Jimmy Bucklesmith's Unexpected Day Out

Jimmy Bucklesmith's Unexpected Day Out

By

Colin Reed

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Illustrated by Jan Pearson

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Published by Colin Reed at Smashwords

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Copyright 2012 Colin Reed

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Smashwords edition licence notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thankyou for respecting the hard work of this author.

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To Barbara

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Fresh Air and Foul

Chapter 2 Self Service Packed Lunch

Chapter 3 The Road To Education

Chapter 4 Classrooms, Playgrounds and Chocolate Bars

Chapter 5 The Beautiful Game

Chapter 6 The Puddlehouse

Chapter 7 The Three Baggers

Chapter 8 At the Gorbellys'

Chapter 9 Pizzas

Chapter 10 The Menswear Department

Chapter 11 The Troothy Bird

Chapter 12 The Paper Tree Toilets

Chapter 13 The Road to Bendo's

Chapter 14 Bendo's

Chapter 15 The Road from Bendo's

Chapter 16 Payday

Chapter 17 Sweeties

Chapter 18 Chocolate Dreams and Blacurai

Chapter 19 Escape from Hevven on Earth

Chapter 20 A Wandering Soul

Chapter 21 White Spectres and Black Gloop

Chapter 22 The Drummer Boy

Chapter 23 Popcorn and Paramedics

Chapter 24 Ascent

Endpieces About the Author

Chapter 1

Fresh Air and Foul

12 year old Jimmy Bucklesmith crawled through the dirt and the noise of the apartment that he shared with his parents and his sister Carota, when she was at home. Reaching the window that looked out onto the free world beyond its glass, he hoisted himself up to his knees. Shuffling a little bit, he placed his forearms upon the sill where, down through the many layers of dirt, he had long since excavated a very specially cleaned place for himself. Laboriously, his journey had taken him anxiously across the rotting, threadbare carpet, and he had negotiated the thick smoke of the dimly lit room with an inbuilt sense of direction, rather than with the assistance of his vision. The continuously pounding noise of the individual sound systems, the projected images of TV channels and websites flickering on the walls, with as much noise as could provide deafness to the realities of living in the minimal space of the room, had accompanied him every centimetre of the way.

Jimmy looked back for a moment only. The joint assault of his father's angry and protracted bumbulum, along with the swing of his oversized foot, had obliterated the ideal world that he had created on the floor out of bits of cardboard, spent cigarette stubs, re-used plastic food containers and anything throw away that could be given a new lease of life via his creative instinct. Now it was a place of desolation, its contents scattered far and wide across the floor, its buildings torn from their foundations, and all the living beings that had tried desperately to scurry for safety back into the omnipotent imagination that had created them, had been annihilated.

Jimmy heard his father complain again. As usual, when his complaining was in full flow, it had come from his rectal voice box. Today it sounded something like, 'Berlobberlob!' but Jimmy didn't care to understand its meaning. Today flatulence, as well as inarticulate grunting, was a standard form of communication and large, compacted, urban populations could often be seen talking with their backs to each other. Popularly known as Beanstalk, those who had been fitted with rectal voice boxes were even able to carry on two different conversations at once, one with the person in front of them in the conventional language of the old order, and one with the person behind them in the modern, universal idiom. Trousers were often worn at a low hung level, to reveal the tops of the buttock cheeks so that the hard of hearing, with an implanted eye or, cheaper, a camera positioned at the back of the head, could lip-read.

The loudness of his father's frustration always somehow managed to reach him, wherever he might be in the apartment, and whatever orifice it issued from. Jimmy, however, ignored the repeat of his insistent demand. Instead, he found himself dreaming without content through the window, which looked out onto the quadrangle of the Bougainvillea block of apartments, situated within the extensive urban spread of the congested, post-industrial world. For a moment he froze. Despite the suffocating heat of the room, a cold sweat suddenly appeared from seemingly nowhere. It scoured his body and, for a short but intense moment, took away from him everything that he had ever been, putting in its place, the beginnings of something that was yet to be.

