Butterfingers

“Oops, butterfingers!” the lady sitting next to me in the little bus shelter exclaimed, making a slurping noise as she tried to retrieve what was left of her dissolving popsicle, before it made a darker pink stain on her light pink top, and I wondered just how thin that top was and if she was concerned for her modesty. 

     I was well aware that this was the point where I was supposed to laugh sympathetically and say, “Oh, we’ve all done that!” and hurriedly pass her a wad of tissues, and make the whole thing both trivial and important. But I didn’t.

     Now even the most tolerant and easy-going person in this world (which I have never claimed to be) has things – by which I mean noises, generally speaking – that set their teeth on edge and give them the reverse of that lovely frisson you get when hearing music that stirs your soul. 

     People could know me for years and think that I was remarkably well-blessed (or tediously stolid) in that department. Noises from the natural world never especially bothered me. Oh, I’m not saying I liked it when small dogs yapped incessantly, or seagulls shrieked as if pursued by the devil, or flies buzzed around, though I wasn’t averse to usually unsuccessful attempts at swatting them. But it didn’t set my teeth on edge. It didn’t make me feel an urge to be somewhere else as quickly as possible. It was the same with music. I had my own tastes, but even Muzak or Heavy Metal or children singing about their lovely grandma (by the way, I’m devoted to my own grandma, but that’s not the point!) didn’t make me grimace and fidget and want to put my fingers in my ears. 

     Machinery such as drills and jack hammers were an undeniable nuisance as they made conversations and nicer sounds harder to hear, but I wouldn’t say I HATED them.

     I suppose it was the same with phrases. I could endure far more doses of at the end of the day or basically or there you go than most folk. 

     But the unfortunate lady sitting beside me in the bus shelter, with the pale pink top and the recalcitrant popsicle had, entirely unwittingly, managed to combine two of my pet hates. I loathed the phrase butterfingers, particularly when in conjunction with oops – and oopsy daisy was even worse – I sincerely hoped I would never be asked to babysit a child with a passion for In the Night Garden. And the sound of a slurp made me feel positively unwell. Oh, I don’t mean as if I were going to throw up, or start hyperventilating or anything like that, but a twitchy queasiness, and the sensation of the sound repeating itself in my mind long after it had stopped. 

     I hated the sound of slurping so much that I even had to steel myself to water my houseplants, waiting for that little sound of soil and roots, never sure, if plants could talk, whether they would be saying, “About ruddy time, too”, or “Thank you, oh beneficent goddess!” But I did love my house plants so I put up with it. And yes, I did put on the radio or TV to try to cover the sound, but there’s a strange thing about small sounds – they sometimes refuse to be drowned out by larger ones.

     The unknowingly guilty popsicle was now slowly dissolving on the kerbstone outside the bus shelter. Soon it would be just a little splash of pink liquid, and then there would be no evidence of its existence. I told myself to say the things you’re supposed to say, but it would have been too late now, anyway. There are things you have to say immediately, or you might as well not say them at all. The lady in the stained pink top had already decided, and I wouldn’t have contradicted her, that she was sitting next to a stand-offish so and so. She would probably tell her Significant Other all about it. 

     I swallowed deeply several times, a swallow that was nothing like a slurp. Or was it? Did it work on the monkeys and muck principle? The what? It was one of my Great Aunt Sarah’s sayings. Basically, if someone appeared to be unaware of anything malodorous about their person, Great Aunt Sarah (and yes, I am aware of the acronym!) would proclaim that Monkeys Never Smell Their Own Muck. 

     I was fairly well endowed with Great Aunts. My grandmother on my Mum’s side had seven sisters. Mum was an only child – that proved something! And I got on famously with most of them and looked forward to visiting them. Three of them, Sarah (the oldest), Eileen (the closest to Grandma in both age and intimacy) and Valerie (who was still referred to as the baby of the family even when in her seventies) still lived in the village where they had been born, though in different houses now. Eileen made delicious cakes, the kind that you could gorge yourself on without feeling uncomfortable and over-stuffed afterwards. Valerie, so Great Aunt Sarah said, was born on the change, and was a bit soft in the head. It was true that she intermittently had spells in what Mum euphemistically called a home when she seemed to be in a little world of her own, but I never minded visiting her, either at her home or the home. A bit soft in the head she might be, but she was certainly good with her hands, and could sew the kind of things a child was actually interested in, not fussy embroidery or the boringly useful. To this day I have a couple of little stuffed animals Great Auntie Val made.

     So I looked forward to visiting Great Aunties Eileen and Val, but the fly in the ointment was that it also meant visiting Great Auntie Sarah.

     Now let’s get this straight. Great Auntie Sarah was no modern or real life equivalent of the evil witch in the Gingerbread House. She could be catty, but can’t we all, and had her prejudices, but don’t we all? So far as I know she had never done anyone a seriously bad turn, and Mum told me it wasn’t her fault her laugh sounded like a cackle, which seemed a tad unfair, as I got a scolding for my own laugh being screechy more than once! 

