Short Story: Saturday Afternoon

Short Story: Saturday Afternoon

‘Go and get your Dad,’ Mum said. She’s sitting in her chair, letting her dinner go down. I didn’t want to. My tin American police car is chasing my tin American ambulance, the one with a stuck wheel, that won’t run properly. I’m driving them along the straight bit of pattern on the polished chocolate brown of the linoleum floor. I’ll stop playing soon though. I can smell the faint burning of the dust as the valves start to heat up in the telly in the corner. The telly will always beat tin American cars.

‘Tell him Mick McManus is on.’ Mick McManus. The dirtiest wrestler you ever saw. “The man you love to hate,” Mum had said.

I like watching him. I like the way he hits people with his arms. So does Dad. I think he likes him. But he never says anything. He just stands at the back of the room, quietly watching. Mum shouts a lot at the television when he’s on, especially if he gets his ears pulled. Mick McManus doesn’t like that. “Not the ears, not the ears,” he would say. “Not the ears,” Mum would repeat in a silly baby voice. My Dad never does silly voices.

I walk down the hall to the front door. I know what I’ll see. Just outside, my Dad will be bent over in his dusty blue overalls, his head under the bonnet of the Morris. It’s what he does every Saturday, all the time. But he’s not there. The bonnet is up as it should be but it doesn’t look right because my Dad is not there.

Stepping onto the narrow pavement, I see him standing with his back to me in the middle of the road. He’s watching something and I can smell something I have never smelt before. A bitter sharp smell.

Down the street, people are standing in the road looking up as black smoke flows thickly out of a bedroom window. They’re shouting at a man standing on the window ledge. The smoke blows around his shoulders and he jumps and disappears into the crowd. Dad walks toward me, smiling, shaking his head a little as we hear the scream. It’s a long, long scream, very high and I can’t tell if it is a baby screaming or a cat or what and my tummy has turned over, full of butterflies. My Dad’s face has changed, gone a funny white colour and he’s not moving, just looking back.

Later I heard them talking, Mum and Dad, very quietly so that I wouldn't hear. “Jumped and let her burn to death,” I heard my Mum say. When they put me to bed, I asked for the landing light to be left on and the door left open. And I dreamed that the houses in our street were blazing fiery red. I said to my Dad, “you wont let us burn, will you Dad?”

Dad shook his head. “Dads can’t do everything,’ he said.