For the first time ever, an uncharacteristic resentment descended upon Jimmy. Behind him in the room, where his self-constructed dreams had just been destroyed, was the world in which he was confined. He lived within all its noise and its dirt and the incessant demands of his parents, upon which he had had to wait hand and foot, day in and day out, from the first moment his legs had given him his unconventional mobility. Outside, beyond the glass of the window, was the real world, of which he had only a sample taste on his way to school, and as a regular and obedient errand boy to the all- day convenience store. Now he felt cramped and suffocated, and he was overcome by a sense of urgency. Life outside his window, where it was lived for real in real time, especially beyond the single, arched exit of the Bougainvillea quadrangle over to his right, at this moment beckoned him tantalisingly. It enticed him with a curling forefinger and a flattering smile from beyond the limits of his experience.

His father repeated his demands with increasing insistence, but today,an unplenishable void had been created in the small physical gap, separating him from the settee, upon which both of his immovable parents were slumped. Overcome with the sensation that he didn't belong any more, he swooned for a moment and would have lost his balance had he been stood up. Just now, he felt it would be far easier to touch the moon, or even take the rings of Saturn between his fingers, than it would be to reach out and touch his father or mother. Whatever his father wanted, it would have to wait. Resting his chin on his forearms, he gazed without focus out into the unknown. Deep within him, he reflected upon the unfamiliarities that had become uncomfortably lodged there but, with much more simplicity and clarity, he was able to see the physical person that he was, now reflected in the glass.

There were an infinite amount of images, and most of them were ridiculously contorted, a bit like those in a fairground mirror, but the one nearest to him was the same one that looked back at him from the bathroom mirror when he cleaned his teeth every morning and evening. His eyes then met those of the Jimmy he knew best, set in the sockets of the head that was presented to the world as Jimmy Bucklesmith. Of average height, his body was slight enough to be called thin. On the front of his small, round head was a small, round, pinkish face, topped with a portion of thin, light coloured hair, which he had recently cut himself, and which gave emphasis to the permanent quiff that stood proudly erect above a larger than average forehead. Like the cockade of a military helmet, it blew in the breeze and it refused to lie down even under the weight of the contents of a whole tub of margarine.

Jimmy was distracted for a moment by his father's movement in the distant and smoke obscured reflection, beyond his own. Dressed in imitation sackcloth, he was well into the process of changing into a potato, and had been Mr. Maris Piper Bucklesmith for some time now, because the modern era in which Jimmy lived was blessed with the technology for the human being to change form successfully, and couch potatoes like his father upon the settee, were no longer figurative. The human form that had originally emerged from the ancient African dust tens of thousands of years since, could now be modified at will. It was technologically a simple task to add, remove or grow limbs and organs and consequently it was not unusual to see populating the streets, those who were part animal, part human and part vegetable in varying proportions. Having fallen foul of the painful responsibilities of being entirely human, it had been his parents' expedient right to take up the vegetable option.

His mother, also a permanently seated feature on the settee, for her part, had eventually decided that life as an aubergine was the life for her. She had been Mrs. Brinjal Bucklesmith for the last couple of months, and she considered herself a much higher class than a potato. She was still suffering from the smarting, fresh tattoo of a bull, with her redeployed wedding ring through its nose on her right buttock cheek, and was thus forced onto her left side. It was to her satisfaction that she sat facing away from Jimmy's father.

Mr. Bucklesmith had rather an angry boil on his left buttock cheek, which forced him to sit mostly upon his right side, and it was equally to his satisfaction that he didn't have to look at Jimmy's mother. Conversation had stopped between them, apart from a few practical essentials, a long time ago. Though they'd maintained a texting and social networking relationship via their mobile phones for a short period of time, this too had ceased, and now there was an almost permanent silence between them, made less obvious by the continuous noise from the televisions and sound systems, which filled the airspace of the room to capacity. Most of what they said, and it was usually his father that said it, was directed at Jimmy.

Jimmy had always put up with it, but at this moment, by the window of this functionally uninteresting, two bedroomed apartment, he suddenly felt very independent, and consequently very alone. As an innocent victim of the destruction meted out by his father's habitual carelessness, a new and unfamiliar being had been woken within him, now further encouraged by the seductive call of the real outside world beyond the triple glazing of the windows. His inner spirit was now claiming refugee status, with expectation of having to face the uncertainty of life in a blank future, entirely alone.

