A DEMON DRAGON ROARS

Pippin Sodbury had known the very worst of life when his father, always a kindly man, started to forget who he was when he came home from school. And dad was on his own. Mum had failed to thrive when she lost the baby she was carrying, and both she and the baby were resting in the cemetery

And now dad was wondering who he was, the man who had been his sole parent for ever, And that was hard to cope with when he was in his teens because hadn’t his father always known him? “Pippin, my boy” he could hear him say in the vault of his mind that recalled treasured moments from the past, “Pippin, my boy, what would you like for your birthday? A small present, maybe, to mark the way another year has trundled past without so much as touching you…?”

That was how, dad had spoken, always a bit pompous, which made other folk tease him, but always honest. And here the honesty was in the use of the term small present. Money was never in plentiful supply back in those days when little economies were always being called for, and birthday presents could never be extravagant. Yet dad managed to take them on holiday most years, to the coast usually, to a caravan site because he had a mate who let him use his caravan at the end of the summer season.

Then life had started unravelling.

Dad had started forgetting things, little things to start with, coming out with such gems as why have I come to the kitchen when he’d gone to see if the kettle was boiling. They were what he had called daddisms, and to start with they made him smile. Until the time came when they didn’t make him smile at all, but rather, made him cry.

The summer holidays came to an end about then too. The man who couldn’t remember why he’d gone into the kitchen could surely never remember to borrow his mate’s caravan and find them transport for the coast?

It had all come to a tragic standstill when his caravan-owning friend called round and asked him why he hadn’t gone this year, the acravam was standing empoty and he’d prefer it if there was someone inside, enjoying a break.

“Haven’t gone where?” asked dad, puzzled, frowning, screwing his brow up in concentration.

And then the world had tumbled into discrete pieces when he was reminded of a holiday he’d asked that friend if he could take, and yet hadn’t gone. It was a pivotal disaster and a signal that all was not well with dthe precious man

Pippin often found tears welling up when he remembered those months, or was it years? It might have been.

Then dad had died. It was as simple as answering the door to the council workman because he wanted access to the rear of the house, and dad had nodded his head as if he understood, had said he’d do it but he understood very little in those last days, or on that last of all days. Because instead of going outside to unlock the garden gate he had climbed upstairs to unlock the landing window.

And lost his footing somehow, and collapsed down the stairs. An ambulance was called for but he was as good as dead. It was his head, where he’d banged it on step after step and then the stone floor at the bottom of the stairs.

Pippin had rushed to the hospital to see his dad but he never had a chance to say goodbye. Instead, he heard the howling manic screams the dear man made as he was trundled to a ward, and then after a while a nurse had come to him and told him how sorry she was, but his dad had passed away, unable to combat his injuries which were quite serious.

“C-can I see him?” asked the boy.

“I wouldn’t advise it, dear. Instead, try to remember him how he was. But if you insist…?

“I’ll do what you suggest then,” he had said, compliant as ever, “I only wanted to say goodbye and.. and I loved him.”

And that had been that.

And now those days were part of a long-ago past, and one dragon kept rising into his mind, a cruel image of him walking in from school and,

“who are you and why are you in my house?” dad had asked as if he was challenging a thief.

It was a dragon that had called on him time after time over the past sixty years. Would he, sharing his father’s blood and DNA, suffer the same decline, forget the kids and the grand kids, fall down the stairs and, dared he think it, die?

But the kids had long since found their own lives, had left home, and only occasionally did they call on him because he had grand children that needed looking after. He understood wthat He had never been what might be called a friendly father. He’d done his best, had driven Emily away though he had loved her more than words can tell, but she could only take so much from his dragon. And he knew that. It had been his own silly fault, but life is so short, a mantra constantly playing inside his mind, his father’s life had been so short, stolen from him by a staircase and gravity, then becoming his dragon of fire and memory

The door. Yes. That’s the door, the back door, and it’s opening… what the devil?

He saw the figure standing there, smiling at him.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

And his visitor’s face had fallen.

“It’s me, dad,” it said.

And that moment Pippin know what he had to do before the staircase did it for him. He had a stash of pills, quite a load of them in the bathroom cabinet, and they would see to things, would stop the nightmare recurring, would slaughter the dragon in his brain.

“Just a minute Jack, it is Jack isn’t it? I love you, and never forget that, never ever…”

© Peter Rogerson 02.02.24

A PERFECT LIFE

Glenys Fisher had never had it so good, or that’s what she truly believed. Except for her childhood that is. That hadn’t been so special because back in those days there had always been fear in the air. There were H-bombs in the news just about every day, and her parents worried about what such monstrous things might do to their town when they fell. Might one make digging the garden and planting cauliflowers into a waste of time? It wasn’t if they fell but always when. In fact, her father, the man she both feared and hated most in all the world, thought it might comfort her if he cuddled her, and he cuddled her a bit too intimately for her own peace of mind, and the tragedy to beat all tragedies was her mother knew and didn’t mind because when the swine was cuddling Glenys he wasn’t cuddling the mother.

