(Copyright © Guy Ellis 1997, 2001
I was eight years old when I first heard about the bottle. In fact I was exactly eight,
it was on my birthday. We were in the kitchen of our four-bedroom shack in La
Punta celebrating it. Dad was sitting at one end of the Formica covered table
and Mum at the other. I had one of the sides to myself and faced my two younger
brothers, Lazareth and Beetle. It was a hot summer’s evening and the flies
buzzed around the chocolate cake like tiny black helicopters attacking the
white drops of icing sugar that spelt out Happy
Birthday Joel in thin squiggly letters on top. Only the “ay” from Birthday and “oel” from Joel still remained when
Beetle started throwing up.
I’d stopped counting the number of pieces of cake he’d
had at piece number five. I blamed Mum for our lack of control when it came to
anything sweet.
“You know we can’t afford candies,’ she’d say. “Wait
until your birthday or Christmas and then you can have something special.”
We could hardly control ourselves around chocolate and
sweets we saw them so rarely. The sugar overload was too much for Beetle that time.
He was only three but had the sense to turn his head to the side and throw up
over Colin, our dachshund, instead of the table. Colin had been faithfully
sitting next to Beetle’s chair, snapping up the bits of food that never made it
into Beetle’s mouth or onto his face. Colin took the gesture personally and
left the room without looking back. After Beetle had finished vomiting, he
turned back to his slice of cake that was still clutched in his little fist.
“No,” said Mum firmly. “You’ve had quite enough.”
With that she wrestled the cake from him and started
cleaning up the mess. Dad was trying to hide a smile. I could see it behind his
hand. He was always trying to be serious and support Mum when she told us off
but I knew that he didn’t care what we did. When he was left in charge of us
we’d run wild and do what we wanted. So long as Mum didn’t find out it was fine
by him. It was Mum that wanted us to be well behaved and grow up with manners.
She wanted children she could be proud of. Dad wanted to be left alone with his
writing and his books.
“This calls for opening the bottle,” he said.
“No,” she said reprimanding him as if he were one of us.
“The bottle is for a special
occasion.”
“This is a special occasion. Joel is eight, Beetle was
sick and it must be around ten years since we were given it.” He had a smile on
his face and I could tell that he was just kidding with her.
She stuck her tongue out at him. “You’ll be put to bed
with no seconds if you continue like that Preacher Styx.” She always called him
Preacher Styx when she was joking with him. Dad was a preacher before he met
Mum. He always used to say that she showed him the light. That celery was
overrated. I knew that celery was overrated, I’d only tried it once and hated
it.
“Joel drank his own wee.”
This completely ruined everything. I was old enough to
understand almost everything that Mum and dad said to each other even when they
were speaking in code. I was also young enough to pretend that I didn’t
understand anything they or their friends talked about. A week earlier I had
overheard them talking with some of their hippie friends about the benefits of
drinking your own urine.
Even though this was technically accurate, Lazarath
shouldn’t have told them. The three of us had been standing on the bank of the
stream that bordered the bottom of our long narrow garden. Lazarath, as usual,
challenged me to a long-piss competition. Beetle, as usual, wanted to join in.
Beetle always came last by miles. Beetle is five years younger than I am and
Lazarath is only a year younger. So when it came to who could piss the
furthest, Lazarath was always just shorter than me while Beetle trickled on his
feet.
“Let’s drink it instead,’ I said.
“What?” asked Lazarath not believing what I’d just said.
“What?” said Beetle mimicking Lazarath’s question.
“Let’s drink our wee instead of seeing who can make it
go the furthest. You always lose anyway. I dare you to.”
“I dare you.”
“I dare you.” Beetle sometimes became a parrot repeating
everything that one of us said. We generally ignored him when he did this. We
generally ignored him when he did anything. He was only three years old.
I knew I’d have to go first. I’d been curious about
doing it ever since I’d overheard my parents talking about it and now I’d put
myself on the spot. I dropped my shorts and cupping my hand under my little
willy I trickled a handful of the yellow liquid out. Before it had a chance to
slip through my tightly squeezed together fingers I brought it up to my face
and threw it in my mouth. It tasted awful. It was warm, salty and tangy. I
hated it but forced myself to swallow it without pulling a
God-this-tastes-awful face.
“Mmm, that’s really nice,” I said licking my lips.