In contrast to the oppressively suffocating atmosphere of the room, the fresh air of the cluttered urban landscape beyond the window continued to tease Jimmy in daylight that hadn't yet reached its full capacity. Placed in its wintry setting of a cold, grey and damp, December morning, the great outdoors was at first represented by the inner quadrangle of the Bougainvillea block of flats, in which his family's apartment was situated. Abandoned vehicles, fridges and freezers, televisions and mattresses and sundry, discarded rubbish of all shapes and sizes, each vied for space with less room than the field of an outdoor rock festival. The four walls of the quadrangle, dour and uninteresting, rose above everything else, the monotony of their structure broken only by the all too regular ranks of windows and balconies, which he knew so well. A deliveryman, carrying a small, brown parcel, jumped from vehicle to vehicle with the graceful ease that his grafted kangaroo legs had given him.

A magpie took his attention as it chased away a blackbird from a patch of breadcrumbs, which had been scattered upon the roof of a burnt out van. But it was the briefest of distractions, for his attention was ambushed once more by his father's demands. Again he felt something inside him urging him to ignore them. In their place, an idea of freedom rose up and serenaded him from below with sweet songs, like a Siren to an unwary, ancient Greek seafarer. Somewhere out there along the streets and alleys, and in among the shops and the deserted buildings of the jumbled and compacted urban landscape, lay a destiny into which his adulthood would be inevitably sucked, like soda up a drinking straw. But he didn't think for a moment that he would be able to escape from the confines of his home within this eternity. And even, perhaps all the way through the next one. This new feeling within him was perhaps, after all, only a dream, a counteraction to an unvoiced hopelessness.

He sighed quite audibly, though his dissatisfaction went un-noticed in the room, occupied by both his father and his mother. Their attentions were entirely upon the flickering content of the television channels and web pages pasted upon the wall, each emanating from a single, handheld projector, which was by far the most used capability of their mobile phones and the noise produced by these, excluded any other sound from their ears. But no-one, less so Jimmy's parents, wanted to lose the pleasure seeking, sensory aspects of being human and, with acoustic purity in mind, the settee upon which they were both permanently sat, had been strategically positioned in the middle of the sound technology which filled the room.

After another, rather protracted attempt to get his attention, Jimmy could tell that his father's mood was deteriorating into panic. He would reluctantly have to see to his needs. He put his new-born thoughts to one side for a moment, and made the decision to leave the window. It was better to keep the peace through compromise, than invite a war through confrontation, and Jimmy's slight build wasn't tuned to physical conflict. However, half way through the manoeuvre to turn back into the room, to solemnly, and reluctantly, continue the life he had always led, he heard a shout from down below in the forest of abandoned vehicles.

His left hand was still taking his body weight by resting on the edge of the sill. Using this as a pivot, he turned his upper body back to the window to identify the noise, which sounded familiar and of some interest, and which had somehow magically, been able to penetrate the lead-lined wall of sound coming from within. Again, his father would have to wait for a fraction of a moment or two. He would tempt his judgement day to the very brink of precipitation, as he felt the need to investigate the noise.

He looked. It was Travis Turncock, unmistakably recognisable by his demeanour, even if he was at the very limit of any vision available to the eyes. A boy from his school, he was a noisy and confident character, and possessed the most powerful vocal chords in the school. His head was adorned with a crimson, Mohican haircut, and his slightly tubby frame belied a natural, but generally unexpressed, athleticism. A permanent sneer had been genetically transcribed onto a face that didn't know how to smile.

He was with two others, whose faces were from the playground but whose names Jimmy didn't know. They were both smaller than Travis Turncock, but otherwise identical in dress and manner, apart from the mops of peroxide-blonde hair flopping above their orange-tinted faces. These were shaved to a couple of inches above the ears right around the skull and, forever entrenched in the lower status that the floppy mop hair expressed, they could never aspire to the high flying street credibility of a red Mohican.

They were playing a game of follow-my-leader, and were jumping from one abandoned car to another. It wasn't that Travis Turncock was a natural born leader, but rather that the other two obedient and insignificant acolytes, in their faultless imitations of whatever he did, were born followers.

