Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 33

Mad Uncle Ted, who one afternoon played William Tell with the dartboard on the back of the kitchen door and missed and threw a dart into the top of my cousin Stephen’s head as he stood stock-still beneath it.

Spellbinding Uncle Ted, who drove down Scottish country lanes in his laundry van with Stephen on his lap holding the steering wheel and me sitting high up behind them on brown paper parcels of washing, and when Stephen crashed the van into a narrow stone bridge, just burst out laughing and didn’t stop laughing until we got back to the house in Dumfries, where one night the kitchen ceiling fell down and rats ran across the beds in the darkness, even though there were nine cats in the house, including one which Stephen’s little sister Christine dressed up in her doll’s clothes and put to bed in her doll’s pram, and another cat, a genuine Scottish Wildcat – or so Uncle Ted said when it sank its teeth into his thumb.

My wonderful uncle, who made the empty space in my heart where my father should have been feel emptier than ever and yet filled it up with light and laughter.

My wonderful, wonderful uncle, so different from my remote grandfather and the rest of my family, who I wished so much was my father, an uncle that I loved like no one else, an uncle that everyone should have one like.

Life with Pam and Ted was one long adventure and I never wanted to go home. It was like being deliriously happy drunk and the sombre silence of my own home was the hangover, stone cold sober and full of sadness.

Life with Auntie Pam and Uncle Ted was how life should be and I lived from one school holiday to the next holding on to tiny details that other people with normal lives forgot because they could take them for granted.

When I was with them, it felt as if my eyes were wide open all the time, and that back at home I was half-asleep, part of me switched off.

Stephen and I would lie in bed at night and talk until we fell asleep. Sometimes we didn’t clean our teeth. Sometimes we didn’t wash our faces and we never knelt by our beds with our hands clasped to say our prayers.

If Auntie Pam had had her way, I would never have gone home, just moved in and lived with them as their fifth child. My loving mother even agreed at one point to Pam and Ted adopting me, but my grandmother put a stop to that because of what the neighbours might think.