I am bat shit crazy

Forgot to attach the story...

The Annual General Meeting of East Kent Macumba Society

‘They’ll not be welcome here again,’ says Dad as we watch the convoy of cars speed away.

They approach the bend, their brake lights flashing red like devil eyes. I wish I could believe Dad but I can’t. So I scrunch mine shut, willing our departing guests to crash and die. When I open them again, the cars have disappeared. Dad sighs heavily.

‘Shall I start with the sitting room?’ I ask.

‘Not after last year’s fiasco,’ says Dad. ‘You can start on the top floor. I’ve already had a quick look and it’s not too bad.’

I drag my feet along the corridor, slowing outside the sitting room door, my hand reaching for the doorknob.

‘Ryan James!’ says Dad, smacking my hand away. ‘We’ve got a lot to do before your mother’s home.’

‘What if I find another?’

‘Pick it up with a plastic bag and chuck it on the compost heap. Don’t forget to wear gloves. I’ll dispose of it as soon as I get a chance. Work your way around and we’ll meet on the first floor.’

‘On my own? But that’s six bedrooms... five en-suites.’

‘Less complaining and more cleaning, young man. Your mother’s back at sixish and you know how upset she got last time.’

I stomp up the stairs. How could I forget? The screaming. The tears. Then the side effects from the anti-depressants.

‘She shouldn’t go on her stupid anniversary trip then should she?’ I shout.

‘Have some respect, Ryan James. Your mother needs a break after all her hard work,’ Dad yells up the stairs.

A bucket, mop, hoover and cleaning backpack are waiting for me on the first floor landing. I take a deep breath, wondering all sorts of bad thoughts. Like why Dad thinks it’s okay to get his 14-year-old son involved with the East Kent Macumba Society but not his adult wife, who swans off every year to a spa with Auntie Sarah to mark Grandpa’s death. And exactly what does colonic irrigation have to do with remembering Grandpa anyway? Dad packs her off under the pretence of caring about Grandpa. But he knows she wouldn’t put up with our guests for five minutes.

I don’t expect the top floor to be too bad and find the first three rooms, two singles and a double, practically spotless. I’m guessing most of the mess is going to be on the ground floor where all the drumming and shrieking was coming from.

But as I open the door to the master bedroom, I shrink back.

I take in the sea of dead flowers scattered over the carpet and bed and half expect the Bride of Frankenstein to stumble out of the en-suite. There’s a horrible smell too. Like a public toilet. I pinch my nostrils shut, bracing myself to clear up other people’s urine.

‘Everything all right up there?’ calls Dad.

‘Piss and dead flowers,’ I shout.

‘Language, Ryan James!’

I wrestle on the rubber gloves and snap the medical mask over my nose, feeling myself prickle with injustice: my language was nothing compared to what our guests got up to. I begin with the flowers, picking up red and yellow rose petals, imagining our guests furtively harvesting them from cemeteries. Three large vases are lying among the flowers, the yellow water creating multicoloured ponds in the swirly carpet, as well as the bad smell. I then strip the sheets. Apart from a few springy pubic hairs, I don’t find anything else unpleasant. The bathroom too is surprisingly clean and I give it a quick going over with a cloth. I remember Mum’s hysterical screaming and check behind the curtains and under the armchair, mini sofa and the bed. But all is clear and I take my cleaning equipment to the next room, a small double where the bedspread is cradling an imprint of two bodies. I clear several Brahama beer bottles from the sideboard and empty the dregs in the sink, wrinkling my nose at the yeasty stench as the golden liquid fizzes down the plug hole.

The next room is in much the same condition; one lone body shape in foetal pose imprinted on the bedspread. Although the bed hasn’t been slept in, I strip it anyway as I know Dad will send me back if I don’t. I use the mop to fish a pair of men’s underpants from under the bed. They’re emblazoned with a colour photo of the Sugar Loaf Mountain. I quickly shove them to the bottom of the bin bag, shuddering at the thought of Dad prancing around in them.

I attempt to carry the hoover, mop, bucket and cleaning backpack down the stairs at the same time. It’s too much. The hoover slips out of my hand and dramatically rolls down the stairs like it’s a stunt vacuum cleaner. I hurry after it but when I get to the bottom of the stairs, Dad is standing there dressed in Mum’s pink cleaning pinny, green rubber-gloved hands on hips, the hoover lying at his feet.