It was a Friday morning of a school day and they were wearing their uniforms, which, to the discerning eye, consisted of a good quality material and cut. Out of obligation, however, to the unwritten rules of wearing school uniforms outside school premises, they each had their ties around their heads, and their shirts, even on this cold and damp winter morning, were open at the collar and flying out at the back. Their jackets were unbuttoned, and their school bags bounced upon their backs, as they stumbled and jumped from one vehicle to another. Their trousers were worn thin, and were soiled at the knees with constant tumbling. Their shoes, originally black, were scuffed so much that there was little left of their manufactured colour, and were instead a dull, grubby grey.

Jimmy watched the group for a moment or two with unusually covetous eyes. He would have loved to have been down there doing the same as they were, carelessly bouncing to school in freefall. He envied them with a strength uncharacteristically bordered upon jealousy. He considered his legs, and a vision of them taunted the vast store of physical energy that was bursting to drive him forwards into the life ahead of him. Incapable of moving him along like the Turncock group, he was worried that the debilitating condition that cursed him might be a genetic hand-me-down, and that his father's seemingly natural immobility might have been passed on to his own lower limbs.

Dropping to his knees again, he would soon have to pass his father's feet and, with an awkward twinge of contempt, he felt an unusual resentment towards those very largely insensitive, sack-covered objects at the end of his male parent's legs. There was little difference between them, apart from their greater size, and those feet within the unchanged socks of the month long binge drinkers, which were lying in their thousands in bus shelters, on park benches, or sticking out of the windows of parked and abandoned cars. Or those that were collapsed in a heap upon any floor, in any place, not out of choice, but at the point at which the motor sensory aspects of the brain could no longer cope with the continuing search for oblivion. Their bodies had been brought almost to a halt, leaving only the vital, voluntary, muscular actions to maintain the life within.

He bundled himself past his father, and he was as quick as he could be, since he didn't want to get in the way of any of the screens he might have been watching.

But his father didn't notice Jimmy pass. His eyes were on the female news presenter who was far more interesting. He was slumped, motionless in his potato costume, and had always been hoping to win the prize of ''best earth apple'' exhibit at the summer fair, held on the Internet via web cams.

But he wasn't a clean potato like the ones found pre-packed at the supermarket. It was too much effort to wash. Instead, he aspired to the natural potato state found rotting at the bottom of a sack. His garment reached down to his knees, out of which protruded two legs of large flab, unexercised by months on the settee, and individually covered, in part, by the same imitation potato sacking cloth that reflected the vegetable on the rest of his body. At the extremities of the legs, a pair of feet protruded from the potato costume, and each was covered in the same material in the shape of a conventional sock. Though his unwashed body, inside his potato outfit, was largely shades of pink and brown, his beard and his balding head had been coloured with green, watery emulsion paint, originally at his wife's insistence, because it looked more authentic. It was paint that had been acquired with the intention of using it on the walls in Jimmy's bedroom in the days when Mr. Bucklesmith still possessed his mobility.

Another awkward manoeuvre took him past his mother. She sat rigidly still, with her headphones permanently fixed to her head, and a blank and indelible stare etched upon her immovable face. She was oblivious to the world and everything in it, including Jimmy. She had converted to an aubergine relatively recently, as the monotony of being human had taken its toll upon her. Her second marriage to Jimmy's father had fallen flat, and the two parents had gone their own ways. Seeing no more point in continuing with the constancy of human failure, his parents had each chosen, in their own individual manner, to adopt another identity. Thus Jimmy's father had developed his natural propensities to become a potato, and his mother had eventually assumed the identity of a slightly upmarket, middle class and more pretentious aubergine.

She had always kept herself very clean, and had decorated herself extensively. Even now, she still had rings on her fingers and toes, in her ears and through her nose, though these had been changed to accommodate her increasing size. She also had tattoos on many parts of her body, and the tattoo on her left buttock cheek was just the latest. There was nothing irrational about an egg plant having a pair of buttocks, and no less rational for those buttocks to be tattooed and festooned.

