Winnie Needs a Holiday
written by: David Milner
She smiles as the opening bars of the song begin. I Don’t Like Mondays was at the top of the charts for the second, maybe the third, week… Winnie can’t remember. Not that she minded Mondays. It was Fridays Winnie didn’t like. Even though it was payday, she dreaded Fridays, especially come the end of the shift at Bunton’s Boiled Sweets where she sweated and toiled. The fact that Vernon would be waiting impatiently at the factory gates; all that was missing was a lead around his flaming neck, tied to the iron railings. She can’t remember or forgets the name of the group, but knows that they are Irish, Dublin Irish, though you cannot discern this from the sound of the singer’s voice, which is both harsh and melodic, and pleading and Americanised because the girl in the song is a high school pupil who’s going to shoot, shoot, shoot… her way to put things right. There’s a line he sings about a mind in overload… and a silicon chip inside her head? Heaven’s above! Winnie likes the blend of voices dipping and swooping from wall to wall, coming to her over the solid steel of the machinery, the thumping piano and the rumble of drums, bringing the chorus to a climax. I Don’t Like Mondays. I… Don’t Like Mon…days. Winnie is aware that the song is based on actual events. She can only imagine how a slip of a girl can feel so alone, to carry a loaded rifle into a high school? I don’t like Mondays, she’s supposed to have said to the cops when they arrested her. That’s America for you! And a strange flaming subject for a popular song.
It was Fridays Winnie didn’t like. The day she handed her wage into the hands of her husband, Vernon.
Abruptly the volume on the radio is turned down to silence, “It’s POETS Day!” comes the piercingly familiar voice of Steve Bunton, 30-year-old son of the Big Boiled One, Eddie Bunton, through the speakers of the public address system, “SO……. Let’s hear it ladies!” To their master’s voice the chorus line replies: “Piss Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday!” Most of them laughing, save for those hard of hearing. Winnie can barely raise a smile.
It was summertime, and that meant the afternoon shift at Bunton’s Boiled Sweets was given over exclusively to… “Keep that Rock A-Rolling, Ladies!” Steve Bunton is on the shop floor now, beaming smile under a fop of blond streaked hair, striding the length of the production line, passing his ladies, 28 in total, all wearing white hairnets with white and yellow striped, buttoned nylon smocks. “Keep that Rock A-Rolling”, the younger ones invariably get a cheeky pinch on the bum, all in good fun, which usually prompts a response from Valerie “He never does that to mine!”, and a “My hands aren’t big enough, Valerie.”, the young man shoots back every time, as though God himself has scripted this mirth and jolly japery. Cylindrical sticks of granulated sugar and glucose syrup, an inch in diameter, 6 to 10 inches in length (oohh missus), mostly bright pink and sticky (oh, now stop it!) roll and roll all afternoon along the production line. Twenty-eight pairs of latex-gloved hands picking out to wrap in cellophane, picking out to wrap in cellophane, all but the knobbly and bent, picking out to wrap…. Winnie doesn’t mind the monotony, this refined rhythm of mind, body and machine. It was work. Work. Whatever the clever men say on the mind-numbing, soul-destroying effect and drudgery of it all, Winnie would rather be here than stuck at home. Sticky sweets are weighed, gold and silver; wheat and cement the things that are weighed, let the people decide their worth through and by the work they do. Winnie didn’t work to expand her mind. She knew how to, had done all her life. Born into a family of Romany travellers, she was on the fairgrounds from the age of ten, sitting on a high stool (sometimes singing Al Jonson’s Mammy) while taking pennies for rides on the Ferris Wheel. At seventeen she was working all hours on her long dancer’s legs in a munitions factory and, though boiled sweets were hardly bullets and shell casings, the work she did these days was essentially the same. Hey, she’s still got the dancer’s legs! And the sense of camaraderie amongst her co-workers has never much dimmed. She enjoyed the togetherness, the gossip, jokes, the saucy banter. You couldn’t always follow or hear the conversation over the noise of machinery and a lot of it went round in circles, like the old Ferris Wheel she remembered…
“Fluoride in the drinking water…”
“So they say!”
“And so they do, clever pants.”
“For yer teeth and gums, is it?”
“And keepin’ people calm from going crazy…”
“Says who now?”
“Ask your husband!”
And thinking of husbands, Winnie had to laugh as the girls were calling Vernon her Toy Boy.
“Got him Bewitched with her gypsy ways…”
“Oh, away with ya.” Toy Boy was a new phrase on Winnie, and she rather liked the sound of it.
“Shaking her arse on them long pins….”
“He’s a dozen years younger than her!
“Ten years younger, you cheeky mare!” Winnie would cackle at the ironies of life, if it wasn’t for laughter, there were plenty of tears.
“At her beck and call, waiting by the gates…”
“With his puppy eyes hahahaaaa…”
“Can’t wait to get you home, eh Winnifred…?
“Woop Woop Woop…. Whip ‘em off… haharrrgh.”
“For the love of – shut yer cake holes!”
