Visions of the End

A sense of the apocalypse has briefly visited itself upon south Texas, specifically a freezing cold apocalypse. It's March and we should be outside in t-shirts, already gearing up to complain about the heat; and yet we've had weeks of dull grey skies just like you get in England with overnight temperatures dipping to freezing, necessitating my covering the pumpkin and sunflower plants with garden blankets each night. All sorts of things which would ordinarily be gearing up for summer - presumably including pollinating insects - are struggling to make it to Spring. Apparently this is a phenomenon known as an arctic blast which occurs because our planet no longer has ice caps, possibly. It's something along those lines. Thankfully I know it can't be climate change because our president has assured us their's no such thing and he should no because he's the president. If their where anything too worry about he would of told us.

Therefore phew.

It's too fucking cold and yet I force myself out the door to ride twenty miles each day in the name of staying healthy, five days a week without fail. Nevertheless the report from a medical check-up I took about a month ago comes back with sirens awail.

'My blood pressure might be a little high right now,' I told the nurse, 'because I've just cycled twenty miles. It's usually fine when I have it taken at the dentist.'

'How much do you weigh?' she asked, beckoning me onto the scales.

'I was 194lbs yesterday,' I told her.

'Well, you're 201lbs today,' she said.

'Maybe that's because I'm still wearing three layers of clothing and heavy boots,' I offered, but she didn't appear to care. The check-up didn't seem particularly focussed on what it was actually supposed to do, so now I have this letter in the mail telling me that I will probably explode before the year is up, but as the unhealthiest person in the world I may qualify for some kind of award. I'd go to collect the thing but I expect my mobility scooter will run out of juice before I get there owing to my having to make excursions to McDonalds and lard retailers on the way.

Also, the kitchen drawer caused me to have a meltdown. I attempted to open it whilst aggravated, but was prevented from doing so by a family size box of matches stuck at the back, because in the year 2019 we somehow still have a family size box of matches. The drawer has annoyed me ever since it became a sea of loose thumbtacks.

'Do we have thumbtacks?' the boy asked.

'They're in the kitchen drawer,' I said, recalling a mental image of all the thumbtacks in their tidy little plastic box.

The kitchen drawer is adjacent to the sink, of which the tap - or faucet if you prefer - has developed a sudden and unexpected drip. We had the entire assembly replaced a couple of years ago, so it's all pretty new, which is why there was no drip; and then suddenly there was, and enough of one to fill an unwashed mug to the brim in about thirty minutes. I examined the nut around the base of the pipe and wondered if it needed tightening. I opened the kitchen drawer, recalling having seen a wrench in there, but it opened only so far due to the family size box of matches, just enough to reveal thumbtacks everywhere.

I tugged.

I tugged harder.

I slipped in my hand, probing for whatever was stuck - some kind of box which I accordingly pushed down.

I tugged but still nothing.

I tugged with brute force, hoping to break the thing and teach it a lesson. 'Cunt,' I screamed at the drawer, so loud that my throat hurt. As I say, it turned out to be a family size box of matches. I still don't even know why we have a family size box of matches.

A flash of white caught my attention, something in the garden.

I went to see. There were two white doggies running around in our garden, two wuvable white puppy dogs which I'll call Barky and Fido, most likely owned by Shooty the drug dealer who just never quite seems to find the time to secure his fucking fence. I'm not sure what breed Barky and Fido are, but they're of that pedigree generally preferred by those in the narcotics retail trade, the kind you often see in the newspaper when they've broken free and killed an infant. Because we have cats, I am displeased to see Barky and Fido having a woofy, waggy-tailed time of it in my garden, and I'm reluctant to pop down the road and ask whether Shooty might see his way to securing his fucking fence in case he decides it would be simpler to pop a cap in my ass.

Anyway, this evening we are dining out, even though we usually stay in on Tuesday, and would prefer to do so this evening because it's freezing out there, despite being March in Texas. The boy's school has done some deal with an eating establishment called Willie's Grill & Icehouse. The deal is that if we eat there on this particular Tuesday evening then present the school with the receipt, this will somehow count as good work and go towards Junior's final grade in his Latin class. It's some sort of sponsorship deal, something to do with  Willie's Grill & Icehouse donating money allowing Junior's Latin class to take part in state competitions, but it sounds like a bribe from where I'm sat - greasing the wheel, stacking the deck, payola, whatever else you want to call it. Still, although the boy gets by in Latin, his grades suggest a scholastic strategy similar to that which he applies to the task of procuring thumbtacks from a drawer. We are therefore on the road, heading for Willie's Grill & Icehouse, because that's how much we care.

