“Paper is more patient than man” — Anne Frank
I am the buried treasure who speaks to skeletons. A flightless fly on time’s walls. A piece of paper, stored in suburbia.
Your narrator for this timely tale may just be a thin slice of wood, but is about to metamorphose into something life changing. The transformation spurred me, self-righteously, to tell you this story. The books i’ve talked to call it ‘fiction’. They say you’ll enjoy it.
Our day, like most, begins with pandemonium.
“Oh, I can never find anything in this bloody house!” Christopher slumped to his knees. Strained wrinkly eyes scanned a magnificent mess. The droopy tip at the end of his smooth nose held his chunky reading goggles from the dusty depths of administrative literature below.
Everywhere, scattered piles of paper, strewn out like sheep in a snowstorm, were sliding ever further out of reach as his daughter, Aurora, a promising young gymnast leaped into the clutter, toppled around on one foot for two seconds before having to jump again to reach the nearest patch of visible floor, landing with a thud.
“- Oh I wish you wouldn’t hop around so much biscuit, i’ve told you before, you’ll bring the house down. Lord knows how many times i’ve had to fill in the cracks on the ceilings.” Early spring’s midday sun transformed each speck of dust that plumed from the arousal.
Resurfacing every financial document from the last 20 years makes anybody stressed, even on a good day. Perhaps especially on a good day. Indeed, a good day’s definition may well be: life without the tiresome trials of paperwork. Anyway, it’s besides the matter because this is quantifiably, a really good day for this man, if he can just manage to enjoy it.
A text just came through from NS&I Premium Bonds & Savings. A mysterious company that stores your money and in return, enters you into their regular raffles. The text had read:
“Congratulations Mr Jumptree! Your Premium Bond Account #NC100099848 won £20,000. Please login to accept your prize!”
“Premium Bond? I haven’t got a Premium Bond…”, dismissed the left side of Christopher’s brain, turning back to the newspaper. You see Mr Big Fish here has dealt with every phishing scam since the days of dial-up and so claims to be vigilant to what he calls the ‘lures of deception’.
But having given himself a minute to remember the truth, he knows it is no scam. He knows I am a winner. A ticket to actual retirement. A ticket out of this house he regularly reminds the kids they “need to sell”. Finding me is the only way out of this mess. So as I lie in wait, amongst forgotten dates, I contemplate the years.
Over the last five years Aurora had also learnt to give her dad’s brain a minute. Every week he ‘lost’ his car keys or a computer password that was staring him right in the face. She hadn’t anticipated anything as good as me though. So, after Dad had bolted from the breakfast table to ransack the bedroom, she grinned.
As if he were explaining it for the fifth time, Christopher began to tell his youngest child, that before her passing, Great Nanny Jumptree had committed £100 in savings to each of her 17 grand-kids. It was their job to hold onto the paperwork.
Judging by the state of the house, Christopher holds onto everything. Literally, everything. Particularly beer matts from independent breweries and the incessant blame he lathers on every situation.
You see, even from my dusty hiding place I know Christopher’s temperament is the reason he tantrums as if it were his prerogative. It’s absurd pantomime at times. To not fume from the ears, and curse the court of Jehovah with a clenched fist; well that’s just a waste of a good moan in his opinion.
Around payday he can get paranoid. If they were looking for his keys or his camera he would genuinely be asking his loving daughter whether her friends had stolen either of them.
Marvel at man’s passionate rage at a thing he misplaced.
A ‘passionate rage’ that once triggered a court case.
“Oo is this it?” Aurora posed, plucking an official document.
Oh god. The separation agreement. What a tiresome bore they are. Jargonistic gibberish to teenage eyes. Triggering for a divorcee.
Christopher barely glanced at it. “No…. it’s got a blue logo on it, if that helps” he sighed, heaving 25 years worth of bank statements, also tauntingly blue, out of the way.
Aurora doesn’t remember her parents ever being intimate. On the surface she wasn’t too bothered by it, well aware their affections were busy competing for hers, as were her brother and sister. The joint bank account statements from ‘02-’15 tell me she’s more expensive than the older siblings, despite their ‘luck’ of having a nuclear family unit. Nuclear being a key word.
The strange environment matured her. Even from an early age she would have lengthy conversations with both her parents. However, when they were all together they exchanged only air; perhaps tedious questions about housekeeping but always preceding an uneasy silence.
The bitter standoffs were unhealthy yes, but relatively, just dull backdrops on the stage of Aurora’s life. With her older siblings trapped between Mum and Dad, she shattered those silences for her amusement, learning how to pry smiles from gritted teeth by mimicking everyone for her favourite audience, the home crowd.
Their parents’ separation, although welcomed by the kids at first, transformed those stage show moments into dull TV dinners. Christopher, the only one employed, had little choice but to accept a higher wage role as Deputy Head at school. From then on Mr. Jumptree barely had time to cook, let alone humour the creativity of his shining star.
But she stayed shining.
Hoping to flip her father’s frown she said, “does this mean I get to go on holiday?”
