This first appeared on my Substag blog; Lager Time. You can hear it on there as audio as well as in text form, if you like it, do me a lemon and subscribe. You can have it as an email or a podcast
Sunday Loathe, by me Paul Cree.
Greetings, bonjour, what’s happening.
Something a little different this week. It’s a short story, that I wrote around 2014. This will most likely be a bit longer than my usual offerings on here, bare with me, I’m trying something.
I have this character, called Reece, who I’ve written a number of stories about, over the last ten or so years, which I’ve never done anything with (apart from entering this one into a short story competition; I’m assuming I didn’t win.)
He first appeared as character, in a spoken word piece, called My Town, which I wrote around 2010 and used to perform it a lot, it was like my flagship piece. I stopped performing it, because I felt didn’t really fit with everything else that I did, which was largely autobiographical. So I decided I was better off keeping him in short story form and every now and again, I’d dig him out, along with his mates, and start writing. Saying that, I wrote a draft of a two-hander play, in which one of the charters was Reece. Also, never went anywhere.
I always enjoy writing as this character, just never really know what to do with it, which I spoke about in the first blog on this here Substack. Most of the stories are just ideas, really, some a bit more developed than others. This was one of the better ones.
Hopefully, I’ll have a crack at writing some more at some point. Hope you enjoy it.
SUNDAY LOATHE
Sunday Roast
I'm at an age in my life where I don't actually mind living with my parents but they probably do. Well, my dad definitely does. I don’t blame him, though. My parents are old school. As a man, you leave home at eighteen - nineteen, get a job, make your way in the world, get married, set up a new home, have a couple of nippers and all that, then once-in-a-while you feed them on the odd Sunday lunchtime, Christmas or Easter, like they did you. That’s it.
I'm approaching thirty and I haven’t yet flown the nest. I pay rent and bills, like most other people (just not as much with the rent bit) but I make up for that tax-break with massive debt re-payments from historical credit binges and general financial mismanagement, that sees me permanently squatting in my overdraft, with nothing to show for it, other than several pairs of once-banging trainers, several hundred booze ups and a few holidays abroad with mates, where we got boozed up, just like we normally do, except under the sun; sporting t-shirts with un-imaginative names written on the back.
Being at home, I sometimes get the benefit of Mums cooking. The meals can be a bit samey but I'm not that fussy when it comes to eating and I don't like cooking, so I'm grateful, most of the time. Really. I am. I just hate sitting around the table to eat as a family. This day was another one of those days, Sunday lunch, the important one, with me, hungover, again, having got cunted the night before, again, which never really helps, does it.
'This looks lovely Pam'
Normally Dad rubs his hands together at this point, like an excitable child, upon being presented a plate full of Mum’s finest Sunday roast. There was no cheery hand-rubbing on this day though. I figured he’d not had his customary pre-match clear-out, which had probably put him out of sorts. This is all part of the build-up for Dad. I normally hear it in my room, unfortunately positioned next to the carzi. It’s awful, though not as bad as the main event, that comes after dinners done.
'Sorry but I think the potatoes are a bit overdone.' Mum, modest as ever.
As I work varying shifts at the call centre, I'm often able to get out of sitting round the dinner table to eat during the week. Sitting together brings it all home for me and stamps it on my face. I'm all too aware that I'm encroaching into my parent’s final swansong, as they approach retirement, like a London Marathon runner, looking like a prick, in some stupid costume they probably regretted as soon as the cameras started rolling; staggering down the Mall towards the finish line, glad that the whole ordeal will shortly be over.
There's not a day that goes by, when I wish I wasn’t an inconvenience on their part. I'm grateful for the roof and the food but I find this tired ritual of eating around the table a mild form of torture, and so does my sister, and it's likely that so do my parents, yet they insist on persisting with it. It's as if were at a conference and I'm the resident fuck-wit, speaking on how to be a complete waste of valuable oxygen and maximise parental disappointment, with a sticker across my chest that says BELL-END, it wasn’t supposed to be like this, was it.
'Can you pass me the pepper please Dad?'
'Speak up Reece, I can't hear you, you're mumbling.'
'Can you pass me the pepper please Dad?'
Dad was in one of those moods where he doesn’t really want to talk. Tip-toeing around him can be like walking across a minefield, blindfolded, not that I've ever walked across a minefield, blindfolded, but I imagine it to be pretty stressful. Closest I ever got, was picking the football out of the stinging nettles in the garden. I was hungover and in no mood for walking, let alone tip-toeing, that required delicate movements and intense concentration. My sister Kerry, was kicking me under the table. I looked at her and she nodded at my hand, which was underneath my chin, elbow resting on the table, supporting my head like a really shit pillar, as if some can’t-be-arsed student had made a crap attempt at a Greek Amphitheatre using cardboard and Sellotape, for a GCSE tech project. The one free hand, my left, was forking up little bits of food then tipping it back over onto the plate.