Beetle wasted no time in copying his oldest brother and
soon he was wetting his hand and licking the urine off it. He hadn’t mastered
the art of catching liquid in one hand yet. Lazarath was hesitant until he saw
Beetle doing it at which point he gave it a try. As soon as it was in his mouth
he spat it out swearing and put his head straight into the stream and gargled
with the water from it. I joined him immediately trying not to choke on the
water as I laughed. Lazarath was on top of me in the water trying to hit me for
making him do it. Now he’d finally got his revenge by telling our parents.
“Is this true Joel?” Mum asked me.
“It was only a joke,” I replied trying not to admit to
the crime.
“Where did you get the idea from?”
I knew then that I’d been rumbled for listening to their
conversations and that they’d be more careful in front of me in the future.
“I don’t know,” I faltered. “I think that Julio at
school was talking about it.”
Mum didn’t look convinced but didn’t continue her line
of questioning and that’s the last we heard of it.
Lazarath avoided me as much as possible after that. When
I finally did catch him alone I sat on his head and farted in his ear.
* * *
My next memory of the
bottle was the first time I saw it. We’d left Mexico two months previously
and had finally finished unpacking our belongings in our new house in Cartagena
de Indias. This was the first house I remember living in with glass windows and
a front door that could lock. It took weeks (and a lost key) before the novelty
of locking and unlocking the front door wore off us. The back door led into a grungy
courtyard with weeds growing between the paving stones and was closed in by the
stark concrete walls of much larger buildings around ours. Dad had taken a job
as an English teacher in one of the four American schools in Cartagena and with
it we got the house.
Even though we didn’t have much, Dad wouldn’t let us
unpack anything unless we were going to use it. He said that if there was
anything still left in the boxes after six months it would get thrown away.
He’d read that somewhere and wanted to test the theory out. He’d forgotten that
we had so little that anything functional had multiple uses. Within two months
the boxes were unpacked and empty.
The
bottle was one of the last
items to come out of the boxes. It was covered with dust when Mum removed it.
With a cloth she carefully wiped it clean and placed it on a shelf next to a
bottle of olive oil. It was a green bottle with its neck wrapped in red painted
lead. Its cream label had Vin du Pays followed by Cabernet Sauvignon on the
next line written in calligraphic magenta and outlined in gold. There was an
embossed emblem and in the inside edges you could see traces of dust that Mum
had missed when she’d wiped it clean.
I took the bottle down and read the French on the label
on the back of the bottle out loud pronouncing each word phonetically in
Spanish. Mum laughed.
“You used to be able to speak French,” she said. I knew
we’d lived in France before we’d moved to Mexico but I couldn’t remember much.
“Before we moved to Mexico we lived in Marseilles and your
French was better than your English. All your little friends would come around
and play and you would all speak French together. If I tried to speak to you in
French however you’d refuse to talk to me and only talk to me in English.”
I couldn’t remember snubbing Mum and refusing to speak
to her. I do remember wishing that I was young enough to still get away with
doing something like that now.
“Is this wine?” I asked.
“Yes, we were given it by the old man that lived in the
cottage next to ours on the farm in Marseilles. Jean-Pierre told us to save it
for a special day. We were going to drink it on our second wedding anniversary
but then I discovered I was pregnant with you and so we’ve been saving it since
then.”
“When are you going to drink it?”
“When we have something special to celebrate. It’s a
very good wine and because it’s red it will keep for a long time.”
“Why does it have crayon marks on the label?”
“The artwork is courtesy of Lazarath when he got crayons
for Christmas.”
It was Beetle’s eighth birthday that evening and when
dad got home I begged him to open the bottle. Lazarath and Beetle, who hadn’t
been part of my conversation with Mum that afternoon, joined in and also begged
for it to be opened. Beetle asked if he could have it for his birthday present.
Dad didn’t say yes or no. It was Mum who said no. She was quite adamant that the bottle wasn’t going to be opened
then. It was being saved for a special occasion.
I tried a few more times over the next few weeks to get
Mum to agree on a date to open the bottle but it was no good. She wasn’t going
to be sucked into any commitments by me and I became bored of the subject and
forgot about it.
* * *
During my late teens the
bottle was locked away with all the other alcohol in the house. This was a
result of Lazarath and I being caught taking sips from the bottle of Tequila.