Willie's Grill & Icehouse is unfortunately packed this evening, mostly with other parents attempting to influence what grades their own kids get in Latin this coming semester - whatever the hell a semester is. The queue reaches out the door, out into the freezing hell of the strip mall. It's wall to wall squares, eager beavers, apple polishers, good company men, loyal snitches, do rights, clean cut kids who unfailingly call you sir, sportswear - Go Spurs Go, and not one funny haircut amongst the lot of them. Once inside we are blasted with country and autotune music. Everywhere I look, there is a Bud Lite logo.

We last ten minutes in the queue which hasn't moved in all of that time. Fuck this, we declare, and leave. We'll go to eat elsewhere, then come back later and pick up a burger on the way home once the crowds have diminished. So long as we get a receipt from the place, it will still count.

We eat at the Longhorn Steakhouse because it's near. Also, there are places to sit and their country and western is at least the genuine article. The food, when it comes, is delicious.

It's approaching eight in the evening as we return to Willie's Grill & Icehouse. Bess goes in to procure a burger which we can take home to the kid. I briefly nod off in the car, cold and tired, then after an indeterminate length of time, go into the restaurant to find my wife. The queues have vanished, but the place is still busy. Bess waits for her order to be processed. We talk to other parents who had the same idea as us. One of them has a boy called Aniston in our kid's Latin group. I don't ask. Maybe she was a big fan of Friends.

Servers scurry back and forth from the hatch running along the front of the kitchen, all young, all wearing Willie's Grill & Icehouse t-shirts bearing the slogan, more food, more fun. I can feel my soul beginning to die around the edges. Food, if it's any good, no more needs to be fun than architecture needs to be educational, and - excepting the mighty Cocina Jibarazo - anyone who serves their food on anything other than a plate is a scoundrel, and so as to be clear on this, no - paper plates don't count either. If I'm sitting down to dine, I do not wish to eat from a punnet, a bag, a bit of cardboard, a piece of slate, a plank, or a bright red plastic basket with the food contained within a nest of greasy paper.

All around us are tables of teenagers and eager beavers and squares, all peeling shrimp and dumping the shells into blue buckets with Bud Lite printed on the side. These are actual diners rather than the kitchen staff which their labours imply, so I suppose peeling your own shrimp constitutes the fun promised by the t-shirt. I can tell I haven't strayed into the picture space of anything painted by Heironymous Bosch because I don't recall his art featuring a million flat screens tuned to knucklehead sports channels.

Eventually we have waited forty-five minutes, and still no sign of our order. 'Can I at least pay?' Bess asks, having finally caught someone's attention.

We pay and leave, because the receipt is all we really came for. We drive around the block, then return to pick up the burger, feeling awkward about just leaving something for which we paid. We drive home, feed the burger to the kid, watch Wheel of Fortune, then go to bed.

Next day is sunny and bright, even a little warm. I take in all of the blankets from where they've been draped to protect plants from the frost. I wedge canes into the earth at the points where Barky and Fido have been getting in under the fence. I take the kitchen drawer to pieces, pull out the old nails, then glue it all back together. Finally I get on my bike and ride, knowing it will be a better day.

My Australian Cousin

My Aunt Lynda moved to Australia in January, 1974. She corresponded with my mother - her older sister - for a little while, but silence eventually fell. I would have been eight-years old when she moved, and although I remember Lynda, it was a long time ago and the details are a bit sketchy. I remember Eddie, her husband, whose name turned out to have been extrapolated from Edwin rather than Edward, which would be at least one reason why more recent Google searches never seemed to come back with anything. I remember the block of flats in Leamington Spa where they lived, possibly because it was the first block of flats I ever entered, what with my being a rural lad and everything. The climb to the eighth floor stuck in my memory, and weirdly I remember it as a peculiarly circular activity in which we went up one flight of steps, then down the next one back to the beginning, over and over as though it were some sort of ritual undertaking designed to unlock the upper floors of the building. 'We're just going up and down again,' I kept trying to tell my parents. Realistically, I'm almost certainly remembering a dream about the ascent, which at least indicates how significant it seemed to me at the time. Big cities full of tower blocks, urban architecture and concrete were places I only ever saw on Doctor Who on the telly, usually subject to invasion by beings from other worlds.

