500 words a day

598 words -5th August 2009

Jeremy wanted to have some fun. Not the usual nerdish fun he had, collecting things, cataloguing things cleaning and ordering his things. He liked that, loved it sometimes, found it wonderfully calming and soothing to see things all lined up, especially when he located a missing piece, No 6 in a set of 22 had been the last missing piece in a set – the cigarette cards from John Stuyvesant’s from 1962-64. Wonderful photos from the times and it was glorious to have them all now. In fact, sometimes he thought it was better to have them than to actually look at them. After all didn’t want to mess them up did he. Grubby little fingers all over them, especially those mint condition, never opened, he couldn’t possibly open them.


It had given him a lot of pleasure over the years, his collecting, but in the last few weeks and months he just didn’t seem to get the same sort of pleasure from it. He started to think, with an anxious twist of the stomach, that maybe, maybe,  he was growing out of it. Hats what his Mum had always said t hi Dad when he’d berated him, called him a sissy. Said he should be doing something more manly, like climbing trees or playing football.


He’ll grow out of it love. But he hadn’t and his Dad had had to put up with having a cissy son for the rest of his life, which hadn’t been that long. He’d died at 64, when Jeremy was only 11. He felt relieved when he died and his Mum never once told him he shouldn’t collect things after that. Even helped him, asking him what he wanted for his Birthday so he could get something he really wanted rather than something she thought he wanted.





He didn’t have the chance to get fed up with living at home with his Mum. He was starting to get a little annoyed with her for insisting on what he ate and when he ate it, but apart from that it was very nice arrangement. A big old house, just the two of them and al his meals cooked, his clothes cleaned and ironed and someone to watch the old films they both liked with in the evenings, sometimes the afternoons, on a Sunday. They would often watch two on Sundays and as a special treat his Mum would make his favourite Apple crumble and ice cream. When he was 18 though, she died too; run over by a bus. Apparently her head had been crushed, he’d heard one of the nurses say it in the hospital when they thought he couldn’t hear. He was old enough to live on his own so he didn’t get any visits from the Social services and he didn’t have to worry about relatives popping in, that never happened.


For the last 3 years he’d been on his own and although he missed his Mum, especially on Sundays, he quite liked being on his own. He had converted her bedroom to another collection room and now had 2 of them, full up. All perfect and immaculate.


It seemed perfect and he’d even started to make a bit of money to supplement the money from his Mum’s life insurance. She’d told him about it when his dad died. Said she didn’t want him to struggle, just in case anything happened. SO he was OK and cold even afford to have al hi clothes cleaned and ironed at the laundry and a woman came and cleaned the house once a week.











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Steve Wybourn





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