Our parents had gone to a school play and left us unattended at home. We were
now old enough not to need a babysitter and responsible enough (or so they
thought) not to abuse their trust. It had started as a dare, as always and by
the time our parents returned Lazarath couldn’t walk and I couldn’t talk.
I knew that Dad found it amusing, he found anything to
do with drunks amusing, because he had to immediately excuse himself and leave
the sitting room and I heard him chuckle as he went down the passage. At first
I thought that Mum was furious but I realised that what she manifested as anger
was actual worry. She couldn’t wake up Lazarath and couldn’t get any sense from
me.
“How much did you drink?” she said looking at the
quarter bottle of tequila that was left.
I held up all my fingers in front of her.
“Ten what?” she said. Her face was red and her lips were
tense and she was leaning over listening to Lazarath breathe. One of her hands
was on his wrist feeling his pulse and she was counting. I couldn’t work out if
she was counting his breaths or the beats of his heart.
“Ten what?” she repeated.
I shrugged. I couldn’t remember how full the bottle was
when we started and couldn’t remember how many sips we’d had. After that I
don’t remember anything.
I woke up in my bed the next morning. I had a splitting
headache and later I learnt that it was my first hangover. I found Lazarath
asleep in our parent’s bed. Mum had apparently insisted on sleeping next to him
all night and Dad had to sleep in his bed. Lazarath slept until two that
afternoon and when he got up he didn’t seem to have the hangover I’d had.
Our parents didn’t speak to us about the incident and we
didn’t bring it up. Lazarath and I gated ourselves for the following week - the
one and only time. Everyday after school we came straight home and helped out
with the housework. The bottle along
with the few other bottles of alcohol that we had, were locked away in a
cupboard.
* * *
On the 23rd July 1962 I turned twenty-one
years old. I asked Dad if we could open the
bottle and celebrate my coming of age with it. He thought it was a great
idea and at the party we had that night the bottle took centre stage. At times
I think that my parents were more proud of the bottle and how long it had
lasted than they were of their eldest son coming of age. They told everybody
about it and how our neighbour Jean-Pierre had insisted that we let it mature
for many years before opening it. Dad kept on telling everyone how much will
power you needed knowing that a good bottle of red was sitting in the cupboard.
“I think we’ll find that it’s been worth the while,” he
said.
Mum’s sister, my aunt, and her two daughters, my
cousins, were over from England and staying with us. They’d never been to South
America before and we’d only met them when we were babies and so couldn’t
remember each other. I immediately became besotted with Katherine. The girls
I’d gone out with in Cartagena had all been Colombian and this was the first
real English girl I’d met. Granted, there had been plenty of English Americans
but they weren’t the same. Their accents were very different from our cousin’s
and they never mixed with us. Their parents were ambassadors, diplomats and
businessmen and didn’t mix in the same circles as English teachers and
housewives. As a result the children of these families were rarely together and
often I felt they looked down on us.
Katherine was gorgeous. She was three years younger than
me and was going to study languages at Oxford in September and wanted to learn
as much Spanish as she could while she was with us. Her willow slender body and
long flaxen hair made many head turns when we were out in the streets. Her
admiration for me stemmed from my fluency in Spanish and she was always asking
me to translate for her.
We consummated our mutual lust for each other between
ten and ten-thirty the night of my twenty-first birthday. It took place under
the table, directly under the bottle.
The tablecloth draped down to the floor and secluded us from the festivities
that were going on around us.
“Where’s Joel? Where’s the birthday boy?” I heard
several times while I was deflowering my princess.
“Where’s Katherine?” I heard my aunt say but nobody
seemed particularly worried and the music and noise continued around us.
The stone floor must have been uncomfortable for
Katherine to lie on as she kept on wanting to move around. I’ve never had to
lie naked on my back on a cold slate floor with someone on top of me so I
wouldn’t know.
Our private little party under the table came to end
when Carmen, the five-year-old daughter of one of my Mum’s friends, lifted up
the tablecloth and looked underneath it.
“There they are,” she said to someone in the room. “They
haven’t got any clothes on.”
I’m not sure how many other faces appeared at Carmen’s
little gap in the tablecloth as I was trying out for the
who-can-get-their-clothes-on-fastest competition. I won and was fully dressed
while Katherine was still putting on her bra.
