Mad is Sometimes Something to Be Missed

No.483 in 'A Story a Day for a Year - and then some!'

MAD IS SOMETIMES SOMETHING TO BE MISSED

He used to say there was time enough to be sensible when we was old and he said that being old would come sooner than we could imagine. He used to say while we was still young we should be mad as sticks and daft as brushes and we should do things just because we could. He said it was something we had to do, like it was a commandment from God.

It was sort of fun at first, doing headstands in the street, legs leaning up against the Laundromat wall, and he said he could see my knickers and he said he’d like to one day see me without ‘em. And we ran hell for leather through the supermarket aisles and all we bought was a bar of Cadbury’s dairy milk. And we sat on the lip of the railway bridge, our legs dangling in the air below, and one square of chocolate on my tongue and one on his and he said we had to hold it there and not swallow but let it melt into a soft and sticky sweetness.

And we took our shoes off and paddled through puddles, or climbed to the tops of lampposts so we could spy into the bedrooms of houses, or walked on the grass in the park where it said we should ‘Keep Off’.

Like I said, it was fun at first, and we stayed out late as stars, and we sang songs at the tops of our voices till lights came on in the sleeping houses, and we kissed in the middle of the road where the full glare of car headlights discovered us. And we were mad right enough, mad as boxed frogs or hares leaping in March, and he said he loved me to the moon and back again and I said I loved him only to the moon if that meant we could stay there with all the wide world gawping up at us.

And one day I put my knickers into his pocket, slipped ‘em in there like they was a present to him, and I kissed him slow and moaning, and I said we should go to his place or mine and fuck till we had no brains left. And we did and that was our undoing.

Weeks after it was, and I was sick in the mornings and my best friend said she could guess what it was and I told her she was daft as doorknobs and talking gobshite. But she wasn’t. She was true as tomatoes, and when I told him he sucked in air and ran one hand through his hair like it was a puzzle he couldn’t solve, and he said, ‘Well, I never,’ and I said, ‘Well, you fucking did,’ and we laughed and he put one hand on my belly and I said he was a silly sot.

Things was different after that, a whole world of difference, and not just the growing so fat I didn’t fit my dresses no more and couldn’t see my toes and sleeping on my back cos there was no other way. We wasn’t to be mad no more, that was the difference and, though that was easy enough for me, for him it was a whole lot harder. He took to being mad on his own sometimes – walking along high walls with his arms thrown wide like he could fly, or juggling oranges at the greengrocers, or dancing crazy dancing and dancing to no music right in the middle of the church; and I just looked at him like he was a dog with two heads and I said he had to grow up and stop pissing about. We got responsibilities now, I told him, and he looked sad and like he didn’t want to grow up, and the minister said he just had to and his own dad said the same and everyone saying it so in the end he had no choice.

And he’s sensible now, like someone grown quickly old, and he’s careful ‘bout most everything and that’s how it should be. But there’s times, when baby Rose is asleep and the house is quiet as empty pockets or cupboards, and I remind him of before. He laughs and says he can’t believe it was ever like I say it was. And I ask him if he wants to go out back and dance in the night garden, but his sensible self says it’s raining and we’ll just get soaked through to our bones, and he laughs and he says I’m daft as bottletops. I strip down to nothing then, naked as the day, and I throw the backdoor wide as an announcement, but he won’t let me out, says I can’t, ‘not no way and not like that’; and it’s then that I miss the fun that was in him before, and I reallymiss it.