It was a dark and stormy night, or at least it was for our single-parent family. The rest of the neighbourhood was enjoying the kind of clear skies which meant a hard frost overnight and a slippery ride to school in the morning.
The barometer in our neat, wee house at the end of our short, ordinary street was falling rapidly, as it often did these days. My father, an Iraq War veteran - ’Honourably discharged for dishonourable reasons, and don’t you forget it. ****** fascists!’ - was in charge of our weather. From blue skies with candy-cotton clouds in the morning to an eerie half-light of silent anticipation by late afternoon, we would end the day huddled around the kitchen table waiting for the maelstrom to hit.
We ate carefully trying not to scrape our plates with our knives and forks, and avoiding each other’s eyes. The cauliflower cheese was examined as closely as every other vegetable my aunt Kate - ‘I’ll not have my family eating slaughtered animals!’ - served up to us. You’d think the food on our plates was the most interesting thing in our precarious little world. Peas were my favourite because you could count them over and over...until they were finished.
Wind and rain lashed our evenings regularly. Sometimes we were treated to the automatic-rifle fire of hail, but worst of all were the sandstorms which ****** all the air out of our home and stymied any hope of sleep. On those occasions we all huddled together in my sister’s bed - ’No, Alex! It’s Livvy’s turn to hold the torch. You can look after the phone in case we need to ring Dr Matt to help Auntie Kate.’
We updated our worst-vegetarian-creation notebook and talked in close whispers about the weather. Mostly, we sat quietly and longed for blue skies and sunshine tomorrow, while the captain cowered in the cubby-hole beneath the stairs and screamed into my six-year-old brother’s plastic walkie-talkie. ‘Man down, man down, man down!’
A drabble for Anzac Day.