Aubergines themselves are aerial products, rather than subterranean ones like potatoes. They are thus much cleaner, and enjoy the fresh air much more than the apples of the earth, to which her husband aspired. She had her own miniature fan, which was placed upon a small table next to her, and which was usually switched on. With an accompanying monotone buzz, it sent a continuous stream of less contaminated air towards her nostrils, which were still apparent at the end of her short, bulbous nose, which used to twitch with mischief when she was younger.

With virtually no conversation between themselves these days, nearly everything they said was directed at Jimmy, and he kept his mobile phone, one of several stolen by his father years ago, fully charged and always switched on, with the alert tone at the loudest setting.

He did everything from arranging the food and shopping, to clearing up and washing, and had become inured to the unpleasant task of emptying the continually filled stink pots, placed beneath an individual hole in the settee. It was habitual for him to empty them when he got up in the morning, and they were always waiting for him when he got in from school.

He would also have to answer the landline phone, on the rare times it would ring, and then it was usually a wrong number. Though his mother had been a respectable hairdresser in a former life, and had had the normal amount of friends and acquaintances that would be expected of a woman of her social exposure and interaction to have had, the family had been obliged to move districts. His father had been a petty thief, though of high quality objects only, and he had made the mistake of stealing from the wrong person. A move away was then necessary before the victim realised the identity of the thief. He had constantly to change his address until he settled down, in a different district with a new and safer life, eventually as a potato.

A rather high-pitched groan issued from his mother's mouth. He didn't understand what it meant, but it was probably a groan of sheer boredom, which she didn't realise was being forced from the depths of her being. The breath from her body, even in the oppressive heat of the room, condensed upon the shiny aubergine skin, which she kept well polished, constantly rubbing herself all over with a cloth. The vegetable skin polisher came round once a fortnight, and he always maintained that she was the cleanest and shiniest aubergine he had ever met.

Jimmy eventually arrived at the back of the settee. Like his parents, it was used to changing its identity. He never really knew what to call the three-seater, upon which his parents were sat, and spent out their sedentary lives. To his mother when she used to talk it had been a settee, to his father a couch and to his uncle on his rare visits, a sofa. The whole seat was covered in crumbs, and marked extensively with the stains of the spills of many a different fluid, of tea and coffee, of alcohol and gravy, and curry and, occasionally, of body fluid. If the nose of the unwary person were to get too dangerously close to it, it would not only be subjected to the sweet, sickly smell of the unwashed, but also of the collection of garbage bins that would be found out at the back of a restaurant. Or, if the eyes were lucky enough to get a glimpse of the world beyond the limits of the urban development, they would compare the stench to the spread of the slurry across the open fields.

Once past the settee, or the couch, or the sofa, Jimmy headed into the kitchen through the gap in the door, kept ajar by the food trolleys with which he served his parents with food. Placing these trolleys at each side of the settee would be one of the last tasks he would have to perform, before leaving for school. It was a system which saved him from supplying his parents with their daily intake of food by the conventional method of walking to and fro nearly all day long and, when he as out of the house, he could be sure that they would not go short. He negotiated the trolleys by twisting and turning and ducking and diving, with the ease born of extended practice and experience, and he entered the kitchen, a place he had, over the last couple of years, painstakingly made all his own.

Chapter 2

Self Service Packed Lunch

Some human inhabitants of the planet practise a meticulously clean and organised life, in attempt to control, as much as possible, the world about themselves. They book their annual holidays ten years in advance, and their diaries are full of controlled obligations, predictable to the exact second. Their rigidly timed commitment even reaches into the underwear drawer, where each item is stacked neatly in a purposefully selected and dated order. It is taken out and worn exactly when needed, to the firm dictate of a predetermined stopwatch. At the other extreme, there are those who would let life come at them with what it might have for them. They have no say in the outcome of events, preferring everything to be determined by a continuing life of uninvolved acceptance or consequence. If they take holidays at all, they are at a moment's notice to an unknown destination, and their underwear drawers, if indeed they have them, are a complex assortment of disorganised, misunderstood, long lost and forgotten items.

