BEYOND the lounge window of our little house, the scurrying villagers on the hill paused to fasten their top buttons and stare deeply into the unspeaking sky, asking where the autumn had gone – leaving the imperturbable old tree to stoop naked over the stone church, where each year he hears the first scraping of Christmas carols.
The hippie holy man of grizzled years touched the medicine beads on the leather lace hanging from his neck and prayed for green tomorrows for his grandchildren. Then he tossed his ponytail over the raised collar of his donkey jacket. The ponytail is the symbol of his spirituality, though he recalls that many years ago a more thrusting colleague had asked him how copying the fly-flicker above a horse’s bottom could bring you closer to God. Sadly, I can no longer grow a ponytail.
In our lounge, my wife and her friend spread magazines on the table and talked about hairstyles. Afternoon darkened into evening and I nursed a mug of cooling tea. A late season wasp, whose frantic attempts to escape had excited my pity, gave up the ghost and hurled himself against the window, landing lifelessly on the sill. How short and brutal is life, I mused, before nipping into the conversation. “By Jove, I, too, have a perm,” I said, admiring one of their photographs. “I am permanently bald.”
My wife quelled the smile that had begun to sparkle in the lovely turquoise of her eyes and then turned to her friend. “All men are hopeless, quite obsolete,” she said. “They just haven’t been programmed to understand what’s important in this world.”
The friend nodded vigorously, as the tip of her tongue explored the left corner of rouged lips, where there lurked a stray crumb of marble cake. As they gazed at each other with deepening sympathy, I edged nearer the only remaining Garibaldi biscuit on the plate and prepared to pounce, saliva gathering in my mouth, though I knew the biscuit was reserved for our guest. “I asked my chap to hang a painting on the hall wall, a simple enough task you’d think,” said the friend. “Anyway, up the ladder he limped with his hammer, sighing in that sulky way of theirs. Then he muttered words, I never want to hear again, of which ‘drat’ was the mildest. By the time he returned to terra firma, the bruises on his thumb were more vivid than the painting itself.
“His thumb was the real work of art,” she added, before dissolving into mirth. Tears bounced off their cheeks in such abundance that I wondered if our carpet was insured against flooding. During these moments of their blurred vision, I advanced again on the Garibaldi biscuit – stealthily, from the rear. But, just as I was closing this manoeuvre, my wife recovered enough to speak. I hastily withdrew my sly hand. “You wouldn’t believe how clumsy my man is,” she said, pointing in my general direction. “A couple of nights back he spilled his blood on the kitchen floor – on our new Italian-designed tiles.”
“They’re just square tiles,” I interjected. “Even the Belgians can design square tiles.”
These words were lost as she recounted the mishap, which started when I stepped barefooted into the kitchen to take the cod-liver oil capsules that are meant to lubricate my joints – so that I’ll be able to fetch and carry into old age. Their tub was tucked behind a pickling jar on a shelf that can only be reached by bending down or kneeling. I chose the former course; but, unhappily, in my haste to grab the tub, I dislodged the jar. It shattered on the floor. Before regaining composure, I had stepped on several shards of glass. Bloody footprints marked my retreat. “The problem is that one of his legs is longer than the other,” explained my wife. “This would be fine if he earned his crust as a professional scarecrow, but it has left him with backache and a poor sense of balance. This prevented him progressing from a tricycle to a bicycle, the poor old sausage.”
Well, I thought they would explode with merriment. But that night, as she applied new plasters to those feet, my wife’s eyes filled with compassion. “It’s a good thing, nobody took the Garibaldi biscuit,” she said. “That wasp had been sucking it.” You see, women always know best.
LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk
