Howdy up my fellow followers of this old bloggy and today I am popping on the next in the series of #conversationswithwonka which is this one!!!
Do enjoy it folks and cheer up your weekends!!
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Wonka - Tales from the back door
Published
by Madeleine Masterson at Smashwords
Copyright
2013 Madeleine Masterson
Wonka is
demanding to know why I have arrived home with my face all screwed up with
tension. ‘is it work?’ he shrills,
skipping ahead of me and meeting Golly by the radiator (I must try to remember
and turn the heating off I think, now it is past the summer solstice). ‘Well –
‘
‘Because if it
is I don’t want to hear it!’ he continues knocking all his biscuit boxes down
and scraping his head on the cat food pouches lined up like a row of
soldiers. They fall down too.
Of course it’s
work. I had two appointments today, one
with a strapping big farmer feeling fairly ghastly due to family stuff. The second, and it was this one that was
still hanging around me, with this chap hovering on the autistic spectrum. I had heartily resisted throughout our one to
one, the appeal of his world. After all,
inside his world, no one but him, was right.
No one but him understood or came close.
And he listened to himself and all was fine. Despite my resistance I felt terribly caught
up in this loop. Or was it loopy.
‘Come on!’
shouted Wonka ‘me and Golly are famished!’
I felt like a slow bovine creature unable to make simple decisions like
chicken or beef flavoured morsels. I
stabbed at the button on my CD/radio.
Complete silence instead of endless whittering might help me. That, or reading the side of the goat’s milk
carton which has jolly write ups and photos of typical (I’m using that word now
instead of normal) people enjoying said milk.
The autistic
chap haunted me though. Even his face I
decided was other worldly, it was bony, sunken even, with blotches and staring
eyes.
Actually it wasn’t too far removed from the
gallery of blokes all looking for a soul mate on the dating site I used. Regular ‘new matches’ would arrive to taunt
me. Wonka had commented on this of
course, telling me that I was Ok as I was.
What? I countered, struggling along on my own – not just the bags of
shopping and having to carry them for miles from the parked car, down the other
street because I couldn’t get parked in my own.
No, it was the overall struggle.
‘Surely there is someone out there for me?’
‘Me and Golly!’
– ‘and Baba!’ yes indeed. Baba was the someone out there, he was doing
his usual piteous squeak at the back door.
Perhaps a stray, who knows, he was allowed access to some food and
drink. Possibly some of Wonka’s
biscuits. Anyhow Wonka enjoyed boxing
him into a corner where I would find him hours later having forgotten I’d let
him in. Golly, benign and loving cat
that he was, tolerated Baba and not just because he couldn’t see him. Being blind had nothing to do with his
temperament. Golly oozed love and
peace. Wonka had attitude.
Wonka had a few
things to say about companions and the like.
Watching me get ready for a meeting up with one of the gallery he would
advise on clothing, driving, walking or taxi and finally whether to tape a
favourite programme.
On my return,
usually disillusioned, feeling ugly and old he immediately restored my
spirits. ‘I never liked the name
Malcolm!’ he trilled, and ‘try and stay local next time!’ He’s got a point. On the long drive back I had to endure some
organ music as this seemed to be what people like to listen to after 7pm on my
music station. They don’t refer to the
other listener for nothing
The latest line
up is equally unappealing and I keep getting viewed by someone in
Slovenia. I daren’t tell Wonka about
this, as I can’t promise for his political sensibilities. He often veers towards conservative views
only to veer back to a liberal stance.
Golly I think, is with Greenpeace.
Talking myself
in and out of these tenuous relationships, I can rely on Wonka to counsel if
not life coach me into action. ‘Go on!
Take a risk!’ he urges, while I spend too much time ruminating on whether to or
not. ‘He looks suspect!’ as I press the
send button for my message. Well at
least I’m making an effort. I close the
laptop down and crank myself up off the floor.
To my left, on the settee, is Golly slumbering away by the cushion with
Wonka snoozing, angel like on the top.
Lined up by the
cushion are three of Wonka’s toys. A
knitted duck, a hand made fur cat and a proper cat toy, which is a penguin. All about the same size and to my knowledge,
Wonka has never bothered with any of them.
Well maybe the cat. There is just
room for me at the other end of the settee.
Perched on it, I
enjoy the rest of my evening in a pleasant daze and not a relationship in
sight. ‘there’s always tomorrow!’ says
Wonka, commencing his night time patrol.
