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They couldn’t even agree on what month we’d go on holiday. Dad said definitely August, Mum said unquestionably July. Which meant we wound up having to take our summer holiday in June, inconveniencing everybody.
Then they couldn’t decide where to go. Dad was set on pony trekking in Iceland, while Mum was only willing to compromise as far as a camelback caravan across the Sahara, and both of them simply looked at us as if we were being a bit silly when we suggested that we’d quite like to sit on a beach in the South of France or somewhere. They stopped arguing long enough to tell us that that wasn’t going to happen, and neither was a trip to Disneyland, and then they went back to disagreeing with each other.
They finished the Where Are We Going for Our Holidays in June Disagreement by slamming a lot of doors and shouting a lot of things like ‘Right then!’ at each other through them.
When the inconvenient holiday rolled around, my sister and I were only certain of one thing: we weren’t going anywhere. We took a huge pile of books out of the library, as many as we could between us, and prepared to listen to lots of arguing for the next ten days.
Then the men came in vans and brought things into the house and started to install them.
Mum had them put a sauna in the cellar. They poured masses of sand onto the floor. They hung a sunlamp from the ceiling. She put a towel on the sand beneath the sunlamp, and she’d lie down on it. She had pictures of sand dunes and camels taped to the cellar walls until they peeled off in the extreme heat.
Dad had the men put the fridge – the biggest fridge he could find, so big you could walk into it – in the garage. It filled the garage so completely that he had to start parking the car in the driveway. He’d get up in the morning, dress warmly in a thick Icelandic wool sweater, he’d get a book and thermos-flask filled with hot cocoa, and some Marmite and cucumber sandwiches, and he’d head in there in the morning with a huge smile on his face, and not come out until di
I wonder if anybody else has a family as weird as mine. My parents never agree on anything at all.
‘Did you know Mum’s been putting her coat on and sneaking into the garage in the afternoons?’ said my sister suddenly, while we were sitting in the garden, reading our library books.
I didn’t, but I’d seen Dad wearing just his bathing trunks and dressing gown heading down into the cellar that morning to be with Mum, with a big, goofy smile on his face.
I don’t understand parents. Honestly, I don’t think anybody ever does.
July Tale
The day that my wife walked out on me, saying she needed to be alone and to have some time to think things over, on the first of July, when the sun beat down on the lake in the centre of the town, when the corn in the meadows that surrounded my house was knee-high, when the first few rockets and firecrackers were let off by over-enthusiastic children to startle us and to speckle the summer sky, I built an igloo out of books in my backyard.
I used paperbacks to build it, scared of the weight of falling hardbacks or encyclopedias if I didn’t build it soundly.
But it held. It was twelve feet high, and had a tu
I took more books into the igloo I had made out of books, and I read in there. I marvelled at how warm and comfortable I was inside. As I read the books, I would put them down, make a floor out of them, and then I got more books, and I sat on them, eliminating the last of the green July grass from my world.
My friends came by the next day. They crawled on their hands and knees into my igloo. They told me I was acting crazy. I told them that the only thing that stood between me and the winter’s cold was my father’s collection of 1950s paperbacks, many of them with racy titles and lurid covers and disappointingly staid stories.
My friends left.
I sat in my igloo imagining the arctic night outside, wondering whether the Northern Lights would be filling the sky above me. I looked out, but saw only a night filled with pinprick stars.
I slept in my igloo made of books. I was getting hungry. I made a hole in the floor, lowered a fishing line and waited until something bit. I pulled it up: a fish made of books – green-covered vintage Penguin detective stories. I ate it raw, fearing a fire in my igloo.
When I went outside I observed that someone had covered the whole world with books: pale-covered books, all shades of white and blue and purple. I wandered the ice floes of books.
I saw someone who looked like my wife out there on the ice. She was making a glacier of autobiographies.
‘I thought you left me,’ I said to her. ‘I thought you left me alone.’
She said nothing, and I realised she was only a shadow of a shadow.
It was July, when the sun never sets in the Arctic, but I was getting tired, and I started back towards the igloo.
I saw the shadows of the bears before I saw the bears themselves: huge they were, and pale, made of the pages of fierce books: poems ancient and modern prowled the ice floes in bear-shape, filled with words that could wound with their beauty. I could see the paper, and the words winding across them, and I was frightened that the bears could see me.
I crept back to my igloo, avoiding the bears. I may have slept in the darkness. And then I crawled out, and I lay on my back on the ice and stared up at the unexpected colours of the shimmering Northern Lights, and listened to the cracks and snaps of the distant ice as an iceberg of fairy tales calved from a glacier of books on mythology.
I do not know when I became aware that there was someone else lying on the ground near to me. I could hear her breathing.
‘They are very beautiful, aren’t they?’ she said.
‘It is aurora borealis, the Northern Lights,’ I told her.
‘It’s the town’s Fourth of July fireworks, baby,’ said my wife.
She held my hand and we watched the fireworks together.
When the last of the fireworks had vanished in a cloud of golden stars, she said, ‘I came home.’
I didn’t say anything. But I held her hand very tightly, and I left my igloo made of books, and I went with her back into the house we lived in, basking like a cat in the July heat.
I heard distant thunder, and in the night, while we slept, it began to rain, tumbling my igloo of books, washing away the words from the world.
August Tale
The forest fires started early that August. All the storms that might have dampened the world went south of us, and they took their rain with them. Each day we would see the helicopters going over above us, with their cargoes of lake water ready to drop on the distant flames.
Peter, who is Australian, and owns the house in which I live, cooking for him, and tending the place, said, ‘In Australia, the eucalypts use fire to survive. Some eucalyptus seeds won’t germinate unless a forest fire has gone through and cleared out all the undergrowth. They need the intense heat.’
‘Weird thought,’ I said. ‘Something hatching out of the flames.’
‘Not really,’ said Peter. ‘Very normal. Probably a lot more normal when the Earth was hotter.’
‘Hard to imagine a world any hotter than this.’
He snorted. ‘This is nothing,’ he said, and then talked about intense heat he had experienced in Australia when he was younger.
The next morning the TV news said that people in our area were advised to evacuate their property: we were in a high-risk area for fire.
‘Load of old tosh,’ said Peter, crossly. ‘It’ll never cause a problem for us. We’re on high ground, and we’ve got the creek all around us.’
When the water was high, the creek could be four, even five feet deep. Now it was no more than a foot, or two at the most.