“Hurry up,” I hissed at her.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” she whispered back.
Everyone was waiting for us when we emerged. I could see
Lazarath, Beetle and Katherine’s younger sister giggling behind some adults.
Dad had his hand over his mouth so he obviously found it funny but that was
unfortunately not the case with Mum and her sister. Mum kept on saying how
sorry she was while her sister looked like she was going to explode. Katherine
was led away by the arm as soon as we stood up. Mum looked at me and shook her
head. She then walked over to the table, picked up the bottle and disappeared into the kitchen with it. Dad followed
her and tried to calm her down.
“This is no longer a special occasion,” I heard her say
to him. “He’s a bloody disgrace that son of yours.”
* * *
Lazarath’s twenty-first came and went and so did
Beetle’s. Our cousins didn’t come over from England to help us celebrate either
of them and the bottle wasn’t opened.
Over the years Beetle and I started our own families and Lazarath married into
an instant one. Our parents were proud grandparents and doted on their
grandchildren at the family events we always seemed to be having.
Our children, when young, viewed their cousins as the
enemy and it was necessary to keep a close eye on them to prevent injury. I
found Beetle’s youngest feeding Husky Chunky dog food to my youngest. This, it
turned out was a panacea as he hadn’t been eating properly and suffered from
bad eczema. By putting him on diet of dog food we managed to increase his
weight and completely eliminate his eczema. We managed to hide the fact that he
was eating dog food from him until he was five and a half when he caught me
dishing it out of the tin. He refused to eat anything after that until he was
shown where it came from. A trait that used to drive us to tears in
restaurants.
When our children grew older their antagonistic views to
their female cousins changed and I was continuously being quoted as an example
of what not to let the cousins get up to. The years went by quickly and soon
the children were having twenty-first birthdays and my mind returned to the bottle and what had happened to it.
One day I called my parents.
“What happened to the
bottle?” I asked Mum as soon as she answered the phone.
There was a pause on the line. “What bottle dear?”
“The bottle,
the one you were saving for a special occasion. The one from Jean-Pierre in
France with the crayon marks on the label.”
“I don’t remember what happened to that dear. I think
your father drank it one night.”
My heart sank. I’d suddenly become obsessed with the
bottle again and was hoping that it still existed and I’d get a taste of it
when it was finally opened.
* * *
Years later Dad went senile. It started with the
Jehovah’s Witnesses and this is how the event was relayed to me.
It was Saturday morning and Mum had gone shopping with
my wife. Mum didn’t like to drive by herself in the streets anymore and always
enjoyed Maria’s company. Dad had been left alone at home. There was a knock at
the door and Dad answered it.
“Good morning sir, we’re Jehovah’s Witnesses and we were
wondering if we could come in and speak to you.”
This all took place in Spanish so what you’re reading is
my translation of what I heard from Mum who heard it from the Jehovah’s
Witnesses.
“Gentlemen, what took you so long? I’ve been waiting for
you for years. Please come in.”
Dad led them into the sitting room and sat them down and
gave them ice-cold lemonade from the fridge. The Jehovah’s Witnesses evidently
knew Dad as they started addressing him as Señor
Styx.
“Señor Styx,
we have these pamphlets that explain all about Jehovah.”
“My sons, my children, my disciples, I am Jehovah. It is
me for whom you are working. I don’t need pamphlets explaining who I am. Make
yourselves comfortable and I’ll tell you how it all started and how it’s going
to end.”
Dad used to be a preacher and knew the story from
beginning to end and in great detail. He loved telling stories, any stories,
and now he was convinced that his disciples had come to listen to him.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses tried to leave but Dad was much
quicker than them and had the front door locked and the key in his pocket
before they could get there. They were released three and a half hours later
when Mum unlocked the door from the outside with her key and laden with
groceries. She said that she was almost knocked over as the three young men
rushed out the front door. She sat Dad down and gave him a stern talking to
after that.
* * *
The coup de grâce came when the local constabulary had
to pick up Dad one morning. They had received some calls from the houses on the
street in which they lived. Dad had been seen walking down the street wearing
nothing but a string vest and holding his cock in his hand. I believe that the
police transcript in their report is a fairly accurate account of what
happened:
We stopped Mr Styx and asked him what he was doing.
Mr Styx told us that he was looking for his girlfriend.