I also remembered Dawn - Eddie and Lynda's daughter, my cousin - who would have been about three by the time they boarded the boat at Southampton; or at least I remembered her in the sense of remembering that she existed.

Decades flapped past and we all began to wonder what had become of this Australian branch of the family, but Google searches came back with nothing. Then in 2017, my wife got on the case, having run out of her own ancestors, or at least hit a wall back in sixteenth century Bermondsey - which was itself an eye opener given my own more recent association with south-east London. Bess, by agency of one of those genealogy websites, discovered that Eddie had been Edwin rather than Edward, that his surname had been Brown - a detail which the rest of us had somehow mislaid - and that, if this was the same guy, the trail led to Lynda and Dawn, both still resident in Australia. So emails were exchanged, and yes - it was them, after all this time. They had similarly been looking for us, on and off, but never found anything.

One year later, and I'm back in England visiting my mother. I'm here for three weeks, and my visit has been timed to coincide with Dawn and her family coming to England. I try to get back to see my folks once a year, and I knew Dawn was planning a trip so it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Dawn's trip lasts two months and seems to involve whizzing around half of northern Europe while they're up this way - even bits of Iceland and Norway. I suppose, if you're going all the way to the other hemisphere, you may as well try to see as much of it as you can.

So we've exchanged emails and we seem to get on fine, but I'm still a little nervous about the meeting, not least that it will take place at my mother's house, because they've hired a car so it's easier for them to drive over to see me from their current hotel, which is somewhere in the Cotswolds. I've met plenty of Australians, and only ever one Australian I didn't like - although he seems to have been the exception which proved the rule - and they probably number in my top ten favourite nationalities, possibly top five; and yet still I have this image of my mother - who generally doesn't do crowds - besieged by gregarious Aussies laughing and chucking tinnies to one another across the couch.

Thankfully and obviously, such ludicrous fears are unfounded. Dawn is with Darren, her husband, and son, Sean. They file into the front room and occupy the sofa as though entering a stately home.

There's a distinct familial resemblance between Dawn and my mother, her aunt; which is, I suppose, consistent with how my mother and Lynda have grown to resemble each other quite closely in recent years, which is surprising given how different they were as children. Dawn seems an outgoing, happy presence, someone whose company warms the room.

We talk about the sort of things you always talk about when you haven't seen someone for forty-five years, and my mother appears quietly delighted by the meeting. This is a relief, because I felt a bit awkward as the intermediary introducing people who may as well be strangers to her home. We talk about the family, and what little we can remember of it, and we talk about England and America and Australia. Darren is a miner, so he's interested in the old mines they've visited in Wales. He works at an open cast mine and I get the impression that it's one of those jobs involving huge, strange looking bits of digging equipment, like the trucking equivalent of the attractions at Jurassic Park. He seems a nice bloke and very much reminds me of my friend Glenn, quiet but with an endless supply of one-liners and with a face accustomed to grinning.

Darren is driving, so we drive to Kenilworth which is a couple of miles down the road. We spend most of the morning plodding around Kenilworth Castle on the grounds of it being there, and that Dawn was almost certainly wheeled around the place in a stroller back in the seventies. They seem to like it, as do I, because it's always good to see a place through the eyes of someone who doesn't know it so well as you do. All the same, given how much the three of them are packing in on this tour of the northern hemisphere, I'm surprised they're not beginning to suffer castle-burn. They've already seen Sudeley Castle, and I suspect it may not have been the first.

After the castle, we drive up to the Mews, as the cul-de-sac is named, to look at the house where our grandparents lived, and where Dawn herself supposedly lived for a couple of months.

'It's that one,' I say, pointing at number thirteen.

We look at the house.

Dawn had been wondering if the memories might come flooding back, which they haven't, but never mind. We drive on, around a couple of corners and end up on Rouncil Lane.

'I think that's where your mother went to school,' I say as we pass Kenilworth Sixth Form, emphasis on I think because this is only a vague impression I have, probably based on the fact of it being a school in Kenilworth. I wouldn't like to claim I'm anything special as a tour guide.

They drop me back off in Coventry and we say goodbye until what we all hope will be a next time. It was short and a bit of a whirlwind, but I'm really glad we managed to work out the dates; and once again I take pleasure from the fact that we're all still alive.

...and thanks to Dawn for the photographs!