Hmm, that’s what Scarlett said.
Looking at
yourself first thing is fraught with danger. My face was bony, sunken even,
with blotches and staring eyes. Now
where had I had seen this kind of look before?
Luckily, and with thanks to Wonka and his sort of don’t dwell on it get
on with it and count your lucky stars on it philosophy, I did not need to
analyse my look, or indeed my life and the careful thinking behind it. Instead and with one hundred percent approval
from Wonka, I needed to go on a healthy eating regime. This alone would sort out my attraction
factor. And I mean the attraction to
myself never mind the gallery.
Being a rather
impatient let’s get it on type (see, I do use that word!) the regime had to
start immediately. Out with the ginger
nuts and in with the thin weird tasting rye wafers cum biscuits cum just weird
tasting things. Also in, was the
swimming. If I couldn’t actually get to
the baths I was thinking about it, and in my regime, this counted as healthy
exercise. Rifling through the pamphlet
which read like a train timetable or worse, that of a pending bus, was also
good exercise. Of the mind.
Two weeks in
with this new regime and I haven’t noticed even a tiny bit of loose
clothing. Some days I just feel outright
fat. ‘You! Fat!’ my dear work colleagues say when I draw attention to my
size. Wonka however knows different. ‘have you weighed yourself yet?’ and ‘those
sweets are missing from the fruit bowl!’
In a frenzy of
thin rye biscuits I need something to take away the sort of earthy dried up
taste and only one of my humbugs was going to do it. As a side effect though, I was brushing my
teeth more. Let’s not go there.
Wonka keeps fairly
fit by darting from one window to another and this includes the half glass on
the back door. He can peer through this,
and round the blind and curtain shielding me from the world out there and the
neighbours opposite. If there is another
cat out there in the yard and thanks to my St Francis attitude, there is always
a cat out there in the yard, then he races upstairs to look at them from my
bedroom window. At night, once I start
my settling down thing, he is often a fat huddled shape behind the heavy
curtain swathed across my bedroom window.
He is perched on a sill roughly an inch wide. Trapeze artist, new philosopher in the
making, he has it all. If only I could
step up a notch, and tackle life with this devil may care attitude.
My face throughout
the regime, seems the same. The blotches
have moved right enough, and in certain lights, my face seems fat rather than
bony.
I have recently
messaged a gallery member who lives locally, just like Wonka suggested. Also, and following his tip for losing
weight, I have weighed myself. It was up
at the baths where in the reception is one of those massive machines that can’t
ever be wrong. Also, it declares your
weight to the massive queue of waiting swimmers. It was alright though, as on Sundays there is
a gap between family bathing and family bathing and it is lane swimming.
I had come upon
the lane swimming after one of my incidents in with the family bathing. Suffice to say, I now needed to avoid some of
the family bathers. Wonka agreed with
this tactic, and thought that lane swimming would be demanding in a different
way. He was right. At first I tried the middle lane thinking
that here would be the kind of swimmers who had a bit of practice under their
belt and were fairly speedy. No. Here were the swimmers who were too fast for
lane one, the ‘slow’ lane. Again I
seemed to mark myself out somehow by carving a middle lane through the dawdling
swimmers in this lane. There was one
option left to take and that was to move into the ‘fast’ and third lane. Now as I swam up and down in the middle lane
I had of course checked this out. It
seemed to me to be full of olympic style swimmers complete with goggles and
sports swimwear. Also, they did fancy
stuff like shooting up the bath with a flipper like action and a float held in
front.
‘Hold your own!’
shouted Wonka as I departed for my Sunday swim and said weigh in. ‘How’s life in the fast lane?’ he pestered on my return. I whispered how much I weighed and that
somehow I had kept some sort of pace up against the relentless backstroke and
crawl of these olympian swimmers.
I felt
exhausted, fat, old and ugly.
Slumped on the
settee later on and sipping a glass of red purely for its anti- oxidant brain
stimulating effect, I vowed to keep going.
That spark of motivation would drive me on and
I envisaged the trimmer, fitter more even skin toned me.
‘Me and Golly are starving!’
shouted Wonka from his perch on the sideboard.
A bigger, sleeker and well fed cat would have been hard to find in our street
or the one where I had to park the car.