     But Great Auntie Sarah was the kind of old woman (and I know that sounds both sexist and ageist, but I honestly have found that such a habit is predominantly found in women no longer in their prime!) who thought that the ideal way to greet a child, the way that a child positively ought to be greeted, was with a pinch on the cheek. And her pinches, though in retrospect probably not meant maliciously, positively hurt. In that contradictory way that’s often the case with plump people, she had very bony fingers. The same bony fingers poked my ribs intermittently throughout the visit. When I showed a bruise to Mum (okay, so I have a very fair skin and bruise easily!) afterwards, she did look troubled and said she would have a word with her. She did, but I wish she hadn’t. This led to a brief cessation of poking but remarks about me being a delicate little flower. I would probably have preferred the poking. But that’s another story.

     As if to contrast with the rigid qualities of her own digits, Great Auntie Sarah was a great lover of the expression “Butterfingers!” This may sound borderline neurotic, but even when I was a child I could have sworn that she deliberately put things where they could be knocked over just to give her a chance to use the expression. They were rarely things that were breakable or made any mess. A crocheted doyley too near the edge of a table, a heavy duty mug entirely drained of its contents that would fall safely onto a shag pile rug, a magazine on a chair arm. And I knew what was coming. “Oopsy Daisy”, followed by, or sometimes preceded by, “Butterfingers!” A few minutes later, when the non-existent damage had been cleared up, she said, “I suppose you can’t help being a clumsy child. Take after your Great Aunt Harriet.” Great Auntie Harriet had flown the next, so to speak, and now lived over a hundred miles away, and I had already established that Great Auntie Sarah had it in for her. I didn’t visit Great Auntie Harriet as often, but always found her very pleasant and not remotely clumsy. Maybe over the decades she had grown out of it. 

     Anyway, with ribs still smarting and left in no doubt concerning my own clumsiness, it was time to “whet our whistle” to use another of Great Auntie Sarah’s sayings. I should add that to this day I’m not quite sure if it’s “wet” or “whet”. I actually quite liked that saying but that doesn’t mean I liked the doing. Unlike the other Great Aunties, Great Auntie Sarah didn’t believe in getting in drinks especially for children. Well, I often drank water at home and didn’t mind that, but it always seemed to taste a bit stale and was never properly cold. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Great Auntie Sarah was one of life’s slurpers. Her slurps took at least twice as long, and were at least twice as noisy as anyone else’s. They were like some aquatic creature that people thought was extinct (and were probably quite relieved about the fact) emerging, in a state of lethargic and malevolent high dudgeon from the primordial mud. 

     I once told Mum how it made me feel queasy and I was pretty sure she didn’t disagree with me, though she hurriedly said what she was “supposed to”, “She wears dentures, you know, that means she probably can’t help it, and it’s rude to comment on it.” But that didn’t really hold water, so far as I was concerned. The other great aunties and Grandma wore dentures, and they didn’t make a noise like that! 

      I had such mixed feelings when we moved further away. I missed visiting Great Auntie Eileen and Great Auntie Val as often, but was relieved to be spared Great Auntie Sarah’s slurping and prodding and pinching and calling me butterfingers. Grandma moved with us, and I fancied she felt much the same. On the surface she was loyal to her sister, but did go so far as to say, “Once a big sister, always a big sister,” in a way that implied it wasn’t exactly a compliment.

     I had just turned twelve and was in my first year at high school when we got a phone call from Great Auntie Eileen, who was plainly in distress. I could only clearly hear one side of the conversation, ignoring Mum’s gesture that I should leave the room (which was pretty half-hearted anyway) but found out about it later, of course. Great Auntie Eileen had said, “Sarah and I had our differences of course, and I’m not going to pretend we didn’t, but it’s still a big shock!”

     Great Auntie Sarah had been having trouble with her plumbing, and her next door neighbour, who really was called Bill Bailey, like in the song, had offered to have a look. As he honestly said, he wasn’t a tradesman, but could fix up most minor things. He knocked and there was no answer, and was surprised that the door was open. Great Auntie Sarah was the kind of person who liked to say the village was somewhere you could still leave your front door open, but never did! He went in, shouting her name, and heard a noise that he first thought was coming from the problematic plumbing.

     But then he saw Great Auntie Sarah lying on the floor, slurping desperately for breath, and looking, as he put it, almost resentfully at the things she had knocked off the table as she collapsed. He was one of the first people in the village to have a mobile phone, and used it now to call for an ambulance, but he knew in his heart that it was too late. She prodded him with a bony finger, and then pointed it at the things strewn on the floor, plainly thinking it was his fault. Her dying word was “Butterfingers!”