“None of us will be going anywhere ‘til we bloody find it! Where’s that boy? Is he still sleeping!?”
Christopher’s words echoed up the stairs to where night owls avoid the morning rush. Having sensed commotion, the 23-year-old ‘boy’ took a deep, waking breath. Aurora chased her father’s words up the cream-carpeted stair way.
To wake the person who’d been pacing above her room all night with exciting news would be much more fun than watching her flatulent father disgruntle the dust.
“I’m awake!” exhaled the man-child, allowing no such satisfaction to his sister as she turned the door knob.
“Good morning, guess what?” she chimed like a bell.
“What?”
“You’ll never guess…”
With eye-rolling certainty he started clambering toward the stairs, “the keys are in the door, no? Dad! The ke-”
Before her brother wasted another breath, she said, “no, Dad’s won twenty grand! But he can’t find the login details for the thing, what a surprise”.
“What thing?”
“A savings bond thing, I dunno” she shook her head beaming.
“Twenty grand…” he paused, which the mania below afforded not.
“Can you come down please!!” strained Christopher.
‘Dad gave that to me to look after’ thought Ainsley as Aurora released her hug and ran to the call. The thuds of her downward descent pounding like the blood to Ainsley’s brain.
“Aurora! Stop! Stomping!” Christopher raged.
Every sound that fell onto Ainsley’s tinnitus-prone ear drums added pressure to the predicament he’d awoken to and would woefully argue, born into.
The poor boy is better and worse at keeping things organised than his father. I say better because I’m happier up here in this plastic sleeve he popped me in. His well-travelled bank statements tell me tales of London’s nightlife and it’s overpriced cocktails. I still say worse because every time he opens the drawer and raises us aloft, I see the mess and hear the wailings of the sun-bleached posters on the wall. Jimi Hendrix has been moaning ever since his top right pin popped and his head slipped to an angle two months ago, mumbling something about “not again”. How they find anything in this chaos is well beyond me, for I am, after all, just a piece of paper amongst many it seems.
I am not a collection of Aurelius’ Meditations, nor am I wealth as money is itself. Yet in Ainsley’s mind I do have stealth and this morning have struck a blow, below the belt.
Ainsley’s diary, a little black book, told me how his heart wallows at responsibility. He believes he paces the floor boards because he is worthless, however having spoken to the unfinished songs and business proposals, his various CVs and a mounting pile of unopened phone bills underneath the drawer lining, he crumples under responsibility like drafts of his poetry unto his own fist.
His greatest responsibility is to his father, to whom he owes an awful lot. And does Christopher let him forget it? Of course not. If Aurora hadn’t done so, it’d been him who ripped open the blinds, cursed the “hovel” he lived in and reminded him “there’s no dossing about in this house, everyone’s got jobs to do”.
Instead the dark, cluttered room sat like rush-hour traffic. Each lonely sock and dirty mug honking anxiety right into the millenials’ heart. Six feet below, like a mirrored image, Christopher began to inflict similar remarks of self depreciation.
Georgia, the fairy that flew between, started perusing the family photo albums unearthed by the dig. Sepia-tone photography paper, boy do those guys like to natter. I could hear her open the book from up here.
“Dad, what was your dad like?” she said, fascinated at the resemblance between her father and his.
Christopher, distracted by an old script, answered, “Oh dad? Well he was… cool man”. He paused. A passing cloud revealed glorious sun into the room once more.
“He used to ride this big motorcycle in a biker gang; would take me and Auntie Mary to the speedway and get donuts…”
“Yeah but what was he like like?” Aurora wanted to know the uncomfortable truths.
“Well he died, gosh, a long time ago now. I was Ainsley’s age. Younger even…”
Another thoughtful pause.
“He was always busy I suppose. He was a baker, so he was always baking aha” he smiled at his daughter’s interest.
Aurora, having heard all that before, carried on pouring over the family she had never met. As she traced the origins of her facial features through her grand parents, she wondered whether they would have loved her or deemed her beautiful in sixties’ South Africa.
Standing broad in his wedding day suit, her grandfather with his boxer’s nose, stood out from the page. Was this man really cool, or as cold as his portrait?
She despised how two people, both a beautiful mix of races, could be persecuted for their love only 50 years ago. The thought that stressed her most was whether the divorce that had gotten them, and then her parents, would one day, get hers.
It’s remarkable how you humans take what us papers say to such heart. We say one thing and you go off searching for what we didn’t.
Then suddenly, Ainsley screaming “i’ve got it!”, thundering down the stairs (Aurora’s favourite) was all she could hear.
As I lay on the kitchen table, my footer now sticky with strawberry jam, I had my first look at the three of them together. Whether it was hope or the sun that made them glow, it didn’t matter. My 16 year sentence was not in vain.
This is my special day. The day I transformed from A4 to 20,000 more. From a missing document to sheer opulence. They will call me Sheetspeare, no no, Mark Plain…
But such disdain, for I could feel their pain, for the strain the morning caused
And as my story fade’s, Christopher bade to the children, “what’s mine, is yours”.
E G Nielson 