Halford’s Helpful Hat

I knew I was dying, I’ve known that for a while, but I didn’t think it was going to happen today, and I certainly didn’t think it would be at the hands of the woman who changed the course of my life but who I met for the first time just today. Being tazed and having your mouth stuffed full of thirty-seven year old wool and polyester doesn’t really give you time to make sense of things, but here I am, and there she is, and it’s slowly coming together in my brain.

My limbs feel like jelly, my insides are twitching, my heart is trying to pound out of my chest and my lungs are going to burst like over-stuffed bin bags.

Who the hell tazes a 70 year old man? How does a junkie get a tazer? What kind of fucked up twist of fate is it to bring her into my life after all these years, in the week when I find out the cancer’s taken more of my pancreas and the six months they gave me at Christmas is now less than three. It almost seems poetic. It’s almost, what’s the word…fortuitous? 

It will be if I give her the present.

The thought hits me like another electric shock. 

She has to have the present. That stupid thing that I was never really going to hand over. Never knew why I kept it but now it makes sense. It’s my last piece of unfinished business. I’ve made peace with everything else, the only thing that haunts me, has haunted me since 1995, is this woman sitting atop me, pressing down on my chest, glaring at me with absolute hatred in her bloodshot eyes, hatred for a man she never knew other than off the TV. A man she believes wronged her so terribly she has no choice but to kill him to claim her peace.

And I can’t really say that I blame her.

Dying next month, next week or today, my final thoughts were always going to be about her, my only regret that I never got to do something for her, but also that I let her affect me so much, allowed myself be pushed so far over the edge that I lost everything, my show, my persona, my mission, gave them reason to paint me as a monster.

And maybe I was, for a time. 

I did go a bit…funny. Yes, my actions got out of hand but I paid for what I did, and at the end of the day…I helped someone. Like my Hat. The Hat they stopped me wearing after nine years entertaining children. The brightly-coloured, puffy foam top hat with the wool-embroidered icons stitched onto it, rainbows, suns and stars, the Hat the grown-up Kelly Burke is ripping to pieces above me and shoving into my mouth. 

“Die you bastard!” she spits through yellowed teeth, as she tears a rainbow-shaped patch from the Hat, a chunk of red polyester coming away with it like a lump of rotten flesh, exposing foam cartilage beneath. 

Into my mouth it goes, between bleeding lips, pushed in by bony fingers, to force the mass of foul-tasting wool that’s already in there further down my throat.

My eyes wide, nostrils flaring, I’m struggling to catch breath. My body convulsing beneath her, vision growing foggy at the edges. This is it. I really am about to die here on my broken-tiled, dirty kitchen floor. 

I’m not going to be able to give her the present. 

I can picture it clearly, the shoebox wrapped in balloon-patterned wrapping paper, torn and frayed, the corners of the box protruding, her name scrawled on the envelope taped to the top, written nearly thirty years before. I’d failed to deliver it back then and I was going to fail again today, because my windpipe is now completely blocked and my eyes are bulging out of their sockets.

I don’t have long. A minute, maybe less. How did this happen so fast? It can’t be more than twenty minutes since I answered the door, to the person I thought was here to buy the last piece of my past, a past I’d slowly been selling, relics and memorabilia from the bygone days of my life as a kids’ tv presenter. 

Happy Halford. 

That’s what I called myself. And happy I was, for a time. Eight years at least as the star of ‘Happy Halford’s Helpful Hat’. Prancing around the studio, talking to puppets and adults in costumes, acting my heart out to pantomime-like scripts about witches and robbers and ne’er-do-wells, causing trouble for the show on a weekly basis. Prancing around with that Hat on my head, held in position by my thick curly hair, gorgeous blonde locks that had long since gone the way of the dodo.

Ah, my wonderful Helpful Hat, the answer to all of life’s problems. There wasn’t a leaky pipe or deflated bicycle tyre or cat stuck up a tree it couldn’t offer a solution for and as long as I positioned it carefully over the trap door on the floor, I could reach inside and pull out almost anything, be it a bucket, a ladder or a pump. Not to mention the letters from the kids, during the ‘Hal Helps You’ part of the show. 

That was always my favourite part, the bit that made it worthwhile. The interaction with the kids, seeing the smiles on their faces when they got to the set and the even bigger smiles when I explained how I was going to help them with the ‘problem’ they’d written to me about.

Those were good days. Satisfying. Before the letters we received became dark and upsetting, before we started to get genuine cries for help from poor kids dealing with things worse than lost cats or bad marks in school. Much worse. Things too painful to think about, except I had to, because I insisted on opening all the letters myself, like I had done from the start, so I could handpick the children we could help.

