Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

It is official: this has now become an occasional series! Of over used exclamation marks, probably. These are scraps of writing I have mostly probably discarded as the basis for a larger story (one I will share I still have hopes to use – will you guess which one?), but think are worth letting folk have a random look at. I do of course assert full copyright control over these story ideas.

This week is something I sat down and committed to screen 10 years ago. Last modified 3/15/13 at 11.45am, US dating system. It could be a reaction to a username on a pool forum I frequent (lurk, never post – signing up was a PITA), but that may be a later misattribution of motive. I suspect not, now I think about it. This time I have not edited it at all, deciding to let it stand as I left it.

If someone wants to use this as a prompt, or continue the story as they wish, they have my permission to do so, provided I am credited for the portion I share below.

I grew up rich

I grew up rich. I lived in a big house by the sea. It was so big there were two smaller houses in the grounds, so I suppose I lived in a Mansion by the sea. Maybe a small palace. One of the ‘outhouses’ (and that is what we called them), was used for guests, and for parties that could be as raucous and as destructive as they wanted to be, as nothing my parents valued was stored there. The other house was where our servants lived, the only place where some fragment of reality intruded into the estate.

There, I said it, the estate. That is what everyone else in our area called it. And it fit, three houses, large grounds running down to the sea, with both cliff view and beach frolic options, a large rose pink wall that tried to be imposing even as its colour let it down, but it was local stone and matched the houses, so that set it apart I suppose – no other houses in our area had been built from that stone, it was far too expensive. There were two pools, a tennis court and a basketball court, an ornamental pond (we called it a pond, so you already know how big it was) filled with exotic fish, some of which we occasionally ate. All that and much more, all taken entirely for granted, that was our estate.

I started telling this story talking about my mother. I never realised how odd and distant she was, a faded bird fluttering around her aviary, constant drink in hand. It seemed normal to me at the time. So normal that I never considered her drunk until I learned for myself what drunkenness was and realised she had probably been there most of my life. She functioned, she kissed us, sent us off to school – we had a driver, after all, and then retreated back to the house (we called it the house, despite its size and opulence – we had a racetrack interior balcony, a play room that could hide a hockey rink, and might have at one time, and had every conceivable toy and gadget to distract us from our lives that money could buy, and it worked). Her drunkenness was mental, not physical, and even then to us she appeared normal, she never slurred or staggered, or at least not until late at night, and only once or twice that I recall, so that was just her being tired. She ran the house, was prominent at the local yacht, tennis, golf clubs. She had a formidable backhand and a handicap I never got close to.  She was chairwoman and treasurer of each at various times in various different years. She had guests over day and night when not arranging, attending or holding social functions, normally aspiring ladies of the neighbourhood who were overjoyed to pass the time with wine and verbal social climbing games. I think she just liked playing with their vanities, even as it bored her. I don’t recall one actual friendship. She had a charity she ran, or at least directed. I was always impressed by her ability to be on the phone with one hand on a cigarette, the other with a tallboy or a martini glass in hand. She was always honest in her glassware, even if free range in her choices of alcohol, I am sure there was a code to what she drank, when and with whom, but I never cracked it. Still, if she had a Tom Collins or a whiskey sour or a martini it was in a glass that proclaimed it. Red wine and white wine, sherry and port, always in the correct glass. The only time she deviated was with her “Lizzy in the Morning”. That was her name for it. It often came in a gigantic short stemmed water tumbler, lots of ice and orange juice, sometimes in a highball, other times still in a hurricane glass. It was named by her after Elizabeth Taylor, and her favourite morning drink. I assumed it was a screwdriver, after I came to realise it must be alcohol based. My mother was slightly obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor, though she was taller and did not have the breasts to topple empires as Richard Burton once said. (I later did some research of my own, which made me wonder if the morning drink could have been based on some Puerto Vayartan dream that the Burtons’ man made for them in the mornings. I never tasted it to find out. The screwdriver still makes most sense.) Not that I wish to linger on my mother’s breasts, you understand, but now I have and this is uncomfortable. She was tall, beautiful, long limbed and well proportioned with dark, but not violet eyes. Her face caught light very well, cheekbones and mouth and eyes combined to be arresting, but not intimidating, and she could charm both men and women alike with a smile and a light touch, though normally a smile would do. She abruptly gave up cigarettes when I was in my teens. She said its chic had faded, and she was not yet ready to. That was my mother.

We had a father too, my siblings and I, an Olympian non presence who descended from on high perhaps twice a year from his constant circuit around the globe making fantastic amounts of money and being powerful. Sometimes his visits amounted to a meeting in a restaurant sixty miles down the coast. He seemed to love us, between his repeated enquiries about our schooling and not giving our mother any trouble. The script did not vary much. Those visits didn’t count, though they were special in their mixture of dread and awe. We did well in school for fear of his wrath. Our successes were met with curt acknowledgement, no praise, nothing less was expected of us as his children. What was truly special was when he did stay at the house, and took off his armour of immaculately tailored suits that radiated implacable authority. Then life was for two weeks at a time perhaps, completely different. There were extra especially big parties, one could almost call them balls to celebrate the presence of the King in town, and we noticed the extra glitter and glamour of them, which was fun; but for us it was more that we were briefly a family. We played together on the beach, my father’s skin was bronze, despite the suit, and he was tall, and athletic, and liked it more and more as we grew to have us compete in sports – swimming, volleyball, basketball, softball, soccer. He did not care for tennis. We would wrestle and laugh and be thrown into the sea by this titan among us. And my mother laughed and clapped and joined in, seemingly as robust as he. And she did not have a glass in her hand when he was home, only when he had a glass in his, or when guests and civility demanded it. She became lighter, funnier, more affectionate towards us. We turned towards her like the sun in these brief times, loving the feel of her warmth. Now I wonder if that in turn caused our father to darken and retreat. No more games, no more races, no more looking into that broad face of power and seeing it crease with laughter, so rare, so valued. He would turn slowly back to stone, the brow would set, the phonecalls begin, the suit would be donned. Business, my dear, always business. And he would be gone, and the sun would fade, and we would go back to the play room, and our usual solitary pursuits.