Making Mountains

Matt couldn’t remember his father, but he could recall the slippers – boats with no sail, no means of manoeuvre from Port Hearth to Chair, other than that which he conjured up in his four-year-old brain, and which, when his mother was busy elsewhere, as was often the case, he physically effected, steering the choppy tides of Carpet by the power of his own two hands; a whizz across the ocean bright, safe docking in the harbour, and then the passengers would come - all the way down the slippery slopes of Footrest; soldiers with their guns, farmers with their livestock, shepherds with their flocks of sheep, and a dog to keep them in check, all intent on escape and safe passage from their cold, dark, dangerous land to one of peace and light and warmth… No, Topsy Ted, there’s no room for you, you’ll make the boat capsize. And anyway, you’re big and strong enough to stay… His father had died on that recliner. At least, that’s what he’d been told. Something about a bomb going off inside his head…

‘Grandad, look at me, I’m an explorer…’ The little boy with the chipped black varnish on his toe and fingernails, the raggedy shoulder-length hair, and glow-in-the-dark Jurassic pyjamas, leapt across the living room before him. Looking only at his face, Matt saw the resemblance between them, just as he did when comparing photographs, but this boy was doubtlessly more active than he had ever been. Cushions, pulled from the sofa, which a moment ago had acted as improvised stepping stones for the ‘lava’ floor (which really had more of a Siberian vibe than any volcanic landscape Matt had ever envisaged) had now been pushed together and, with a Herculean effort for one so small in stature, piled onto one another in a higgledy-piggledy sequence of mountain tiers.

‘Be careful, will you? If those cushions slide apart – which they will the way you’re bouncing around - you’ll end up cracking your head!’

‘Not me!’

‘Yeah, you say that now…’

Hurtle. Flump. A belly-flop. Upper and lower limbs akimbo, a bendy-boy stretch between padded squares… ‘Look, Grandad, I’m swimming… And gotta swim fast, ‘cos the crocodiles are coming… Grandad, do you want to be the big crocodile…?’

Sure, a croc with a dodgy hip and ill-fitting dentures…

‘I’ll crocodile you the now, boy, if you don’t go back up to bed. You should’ve been asleep two hours ago.’

‘But I’m waiting for Mummy.’

Matt shook his head, and with a grinding clench of the jaw, endeavoured to keep both his patience and plastic molars in place just that little bit longer. Every day, every night was the same. Up at the crack of dawn, sleep at goodness knows when, and in between, apart from the hours when his grandchild attended nursery (and he had to walk him there and back as well) the non-stop, fear-inducing tempest that was Jake, his elder daughter, Chantelle’s only son. ‘A riot’ according to her younger sister, Clarisse, ‘a nightmare’ to his mother, but then that blasted hotel had her cleaning at all hours, picking up everyone else’s slack, so she was bound to be exhausted. Run ragged. Couldn’t get the staff, they said, no one anywhere near as reliable as her, so on her rare days off – and that’s when they didn’t end up calling her in ‘to cover’ – he was often left with Jake too. Him or Clarisse, and she was supposed to be on study leave working towards her A-levels, not faffing around painting little boys’ nails, or disappearing off at every God-given opportunity in the pursuit of some local reality star, some talentless z-list celebrity. As for Jake, if this continued much longer, the boy was in danger of forgetting what his mother looked like.

Matt did remember his mother, of course, even if the first clear memory he had of her did happen to be in the guise of a fallen tree. One which had screamed ahead of it being chopped down. And what a length she had looked, taking up the entire lower landing, sirens cutting through the silence as he’d stood there not knowing what he’d said or done to cause her collapse or for the police and all those other people to come. She’d have normally shouted or smacked him, or threatened him with his father. He’ll have the slipper to you, just wait and see… But that shiny sole raised up high had never come down on his bare backside – not once… I love you, Daddy, I love you… Slippers away, chuckles from a man without a face – or one he must have hidden his own from – and all because of those slippers. Matt had never said anything like that to his mother, even when she had got back up off the floor to regain her customary upright position – at the cooker or the sink for the most part, although he had seen her hunched as well, over the sewing machine in that little room where she did her work and where he usually wasn’t allowed… Matthew, just let me get on. Got to get this done. Got to earn a living somehow…

‘Jake, I’ve told you before, your mummy won’t be home till late, and she’ll expect you to be asleep well before then. Now up the stairs with you, come on. Up the wooden hill to beddie-byes.’

‘Not a wooden hill. A mountain. The biggest one ever…’

Yeah, so you up for climbing it, champ?’ Matt struggled up from his seat, loomed over the boy whose bottom now appeared to be glued to the laminate, hands gripping the cushions at either side. ‘Come on, now. I’ll be right behind you. Sherpa Tenzing to your Hillary.’ A searing pain shot through his hip as made to pull the boy up, and as Jake pulled against him, he fell back, head to the wall. Double ‘ow!’

‘There, you see what happens!’