Over the last few years of being at home, me and Kerry have developed this physical dialogue and perfected it; this wordless and slightly painful form of communication is used specifically for meal times, mostly on Sundays. There were several phrases, most of which roughly translated too;
'REECE YOU MELON, IF YOU'RE HUNGOVER AT LEAST TRY TO LOOK LIKE YOU'RE NOT HUNGOVER, YOU KNOW IT WINDS THEM UP.'
Dad shovels his first forkful into his cement mixer of a mouth, lips smacking like a racehorse with the munchies. I find the sound of people eating repulsive. It's one of the most basic of human functions yet, I can’t stand it, even when I eat. We piss, shit and fuck separately, why do we all have to do this one together? Sat around tables like a bunch of mugs, pretending to enjoy each other's company. Most of my mates' families didn’t bother with this tired ritual. They thought I was posh because my family did it, was always really awkward when they came round for tea. What’s the point in having a fucking sky-dish if we’re not gonna spend dinner time gorping at the Fresh Prince, like a stoned Goldfish? I must have automatically winced when Dad made a particularly loud lip-smack, because Kerry spoke me again, KICK;
'REECE, FOR FUCKS SAKE GET IT TOGETHOR!'
'How’s work at the moment Reece?'
As ever, Mum attempts to break the ice, whilst desperately trying in vain to hold this pangea together, instead of letting evolution explode us in to our independent land masses; for the record, I'd probably be some crap island cut adrift in the North Atlantic, fuck-all minerals to mine and too weak to defend itself from imperialists, who'd want to use it as an military base to attack somewhere much bigger, wealthier and generally more useful to humanity.
'It's aright...thanks.' I say, forking up and twisting another bit of mash.
'Nothing new then?'
'Na... not really,' staring at the mash, thinking that it looks like a fluffy cloud.
'Your mum is asking you a question Reece.'
Dad interjects with a mouth full of food, speaking words as if there was a sock stuffed in his mouth. A lone pea and a couple of bits of swede escape out and fly onto the table cloth, like debris from a restaurant bomb-blast shattering into the street, I follow the peas trajactory. The pea lands just in front of the water jug, right in my eye line;
'Sorry Mum, just don't have much to say about it at the moment, nothing positive anyway...The mash potato is really nice.'
'Dunno why we bother Pam.' Dad ploughs back into his food.
My response was C/D borderline at best, could do better, just like most of my school reports, reminding me of that time I made that half-arsed Greek-Amphitheatre out of Sellotape and paper for my GCSE tech project.
I looked at the pea for a moment and wondered if he was hoping, that another one of his mates might come flying out of Dad’s mouth to join him on the table, whilst Dad was barking at me. Alas, he was still on his own, isolated. must have been hard for that pea, despair was something I could empathise with. Dad finally swallowed then spoke, the pea must have winced;
'You spend full working days there, five days a week and you have nothing to say!?'
'Not really...What do you want me to say, Dad?'
'I want you to give your mother a proper answer, not some crap attempt like the poxy one you just gave.' Think Dad must have been constipated again.
'Leave it Tony, he doesn’t want to talk about it.' Mum speaks, her eyes closed and her chin to her chest. KICK
'YOU FUCKLING IDIOT REECE, MUM'S UPSET NOW, WHY DO YOU ALWAYS DO THIS?!'
Mum looks as if she could cry, she stares at her plate, composes her-self, then asks Kerry about how her A-levels are going. Kerry answers, Kerry to the rescue, she speaks well, talking about her uni-choices, giving Mum and Dad reason for optimism. A daughter that could genuinely go on to make some actual achievements in life. Kerry knows how to play this game. She finishes her modest Oscar speech ,then gives me a double KICK;
‘I'VE GOT YOU OUT OF THIS ONE AGAIN, SEE, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS ENGAGE THEM, IT'S NOT THAT HARD REECE, IS IT? STOP FEELING SORRY FOR YOUR-SELF, YOU’RE LIKE A FUCKING CHILD SOMETIMES!'
Mum and Dad start talking about the Seventies Weekender they'd just been on down at Pontins, after Kerry had tactically asked how it went. They seemed to perk up at this, even Dad raised a smile, sounds like they really enjoyed it. I’m glad they enjoyed.