‘I suppose it’d had enough of the mess and threw itself down the stairs?’

‘It just slipped.’

‘Be more careful. Hoovers don’t grow on trees, you know.’

‘Really? Not even suc-amore trees?’

Dad mock clips me round the ear

‘Come on! We haven’t got time to mess around. I need your young legs to pop to the larder and fetch the stain remover. Blood’s a bugger to get out of the curtains.’

I jog downstairs and glance out of the larder window at the garden, remembering the night before. We were sleeping in Grandpa’s old flat over the garage and while Dad snored the night away, I kept being woken up by shouting, drumming and a few screams of what I hoped was delight. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I made myself a cup of tea and sat on the balcony with the man on the moon keeping me company. A few moments later, we watched the Brazilians spill out of the French windows onto the terrace, where after a lot of whispering, they gathered in a circle.

I’d quickly grabbed Grandpa’s binoculars and watched a woman in her 60s, dressed in a long white robe and turban, waving her arms up and down. I recognised her from breakfast. She’d complained about her fried eggs being undercooked. I zoomed in as she went up to Nelson, the man who organised the AGM, and started wafting her hands around him as if he’d done a big stinky fart and she was trying to dissipate the smell. I felt embarrassed for him. But he just stood there, eyes closed, not at all fazed by being so publicly humiliated. She then moved onto Nelson’s latest girlfriend, a twenty-something, olive-skinned woman with closely cropped bleached blonde hair, who again stood impassively as the woman went about her wafting.

But the weird thing was after she’d wafted five or six people, there was a strange greyish froth flowing from of her mouth and down her chin. By the time she’d finished the entire circle of 30, it looked as though she’d swallowed a box of washing powder. She then threw herself onto the lawn and rolled around as if her robes were on fire. I waited for someone to kneel down and help but they just stood there watching her convulsing as if such behaviour was an everyday occurrence. Perhaps it was in Brazil, but as we were in Dover, I thought I’d better wake Dad and call an ambulance. However, just as I was about to get up, she sat up, wiped the foam away with her robes and started chatting away as if nothing had happened.

I grab the stain remover and glance at the kitchen clock. We only have another three hours before Mum’s home so I take the stairs two at a time, shouting for Dad. All the bedroom and bathroom doors are closed. I knock on each just in case he’s cleaning inside. But there’s no sound of scrubbing or running water. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spot a flash of fuchsia out of the landing window. It’s Dad wheeling the barrow down to the end of the garden.

I sprint after him, and get there in time to see him tipping the barrow’s contents onto the compost heap.

‘Fetch the fork, will you son?’

I jog back with the fork and see Dad burying something with his foot.

‘What was it?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Not another one?’

‘No,’ he says taking the fork from me and stabbing it into the compost.

‘Just these.’

He unearths two little sack cloth dolls, a single stitch for their eyes, mouth and nose, making them look more like evil cats than anything human.

‘And the usual champagne bottles, burnt candles, and feathers.’

‘Feathers? From what?’

‘I wonder?’ he says, all sarcastic.

‘Crow? Magpie?’

Dad shrugs and reburies the evil cats and I get my answer as I glimpse an oily black feathered head and beak.

I want to ask if he thinks that’s where the blood on the curtains is from. But he’s already wheeling the barrow back up the path.

My foot hovers over the mound.

‘Ryan James,’ he growls.

I tear myself away. After he dumps the barrow at the door, we go straight to the first-floor master bedroom.

‘I won’t be long. Why don’t you start on the two bathrooms. I’ve checked them already. They just need a wipe round,’ he says, Vanish in one hand, closing the door with the other.

I put my ear to the door, listening to Dad grunting and cursing before shouting the familiar: ‘Never again!’

A few minutes later, Dad emerges and we head to Room 10, a large double.

When he opens the door, the stench of stale river water hits us, reminding me of the trout Uncle Tom brings when he visits.

‘Jesus,’ says Dad, looking down at the bed. ‘It’s soaked through. The mattress will be ruined. Nelson said they were doing the dolphin thing this year but I thought he meant it figuratively.’

‘Figuratively?’

‘I didn’t think he actually believed they could summon the spirit of an Amazonian dolphin and do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘You know. They do it,’ he said nodding his head at the bed. ‘The dolphin does the... business with the ladies.’

