Catherine O'Flynn - News Where You Are

In fact, Francis can’t imagine at all. He can think of nothing more incredible than the idea of his father dancing to a song about a girl who resembles macaroni. He has to stop himself thinking about it.

‘That’s why I’m rubbish at rugby.’

‘Are you really rubbish, dear?’

‘I’m too floppy — everyone pushes me out of the way.’

His mother looks worried. ‘Do the other boys tease you?’

Francis shrugs. ‘Sometimes they say things, but I don’t mind.’

‘Really?’

‘I think rugby’s silly.’

‘Well, I couldn’t agree more.’ She is quiet for a moment and then adds, ‘But I dare say you write far better essays than some of those boys, or are better at whistling, or know more about cars. People put emphasis on all the wrong things, Francis — being good at rugby, or being a fast runner or living in a nice big house. They think as long as everything looks good on the surface that’s all that matters — but it’s not, is it? It’s what’s underneath that counts.’

Francis doesn’t really understand what his mother is talking about, but he nods anyway.

She looks at him and smiles. ‘I’m preaching to the converted, aren’t I?’

Francis frowns. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Ignore me, Francis.’ She reaches over and holds his head tightly with both hands and pretends to try to twist it. She gasps with the effort and gives up: ‘No, can’t be done!’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Your head — it’s screwed on nice and tight already— can’t be budged.’

Francis thinks this may be a new game. ‘Shall I test yours is on tight?’

His mother laughs. ‘Oh, goodness no. I’m sure it’s not — you might twist it right off. I’m sure living with your father for fifteen years has loosened a few of my screws.’

Her laughter dies off and Francis panics that the day is about to change colour. He scurries off to his room to find Mrs Bumbles, a cuddly cat from his infancy. Mrs Bumbles should have been discarded years ago, but the expression of outright alarm on her face has always amused both Francis and his mother and has led to a colourful history being created for the stuffed toy. Francis runs back into the living room to the pile of records. He finds the one he’s looking for and puts it on the turntable. As Guy Mitchell starts to sing, Mrs Bumbles rises wide-eyed from behind the sofa:

(She wears red feathers and a hooly-hooly skirt)

(She wears red feathers and a hooly-hooly skirt)

She lives on just cokey-nuts and fish from the sea

A rose in her hair, a gleam in her eyes

And love in her heart for me

Mrs Bumbles clearly disapproves of the song. She makes repeated attempts to leave the makeshift stage, but is prevented by the other hand holding the album cover showing Mitchell’s cheeky face as he prevents her departure and serenades her against her will. Francis crouches behind the sofa performing the puppet show, listening to his mother laugh as she always does at Mrs Bumbles’s mounting indignation. When the song is finished, he and Mrs Bumbles take a bow. His mother claps enthusiastically.

‘Thank you, Mrs Bumbles. Thank you, Mr Mitchell. And thank you most of all to the puppet master.’ She smiles widely at Francis. ‘You do make me laugh, darling.’ Francis smiles back and tries to believe that it’s always like this.

They sat at a corner table next to the window looking out on the street. Frank always forgot how bad the coffee was and found himself once more trying to get through a cup of the greasy brown liquid that the café served. It never seemed to cool down.

‘Do you think they pipe this directly from the earth’s core?’ he asked.

Andrea was sniffing her cup of tea. ‘This really smells of peas. I mean really strongly.’ Frank looked unsurprised.

Andrea took a sip. ‘You’ve got to take your hat off to him. I suspect what he’s doing with flavours here is quite cutting edge. He really confounds your expectations.’

Frank nodded. ‘He certainly does that.’

They both looked now at Mo, who was diligently transferring a towering Knickerbocker Glory from a tall glass into her mouth a spoonful at a time, legs swinging, her face a mask of contentment. Mo loved JD’s Diner. Frank cursed the day they had happened to pass by and she had seen the gaudy photos of desserts in the window. She had begged to try the Knickerbocker Glory and Frank had relented. Now every time they went into the city centre they had to go to JD’s. Frank and Andrea perhaps could say no occasionally, but it seemed churlish to deny Mo the immense happiness that every visit unfailingly delivered. JD’s was not the kind of place Frank or Andrea would choose to frequent. It was essentially a glorified kebab hut. The plastic tables and chairs were bolted to each other and to the floor, the radio played loudly and everything smelled of bleach. There seemed to be only one member of staff, a lugubrious Iranian man who carried with him an air of deep melancholy. They were unsure if he was in fact JD, but they referred to him as that in the absence of anything else. Sometimes Frank and Andrea speculated as to what the initials might stand for. Frank thought ‘Johnny Doom’ but Andrea had suggested the more exotic ‘Je-suis Desolé’. He reminded Frank of a character in a comic he used to read, who went everywhere underneath his own personal rain cloud.

Mo was always concerned about his sadness. If ever her parents expressed reluctance about going to the café, she’d say: ‘But what about JD? Think how sad he would be.’ And it was true that they rarely saw other customers in there. When they placed their order, JD would always react in the same way, as if each item requested was a blow he had been expecting. He would nod his head glumly as if to say: ‘Of course. What else but a cup of coffee?’ Even the Knickerbocker Glory was just another slight. Frank and Andrea had a theory that somewhere on the menu was one item that if ordered would make JD smile. The one thing that he had been waiting all these years to serve. They always intended to try to work through the menu until they hit the jackpot, but each time they visited they lost their nerve in the face of JD’s doleful gaze and ordered the same strange non-tea and coffee.

The one thing about the café that Frank liked was its location. It was on a once busy street in town fallen on quiet times as the ever shifting centre of retail energy in the city had moved a few blocks away, like a slow-moving tornado, leaving pound shops and cheap cafés like JD’s in its wake. Frank remembered when the street was the heart of the city.

‘Hey, Mo. Do you see that Subway over there? That used to be a really good record shop.’

Mo looked and nodded. ‘Oh, right.’

‘And you see at the end where it opens up into a square? Well, that never used to be there; that used to be a busy road and if you wanted to get across you had to go down some steps and through an underpass, but it wasn’t really like an underpass — it was enormous with shops, and phone boxes and thousands of pigeons.’

‘Mm-hmm,’ said Mo as she attempted to spear a piece of fruit from the bottom of the glass. Frank realized that she wasn’t interested, and in the same instant he realized that the reason she wasn’t interested was because what he was saying was not interesting. No more interesting to Mo than it was to Andrea when he tried to tell her about shops that had once stood or forgotten news stories he had once covered.

He swore under his breath as he burned his tongue on the coffee for the third time. He wondered why he couldn’t just focus on the here and now. It was perhaps Andrea and Mo’s misfortune that he felt compelled to share these glimpses of the past with them, assuming that they too would feel his fascination, his responsibility to remember. He decided not to tell Mo about the particular type of cakes you used to be able to eat on the top floor of the department store that had been across the road. Or about the shoe-shop assistant who had won the pools. Perhaps he’d tell her another time.