Towards the end, I lost interest in the kids that could be cheered up with a surprise birthday party or trip to the zoo. I wanted to help the other kids, the ones suffering in silence at the hands of people they trusted. But the producers wouldn’t let me. We weren’t that kind of show. We were light, fluffy children’s entertainment, not welfare services. There were specialists for that, they’d pass the letters on. But the more time passed, the more upsetting letters I received…the more I struggled to stand back quietly and do nothing.

And then came her letter. 

And that was the beginning of my downfall.

A long, meandering downfall through heartache and frustration, anger and violence, prisons and hospitals, rehabilitation centres and alcoholics anonymous meetings, all of it leading me here, to the hallway of my cottage on a Tuesday, opening the door to greet the person who’d come to pay 500 euros for the last vestige of my past, the thing I’d kept ’til the end, far longer than the puppets and photographs and scripts and awards I’d long since sold off to pay bills.

It was time to surrender the Hat and I was ready to do it, selling it to a fan, or a collector, someone who would cherish it and talk about it proudly to their friends. One last smile I could pass on, one last person I could make happy. Except, when I saw who was standing on my doorstep, she wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

“Kelly, is it?”

I’d tried to sound pleasant, to not show disgust at her greasy hair, drawn features, dirty clothes and that smell.

“Yeah, that’s me,” she said, acting somewhat shady. “Hope I’m not early.”

“Oh, no, not at all. 11am, on the nose. Um…do you want to come in? I have it ready to go if you want to have a look first?”

“Eh…yeah. Is your missus around?”

“No, I’m not married, why… Oh. Yes, you’re probably right. Okay, you wait here, I’ll go get it and...”

“Ah no, you’re grand, I trust ya,” she said, abruptly brushing past me into the hall. “Me mate’s waitin’ in the car anyway.”

I couldn’t see a car and even then I had a bad feeling. Should have trusted my instincts, told her I’d had a change of heart and asked her to leave. Well. It wouldn’t have made a difference. She’d come today for one specific reason.

I led her into the kitchen, where the Hat was waiting on the table, alongside the open box it had been stored in for nearly thirty years.

She smiled when she saw it. A real smile, that lit up her face, changed her whole demeanor. It was almost like her inner child found a way to briefly shine through the hardened visage that had been forged by a life of what I could only imagine had featured drug abuse, alcoholism and homelessness. I caught myself and told myself not to judge. I didn’t know what she’d been through, and she was the living example of the kind of real life problems I’d wanted to prevent back in the day. 

“Fan of the show, were you?” I asked, watching as she shrugged a backpack off her shoulders and removed a wad of cash, which she deposited on the table without a word. I spotted tell-tale track marks on her inner arms and cringed. Stop it, I remember thinking. Don’t be prissy. She has the money. She wants the Hat. She’s the perfect person to have it.

Seeing how she picked up the Hat and handled it, carefully, with reverence, made me feel better, but I still had anxiety about the situation and wanted the sale concluded and her on her way as soon as possible.

She didn’t answer the question, just turned to look at me, cocked her head to the side and squinted. “You are him, aren’t ya? The bald head an’ beard make it hard to tell…but the eyes give it away. You’re really Halford.”

I grimaced.

“I…was Halford, yes. But that was a stage name and it’s a long time ago, I don’t like to…”

“Put it on,” she said, holding the Hat out towards me. “I want to take a picture. Or no one will believe I got it from you.”

I was caught off guard, didn’t know what to say so I just reached out and took it, reluctantly lifting it up over my head. “Okay,” I said, watching as she fished her phone out of her backpack. “I’ll have to hold it. Without the hair, it doesn’t...” 

That’s when I noticed it wasn’t a phone in her hand. That’s when she pointed the taser and fired, two wires snaking towards me, stabbing me in the chest, shooting thousands of volts into my body and making me drop.

I’m not sure how long I lay there, jerking and quivering. I just remember her slapping my face and shouting to snap me out of it, yanking my head up roughly so I could see the laptop she’d placed on my chest, the YouTube video that was playing, a clip from an episode of my show, that episode, the last one before the plug was pulled. I recognised it immediately, even in my shaky, post-taze state. The look on my face as I sat on the Happy Throne gave it away.

“Listen,” she hissed in my ear. “This is the important part.”

I listened to my old self talking, words spoken twenty-eight years in the past, not the jolly words of the Halford I’d portrayed for eight years, rather the less-than-enthusiastic, disillusioned words of the Halford I’d become at the end. The one that was taken off the air because he was no longer Happy.