‘A dolphin? That’s disgusting!’

‘It’s not an actual dolphin. It’s the spirit of a dolphin.’

‘It’s still disgusting.’

‘This is disgusting,’ says Dad sniffing around the bed like a dog.

He pulls back the soggy velvet bedcover to reveal a saturated mattress, sprouting patches of bright green algae fur.

I clamp my hand over my nose.

‘You know I saw them outside last night.’

Dad glares at me.

‘Hope they didn’t see you spying on them. That’s in the contract. No prying, taking photos or asking questions.’

‘I wasn’t prying. I couldn’t sleep. That women who always complains about the eggs. She had foam -.’

‘You saw the cleansing then?’ interrupts Dad, scooping handfuls of algae into the bucket. ‘I pay a fortune for a therapist; they pay a fortune for an annual spiritual cleanse.’

‘If Mum knew what was going on... knew that you were renting this place out to a voodoo society.’

‘It’s not voodoo. It’s macumba.’

‘I’ve Googled it, Dad. It’s pretty much the same thing.’

‘It’s nothing like it,’ says Dad, jabbing a slimy green forefinger at me. ‘Now don’t you dare say anything!’

‘I wouldn’t, not after last year. I wouldn’t mind but I was the one who found it. What about the effect on me? I still can’t get that image out of my head. It looked just like Squeaker.’

‘Squeaker died when you were seven.’

‘I was 11. He had the same sweep of hair and centre parting,’ I say. ‘Why do you think Mum was so upset? She’d hand-reared him.’

‘Stop for a moment, Ryan and think. How could it have been Squeaker? He was a brindle. That one was ginger,’ says Dad yanking back the sheets. ‘Help me with these.’

I stomp to the other side of the bed and tug back the soggy sheets, remembering how I’d spotted the creature’s glassy eyes gazing up at me from underneath the piano stool as I sat on the sofa watching TV. In hindsight, I should have ignored it until Mum had left the room. But I couldn’t help glancing at it. Wondering if it really was Squeaker back from his grave with a new hairdo? Or had a fox dug him up and Bernard, our cat, brought him in? When I looked closer I realised, of course, it couldn’t be him. He’d been dead for four years. He’d be a skeleton, whereas this one looked very much in rude health before our guests had cut off its head.

Dad had managed to convince Mum the head belonged to an obese squirrel we’d seen Bernard eyeing up as it struggled to climb the willow tree. However, he couldn’t quite so easily explain how Bernard had managed to get hold of the bloody pile of entrails she’d found under one of the beds.

Dad shoves the mattress up against the wall.

‘We’ll leave it overnight. Say one of the guests spilled some tea and then you came along and accidently knocked a bucket of water all over it.’

‘Why me? Why -,’ I begin to say as the phone in reception rings.

‘Get that, will you. It’s probably your Mum, letting us know she’s about to leave.’

‘But -.’

‘It’s okay, don’t worry. I’ll finish off up here,’ says Dad, patting the mattress with a towel.

I run down the stairs and throw myself at the phone.

‘Mum?’

A familiar voice greets me.

I place my hand over the receiver and shout up the stairs.

‘Dad!’

He’s already halfway down and when he’s at the bottom, I whisper: ‘Are you going to tell him where he can stick his AGM?’

Dad nods and takes the receiver before shooing me back upstairs. I linger halfway up, out of sight but still in earshot.

‘Hello! Yes, quite a bit. A new mattress, new curtains and possibly a new carpet in Room 10. We’re looking at about £2,000 over the deposit.’

I strain my ears waiting for Dad to tell them.

‘That’s very generous! Yes, pay it directly into the account,’ he says.

I bristle at Dad doing his fake ‘I’m such a great host’ laugh.

‘No worries at all. Same time next year, you say? I’m not sure if we’re already booked though - Dover Taxis have been on the phone about a dinner and dance... Oh really? That’s very tempting but I’m not sure I can cancel. They’ve already paid a hefty deposit. Let me just see what I can do.’

I hear the diary pages rustling and cross my fingers tightly.

‘Ah, my mistake. Their do is the week before. It’s all booked for you… and you, Nelson. De nada.’

The end

If you enjoyed the story, it’s in Homecoming Queen & Other Twisted Tales you can pick up a copy from Folkestone Bookshop or you can order it here.

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