I looked at the pea again, the lone, green pea, the maverick escapee, seeking asylum from the death camps of my Dad's guts, where the stodge of low quality white bread, streaky bacon, digestive biscuits and shitty larger, permanently undulate in one mass gloop of shite. Sitting quietly on the kitchen table cloth, lonely and isolated, far removed from his earthy beginnings. It wasn’t meant to be like this, was it Pea? I reckoned he was waiting round to see if anyone else made it out. The swede were straight goners to the floor, no chance anyone will ever find them other than the hoover. This pea was probably well educated, expecting great things from the promised land of the table cloth, but he was on his own, no help from anyone and probably seen as a piece of shit to be disposed of, but he's free, free, if only he knew it!
Somewhere in-between fantasising about the pea, the conversation had moved from the seventies weekender in Pontins, to Mum and Dad's history together, a regular feature at the meal time and one that always left me feeling worse than I already did, upon hearing their achievements and inevitably comparing them to mine. More appeasement from the school of Kerry’s-Diplomacy.
'1984 I think it was, me and your Father managed to buy our first place, a small flat in Norwood, I think we were 22?' Mum looks at Dad, Dad shovels another load of food in his mouth then replies;
'No, 21. We were both the first in our families to ever get a mortgage'
Every time, years younger than what I am now, married and on the property ladder. I'm pretty sure they don't do it on purpose, but stories of Mum and Dad’s achievements are like someone laying the boot in, a real wind-stealer right in the ribs, whilst you're already lying on the floor, having had the shit beaten out of you by the school bully, in front of everyone, after making the mistake of trying to stick up for your-self.
tell myself it's pointless making comparisons, they didn’t have Pimp My Ride back then to microwave any ambitions they might’ve had, but still, I couldn’t help making those comparisons and inevitably feeling like a massive piece of shit that had taken up permanent residence in their bought-and-paid-for home; me and the pea were one now..
'Norwood was a lovely little place. That area was a bit different back then, really nice little community it was, you knew who your neighbours were, not like it is now, no, couldn’t go back to London now'
I looked at my parents and watched their mouths moving as they spoke. I began to imagine that I'd conducted a full-blown MRI scan on their brains as they were sat there at the table, whilst talking to Kerry, and I was now analysing the results, via the medium of Mirocoft Powerpoint, the lone pea, wearing a little lab coat, glasses and holding a clipboad, as my assistant;
'if you see the red patches here these are momentary flashes of xenophobia, normally triggered during moments of nostalgia, quite common amongst people of this age.'
'That's right. Wouldn’t go back to Norwood now, no chance. Ted from work still drinks there from time to time, when he goes up to watch the Palace. There was a shooting on our old street Pam! It's all gangs fighting over drugs now.'
If you pay particular attention to the male, these yellow patches here are nerve endings, sending messages to the bowels to release a highly toxic gas, known to stink-up the whole top floor of a house, often requiring fumigation afterwards. There is a severe build up of this gas in the gut, due to years of bad diet and stubborn refusal to adhere to any type of dietary advice. This blue light here just above it, is directly linked, it's a revulsion for anyone who dares to suggest implementing a dietary change, and anyone that does is either an obnoxious middle-class twat or just plain homosexual. This green light here is an internal query, queering whether-or-not 'plain homosexual' makes sense as a phrase, and this purple light is an insecurity, due to the word 'query' being used internally in reference to homosexuals, sounding a bit too much like 'queer' triggering this red light here at the back of the brain, which is an anxiety about whether or not there is a subconscious link.'
'That was lovely Pam, really hit the spot that did.'
Dad gets up from the table and goes into the kitchen, returning with two slices of white bread to mop up the gravy still on his plate. I look at the pea and I'm sure I could sense a small feeling of humour, emitting from the little green being, like a snigger or something, at the look of Dad with the white bread.
'Would you like any more love?'
'No thanks Mum, I'm stuffed.'
'What about pudding? It's apple crumble, your favourite.'
Apple crumble has never been my favourite, I might have said I liked it once, when I was about twelve. I stopped eating puddings a few years ago, yet Mum still insists on offering it. I read somewhere it was bad for your digestion, to eat a load of sugar-blasted food straight after a heavy meal. This was probably instantly dismissed by my parents as 'codswollop.' Even though Dad would’ve most likely gone upsatirs after the meal to obliterate the toilet, yet fail to make the connection, whilst condemning the upstairs part of the house, again. KICK;
‘STOP THINKING ABOUT DAD'S EATING HABBITS!'
'I'm ok for pudding thanks Mum, I'll go and start the washing up.'
I got up and left, washing up was my exit card. A chance for me to stick my headphones on, listen to some beats and block out the dull and painful thud of my own failings. As I got up from the table and walked into the kitchen, I suddenly thought about the pea, stranded, no longer under my protection. BANG;
'That bloody boy, doesn’t clean up after himself!'
I suddenly noticed that my leg was hurting from all the kicks. It wasn’t meant to be this way, was it.
