The kids all laugh, pointing at their dad’s fat ass spread out across the crack somewhere between the two large cushions. He looks up, catching the eyes of each of them in turn, but he has nothing to say.
Mum fills the silence with another long fart until her bowels have been emptied of all available air. The pungent scent gets muffled by the immense stretch of fabric underneath, but eventually reaches its victims nonetheless. She gives a satisfied grin, like she’s marking her territory. ‘Beans for breakfast do the trick nicely.’
All the family laugh again, even Dad this time. This faint hum slips out of the side of his mouth for just a moment, just long enough for him to be recognisable from that previous life.
‘Let’s see them greedy bastards sell this now,’ Mum says, holding out her hand.
Ashley does his duty and pulls her up, hoisting her out of yet another piece of furniture that they won’t be buying until Dad gets himself back into a job, which looks like it will be sometime close to never.
‘Don’t like it anyway,’ she says. ‘That colour looks like dog-shit-brown to me.’ She crinkles her nose as she starts down the long path towards bedrooms, with dining and casual chairs still to get through. The family follow, the two daughters heaving their dad out of his comfy chair. He would have told them he had enjoyed that, if he could just have found the right words.
‘Oi! Why’s it so quiet in ’ere?’ Mum shouts at two staff hanging around the display rugs.
The first one shrugs her shoulders, and then carries on with her tidying and shuffling about. Mum stares at the other one, determined that she will not be looked down on by these little slappers, all dressed up as wannabe till tarts.
‘It’s the virus, innit,’ the other one says, still playing with the stock, not wanting to look up at the woman.
‘See! I told you about that!’ Ashley shouts out.
He gets a quick smack, a bashing on the back of his head that warns him not to push his luck. ‘That’s total bollocks. There’s always some flapping about MRSA or bird-shit flu in this shithole of a country, plus all that other crap going round from all them foreigners.’
‘This one’s for real though, they reckon,’ the staff member says. ‘Our supervisor is probably gonna close the store soon, especially since there are only a few customers in here.’
‘Oh, Mum, we ain’t been to the marketplace yet!’ Jade shouts.
‘And my mattress,’ Ashley says, tugging at her arm.
‘Meatballs,’ Dad says.
Mum pushes Ashley off and holds out her hands, silencing all. ‘What a load of shit. I can’t believe any of you is gonna believe this. You remember when we came back from Majorca? When them cabin crew reckoned we got some bug from the hotel and they wouldn’t let us get on the plane?’
The kids nod, all of them suddenly reliving that particular nightmare.
Mum looks at each of them and then turns to the staff member. ‘Well, that ain’t happening to me again, so is that restaurant still open or what?’
She nods. ‘It is for now.’
Ashley hears this; he knows how long a trip to the restaurant will take, and he taps his mum’s arm again. ‘Please, Mum, what about my mattress?’ he says, desperate to get it. After all, if they are going to be holed up indoors for weeks then he doesn’t want to be sleeping on a piss-soaked bed any longer, especially as he thought this sort of thing was now consigned to that past life he doesn’t ever want to remember.
She pushes him away. ‘It’s not all about you, Ashley!’
He looks down at the floor, knowing it’s never about him, but knowing better than to argue with her in public.
Mum makes a loud tut, telling everyone how pissed she is. ‘He ain’t ever gonna shut up. It’s like having a three year old all over again. So, let’s all go and get young Ashley’s piss protector and mattress and then we can finally get some nosh.’
Most of the family cheer, and then Ashley’s sisters remember that they need to laugh at him for still wetting the bed. They point their fingers at him, all the time calling him ‘pissy pants’ and never once wondering if this constant taunting was in any way contributing to him wetting himself in the middle of the night.
Ashley hasn’t always wet the bed; he is a teenager, after all. He did it a few times when he was younger – like, much younger. Then it started again, sometime between him starting school and his balls dropping, and once he had got a few slaps from his mum, he realised that his life would be much easier if he simply didn’t wee himself in the middle of the night. He approached this as intelligently as he could, by reading online about the causes of bedwetting. The best and simplest – and, of course, cheapest – piece of advice was not to drink anything from eight in the evening onwards – three full hours before he went to sleep. He used to go to bed dying of thirst, his still-digesting dinner demanding some liquid to help the process, and he used to wake up with a thick layer of fur across his tongue and his lips cracking from his self-imposed torment. But, however dry his mouth was, so was the rest of the bed, and so to Ashley it was worth all that suffering.
Two weeks ago it all started again. He woke up with a big wet patch all around him and his boxers drenched. He had stopped his routine of not drinking before bed some years ago, since his mind had clearly become able to control his bodily fluids while he wasn’t awake, so he was pretty annoyed with himself that this particular problem had come back. He hadn’t dared ask his mates, and of course his sisters would have had no interest in helping, other than to tell his so-called mates, just to make sure everyone knew how weird Ashley was. He did ask his Dad, hoping a man-to-man chat would sort things out, but of course, he got nothing back of any substance, just some rambling and a few shrugs of his shoulders.
When he had found the courage to approach his old man, he hadn’t realised that his mum had been listening from the kitchen. Hearing that he wasn’t getting anything helpful from his dad, she chose to fill that void with her own opinions, frying pan in hand, which Ashley could definitely vouch for how much that hurts when it catches the side of your head.
In that painful moment, as Ashley’s Mum continued to chastise her son for something that was arguably out of his conscious control, she obviously thought that bellowing at him with all manner of her own issues, whilst brandishing her favourite sausage pan just above his head, would somehow solve the problem. And while she screamed that ‘I really don’t fucking need this,’ and ‘I ain’t washing your pissy sheets no more,’ Ashley thought that if she had just asked him why he was wetting the bed again then he would have happily told her.
To Ashley, there was an obvious reason why this problem had returned, and that reason was the stress they were under. He often spent the final few moments of any evening looking at this family unit that had fallen into chaos. It had never been particularly strong at the best of times – certainly had never been a team – but when his dad was normal, things at least happened.
Every night before heading to bed, he would take a final look at his old man, and he would always find him staring blankly at the flickering TV screen. He would then look over at his mum, who was always asleep on the sofa, her oversized, snotty nose scooping up all the air and her fat, greedy gob pushing it back out again. He knew she was slowly poisoning the place he once called home but any love for her had left a long time ago, and once his dad had sort of left then there was no actual reason for him to stay.
The family make it to the bed section before Ashley can sort any more of these thoughts out in his head, which he is strangely okay with. He knows that if you can’t fix something then you put up or get out. He just needs more time and, quite obviously, a lot more money. The scary shit that was going on right now wasn’t helping but there was little he could do about that either.