“The Helpful Hat has spoken and the name of the lucky person we’ll be meeting here next week is…” The sombre-looking me in the video paused to take a card from the white-gloved hand that rose up out of the Hat. “Kelly Burke! You’ve been chosen, and like I always say: We’ll spirit you here, we’ll chit and chat, and if I can’t help you…I’ll eat my Hat!”

The last words were picked up, as always, by the children in the studio audience and shouted back at me, something that used to make me happy, until I realised the kids that needed help most were off-limits. That’s why I went beyond the producers’ backs and called Kelly’s name instead of the one we’d prepared. I’d read her letter dozens of times and it pained me greatly. It was carefully worded but I knew what she was hinting at, what was being done to her at home, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. The look on my face, before that very same person slammed the laptop shut and slid it off my chest to the floor, betrayed the emotions I was feeling.

“But you didn’t, did you?” she said, straddling me, Helpful Hat scrunched up in her hands. “You called my name but you didn’t help. Not you or this stupid hat. You said we’d ‘chit and chat’ but then you were outed as a pervert, a filthy pedo who exposed himself to a child and good old Happy Hal was off the air. And poor old Kelly Burke was left to suffer. And eventually end up on the streets.”

“Wh-what?” I muttered, trying to clear the fog from my head and understand what was happening. “No, that’s…wrong, that was all just rumours and gossip…”

“So you never did time for a violent assault, for beating a man to death?”

“Not…that. Y-yes, I did that, but it was…he was trying to rape a girl. She was drunk, I had to help her. I did help her. I saved her from that, don’t regret it. But the other stuff… I never… I’d never have done anything like...”

“So why did they take ya off TV? Let me guess, bad ratings, right? Bullshit! You were as popular as ever. We all wanted to be on your show. We all wanted Happy Hal to help us and you promised, you said if you didn’t you’d eat your hat. Well, guess what, Halford. It’s time for you to eat your fucking hat!”

And that’s when she started with the tearing.

I tried to tell her. The truth. The real reason for the show being axed. Tried to explain it was actually because of her, her letter, how angry it made me, how much it made me want to hurt her father. How far I was going to go. But then she was filling my mouth full of foam and I couldn’t speak.

And here I am, and there she is, and now I’m going to…

Laptop.

My hand is on her laptop. 

I close my fingers around it and with all the strength I can muster I swing it up. I see it collide with her temple, see her cry out in pain, squeeze her eyes shut, drop the mutilated Hat and fall away. 

I can’t breathe. I have to get up. My legs are like jelly. I’m moving, hacking, windpipe blocked, can’t breathe through my nose, vision blurring. My fingers are in my mouth, trying to pull out the fabric.

Present.

She has to have the present. I understand now.

Loose ends.

I turn, throw myself into the hallway, crash against the wall. Stars in my eyes, everything spinning. My lungs are burning, I can’t take this any more. Why can’t I get this shit out of my mouth?

Lurch down the hall, lose my footing, fall to my knees, drag myself into my bedroom. Moth-eaten carpet, patchy and stained, mustard-coloured but now it looks black, undulating under me, like the ocean. 

I’m sinking into the black. 

Not yet.

On my hands and knees. The dresser, there it is. The drawer, bottom drawer, pull it out. Inside. Reach in. The. Present. The. Thing I made. Have to…give it to her.

Have to…make sure…she…

***

Happy Halford was dead.

She’d done it. After all these years, she’d found him and done what she’d wanted to do since he betrayed her when she was eleven. If not for him being a dirty, bastard…maybe she could have been saved. Maybe her life would have been better. Maybe she wouldn’t have fallen into addiction, prostitution, homelessness. 

If only he’d saved her from her dad.

Before she turned away she looked in the drawer. She’d thought he was going for a gun but what was actually inside was just a present. Balloon-patterned wrapping paper. Card taped to the front. Her name on the dusty old envelope.

What?

She stepped over his body, pushed his arm aside, retrieved it.

What?

She tore open the envelope, took out a sheet of paper, flipped it open.

“Dear Kelly,

I am so, so sorry for what you are going through. I have no words to describe how saddened I was to read your letter. It’s possible I won’t be able to help you very much when we meet in the studio, so I’m preparing this for you just in case. This is a present for your dad. It will make him understand, it will help. Whatever you do, don’t open it yourself. Give it to him as soon as you get home.

Helping Always,

Hal.”

“What the fuck is this?” she said, dropping the letter, tearing the balloons, revealing the battered shoebox wrapped up inside. 

“Me da’s been dead for years, you dickhead,” she said, lifting the top of the box. “And why would I have given him a…”

The wire attached to the pipe-like mechanism inside snapped as the lid opened fully and Kelly Burke finally had her peace.