As Jimmy entered the kitchen, he arrived in a perfectly clean and tidy room. His orderliness rose like a phoenix from the carelessness and neglect that surrounded him. Apart from his father's demands, which defied the physical obstructions of the walls to remind him of his expected duties, the kitchen was his sole domain. But today the cleanliness of which he had always been proud, looked back mockingly at him with a sneer on its face. Before today, on habitually entering the room, he would normally indulge in a round of self-congratulation, just so he could experience what it was like to receive compliment for a job well done, in this now sparkingly, clean room. He would often speak out loud and take on the dual roles of both the person complimenting and the person being complimented. Over a period of time, and opposed by conditions that most certainly could be regarded as difficult to an extreme degree, Jimmy had created a scintillatingly clean kitchen from what formerly could have quite easily been mistaken for the bowels of a stinking shippen. For, along with the decreasing mobility of his parents, had come the increasing mobility of the dirt and grease within the neglected apartment, and this had been manifested most noticeably in the kitchen.

Having taken over his parents' responsibilities, he had eventually reduced the piles of unwashed crockery, and had placed the items back into the cupboards or onto the shelves where they belonged in their post-washed state. In a prolonged orgy of effort and hygiene, he had scoured the inch deep grease and grime from the walls and the floor. He had removed the bags of out of date food, which had gradually been covered in an ever-deepening growth of turquoise-blue fungus, and which had infested every nook and cranny. He had tried to keep the cooker clean, but the spilt food, some soft and greasy, some black and carbonated, had gradually colonised the enamelled surface and, here and there, had claimed it for its own, pushing out forever the indigenous metallic shine by its superior, dominant and more easily adaptable culture.

'Bwmmmpphh!!!!' repeated his father behind him, brea king into new, increased levels of agitation, but it only served to highlight the contempt with which the cleanliness and tidiness of the kitchen looked back at Jimmy, and which he uncharacteristically felt inclined to reciprocate.

Today, with a mind closed to any kind of appreciation of the world about him, he headed for the microwave in an upright position that, for him, came as close to walking as possible, for his legs had always been like they were. He had not known anything different from one lumbering step to another since he had first stood up on his legs in the first year of his life. Unknown to him however, they were like they were, not because of some cruel genetic curse, or mistakenly injected DNA to his physical mother's egg, but because he was pulled out of his mother's body by his father in one of his regular, drunken stupors. He had come back from the drinking den one day and, finding her in labour, had used the telephone to ring an ambulance, where he'd mistakenly reached the bookies and had taken the opportunity to place a bet upon his midwifery skills, claiming that he could deliver his child before the ambulance arrived.

He thus set to work with an incompetent pair of hands and a befuddled mind, and first pulled the stuffing out of the nearest cushion before he identified his wife, contorting upon the floor of the living room in the midst of the acute discomfort and demanding pain of childbirth.

By the time he had located the squirming and life giving body of Jimmy's mother, the birth process was almost complete. He had grabbed hold of the new-born infant, unintentionally squeezing the legs hard enough to affect their straightness, and he held his son in the air like a proud duck shooter would, showing off the carcass of his prize bird for all to see.

It was with this loving care and attention that Jimmy Bucklesmith was born into the world, and it was why he had such an unusual way of putting one foot in front of the other which, for everyone else, was called walking.

In the kitchen though, the awkwardness of his legs didn't matter. He enjoyed unusual freedom, despite the small size of the room. He could shuffle about without the restrictions of any of the large, projected images that lined the living room, and where his uninvited presence would result in an indignant curse from his father. Here, by the cooker, the fridge and the worktops, he had freedom of movement, despite the debilitating nature of his legs. He even tried dancing occasionally, because he knew nobody could be looking.

'Bwmph!!!! Urrgh!!!!' Jimmy glanced around at his father, somewhat alarmed at his increasing vocabulary. 'Ahh, porridge', he realised as he translated. The news had finished, and he could see that his father was no longer distracted by the hologram of the female news anchorwoman sat on his knee. He could only see the green sheen of the back of his head, but he could tell that his leg was beginning to rise in order to facilitate the expulsion of a deafeningly climactic complaint. His rectal voice box was a cheap one bought on the Internet, and its dialect of origin was not able to simulate some of the letters in the mild expletive.

