The
bell above the door announced Skunk’s entry into the toyshop’s warmth,
competing with the Christmas carol issuing from out the loudspeakers: “Deck the halls with boughs of holly”
His
parka hung heavily from him at one side, weighted down with the aggregate
groundscore he had brought still in the small jar in which it had been
collected and banked ever since he had found himself troubled by the unbidden
thought that his admission into Heaven might not be the moral tally of a
lifetime’s good and evil deeds, but rather an actual monetary sum comprising
every coin he had failed to pick up from off the pavement.
Yet
here he was in direct contravention of the reasoning behind its assembly,
having decided to spend it upon an assortment of small presents for ache1.
Looking at the dolls, teddy bears, games and puzzles, fire engines and boats
and wagons, and row on row of closed boxes hoping something his collected coins
could afford might suggest itself, he fought off a dreadful nostalgia, trying
hard to suppress memories of Christmas and saddened at the thought of the limbo
he currently occupied: his first Christmas without his mother and, knowing that
before the coming year was even halfway done he would be a parent himself, his
last without a child.
From
a hook in the ceiling descended a continuous strip of colourful plastic
packets, each full of balloons and connected to the next with rough
perforations. Separating the last of the line from the others he could not help
but think back to that childhood Christmas when their television had broken
down, its picture collapsing to a thin bright horizon crossing the centre of
the screen in which they imagined visible movement and changes of colour. While
his mother exhausted her attempts at its revival Skunk was frantically bouncing
his legs up and down off the sofa and waving a balloon before him. Something in
this passing of the bright reflective surface in front of his eyes left the
impression he was again witness to the full screen’s content.
Skunk (the balloon moving rapidly across
his ecstatic face): I can see it! I can see it! Mummy I can see
it if I do this
unable
to comprehend why she did not want to share his discovery, why she stood
regarding him with what he was too young to recognise as pity, concern, fear
even, then fled weeping from the room.
Skunk
felt his head begin to empty out into the oppressive artificial warmth; he
moved with the queue as though underwater, clutching to himself the balloons
and a box of tiny plastic cowboys picked quickly from the shelf.
At
the till the saleslady pursed her lips, distracted by a presence beyond the
window Brother Skunk could not fully discern, and her face held its expression
of distaste when returning to be confronted by his emptying the little jarful
of small denomination coins out alongside the dolls’ house upon the glass
counter.
Within
this rising sense of suffocation, Skunk gathered his purchases and staggered
from the shop, not waiting for the money to be deemed enough or even too much,
knowing only he must breathe his lungs full of other air.