Shaking out a handful of biscuits into Wonka’s trough I thought it
looked like rain. Wonka sniffed the
contents and jumped up onto the side to inspect the yard. Sure enough, specks of rain appeared on the window
and me and Wonka turned our attention to the bottom of the back door. It was a tiny kitchen and the back door
opened onto the first bit where the washer was and where the small surface I
prepared all my meals was. More than one
person in the kitchen was fine if you were having an affair with them, married
to them or wanted to be. Even me and
Wonka was a crowd. When Golly tiptoed by
I looked like an exotic dancer, moving in strange ways to avoid him.
But yes, the back door. Try as it might, it could not hold the rain
back anymore, so when it rained outside, it rained in the kitchen too.
The Back Door: it had
suffered, been through it really, been healed and patched up but the scars were
still there. Struck at with a fireman’s
axe had rather changed the hang of it.
Prior to this it had been a good sturdy door, opening and shutting
without any trouble. Indeed it was
through this very good door that Wonka had sped in and stayed in
.
Through the same door trotted Baba occasionally (and straight back out)
and then Golly in his twilight zone also popping out and down the three steps
into the yard. All was well until I had
one of my stressful days where clients, colleagues, passing strangers and the
world were lined up. The awful
realisation that my keys were on the inside of the door and not available to me
on the outside led to a series of ridiculous decisions. Wonka gazed at me with a startled expression
from the comfort of the sideboard.
‘We’re starving,
me and Golly!’ he mouthed through the back
window. ‘I’ve locked myself out’ I
whispered back at him. Saying it made it
true. Calling the fire brigade was the
option suggested by a friendly neighbour and seized upon as the right thing to
do. Why it took three burly firemen to
hack into the good back door and reunite me with Wonka and Golly it matters
not. I had arrived home. Yes, I no longer had a good back door that
locked or held the world at bay and would cost a fortune to fix and ruin my
hitherto good relationship with the landlord, and No, I was no longer in the
yard with stress levels a mile high.
‘Locksmith?’
questioned Wonka, once he had settled and Golly had come out from under the
bed. ‘Well I – ‘
‘it’ll cost a
fortune!’ and ‘ that was a good back door!’
So the back door
had been through it rather. The chap
that fixed it up or bodged it up wanted to replace it with a new one. At an exorbitant price. Wonka advised against and said we could make
do
Like the
concentration of an animal marking its prey, Wonka studied the steady trickle
of water through the bottom of the back door.
Loath to alert Landlords to this new problem, I set about laying towels
and old bits of cloth down below. This
worked nicely unless it rained in the middle of the night or when I was slaving
away at work. Both happened. In the night, in my trance like state coming
down stairs to use the bathroom, stepping round cats in the dark, cat dishes
and cat toys, I was not ready to step into a lake where the kitchen used to be.
‘Don’t go in the
kitchen Mum! Warned Wonka as I crashed through the front door after another
ghastly appointment. ‘Be strong!’ Wonka suggested I get my courage up and ring
the Landlord. Having just put together a
rather good session on assertiveness for my clients, I wondered yet again about
the lack of my own. Surely I can get
through a silly old phone call?
The Landlord
arrived into the yard en famille, on a Saturday morning to inspect guttering
and doors accordingly. I thought I was
being assertive although Wonka reports my voice went a little sharp. Perhaps at the suggestion I was being
obstructive. Me?
They want to
replace the back door. Will it still
have glass in it I enquired, thinking that neither I nor Wonka could cope if it
didn’t. Assured that it will I am trying
to go with the change. No more faulty
bodged up water letting in back door. It
will be double glazed (will I hear Baba on the other side?) and probably that PVC
stuff. Dad would twizzle round in his
urn.
Wonka is asleep
on the top of the settee and Golly slumbers on below.
Meanwhile I am
working on an Anger Management session for my clients, this will dovetail with
the assertiveness Wonka says. He also
recommends some stuff on anxiety and stress but the thought of it has me in a
sweat. For now I am concentrating on my
regime, and the gallery. There is a new
chap on it who seems remarkably ordinary.
‘Is he local?’
checks Wonka.
Is he hell.
The End
Folks I do hope you enjoyed the second in the series!! if you want to read on, then please go to smashwords.com and look for the next conversations with wonka!! Go forth into the next week with your furry fur sleek and shining and those whiskers preened!!
big Love Wonka XXXXX
