The Coffee Cup Episode... (an excerpt from O'Connor Street)

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 I remember the creak of the treaders on that polished wooden staircase as I climbed to find ‘my’ room, a sound I would come to learn by heart. I quickly learnt which steps made the least noise when you stepped in certain spots and was able to master and manipulate that skill to suit my escaping needs from time to time.

The cool, smooth feel of the carved, polished-mahogany handrail brought comfort and safety, a drawbridge against the fear in my mind.

I remember the light and smell of that blue room without furniture, the feel of the polished floorboards beneath my bare feet, the sounds of excitement from us the children, and the impatient shouts of my father.

I remember the mysterious trap door in the ceiling to an attic that we never went into, not once. But there were plans though, and I always knew one day I’d get into the attic.

I remember the upstairs bathroom with plumbing that never worked, so we hardly ever used it, it was just another place for my mom to decorate and store stuff.

The shower itself was full of boxes that were full of stuff and to this day my mother has more boxes of stuff than places to keep that stuff.

I think O’Connor Street was a step up for us in the world, for my mother looked happy, and she was always happy when our appearance to other people was improving.

There were other people there I am sure, movers moving stuff, but I have no memory of them, just the house.

My sisters’ room was across from ours; a pink and frilly place dedicated to Barbie (on Giselle’s side of the room) and to heartthrob pin up’s on Faye-Ann’s.

My parent’s room was dark despite having two sets of windows on either side, and was very heavily decorated.

They would frame and hang just about anything, and our house contained everything from original paintings, quirky quips and oversized greeting cards framed and hung to ‘brighten’ the walls.

The House was dead center on the western side of the street, ideal for the sun rises on the porch (which we called ‘The Gallery’ which ran round two sides of the house and was enclosed by a wall that ran to about waist high to an adult, and was capped by a wider surface, which provided excellent real estate for the planning of my mind as a child).

The houses on that side seemed to be always open, while the houses on the other side of the street were shut against the evening sun.

The ‘House’ was two stories with a high attic, built colonially off the ground and appeared imposing, as it was the largest house on the street.

Up the path in the front garden and up the five orange and yellow tiled steps was the front door (which I never saw opened, not once).

You accessed the house by proceeding along the gallery to either a door to the dining room or to the ‘maid’s’ room (where Haniffa slept) which led into the TV room, which had all the design feature opposites of an add-on.

The TV room led to the downstairs toilet and bath and to the kitchen, which in turn led to the pantry (which we used as a dining room, the real dining room was for guests) and to the main dining room.

This gave way to the living room, which we called the ‘joining’ room, a room to which all children were forbidden, yet through which one had to pass to go ‘upstairs’, which in turn always led to some admonishment and ‘buff’. It was carpeted with a white (of all colors) carpet, but had plastic runners from the dining room to the base of the stairs, and you were not allowed to step off the runners onto carpet for any reason. As a child I learned to traverse the living room very quickly.

The front garden and side driveway was covered with an arbor strewn with a struggling grape vine, which to my recollection, only bore leaves.

My father loved and maintained and bitched about this grape vine on a Sunday, which was part of his routine.

I hated the chore of picking up the leaves, the damn thing gave no fruit, no shade, I never understood how one failing plant could be the source of so much stress.

At different times during the year my father would drag around a red paint-splattered ladder and climb to its height (it was about ten feet off the ground), and ‘prune’ it.

He was a totalitarian, seldom happy, always dominating, loud and angry person, and I was absolutely convinced at some point of reason and understanding that this man hated me, though I could never for the life of me figure out why.

Our relationship was based on him chasing me away or disciplining me for whichever failing I performed that day, and me doing my endeavor best to stay out of his way.

I absolutely hated the pruning day because I always got in trouble.

I did not know what pruning was supposed to do, my father cut every single leaf off that vine and I wondered; well, what was the point then.

He would clip the leaves and drop them on the ground beneath the ladder and expect me and my brother to follow him around with garbage bags and pick them up, one by one, and waste the better part of a totally good Sunday.

His disposition would deteriorate rapidly as the pruning day progressed, and I could not wait to get away from the house. Most of my time was spent finding ways to get away from the house.

I came up with an ingenious although dangerous plan.