Quickly picking up a dish of last night's half-eaten porridge, Jimmy urgently smoothed it over with his forefinger and popped it into the microwave and, in the short time that it was warming up, he began to fill the containers with all sorts of food that would keep his parents in a mode of pampered sanity until he would be home from school later that day.

The microwave was taking its time. His father's leg had lifted as high as he had ever seen it do, but the agitated complaint hadn't yet arrived, and its tardiness encouraged a sense of power in Jimmy, as if his father had seen something different in his son and sole provider this morning; an unconscious movement, a gesture, a delay that had been interpreted as a threat. Maybe he had realised for the first time that his son was no longer a pushover, that he had to be respected as an equal, and that he needed him more than his son needed his father, and he was fearful of the fact that he was being ignored for the first time.

But, just as Jimmy was beginning to feel quite comfortably smug, the first syllable sounded. 'Bweerr…' Self importance suddenly left him as quickly as it had arrived. He looked at the microwave. There were still seconds to go. '…rdddiii…' He cut the warming time off short and, with one hand opening the microwave doors, the other reached out to put the last container onto the trolley, which was ready and waiting by the kitchen. Then, with the assistance of a hasty push, it arrived at his father's side just as the '…eew…' of the final syllable began to sound from his father's box. All the pressure that had been building up to dispel it, which would have been enough to send a rocket to the moon, suddenly collapsed, and the final letters of the expletive which had threatened so much, slid off the settee and dropped to the floor as a single, harmless and almost inaudible whimper.

Jimmy watched his father look in each of the receptacles, passing over anything that wasn't porridge and, when he'd located the correct dish, he waited for him give a thumbs-up, one of acute, self satisfaction rather than of eternal gratitude. The dish was then taken off the trolley,and the contents were voraciously devoured. The fact that Jimmy, in an unusual lapse of efficiency had forgotten to put a spoon with the dish, was resolved with the assistance of an unwashed one which had been lost after a midnight curry several days ago, and that his father had dug out from a gap in the settee.

Satisfied that his omission had been reprieved, and that he could complete his cutlery inventory, Jimmy then made sure that the food supply in the house was adequate for the day. The weekend would arrive tomorrow, a time when supplies would be replenished in full. But though a trip to the shops was a brief time out of the house, it was a time that he detested, less because he had no money of his own to spend, but more because he was expected back home in exactly thirty minutes prompt, which gave him no time to experience the outside world. Consequently, he was regarded as quite aloof by those acting out their lives there.

Making his way back into the living room, he placed his mother's food trolley next to her, for which he received no recognition. Finishing this obligatory task, he deliberately dropped himself onto the floor with a skilful flop. It was ungainly, but entirely successful and injury free, and he was in a position to clear up the destruction that had been caused by his father's careless foot. The carpet upon which he spent much of his time was, like the settee, threadbare and, here and there, moist in patches, caused by the constant dropping of food and fluids. Apart from the settee, there was no other chair in the room. The floor was his only chair and the carpet upon it had been down since the Bucklesmiths had lived here, and had seen the occupancy of several tenants before them. Its nature was that of a layer of rotting, organic matter upon the floor of a forest, soft by nature and oozing a sweet odour of decay. He guessed that the teeming microscopic life within the inorganic threads of the carpet, held together by the organic waste that had been deposited there over the last several years, would weigh, to his scientific mind, as much as that of the living creatures inhabiting the human world above the rotting material.

Things did occasionally crawl or wriggle, but if he spotted them going about their daily business, he would not be immediately inspired to crush them out of existence. Instead, he would often leave them cosy and warm, and their food would continue to drop daily from the sky in a continuing shower of heaven sent manna.

The world that Jimmy had created upon the carpet, and to which his imagination had been his passport, was a warm, white sanded beach with a blue sky and a caressing sea, and the inhabitants laughed and walked freely. He was playing football with legs that ran like the wind and a heart that engaged with the reliable constancy of the life around him with fervour normally only associated with ardent, starry eyed lovers.