Then there was Mr Cradditch at school, the caretaker who had a reputation for liking little girls, and he had taken a liking to her until she decided enough was enough and screamed loud enough to waken the dead, which had got her into a whole lot of trouble including the cane on her right hand, her writing hand.

But that had all been in her childhood, and when she left school she surprisingly discovered that the world was a good place to explore. The H-bomb fears had somehow dissolved away and there was more confidence in the smiling faces that surrounded her when she started work in Wooleorth’s on the High Street.

It was there she met Anthony, a customer who turned out to be her first boy friend. And it was then when she found out that her mother warned her there are some things that she should be wary of when it came to boys.

“You don’t want to bring shame on your family,” warned that good and very patient woman.

“What do you mean,” mum?” she had asked.

“You know, duckie, what your father sometimes tries to do to me,” replied her mother coyly.

“And says he wants to do to me one day,” Glenys braved to say, and the older mother rose up in a volcano of indignation and looked so shocked Glenys wished that she’d not said any such thing.

“What are you doing, trying to ruin a good man’s reputation?” she shouted, “and don’t you say that to anyone else or you’ll find yourself out on the streets with no pillow for your head! He’s a good man, is your father, and don’t you forget it!”

She had left home to live with Anthony soon after that .She knew her father was +anything but a good man, had the proof if grubby fingermarks on her underwear and since washed off constituted proof, and never spoke of her father again. Until he died, that is, cancer they said, and she was working in the store at the time of the funeral and hadn’t gone.

Maybe she should have said a kind of hesitant farewell to the man who had provided her mother with the sperm that had made her. But no. Her good life had started and there was no way she was going to let it stop if it came to taking time off work for the burial of that man. So in order to make some kind of amends she had walked with Anthony through the cemetery where he’d been laid to rest and paused by the newly dug plot with tits simple wooden marker bearing his name in what .looked like marker ink, and said to the boyfriend,

“That’s where they put my dad.”

“I heard he died,” said Anthony, “didn’t you like him?”

“He was all right,” conceded Glenys, “Like dads are.”

“Mine’s a bastard,” Anthony had told her, “which is why I’ve got the flat that we share. I wasn’t going to spend another minute under the same roof as him in his house, the way he found fault with every single thing I did.”

Life with Anthony became a drag after a few months but even so it was better than life at home had been, but now her father was dead she began to wonder about seeing if mum would welcome her back. After all, her room was still there and mum probably needed some company especially during the long grey winters like this one.

But mum didn’t want her back because she’d found Simon, an elderly lonely man who said he really loved her. But there was a huge plus. Simon had a son who was visiting, and that son, Barry, was like an angel. He looked right, dressed properly and when he opened his mouth a sounded right. And what’s more, he was on the look out for a girl his father would approve of, and his father, Simon, besotted by Glenys’s mum was bound to see little wrong with Glenys. Which is how it worked out, so it was goodbye to boring Anthony and hello to the best of all worlds, a good looking man with a whole house (his family home) to himself, and an intense fondness for Glenys, right from the very beginning.

So she left Woolworth’s store when she got pregnant, an event that was swiftly followed by wedding bells. Barry wasn’t the sort of man to want to admit that he’d fathered a child out of wedlock, though he had, but it wasn’t so far out of wedlock to cause him more than a small sniff of worry.

So she was a married woman and still in her teens. Barry had a good job (with the council) and a steady income was coming in, and he was caring in every possible way. All she had to do in return was prepare his meals, which is something she loved doing anyway, and Barry, being the angel that he was, always demonstrated his willingness to help even if that willingness was simply standing as close to her as he could and whispering the sort of things a young wife likes to hear into her ears.

Nothing was wrong in her world, though her mother passed away before she should have, and the years mounted up as the family grew, four children by the time they’d forged it, two of each, which was practically perfect. The children even did well at school and they all went on the either college or university, leaving more time for Glenys to enjoy life and love.

Until, that is, just after her sixtieth birthday, there came a knock on the door, and when he answered it Barry went whiter than driven snow, if that’s possible.

It was a policeman and he looked so severe it made Glenys shudder.

“Barry Hunter,” said the policeman, “I have here a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Cynthia Fisher You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

Cynthia Fisher was Glenys’s mother, and she had been dead for several years. And the perfect Barry was the one who had se nt her to the hereafter, was he? She looked beseechingly at him, but his face told the truth like it always did. Her perfect life had suddenly and horribly come to an end.

© Peter Rogerson 03.02.24