I shook my head.
“My mam and dad moved there after they just met. He met her at the
Poplar Grove Town Hall Christmas Dance in 1917. No! It couldn’t have been 1917
because our aunt Maggie was having her baby then so had to take her in the
motorcar. Now, my mam knew my dad five years before I was born so it was 1918.”
He looked up at me after keeping his head down for the entire duration
of this garrulous display of mental arithmetic. It was clear that I was going
to need to sit down if he was staying for any length of time. A minimum of two
glasses of brandy would be needed too, if I were going to feign any sense of
civility or warmth that I am so innately void of. It seemed only fair to offer
him one, particularly if the old man was going to pay the slightest bit of
attention to his own story. Maybe the alcohol would help his inevitable
autobiography of a monologue take a turn for the amusing, and he’ll tell me
about the time he caught sight of the garters on some post-war eye-candy.
“Brandy?” I said. Decades as a near-recluse made me inevitably lose
the obligatory “would you like a-” and my outward articulation had gone into
such regress that I could easily have been some mono-syllabic Neanderthal -
with distilled spirits to offer.
“Ooh, well, I shouldn’t be taking it with my medication and all,” at
this point his face lit up with quasi-excitement; eyebrows raised, gossamer
lips forming a narrow ‘o’ shape. The only way that I could adequately describe
it is if you could imagine that he reserved it specially for when he saw a
naughty boy with a bag of pear drops.
“But I will!” His quickly-made verdict rang out with surprising
zeal.
[Over the next few weeks I will be posting a part of my short story The Old Man Visits Solitude every Friday.]
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