If I messed up enough he would chase me and I’d get away from the house for the duration of the pruning, but it was a delicate balance, mess up too much and I’d be in serious trouble, the kind that could get you licks.

You never just dealt with my father; you needed a plan always if you were going to survive the day.

 Any Given Sunday

Eyes open, daylight streaming through the windows, I was awake.

No need to test for a pulse, I was alive. Quick system scan revealed I was the only one in my room, the only one upstairs; safe for now.

The light blue of the sky washed over my eyes into me and pulled out a smile that plastered across my face inside out; God how I loved daytime. There was something hanging in the air, I needed to get outside into the dancing sunshine.

It was ‘jump around’, ‘no school’, ‘nothing open’, ‘nowhere to go’, ‘free to roam’ Sunday.

Obligatory pause to acknowledge that if today was Sunday tomorrow was school and that thought always sucked.

But then the realization that today was Sunday, yaaay, and until it ended I was going to wring every bit of fun out of it that I could.

I was ten years old, and the world ‘outside’ was alive with adventure for us dwellers of imagination, the world ‘inside’ fraught with danger.

Between my bed and the back door (my portal to the outside world), lay fifteen million ways to get into trouble for just ‘being there’, seventy seven million ways to collide with someone else’s plans in a negative way, and fifty two million ways to just tick my father off for no reason at all (or none that I could ever find, it seems that just seeing me ticked him off). Nothing ruined a Sunday like getting into trouble first thing in the morning.

The plan - Got to get out of my bed, change my clothes, then down the stairs and outside without bumping into anybody.

This particular slalom required timing, finesse and speed, in no particular order. Sort of like barreling down the stairs three at a time as quietly as possible (trying hard to land on the steps that made the least noise), streaking lightly across the living room (feet stay on the plastic runway, please don’t touch the carpet), through the dining room (compensating for the large round wrought iron glass topped circular table that required a left lean in the run and absolutely no oncoming traffic whatsoever), into the TV room, sharp left turn to get to that space with the toilet and shower, sharp right with eyes wide open, hoping the back door was open.

If it was open I was free.

If it was closed I was stuck. I could not reach the top bolt that opened this wooden obstacle to all the joy my heart could find, dancing in the sunshine, outside.

I was going to make it. I was through the dining room into the TV room, my frenetic timing perfect, I was going to make it, freedom, ready for that sharp right, yaaay, here we go and - wham!

Yes wham! That’s the sound I heard. I will never forget it as long as I live. Something’s never leave you, read on and you’ll understand.

Wham! Slammed - straight into my father; Bad. He was carrying a full cup of coffee; Worse. Cup falls and smashes in slow motion, coffee everywhere. Could it really get worse than this? Any given Sunday is full of endless opportunities. On this particular Sunday I was going to die.

My father was the most unforgiving person in the world, I was so dead, and I knew it. Dead, dead, dead. And a life so full of promise. 

This was going to end very, very bad.

Damn that bad timing.

I have seen my father so angry words could not come out, only a violent sort of labored quiet screech that made the dogs up and down the street howl, where he would use very, very bad words and change the sound of them and make them sound even worse.

None of that mattered now.

I was dead.

Oh how dead I was. My life flashed before my eyes, and yes, this was the worst thing I had done to date, so there was no comparison to what was going to happen next and I just wanted to disappear.

I was not ready for what happened next. I was still untangling myself from the collision, trying not to step on broken coffee cup or slip in the hot coffee (well I guess it could get worse) when my father grabbed me under my left armpit with his left arm and in one seamless move threw me (flung me?) almost over his right shoulder, through the door and – believe it or not – outside.

I was outside.

Covered in coffee and still shaking from the collision, but outside. I looked up and he looked down and I knew no matter what happened next I did not want to be around for it. The vultures were starting to circle, my brother and all my sisters appeared at the scene of the carnage, my mother shouting at everyone not to step on the broken pieces of coffee cup while shouting at my father to tell her what happened and my father shouting back with new words and gesticulating, I guess the loss of his cup of coffee together with the unplanned collision unhinged him a bit. This assault from my mother sort of pushed him over the edge.

