Free Heaps of Trouble by Emelyn Heaps Page B

jumped into bed, glad that my wish of becoming him had not come true after all, and within seconds I was fast asleep.
    The next morning I woke early, as if some inner sense had triggered a premonition of some great change overnight. Opening my eyes, the first thing I noticed was that the room was bathed in an eerie, pale light, and all sounds from outside were muffled as if wrapped in cotton wool. I flung myself out of bed and rushed over to the window to peer out in awe at a world turned white.
    Dressing as quickly as I could, I rushed downstairs and out on the street, where I began to scoop up handfuls of snow and make piles of snowballs. These I attempted to lob onto the roofs on the opposite side of the road. When I’d seen this in my comic books the snowballs had gained dramatically in size from the snow on the roofs until, gigantic in proportion, they had hurtled back down to the street.
    All I succeeded in accomplishing was to incur the wrath of Mrs Malloy, whom I woke with the sound of my snowballs crashing against her bedroom window. With numbed fingers and hands, I continued throughout the day to construct snowman after snowman, until the backyard was packed with strange snow-beings in various shapes and sizes, from blobs to odd, egg-shaped mounds. But with the assistance of the father we finally produced something resembling a snowman as depicted in the
Beano
. After we had finished the masterpiece, the mother completed the sculpture with a few buttons off an old duffel coat, a scarf donated by the grandmother and one of her father’s old broken pipes that he had left on his last visit.
    *
    A week later I was back in Golden Bridge School with the heating pipes repaired and the nuns lecturing us on the cost they had incurred in ensuring our comfort. Our first Holy Communion was now only a few short months away and they were intent on redoubling their efforts to teach the catechism. Eventually the big day arrived. I was up at the crack of dawn preparing for the event, beginning with a bath presided over by the grandmother. She insisted on scrubbing the back of my neck until it turned red and it felt as if she had removed the first layer of my skin. She then targeted my ears and, after cleaning them to her satisfaction, left me to complete the bathing on condition that I was to give ‘down there’ a good scrubbing.
    Once dried, I was taken downstairs to the kitchen and stood on top of the kitchen table, wearing nothing more than a pair of white underpants. With this, both the mother and grandmother set about me, as if preparing a pedigree animal for a dog show. First the mother tried to get the black shorts on me by issuing instructions to lift first one leg and then the other. Unfortunately this coincided with a different instruction from the grandmother to raise my arms so that she could attach the shirt to my carcass. Before long I was balancing on top of the table like Boy-o-Boy attempting to navigate our hallway on one of his bad nights.
    When I was dressed to their satisfaction there followed a tour of the various shops. I felt like a right idiot. First I was over to Mrs Malloy, who said that my socks didn’t go with the shoes. That made the mother spin me out of the place before my feet could change direction and haul me back across the street to Mrs Finnegan.
She
was too busy getting her daughter Ann ready for her first Holy Communion to make a fuss of me. But with that, the mother was caught with having to remark on how well Ann looked, defeating the whole purpose of showing me off in the first place. She had to settle for a bunch of women shopping in Finnegan’s, who commented on how well the ‘little angel’ looked: ‘…and Jaysus, would you just look at the cut of him, shure, once the bishop sets eyes on him, they’ll pop out of his fat head, ha, ha, ha. And Mrs Finnegan – that fish you sold me last Friday made my husband shit all night and I didn’t get