"-and he made the children laugh"

“-and he made the children laugh”

“Oh no! Luca is due home on Saturday. He will create pandemonium again. It has been peaceful to have him away for a year.”

“Maybe he has calmed down Dad,” said Hannah.

“We can only hope so. What was the worst thing he did, last summer?”

“There were so many ‘worst things,’  but I remember when he made a sculpture on his bed, covered it with a white sheet  and left it on his bed. We all thought he had died in the night,” replied  Diana.

“ He said he was going to fix the car in the driveway one day. He went off to town for the day leaving a pair of stuffed jeans with some shoes on the end, sticking out from under the chassis.” I felt so sorry for him working so long and hard. When I spoke to him and got no reply, I realized it was one of his tricks.”

“ He was always buying toy jokes from the joke shop and using them to infuriate us, like planting dummy pens on the desk. When you pick them up they bend in your hand like a piece of jelly. I don’t know where he gets this from.”

Bryan, Luca’s father, looked across the room at Diana and Hannah waiting for more. Hannah was Diana’s daughter from her first marriage and Luca, Bryan’s son. Bryan had lost his wife in a car accident 15 years ago and when he married Diana, they had became  a fairly close knit family of four.

The two children had grown up together like brother and sister from the ages of 12 and 10.

“I think the worst thing Luca did for me, was when we thought there was a real ghostly presence in the house. That was when he moved the books around in the bookcase, the books that belonged to grand dad, making  us think that Fred had returned from the grave to look at his books.”

Hannah sat looking thoughtfully at the two of them. There was no way she was going to tell them about Luca’s worst practical joke.

Luca had come down the stairs one morning, pulling up his shirt sleeves. He had beautiful muscular arms from all the exercise he did. His hands were beautiful too, finely shaped with long neat fingers. Hannah had watched Luca at play and at work, all through the growing up years.

She had watched him playing with Copper the dog, throwing the ball over and over again, tying  pieces of rope together to strengthen  a broken fence his face deep with concentration. She had watched him playing cricket, twisting the ball as he threw it into a spin, watched him gluing model aeroplanes together, making a fire for a braai or deftly learning the new skills for restoring old furniture. Those hands had often helped her. They had given her a leg up over a wall into the neighbouring field to look for mushrooms.  She could still feel the warmth of the sun on that day and smell the new cut grass. They competed for who would find the most mushrooms hidden in the damp earth.  Those hands had pulled her up cliff sides when they went hiking on Table Mountain.  They had helped her up the chain ladder on Skeleton Gorge. They had stuck plasters over scraped knees and wiped away tears.

But it was that one morning, when she had a sudden revelation about her true feelings for Luca.

He was in the kitchen fussing around and she heard a fearful shout.

“Aah! Aah”

Rushing to the kitchen she saw a dreadful sight. Luca was bent over the counter, blood all over the place, a knife sticking out of the palm of his left hand, and she had only this minute past, been admiring his hands. Hannah who could not stand the sight of blood, fainted, hitting her head on the table edge. She went out, cold.

“ Hannah, Hannah, are you alright? Oh what have I done.”

 Luca wrung his hands, both of which were in very good order . He grabbed a dish cloth from the counter and soaking it under the cold tap placed it on Hannah’s brow. He knelt on the floor and cradled her head in his hands rubbing his fingers along the side of her face.

“Wake up Hannah, please wake up!”

 She fluttered her eyelids and looked up at him.

“What happened? ”

His face swam into her vision and she sat up slowly.

“ Your hand? What happened? Where is  the knife and the blood?”

“It was a hoax, one of my jokes gone wrong. Horribly wrong!”

Hannah’s head was throbbing but she did not feel pain, only rage, a rage which showed in her wrinkled eyes and twisted mouth.

 “ I know and I am sorry. ”

Hannah got up and inspected the kitchen counter which was covered in tomato sauce, the dummy knife lying in the middle of all the mess.

“You made the children laugh at school but this is not funny.  I could have killed myself.  Home is not a playground for your pranks.”

“I don’t know why I do them.”

“I‘ll help you clean up the mess. Promise you  won’t  play any more tricks before you go away!”

“Promise!”

Hannah drove him to the airport. He was going to Denmark to further his studies in the wind turbine manufacture in Aarhus. He was looking forward to this.

He got out at the Stop and Go,  dumping his suitcase on the ground. Hannah felt tears pricking at her eyes. She could smell his after shave and her heart missed a beat when he took her face in his beautiful hands and kissed her hard on the mouth.

“Goodbye my girl. That is just for now, I’ll be back in a year and we will take it from there. I have been reluctant to say this to you but when I saw you lying on the kitchen floor, knocked out, and  knowing it was totally my fault, I knew. I love you and not like a brother! Look after yourself until I’m back home.

Bryan decided to try an experiment of his own. Before going to bed one night he took four books from the bottom shelf of the bookcase and put them on the top shelf. In the morning the four books were back on the bottom shelf.

“Hmm... and Luca is in Denmark!”

He tried this a few times and always with the same result.

He kept his thoughts to himself.

“Hannah can you please fetch Luca from the airport?”

Now here she was, waiting for him at Arrivals and there he was, wheeling his case along. She felt a shiver of excitement flow through her.  Would he have changed? In their messages over their cell phones in the past year it was difficult to judge emotions on a text message. He looked more confident than when he left a year ago, walking with the air of someone who knew where they were going. Would he still have the habit of playing practical jokes on everyone, especially the family? She was not sure if she could live with that, much as she knew, deep down, that she had fallen in love with him, a long time ago.

“Hi Hannah, you look great, just as I have imagined you for months. Can’t wait to make up for my absence in your life.

He got in the car and leaning over the arm rest,  gave her a hug. This was it, she thought .  Could she love him enough to get over his faults? He probably had no real inkling of the way she felt.

Driving home she asked,

“How have you been all this time, did you have a social life as well as a working life?

“ Yes it was good and I made a lot of friends but I am looking forward to being home and taking things from where we left off. Are you still unattached Hannah? You haven’t mentioned any boy friend in your messages to me?”

“ No,”

“Fancy free hey? We will have to do something about that!”

The family settled into their usual routine, Bryan, Diana and Hannah holding their breaths for  the jokes to begin.

A week later, Bryan rearranged the books in the bookcase. No one would ever read  ‘Western Philosophy’ or the ‘History of voting’ again, at least not in this house. They were not on the top of the popular reading list here, he was sure. He put the two books on the top shelf on the right, hidden by the wooden panel of the book case.  On checking the next morning he saw that the books had been moved. They had found their way back to the bottom shelf .

“Hey! You have been up to your tricks again Luca.”

“ I did not touch the books , Dad. I have turned over a new leaf since the last time I was home,” looking across the breakfast table at Hannah.

 “ I had every reason to mend my ways and I have.”

Once again, Bryan moved two books from the bottom shelf to the top right corner of the bookcase, where they were hidden from view. In the morning, sure enough, the books were back in their place on the bottom shelf.

Bryan thought he heard his Dad laughing, the way he used to laugh when he had played a trick on his family. The hands that had moved the books were not Luca’s but Fred’s. He knew now, he knew where Luca had inherited his joker mentality from.