GUESSING GAME
When the cold late afternoon began to darken, the family eagerly expected Father's arrival home from work. Mother took the children into the parlour and, with the electric light off, she conducted the usual game of "I Spy" to while away those magic hours of dusk till Father returned on his trusty bicycle.
They also expected the fish and chip supper he fetched - already salted and soaked in vinegar at the Chippie. He always bustled into the parlour, beaming with cold, having pedalled from the factory on the other side of the hilly town; and, even before removing his bicycle-clips, he would raise each of his children into the air as a greeting, allowing them to see how his glasses had steamed up. They would hear him arrive at the squeaky garden gate - and their eyes lit up in expectation, as echoed by the flickering coal fire. With any idea of continuing "I Spy" gone straight out of the window and their giggles escaping into the palms of their hand, they would pick him out pacing up to the front door after passing the parlour's uncurtained window. Meantime, they huddled in the blackening twilight.
But this evening, he was late and they were running out of objects to "spy". Suddenly, Mother had a brainwave for a variation in the game that should keep them amused until father finally turned up.
"I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with the letter B."
She feinted a look through the darkening window. The children were quizzical. They had seen in her eyes that this was going to be a real teaser. Even, perhaps, a trick. Their round happy faces were pictures of scrumptious puzzlement, as they placed thoughtful fingers to their barely restrained smiles. The coals shuffled position in the grate, whilst the last flame became a glimmer at the foot of a black cliff - then an abrupt machine-gun of eager voices as they threw guesses into the gloomy arena.
"Beaker."
Reference to little Basil's pink nozzled contraption, designed to aid first steps in drinking.
"Belly."
The tiny faces broke cover from their mock-seriousness into a renewed chain-reaction of gurgles and giggles, as they indicated this swollen part of Mother's body wherein their would-be brother or sister played hide and seek.
"Bath."
Basil was in it near the fire. They pointed at him with renewed laughter as one shouted out "Billy" in reference to his member. Mother frowned at such rude suggestiveness, but her mouth quivered with amusement.
"Book."
It rested on the arm of Father’s chair, where he had left it last night with a dog-eared leather marker which the children had given him for Christmas.
"Blood!" interrupted a toddler by the window who had previously not offered a guess. He screeched with delight as he pointed at a large stain on the carpet which all the others knew full well was an ancient spillage of Ovaltine.
Mother decided that she should now own up because the guilt of cheating was becoming too great to bear.
"No, it's Daddy's bikeclips."
In her playful deviousness, she had intended to await her husband's return, with his trouser-bottoms neatly parcelled - before coming clean about the bikeclips that thus parcelled them.
Even as they complained in unison about her outrageous trick, they heard the garden gate go and forgot the game of "I Spy". But the toddler by the window, the one who’d offered “blood” as an answer, claimed victory as Daddy's bloody face smeared itself over the parlour window, limned like a red blotchy moon against the street lamp, a face bereft of the customary steamed-up glasses. He was trying to say something, the lips of his mouth squeaking across the glass in short sharp jolts.
Mother guessed he must have struggled home on hands and knees from where, she later discovered, he had been knocked off his bike by a hit-and-run driver.
His final action was to lift the newspaper-wrapped fish and chip supper into view before his head disappeared below the window-sill. He wanted them to know he had done his best to get the fish and chips home whilst they were still piping hot. But , like him, they were, of course, stone cold. There was, however, a little extra treat of one pickled onion for that evening's winner of "I Spy".
(published ‘A Sink Full Of Dishes’ 1997)