With everyone talking at the same time and my father distracted by my mother, I decided it was time to take me away from there. Wait until all this heat cooled down a bit. I bolted around the side of the house, down the dark cavern between house and wall, into the front yard down to the front gate, pull, push and…..

Freedom

“Why you smell like coffee?” Young boys don’t beat around the bush, nor are they as yet armed with the ability to use tact. Truth is I reeked of coffee. I guess more of it hit me than the floor.

“There was an accident.” No need to give more than that at this point or to worry my friends with the fact that I was a fugitive from my father and was hiding out here with them.

I was in the churchyard - a vast space of excellent refuge. Growing up we spent a lot of time here, me, Denyl and Colin.

The quiet contained in this space was almost a thing alive; you stepped through the gates and literally left the outside world behind.

Anytime I needed to completely escape my family, this was where I came. The church and school that bore the same name – St. Theresa’s, was my immaculate refuge, the ultimate escape. The church itself was huge, built in a very European style with tall spires and complete with bell tower. The church ran from street to street, on the northern most end of the block. From its westernmost side the priest’s quarters sprung like an appendage, and continued into the buildings of the school and a wall that ran back to the eastern side of the block. This had the effect of creating a spacious courtyard/car park surrounded on three sides by buildings, and was completely empty on a Sunday, save for the pigeons and Brother Mudada.

Brother Mudada was a homeless man who practically lived in the churchyard from time to time and he was one scary looking man. My parents said he was a ‘vagrant’ (didn’t know what that meant) and we were to leave him alone because he wasn’t ‘right’ in his head. He was scary looking and had so much hair and beard you couldn’t tell what was hair and what was beard, so that all you could see were his eyes and he smelled like how dogs smell when they make puppies, only worse.

The priest from our church -Father Curtain, always smiling, slow walking, bear of an Irish man who ‘was always half drunk’ my father said named him Brother Mudada, which was somehow funny to the adults, but scary to us.

Anyway, it was Sunday morning, and we were in our stomping ground, and there was stuff to be done. The amazing thing is we never, ever, had a plan. Someone showed up with a piece of string, we’d find ways to play with that string. Someone showed up with a box…..you get the idea.

Colin came armed with a piece of good string and Denyl brought a box (I did not have time to source anything due to the coffee incident), so our imaginations went to work and came up with….catching pigeons. What a brilliant plan, nothing was more fun than implementing and executing a plan to catch anything. We were going to catch a pigeon. And even though none of us had ever held much less caught a pigeon before, that was not going to stop us from trying. You would think that the memory of the previous Sunday’s ‘Jack Spaniard’ nest episode would have taught us to leave nature alone, but we obviously didn’t learn easily. (A ‘Jack Spaniard’ is a big tropical wasp that has a vicious sting that delivers intense hot pain upon implementation, and we learned it together that prior occasion.)

‘’How’s your bites?’ I asked in passing, and we all discussed the various stages of healing that the ‘Jack Spaniard’ ‘Bites’ we got were in, and spent a little time comparing wounds.

Denyl had much more than either of us realized, but he was kind of klutzy and the one most likely to get injured on any of our escapades.

Looking at his wounds reminded Denyl that he was upset with me. Apparently the only stone thrown that connected with the massive nest we found under the church eave was my own, and it happened to connect when Denyl went to pick up a stone he had thrown earlier, which he believed had much potential and should be used again. Truth is everything happened so fast, and who does a ‘do-over’ with a stone anyway?

“You didn’t see me under the nest?”

I wanted to apologize, but then the memory of the stone ‘connecting’ so properly to the base of the nest that it completely severed it from the eave and it dropped about eight inches left of a wide eyed Denyl. The thought of the speed he was able to muster flying past us, ‘Jack Spaniards’ in tow, hands vigorously brushing at the sides of his head brought tears to my eyes and a belly full of laughter that I could not hold inside (I tried, I tried so hard), and as upset as he was, in no time the three of us were on the ground rolling in crying laughter (the best kind).

My ribs hurt.

Through fits of laughter Colin said “you broke the land speed record that day, boy”, and we all laughed harder.

