Marshmallow fish

“Enough joking around,” I say sternly. I am speaking to my dear grandparents, who I have been making laugh very, very hard. “Was I extremely well-liked, as a child?”

“Well,” my grandpapa smiles, “you always had a great many friends. Your classmates were intrigued by what you brought to the table and approached you accordingly. You invented a game called Fish, do you remember? There you would all be at pick-up, the whole class stood in a line, each dangling a sock in lieu of a rod.”

He pauses.

“Of course, there was never a real fish to be caught in the playground, on account of its being tarmac. But that only made the imaginative aspect of the game all the more exciting.”

“So I was inventive?”

“Exceedingly. You liked to make up songs.”

“Songs about Fish?”

“Not necessarily.”

“And I was extremely well-liked?”

“I’ve just explained that you were.”

“Right.”

I coolly survey my grandpapa and sense that I have extracted as much information about me as a child as is likely to be extracted. Coaxing out more will, at this point, feel like drawing blood from a stone. In what could very well be construed as a ‘bullying’ move, I speed my walk up, leaving the poor sod in a cloud of dust. I sidle up to my grandmama and pat her lovingly on the shoulder.

“And what of my genius?”

“You were always very precise,” she muses. She is being open and forthcoming about my genius. This pleases me.

“How so? I want details, grandmama, details.”

“In the summer of 2002,” she recounts, “you figured out that, in order to be able to drink the sweet, refreshing contents of your Liquifruit juice box, you would need to puncture said box with the straw provided.”

“And I figured this out…quickly?”

“Very quickly. You took the straw in your fat little hand, established which end was the pointier, and ruptured the foil membrane covering the hole.”

“And this was, I suppose, very clever of me to have done?”

“Very clever. You were not even one year old. We thought you were going to grow up to become an electrical engineer.”

“Did I grow up to become an electrical engineer?”

“You know very well that you didn’t.”

I coolly survey my grandmama and sense that I have extracted as much information about me as a child as is likely to be extracted. Coaxing out more will, at this point, feel like drawing blood from a stone. In what could very well be construed as a ‘bullying’ move, I slow my walk down, leaving the poor sod in a cloud of dust. I wait for my grandpapa to catch up with me and and pat him lovingly on the shoulder.

“And what of my wit?”

“You were a gay little child,” my grandpapa posits, “always with a trick up your sleeve.”

My grandmama has caught us both up. It is clear that she has something to contribute. This pleases me immeasurably.

“We took you to church in Clarens in 2004,” she states, “and you loudly sang your own song whenever the congregation was invited to sing a hymn. It was distracting but, I must admit, most witty of you. You also stood up on the pew during the psalms, facing backwards, and had a protracted conversation with Darryl van Zyl about your fairy wings.”

“And what of my budding friendship with Darryl van Zyl?”

“He was charmed by you. He said you had spirit. And you, in turn, thought he was a very nice man, a sentiment that you shared with us that night over dinner.”

“I’ll level with you both,” I say, stopping dead in my tracks. “I sound like a total delight - a pleasure to have in class - a little ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy world - a peach. I sound like a peach. Am I right in saying that, peach? Was I always such a peach?”

“You’ve got comic timing,” my grandpapa chuckles, “in spades.”

“You have always been,” my grandmama nods, “a stand-up young lady. You’re the thinking man’s crumpet. A gem.”

“A peach?!,” the elderly gentleman exiting the pub just as we pass by its entrance exclaims, “a peach?! My dear girl, I don’t know you from Adam, but you’ve got such a way about you, and I hope this is not too forward to say, out loud and right here and right now, that you strike me, if this is not too forward to say, well, you strike me, if this is not too forward to say, as quite simply being, if this is not too forward to say, as, well, something of the whole damned fruit bowl!”

“Thank you, sir,” I laugh gaily, “and a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you and yours, from my chosen family” - and here I gesture expansively towards my grandpapa and grandmama - “to yours, and a joyous festive season!”

“Should old acquaintance” my grandpapa poses rhetorically to the elderly gentleman, who is making slow progress down the pavement, “be forgot?”

“And never,” my grandmama roars, her eyes blazing with integrity, “brought to mind?”

The elderly gentleman, still with his back to us, picks up a fist-sized rock from the gravelly section next to the pavement and brings it down softly on his own head. The rock cracks open and a slimy yellow yolk oozes out, dribbling its way down the back of his neck.

“Eurggghehggehghgghgg,” gurgles the elderly gentleman.

My grandparents and I stand there like lemons, not quite knowing what to do.

“Eughhghehghhehhhggg,” gurgles the elderly gentleman again, wiping the spilled bits of rock off his jacket, and he turns around fully, and he reveals himself to be the spitting image of my boyfriend from sixth form, and now his face is sort of melting, like hot pale wax, and now he seems to be winding a never-ending scarf around his neck, and now the scarf is in his hand and he is dangling it, dangling it, dangling it, and snow is starting to fall, flake by soft white flake, and I cough up one of my back teeth into my outstretched left palm, and I pass my tongue over my toothless gums, and they’re rotting, and bits of flaky gum are floating around in my mouth, and now I realise that we are all stood on a very long bridge, and the pub that we have just passed has vanished, and the pavement that we have been walking on has vanished, and there is no rope handrail, which is making me feel very stressed indeed, because what if we all fa-

“HELLO,” my alarm says loudly. “HELLO.”

I am awake now, from my dream, and I have a nice sheen of sweat just about breaking out on my upper lip. It looks like one of those sped-up videos of a mushroom sprouting out from a fecund forest floor, if you can even believe such a thing.

“HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO.”

I do a nice fat little run with my phone to the bed. I sit on the edge of the bed. I look at my feet. They are small and pale. I don’t blow my nose in yesterday’s pants that I find on the floor, because my Mom had to stage an intervention when I wrote about this despicable one-off in my last blogpost.

(“You write well,” she said this morning, in a tone too brusque for me to take it as a compliment. “You write well, but that bit last time about the pants and the floor and the snot, well, I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I could barely finish the piece.”)

I still drink twelve sips of water, though, and I still reflect darkly on how I have to take sips of liquid in multiples of three. I feel like a freak, even more so when I remember that I’ve already written about all of this in a separate blog post. I’m basically plagiarising myself.

You are boring and repetitive, my brain greets me, and bland and, well, weak. You’re weak. Which is a shame, because of today.

“Today?”

The funeral, my brain whispers, the funeral.