We asked Mr Styx where he’d last seen his girlfriend.
Mr Styx then pointed to his penis and told us that he’d
last seen her on the end of it.
We asked Mr Styx for a description of his girlfriend.
According to Mr Styx she is taller than Constable Gonzalez, who is 1m 92cm, has
long blonde hair, enormous breasts and is seventeen years old.
The transcript continued with a few more ludicrous
comments that Dad had made. I went down to the police station to pick him up
and he was released to me on my promise that it wouldn’t happen again.
Dad was oblivious to what was happening around him and
Mum was despairing more and more by the day. With my brothers I suggested that
we get them some professional help to come in and look after him. What
surprised us most was Mum’s suggestion that they move into a home for the
elderly. She already had a few friends that lived in such a home and enjoyed
visiting them.
“I’ll be around my other friends and there’ll always be
someone at the sound of a bell to help me with father if anything happens.”
I’d always thought it was a cruel condemnation when
children put their parents into a home and it was only then that I realised how
lonely their existence had become once we’d left home.
So our parents moved into the Los Amigos de los Viejos de Santa María de Sanchez Gomez and we set
about selling their house, their furniture and their belongings. In the
storeroom were the boxes and bundles they’d collected over their lives that had
no value to anyone except themselves and maybe their offspring. In one box I
found an old tin soldier that I recognised as One Eyed Nelson. There were
photos of us as children and we argued as if we were children as to who would
get to keep which ones. Dad’s manuscripts of books never published and notes
about stories never written were tied together in bundles. I took them vowing
to read them, edit them and try and get something of his published. To date
they are still tied in the same bundles I found them in.
It was in the last box that we pulled out that we found the bottle. The sitting room was already
littered with the contents of all the other boxes when Beetle walked in with
the last box. I rummaged through it and pulled out two old T-shirts, a comb
(Why do people save combs?) and a box of paper clips before I spotted the green
slender neck covered in red painted lead. I pulled it out and rubbed the dust
off it. Most of the label was still visible and the crayon marks could just be
made out.
Lazarath and Beetle were both staring at it. They knew
exactly what it was. We’d spoken about it over the years (until I thought it
had been drunk) as if it was a family heirloom of priceless value.
“Shall I open it?” I asked.
“We had better not,” Lazarath said. “They’re keeping it
for a special occasion.”
“And when do you think that special occasion will
happen?” I said.
They both looked
at me and nodded. It was an unspoken and implicit agreement that our parents
would never open the bottle and celebrate anything with it. Dad wouldn’t
remember it and Mum thought it was gone. I went to the kitchen and brought back
a corkscrew, three glasses and a knife.
Using the knife I carefully cut a line into the lead at
the top of the bottle and flipped it off like a bottle top. I examined the
cork. It was perfect without so much as a blemish. The corkscrew sunk into it
without resistance and the cork slid out with a gentle pop. I looked at the
bottom of the cork expecting to see a dark red stain but instead there was
none.
‘We have to let it breathe,’ Beetle said.
‘It can breathe in the glasses,’ I replied. “We’ve
waited...,” I paused as I tried to work out how many years we’d waited to open the bottle, “...a lot of years to open
this bottle. Let’s waste no more time.”
I put my nose to the bottle and took a deep sniff. “I
hope it’s all right,” I said. “It smells a little bit acidic.”
I started filling the glasses and we all looked on in
surprise. We were clearly expecting a red wine to be coming out and not a
white.
“I thought green bottles were for red wines and clear
bottles were for white wines,” Beetle said.
“Me too,” added Lazarath.
“So did I,” I said just as confused as they were. “Maybe
that has only become the rule recently and in those days it was the other way
around, or maybe all wines came in green bottles in that part of France.”
I pushed a glass over to Lazarath and one over to Beetle
and held mine up to the light. The afternoon sun reflected in the wine and gave
it a tinge of green.
“To Mum and Dad, the best parents anybody could ever
have,” I said holding my glass up to my two brothers.
“To Mum and Dad,” they said in unison and we clinked our
glasses together and put them to our lips.
Lazarath was the first to spit his out covering the wall
next to him. Beetle and I were less discerning and covered the table in front
of us with a fountain of the liquid.
“I’d recognise that taste anywhere,” Lazarath said. “It’s
bloody urine.”
[THE
END]
Word Count: 4735