Winnie would rather Vern take her to a show or, well, perhaps not on the Friday night after a long week; a night at the cinema come the Saturday would be something. When asked what her husband did to earn a crust, Winnie said it was Bookkeeping. That he worked for his sister, a woman in business. Any more than that the nosy beggars could mind their friggin’ own. Vernon was, in a manner of speaking, work-shy. Barely a day’s work had he done in the fifteen years she’d known him, by now he was unemployable! What little money he had (hers!) he gambled on the horses, couldn’t help himself and couldn’t pick a winner to save his skin. Useless. Two days was the longest he’d lasted in a job before it all started. Vernon would convince himself that everyone was talking about him behind his back. They’d have to get to know you first, Winnie had once opined and got a right slap for it. The man was paranoid. Something chronic, pathological, something wrong in his head, but time and again he refused to see a doctor. Between what ought to be and how it is, Winnie wonders what would happen to Vern if she upped and left him.
She needed a holiday.
That Vernon didn’t work, was always short of money, gambled on the horses without success and smoked a brand of cigarettes known (colloquially) as O. P.s (Other People’s) mattered not a jot to his nephew. Toby liked his uncle being there when he’d got home from school. As he continues to like Vernon being there when he returns from his morning shift at a local cafeteria. His mum was a buyer for a major cosmetics company, travelled a lot. And with a new boyfriend to occupy her mind, she was in and out of the house, Toby hardly saw her.
Toby liked to smoke a bit of hash or weed, squirreling himself away in his bedroom or the bathroom for a crafty toke, though he suspected that his uncle had cottoned on.
“Keep the back door and front door open, Toby, on these hotter days…”
“Will do….”
“The breeze circulates through th’ house, you see.”
“Good thinking, Batman.”
His Mum said often that Vernon was basically a child. Her reasoning, as far as Toby wanted to follow, was that her older brother wasn’t mentally equipped for the rigours of the modern, technological world. In her opinion, Vernon was a casualty. Whatever his faults and however they weighed upon him, Vernon was an asset, arriving at the house day after day to mop, dust, vacuum, spit, polish and clean, often whistling while he worked, he kept the place spick and span. Toby had no reply to his mum’s assessment, casualties come in all shapes and sizes, any dumb ass school leaver is aware that the world is full of winners and losers. For Toby, his uncle Vern was one of life’s innocents. He loved the man.
Responding to a Middle Eastern academic’s claim during a radio news item that over sixty percent of Iran’s population was under the age of thirty, Toby called to his uncle, “You hear that?” Entering the kitchen, Toby sees that his uncle is on his knees beside the oven, his soft blond thinning hair, parted on the left, damp with sweat and curling at the temples; temperature passing 30 degrees on this dead-air afternoon, and Vernon is about to scrub and clean the oven? Though on second thoughts it looks like Vernon might be on the verge of crawling inside the bleeding thing. This time of the day Vernon could get a bit tetchy.
“Over sixty percent of the population of Iran under thirty… who’d ‘ave thought, eh Vernon?”
Toby opens the door of the fridge, wishing there was a can of lager to crack open, he takes out a carton of grapefruit juice. The interview continues over the airwaves. A year had passed since the ruling monarchy of Iran had been overthrown. Toby had only recently become aware of the situation, glancing at articles in the papers.
“Maybe the birth rate increased under the Shah, whatever his name…”
“We helped the Yanks install him, back in the fifties.” Vernon shrugs. Rising to his feet, he places a hand flat against his belly and grimaces. Earlier in the day he was complaining about stomach pains. “Pahlavi, that’s the name. Nineteen-fifty-three, the year the CIA put him in charge.” Toby sees that Vernon is avoiding eye contact; a sure sign that he’s getting tetchy. His mind wandering to the betting shop round the corner, to place a bet on the gee-gees. But it being a Friday, the poor sod probably didn’t have a penny on him.
“And wanted something in return, eh, unck?”
“We were involved, lad, no mistake, offering protection and the benefits of westernization, for a large chunk of the country’s oil revenues, no mistake.” Vernon’s thin lips tightened over his dentures as he spoke. “A large chunk! Now, as yer man is saying,” Vernon stabbing his left thumb towards the radio, “the rural poor, yer urban whatnots and the younger educated got united with the Islamic clerics, eh? Wonder the Pahlavi clan, all of them, weren’t butchered and roasted alive. All they need now is a bleeding earthquake!” Vernon’s blue-grey eyes were twitching, unfocussed, as he dug his fingers into the palm of his hand. Toby is keeping his eyes firmly on Vernon, “All CIA shit and shenanigans, you with me?” watching a display of inner torment, as his uncle tries to keep a lid on his cravings. “CIA shit, CIA shit, meddling in the affairs of the world, hey you got a spare smoke, a spare smoke on yer, Toby?” Vernon eventually takes a breather. He closes the oven door.
“’Course,” says Toby, going into the pocket of his light cotton shirt to bring out a packet of ten Benson and Hedges. “It’s been a good week for tips at the café…” he begins breezily as he hands Vernon a ciggie. “Good week, indeedy,”
“Kept busy, lad… Kept busy, good that.”
