Joy: A Winters Tale It is nearly Christmas and I am very small, and Grace, red cheeked, runny nosed yet full of beans despite cutting a gobful of teeth, is toddling around the living room after me noising raucously. She is carrying one of my Dinky trucks in each chubby little fist but still desperately craves the bright red car which I have in my hand at that particular moment; even though she has only just swapped it to me for a green tractor. Our living room is warm and bright; all scarlet carpet swirls, soft furnishings and flickering firelight. Our mother is seated upon a scarlet cushioned leatherette sofa, long legs coiled beneath her and she is quietly but intently watching us over the top of a hardback novel like some beautiful, hazel-eyed feline. The darkness of her curly hair frames and accentuates the soft, creamy paleness of her skin. A lot of people used to tell me that I am the image of my mother. It is late afternoon and midwinter so dusk, like a panther, has pounced upon our house but the air is a billion dancing bits of eiderdowny snow, so the whole sky seems to glow with a milky moon-shine: like the earth itself is a chinese lantern lighting the snow from below. There is the snare drum rat-ta-ta-tat of key upon window pane and outside I see our father, snowflakes settling like epaulettes upon the navy-black shoulders of his donkey jacket, smiling red nosed through the window at us. Dinky dispute forgotten, I run to the window, press my nose up against the windowpane and kiss the glass. The glass is fogged around the smudgy imprint of my pursed lips and nose tip. I stare at it then tentatively touch it with a fingertip as it begins to dissipate. Behind the glass my father is silently chuckling, puffing steam from his nostrils. I can hear the crunch of his hobnailed boots on the paving stones as he shuffles his feet to keep them from freezing. Tiny particles of snow dot the glass and as I wipe away the remains of my kiss he squashes his nose and lips against the glass and places his big, moustachioed kiss on the self same spot on the opposite side of the glass. Now it’s my turn to chuckle with delight. He looks so funny with his face squashed against the glass, black moustache splayed like broom bristles pressed hard against a floor. With thumb tip and edge of sleeve he clears a swathe of windowpane free of snow and blows on the glass creating a big foggy blob. I cannot see his face behind the circular opacity but I can see and hear his big calloused fingertip squeaking on the window pain as he carves out a love heart shape and then writes my name in the middle. My father and I more or less learnt to read together. He was too busy selling papers on the streets of Dublin from age six onwards to ever receive much of a formal schooling so he only really learnt to read as he read to me; starting with pop up picture books. He was so passionate about my learning to read that our heads were together inside a book every spare moment he had and I think it is because of this I took to reading and writing much the way a baby dolphin takes to cavorting in water. My dad used to laugh very loudly, sing very well, dance really sillily and play guitar really badly, but although he would eventually read the broadsheets from cover to cover he never was a great one for spelling. So while he remembers to write the letters on the glass backwards from his point of view so that I am reading them the right way round, he spells my name as he always does, not Joey but ‘Joy’. But it is my name just the same. (c) Jh, 2014. All Rights Reserved If you would like to read more of this story just visit my website and select Bull Island from the menu. Thank you for reading my work. Jh :)
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 17:40:28 +0000
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