What a carve-up, eh?

It was well after midnight when I got home. Which I found somewhat surprising as I was sure that it was hardly ten.

My mother and father were still up. Because mothers and fathers stayed up in those days if schoolboys didn’t arrive home until well gone midnight. And mothers and fathers generally had quite definite things to say to the late-returning youth.

They were both in the hall as I entered.

I pushed open the front door, which was never locked, because no one ever locked their doors back in those days. Well, not in our neighbourhood, anyway.

It wasn’t that people were more honest in those days. No, it really wasn’t that. It was that we, along with our neighbours and most other folk in our neighbourhood, had absolutely nothing whatsoever worth stealing.

Except, of course, for the Sea-Monkeys.

But then, as everyone had Sea-Monkeys in those days, there was really no need to walk into someone else’s home through their unlocked front door and steal theirs.

So I pushed open our unlocked front door to find my mother and father waiting in the hall.

‘Hello, Mother,’ I said. ‘Hello, Father. I have some really exciting news.’ And then I gave the hall the once-over. But for my mother and my father and now myself, it was otherwise empty.

‘Where’s my bike?’ I asked. ‘I left it here in the hall.’

‘Someone’s nicked it,’ said my father. ‘Probably either that travelling mendicant who specialised in gutha pertha dolls, or that gatherer of the pure who popped in earlier to share a joke about beards and baldness.’

‘Right,’ I said. Slowly and definitely. ‘Right, I see.’

‘You do,’ said my father. ‘You do.’

And I did. In a manner of speaking.

‘And you are late,’ said my father, pointing to his wrist, where a wristwatch, had he worn one, would have been and then towards the circular light patch of wallpaper where, until quite recently, our hall clock had hung. ‘It’s after midnight.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I am confused about this.’

‘How so?’ asked my father, already unbuckling his belt.

And, I knew, preparing himself inwardly for the beating he was about to administer, which would be prefaced with the words ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’.

‘Well,’ I said, wondering quietly to myself whether tonight might be that night. That night, which I had been assured by my peers would one day come, when I would stand up to my father and, as a result of him now being old and frail and myself young and in the peak of my physical fitness, mete out to him many summary blows to the skull and never again feel that belt of his across my rarely washed bottom. ‘Well-’

‘Well what?’

I shuddered, silently. It was not going to be that night.

‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand two things in particular. One being how come it is now after midnight, because I am absolutely sure it was only a quarter to ten just a few minutes ago.’

‘And secondly?’ asked my father, his belt now off and his trousers falling to beneath his knees for the lack of its support.

‘Secondly,’ I said, ‘how we actually know that it’s after midnight, as we no longer have any means of accurately telling the time in this house.’

‘The boy has a point there,’ said my mother, who, I must say, in praise of her loving humanity, hated to see my father laying about me with his belt.

She always thought he went far too easy on me and would have much preferred to have done the job herself.

There were some times when I actually wished that we did not live in the enlightened times of the nineteen-sixties, but back in Mediaeval days.

Because in those days I could have denounced my mum as a witch and had the very last laugh.

‘I think twelve of the best are in order,’ said my father, struggling one-handedly with his trousers.

And then he beckoned to me with his belt hand and I took a trembly step forward in the hall.

And lo.

I felt a certain something. It was something that I had never felt before. And, as such, it was something that I did not entirely understand at first. My initial thought was that it had snowed in the hall, but that someone had painted the snow. And I’ll tell you for why this was.

It was because, as I took that trembly and tentative step forward into the hall, I felt something soft beneath my feet. Where before, and for ever before, there had been bare floorboards, now there was a certain softness all in green.

‘Carpet,’ I said, in the voice of one exalted. ‘Praise baby Jesus, Mother, a miracle – we have a fitted carpet.’

‘And not just in the hall -’ my mother now raised her voice also ‘- but all through our poor but honest little home.’

‘All through…’ and my voice tailed off. All through? Picture that! At this time in my life I could not. And so I must have fainted. Dead away.

I awoke to find myself supported by my mother’s arms, upon the Persian pouffe beside the fire. I awoke with a start and then with a cough, for thick smoke appeared to fill the room.

‘Don’t trouble yourself about the smoke,’ said my mother, once she had teased me into full consciousness with a Bourbon biscuit dipped in sal volatile. ‘It’s only the offcuts burning in the grate. They haven’t proved themselves to be a particularly good substitute for coal. I think I will discontinue their use as soon as I run out of them.’

‘Offcuts?’ I said. And then, ‘carpet offcuts.’ And then I felt faint all over again. But I didn’t pass out again. Once wasn’t cool. Twice would really be taking the Mickey Mouse hat. And I didn’t want to do that.

I did a little squinting about and, true as true, we did have a carpet, too, right here in the sitting room. Same as the hall. Same green.

‘Billiard table green,’ I said.

‘Billiard table baize offcuts,’ said my mother. ‘The same as the stage clothes you are wearing. In fact, when you fainted in the hall we had a job finding you. You sort of blended into the carpet. As would a chameleon.’

‘Billiard table baize offcuts?’ I did a bit of gauging up and mental arithmetic. ‘I would say,’ I said, ‘that surely this front sitting room of ours would have a floor area roughly equivalent to at least three billiard tables. Surely these are very large offcuts.’

‘That is what the foreman said to your father,’ said my mother. ‘Before he sacked him, this afternoon.’

‘Sacked him?’ I said. ‘Oh dear, not again.’

‘No, he only sacked him the once.’ My mother was a stickler for detail.

My father was not in the room. For had he been, I very much doubt whether this conversation would have taken place.

‘Since you have known my father,’ I said to my mother as she now kindly mopped my fevered brow with a rum-soaked copy of Pirate Today, [7] ‘how many different jobs do you think he has had?’

‘It depends on what you mean by “different”,’ said my mother. ‘Many have been in the same line of business.’

I nodded and I gave the matter thought. ‘With different employers, then,’ I said.

‘Goodness me,’ said my mother. ‘I have long ago lost count. But forty or so years from now you will be able to “Google” him on the “Internet”. You can find out all about him then.’

‘Google?’ I said. ‘Internet?’ I said also.

‘Sorry,’ said my mother. ‘I was just having one of my visions. I have been granted the gift of prophecy, you see, from Northfields Pentecostal Church. Captain Lynch is schooling me in the technique.’

‘I’ll just bet he is,’ I said. ‘And have you had any visions, or prophetic insights, regarding him? Such as him discovering a lost city of gold, or suchlike?’

My mother shook her head and said that no, she hadn’t.

‘I suppose Dad’ll be at home a lot now,’ I said, with a degree of dread, if not in my voice, then probably upon my face. ‘It always takes him a long time to find a new job.’