But in one swift moment his innocent expectations had been ridiculed. The hurricane issuing from his father's bottom and the tidal wave, in the form of an unwashed foot hurtling out of the blue, had destroyed all before them. His dreams had come crashing down in front of him, and he had witnessed the destruction of all the happiness he had created. In its place, he was presented with the uncompromising reality of a noisy, dirty, smoke filled room, occupied by a couple of immobile and incommunicative parents. He stood alone among the devastation, without a single human being in the world to give him hope or encouragement.

'Phwewowewor, bwwfff shuwwup,' slurred his father, in the drunken, unintelligible language that only Jimmy was able to understand. In this instance however, even though it had issued from his mouth, Jimmy wasn't sure what he was talking about, until he realised that a projected TV image on the wall had altered, and it must have been an attempt to change a television channel by means of the voice recognition facility.

Surveying the destruction with his young eyes, he dragged his body over the floor. He began to gather up in his arms all that lay before him, so he could shunt it to a safer place, where it could be recreated at a later date when, subject to the dispassionate laws of physics, nothing can be destroyed, only modified.

He completed his task, pushing the heap of sundry, collected items behind the settee where they would be safe. Having done this, and then pausing to consider that everything that should have been done, had been done, he set off to get ready for school. His first destination was always the bathroom, where an extended wash was always necessary after this intimate association with the carpet and its inhabitants.

Like the kitchen, the bathroom for which he headed was his own domain, since his parents never used it. He emptied their stink pots in here when they were full, and had made a trolley to assist him in avoiding unpleasant spillages. But on just a couple of occasions, his sister had fallen asleep in the bathroom after a binge on the alcohol and wakey-wakey pills, when she had been without sleep for several days. On these rare occasions, when he hadn't been able to get into the bathroom, he'd had to use the kitchen sink to wash in instead, and had waited patiently for the use of the toilet until he had got to school.

He hadn't seen his sister Carota for about six weeks now for, despite the other two occupants of the apartment, Jimmy spent his time alone. In fact, he had forgotten what she looked like. Each time he had seen her in the last year or so, she had had a different appearance. Once she had black hair which was groomed and lacquered to stand up like a beehive, two foot above her scalp. Another time she had short, cropped, red hair which made the bones of her temples stand out. Yet another time she was blonde and her face was painted vermillion.

Carota's external image was of out and out importance to her. Image alone was essential conversation for those where the natural articulation of verbal communication had become severely stunted. She had often taken two days to get dressed in order to go out, and one of these days would be spent in the bathroom. In the flesh, she possessed a slender, sylph-like figure that could have easily fallen down a crack in the poorly maintained footpaths. The features of her face were soft and unpronounced and her eyes were shallow. Her movement, however, was nervous and jumpy, and spoke of uncertainty and dissatisfaction.

In her quest for anonymity, she cleverly disguised herself with a character for which a professional actress would have elicited rave reviews from even the sternest of critics. Her make-up was worn so thick, that it hid the subtle features of her face. Her eyes became glazed over as if out of fear and, losing their depth, were rendered insensitive to the rigours of social expectations.

He'd seen her friends, on one occasion, when they were waiting for her down below in the quadrangle, since she would never let them up into the apartment. At least two of them had cat’s tails grafted onto to their lower backs, and whiskers onto their cheekbones. They all sported different hairstyles. One had a perfect copy of the pyramid of Cheops, silver grey and gelled so much to make it rigid and withstand the uncompromising weather of all ages and more, of the dance floor. On the heads of the others, there were trees, buildings and different sorts of constructions. The one with a tree had a bird sitting on top of it, and another with a chimney stack, which even included the pigeon droppings and ancient black soot, to add just that little bit more authenticity.

In the eternally cyclical nature of fashion however, the Perromerds, a family of four across the block, had started from the beginning again. They favoured imitation animal skins, and carried clubs made from polystyrene out of a self styled sense of social responsibility.

In Jimmy’s limited experience of people, the Perromerds were the nearest you could get to intellectuals, and they were even to be seen reading books on occasion. Jimmy liked books and thought nothing wrong with them. Without access to the Internet, his active and curious mind had done a lot of reading thanks to his uncle who, as the local librarian and used book distributor, used to visit quite regularly before his father's escape to this accommodation. Books, even in electronic presentations, had not been popular for a long time, but there was still a