We laughed, and remembered, and laughed again. This went on for some time until the issue was all laughed out (for the time being at least), and we set about constructing the ‘Trap’, which was basically Denyl’s box propped on one side with a stick tied with Colin’s string. The plan was to wait until a pigeon wandered under the box, pull the string and, presto. We took shifts lying still holding the string until we got bored. The pigeons were all over the churchyard, but none were inclined to walk under the box. We needed a new plan.

“We need bread” said Denyl, “we put bread crumbs under the box and the pigeons will come.” We had no bread though, and no one wanted to go home for bread in case they got ‘kept’ home, and I was the last person thinking of going home for a while. I was even toying with the idea of living in the churchyard but I didn’t tell Denyl or Colin that. We looked in all the bins, but the cleaners had cleaned them empty. We thought about ringing the bell by the nun’s house and asking for some bread, hoping Sister Timothy answered the door because Sister Timothy was like an angel, and if she was there, not only would we get bread, she might even go and put butter in it too. But if Sister Roberta was there she would have just chased us out of the churchyard so that plan wasn’t good. You would think Sister Roberta took a vow against happiness, she was always so bitter, and I think she hated children too, but my mother said is the heat, because she was from Ireland, and Ireland wasn’t hot like this. I didn’t know which was true; all I know is that I avoided Sister Roberta. Survival in Woodbrook required knowing who to avoid and who was nice.

“We could ask a neighbor” said Colin, and we mulled over that for a while.

We decided to approach the family immediately next door to the church to borrow some bread when Allan, Colin’s brother, showed up to call him home for lunch.

Damn.

“I’ll come back after lunch” said Colin. “Try and bring some bread” said Denyl.

“Yokay” Colin replied as he was running off trying to catch up with his brother. Colin was always adjusting words to make them his own. Everybody needed something I guess.

I said to Denyl “what are we going to do until he gets back?” and he said “We could try and find something to use instead of bread,” and we sat there thinking about that for a while but couldn’t come up with a better idea than the bread so I said “let’s go see if Sister Timothy there.” To which Denyl replied “Nah, I feeling hungry, I better go home and eat too,” which left me two choices; I could remain in the churchyard alone, or go home. I didn’t really want to stay in the churchyard alone in case brother Mudada came by, but I really, really, really, didn’t want to go home.

With Colin and Denyl and some big stone, nothing scared us, but alone?

With a very heavy and apprehensive heart, I headed off home.

Dead man walking

 I walked the slow, foot dragging pace of the condemned, and it took as long as I could make it take to get myself back to the scene of the incident. The midday sun was beating down hard on the hot concrete as I walked, but the gloom inside me felt like dark clouds and rain. Boy was I dreading walking through that gate.

It never ceases to amaze me how one insignificant thing could elicit diametrically opposite feelings or emotions depending on the moment.

Take our front gate for example.

At the end of the long walk home from school, nothing felt better than the cold steel welcome hug of my fingers on the latch of that black pedestrian gate.

The sweet song of its swing shut and catch behind me as I was bounding up the front steps seemed to exclaim home and safe, another day over, closer to the weekend, school week almost over.

Or the feel of that same catch from the other side on a Saturday or Sunday morning, the absolute nostril filling smell of freedom.

Not today though. The feel of that catch in my fingers was taking me back, closing in on the scene of the crime.

Seconds split and drag on when I was doing something I dreaded doing, and right at that moment I dreaded going through that gate so minutes had hours of space between them.

I paused in the opening, caught between freedom and God alone knows what, pondering all other options and avenues, (where else could I go?), I did not want to face him.

In my mid ponder, contemplating the tips of my fingers there in that opening between street and house I looked up and saw him - standing there – watching me.

I felt my heart fall pass my rising fear and everything bottlenecked in my throat.

He said one word.

“Come”.

The ground below my feet disappeared and I was standing there, hovering above the mists of hell.

With deliberate and guarded slow steps I walked the dead man’s walk, up those loving steps through the top gate and into the gallery.

All he did was stand and stare and my fear seemed to want to consume me whole.

I was ill prepared for what happened next.

With a stone sober straight face he looked into my eyes and said “are you all right”? You didn’t get cut or anything”?

I opened my mouth to say ‘No’, but nothing came out. I tried again and chokingly whispered “no” and he said “ok, come inside. It’s lunch time”.

And like that it was over.

And my relief at being spared left me barely able to stand.