You had to keep an eye on Vernon, get tuned in to the tetchy moods of his, sort of navigate yourself, and him! over the bumpy terrain. Toby’s mum was fond of telling folk that Vernon’s skin was as thin as rice paper… If Uncle Vernon wasn’t one of life’s innocents, he was one of life’s overwhelmed, which is a kind of innocence. So, this time of day, his chores complete, Vernon would be readying himself to leave the house. There was a betting shop round the corner, with a couple of others to pass as he walked the mile or so to collect Winnie from the boiled sweet factory. Every Friday was a ritual of sorts. Vernon could have travelled by bus. In all weathers he chose to walk.
“I’ve quite a lot of spare change, you know …”
“That right, lad?”
“Going spare….”
“Well, if you’ve got it…”
Vernon wasn’t a charity case. He wouldn’t have that put on him. There could only be a tacit understanding between flesh and blood. (All that’s required is a smile). Toby was happy to help. And happier still that the gambling addiction hasn’t passed to him through the generations, not that he was aware of any gamblers down the family line; a few drinkers, an embezzler, a wife murderer, but what you gonna do? His uncle softly whistles a tune, as he shuffles newspapers and magazines into a neat pile to place on the bottom shelf of the coffee table. Toby pauses and smiles before he leaves the lounge.
Vernon and Winnie were his family. Toby loves them both dearly.
This is what she needed, a bed of crisp white cotton sheets, cool to the touch, comforting her calves, thighs, arms, neck as she stretches her body. Winnie keeps herself from smiling like a loony lest her gratitude upturns her desperate ruse. She’ll never forget the look on Valerie’s face “Winnie… Winnie, what’s wrong?” Oh, dear. Winnie doesn’t relish her natural ability to trick people. And the ladies of the boiled sweets, her sisters in arms, rushing to her aid, as she went into her swoon, clutching her breast, panting for breath like a floundering trout on a riverbank. Oh, God forgive. She needed…
“You’s feeling alright, Mrs. Crabtree?” The nurse inquires.
“Oh, call me Winnie.” She’s ebony black, the young woman, mid-twenties, wonderfully rounded hips in her pale blue uniform.
“The doctor come to see you?”
“A tall grey-haired fellow? And where are you from? Oh, don’t mind me…”
“Ghana.” The young woman replies while casting her large, gleaming eyes over Winnie’s medical chart.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you, Winnie.”
“My husband… Vernon, you can’t miss him! Has he been in touch at all?”
“I shall ask at the desk for you. Vernon Crabtree?”
“His Very Honourable!” Winnie heartily laughs.
Growing up on the fairgrounds, travelling town to town, young Winnie got to know all the tricks. All those pratfalls she’d practiced with the midgets meant she was able to fall from a stepladder to this very day, age of 56, without causing injury to herself. She wasn’t proud of herself, duping the girls at work. And the hospital staff. Let the guilt come later. If the girls could see life through her eyes, maybe they’d understand. She needed time away. Where better under the present circumstances than a hospital, waited on round the clock, regular meals, fussed and smiled over, might even have her hair trimmed, shampooed and set. Bloody well needed it. Winnie rests her head into the softness of the pillow, taking long, slow breaths she closes her eyes… It was only a couple of days over the weekend she’d be kept under observation. She’d take the Monday off work…
At the sound of footfall approaching, Winnie opens her eyes and is very surprised to see her nephew.
“Toby? What a surprise.” She smiles and notices that his eyes are reddened. “Where have you… Is Vernon here?” With the soft blond curls and the freckles over the bridge of his nose, there is a marked resemblance to his uncle. Such a kind, sweet boy.
“Oh, Winnie…”
“What’s the matter, don’t worry, I’ll be right as rain.”
“Winnie…”
“No need for tears. You want some orange juice from the…?” She indicates the glass jug on the bedside cabinet, then realises she hasn’t got her teeth in, “Ohphh, lemme get me teeth, my word… hahaaa…”
Toby watches as she picks up the little case where she keeps her dentures from the top of the bedside cabinet. He can hardly credit what is happening. It is insane. Insane. Dabbing his eyes on the cuff of his shirt, Toby moves to the window and looks over the surrounding fields towards the perimeter of the golf course and, in the blue summer sky, like a thumbprint of icing sugar, the faintest trace of the moon… Perhaps he should have let the nurse…? Yes, he should turn on his heels and go to….
“Ah, that’s better. So, where is he? Gabbing with the nurses, the daft article. He hates hospitals. Did work phone you? Toby?”
How can he possibly begin? That his last words, the last words he uttered in the ambulance… Toby lowers himself into the chair, pulls it flush with the bed. He reaches for Winnie’s left hand. It feels warm. With her right hand she strokes his cheek. They smile at each other.
“Oh, Winnie.”
“I’ll be out by Sunday. It’s a flying visit!”
In the time it took for him to go to his bedroom to pick up the pathetic bit of change and return to the lounge, Vernon had suffered a massive heart attack. Five floors below on a mortuary slab, her husband lies. How does this story begin and end?
“Tell Winnie… It’ll be alright.” Vernon’s dying words.
Tell Winnie it will be alright.
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