Even through booze-shot eyes, a succession of bears on the stairs might have aroused some kind of warranted suspicion, but a pile or random bears in the hall could I suppose be put down to one of the kids chucking a load of their toys down from the landing. Kids did that sort of thing quite regularly for some reason. I don’t know - you get cuddled half to death one day, the next you’re being hurled up into a tree or something.

The dull throb of music leaked with a thin shaft of lamp light from beneath the closed door, so we hotfooted it into the kitchen. From here on in our passage outside was a doddle, thanks to the Dad’s inability to fire himself up enough to seal up an old cat flap, left by the previous owners some five years before. Acting as leader and lookout, I ushered the bears one by one through the swinging plastic door. It might sound corny but the way I liked to do this was like an army guy on the plane, with that long line of parachute fellas – ‘go, go, go’ – that sort of thing.

Approaching the redundant feline access point, Sarah put Junior down carefully, exhibiting all of the parental care their child-imagined relationship might suggest. “Brownie,” she said, her dark plastic eyes glinting sadly in the dusky gloom. “What does this all mean? What if you and I can’t…”

I interrupted her with a soft paw on her sweet lips. “Sarah, everything’s going to be fine. We’ll figure out a plan. We’re all pillow bears. You, me and Junior. When the kids are together – wherever they are – we’re together. It’s always been that way. At home, in the car, on holidays, wherever. It’s always been that way and it always will be. We just have to make sure of it.”

She smiled the vaguest of smiles, hoisting Sarah Junior through the flap and following directly after her.

As that last, rather cute furry behind disappeared from view, I clambered through myself, my fall broken by Pinko who lay sprawled on the patio like, well, a rotund teddy bear who’s just forced his way through a cat flap, I suppose. Now to the casual observer, this is where things could be seen to be a little odd, to be honest. I mean, I’m pretty certain that if the Dad had ever actually seen us go through this whole rigmarole, we’d definitely know something about it. It’s not the sort of thing an adult would be able to keep to himself. If I know the human mind, I bet he’d have set some kind of devious trap for us or something, like a camouflaged pit under the cat flap or razor wire across the stairs.

But like I said, this story he’d tell the kids of a night time had a fair bit more than a mere basis in actual truth. Maybe it was all a coincidence; maybe it was life imitating art or whatever. But the weird fact is that he’d got it pretty much down to a tee. The sneaking down the stairs, the flopping out the old cat flap. I mean, I guess that bit would be obvious to even the least imaginative storyteller. But the whole thing about the stone slab in the garden, the little stairs down, the underground room, well that was just uncanny.