‘Not sore! Not sore anymore! Hahaha! I can run faster than you. I can escape the crocodile, get all the way up the mountain by myself…’ Well, thank goodness for that… ‘But think I’ll stop here for a rest. Explorers need refreshments…’

Why the little scamp! He was only on the fourth step… Okay, a glass of milk. A small one…

‘Grandad, how do you know about Miss Hilary?’ Jake asked when he returned with the milk. ‘How do you know she climbs mountains? I thought she was just a teacher.’

Matt laughed. He’d forgotten all about Hilary Cope, the woman who sometimes helped out at Jake’s nursery. Although, from what he’d heard, she'd almost certainly have a few mountains of her own to climb when it came to this lad. Still, an easy mistake to make at four years old, and Matt had made his share as well, like when he’d laughed when he wasn’t supposed to, when that very serious looking man in the scary black suit had fallen into the hole his mother said had been dug for his father, and the minister man had to stop reading out loud while his uncles George and Gerald pulled him back out along with the head of the big stone angel he’d been holding onto when it had cracked right off its neck and toppled down alongside him. Matt had got a walloping for that. For laughing when he should have been crying. And he had cried then - louder, in fact, than anyone else that day - so his mother had got her wish…

With an arm on the stairwell wall, Matt waited as the boy toyed with his milk… Sip... Sip... Sip... Slowly. Deliberately slowly… He let out a sigh. He wasn't a young man. He'd married later than average and he'd be sixty next year, too old for this, too tired, too sore, but then, family was everything – of course he had to be there, he had no choice. It was just a pity the same couldn’t be said for Jake’s dad – that jobless waste of space, that arrogant shirker who had got Chantelle pregnant at seventeen, and then left her, coming back like he did every once in the bluest of moons to demand his paternal rights with regard to a child he wouldn’t know if he passed on the street and called him 'Daddy', never mind one he had any intention of supporting... Oh, but he did, he’d once had the cheek to retort; the dole took a whole seven pounds a week off his benefits… No point then lecturing to an idiot, at least not about the responsibilities of parenthood, and much less about how his mother had slaved her guts out to bring him up single-handed, or how he had worked from home, earning what money he could as a sculptor, while raising his own two kids. Except now, it seemed – and largely because of this gormless prick, but, also partly because he’d taken the eye off the ball himself with regards to Chantelle – he was having to do it all over again. The only difference this time was that no one had died.

Chantelle had been six, and Clarisse only two, when Matt had lost his wife. Always an adventurer, bungee-jumping, sky-diving, you name it, she’d gone to a party one night, taken something she shouldn’t have – he didn’t know why at the time - and fallen from the upper floor of the building in which the do had been held. Not suicide, but the effects of the drug, according to the inquiry. She’d been discussing free-running with a group of like-minded people just minutes beforehand. Only, Valerie had been depressed, and he hadn’t even noticed, hands-on as he was with the girls, so determined to be ‘a new man’ encouraging her to work and indulge her interests whenever. He’d stay home, he’d said, see to the kids, do his sculpting, and all the while...

Sip, sip, sip… ‘Grandad, I need a straw…’

‘No, you don’t. Up to bed now. I’ll put the milk back in the fridge…’

‘No, I want it.’

Jake, it’s half past ten. You’ve got nursery tomorrow. You’ll never get up.’

‘Aw, but it’s hard getting up the mountain. I don’t think I’ll make it… Carry me, Grandad. Carry me.’

Matt only just managed to grab the cup before Jake threw himself down in theatrical fashion onto the stairs.

‘Now, you know I can’t carry you; my hip won’t take it…’

‘Grandad! Grandad! Carry me!’ Part chant, part roar, and then, just as Matt was about to raise his voice, a manic bout of laughter… ‘Grandad, what’s wrong with your teeth?’

Matt pushed his upper dentures back into his mouth and in spite of the pain it caused him, bent down and grabbed hold of the boy who continued to laugh as he wriggled around in his arms like a giant worm with extended flailing limbs. ‘Up we go then! Up the mountainside! And you can tell Miss Hilary tomorrow how, against all odds, your old Grandad can still scale the heights.’

Matt thought about it then, what Chantelle had said when she’d caught him, one day, feeling sorry for himself, like he had tonight, blaming himself for not being there on the night their mother had died, for not realising what she'd been going through, her post-natal depression following Clarisse's birth, and for her ending up pregnant. He'd also been plagued with anxiety that a similar fate might befall Clarisse… ‘But, Dad,’ his daughter had assured him, ‘None of that was your fault, and you know, you were always my hero. Clarisse’s too – and she’s not half as daft as I was at seventeen. Besides, I couldn’t wish for a better role-model for Jake. Stop being so hard on yourself...'

He was tired, that was all, tired and sore, but not to the extent that he couldn’t still tuck his grandson into bed and make sure he had his favourite teddy to cuddle into. Topsy Ted, who, though battered and balding as he was, had survived all those years on the slippery slopes of a dozen different ‘Chairs’, and had, for now, found peace and warmth and comfort in the arms of this exuberant new-age explorer. A mini-me but different, first-mate and future captain of life… A plumber or a chef or a soldier, perhaps an artist like himself. Even just a father… No, not ‘just’… Never ‘just’...