Free The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay by Rebecca Sparrow

swings, a slippery dip and a poo. One minute I’m sending Sally and her friends outside to play. The next minute the little girls are tearing back inside. Screaming. Screaming about poo.
    â€˜ There’s a poo !’ They scream hysterically, over and over, waving their little arms in the air like Muppets on speed .
    A quick investigation reveals that Sally’s three-year-old little brother has crept into the playground, pulled down his pants and done an enormous shit on the AstroTurf. On the bright side – if there can be a bright side to poos in playgrounds – the poo looks easy to clean up. Sort of. On the not so bright side he did it at the bottom of the slippery dip. A slippery dip that just minutes ago Sally and two of her friends slid down headfirst. Headfirst into turdsville.
    I try to stay calm amidst the hysteria. I look around at the little girls. Screaming and crying seems reasonable when some of their heads have passed through the poo of a three-year-old. There’s poo in hair. On plaits. In hair ribbons. The other three just seem mildly traumatised by the afternoon’s events. I look at Sally’s mum, who is saying, ‘This has got to stop,’ in a rather fierce voice to Sally’s smug-looking little brother. Then I look at Chris, who is pacing back and forth, and talking into a headset. When he eventually starts writing on the clipboard again, he’s shaking his head in a way that tells me that poo has no part in this restaurant’s mission statement. And that I’m being marked down. This is an Act of God, I want to say. It shouldn’t count against my score. That poo was beyond my control. But nobody’s listening. Chris motions for me to come over. In a weary tone, he says that I should keep going with the party ‘as best I can’, and that he’s organised for another crew member to help me clean up. As I usher the five-year-olds into the toilets, Fiona Curtis rounds the corner with a mop and bucket.

I’m in the mother of all bad moods when I get home. I’ve literally had a shit day. I’ve been given my first-ever detention. Nick McGowan is finally talking to me again but only because he wants me to sign some stupid form. There was the whole poo thing at work. Worse, Fiona Curtis was unspeakably friendly to me as she mopped poo on the AstroTurf. I’m tired. And grumpy. And fed up with everybody and everything. And to top it all off, as soon as I walk into the kitchen I see that Mum has cooked apricot chicken for dinner. I hate apricot chicken. Fruit and poultry have no place together.
    During the meal itself there’s an added level of tension. Nick and I sit in frosty silence with the haunted look of hostages. Not that my parents seem to notice – they’re too busy discussing Caitlin’s latest financial dilemma in Paris, and remain oblivious to the cold war being waged around them. My mood is not helped when my mother finally turns her attention to me and orders me to stop slouching. She then tells me that my fringe needs a cut, and offers to cut it for me after dinner. I remind her that the last time I let her cut my hair she gave me an ‘economy fringe’. It was so short that I looked like a chipmunk. She rolls her eyes as though I am exaggerating. I remind her that even Dad started calling me Alvin. She says, ‘Well just push it out of your eyes’ and then leans over and does it for me, brutally pushing my fringe and a fair amount of my skin across my forehead. I respond by saying, ‘Ow!’ even though it doesn’t hurt.
    And then, in what can only be considered a blatant move to antagonise me, Nick McGowan for the second time offers to do the washing-up. Knowing that my parents will make me do it with him. Knowing that this is completely throwing my study timetable out of whack. And my parents, rather than insisting that as a guest he do no chores, revel in it. My mother, in