Sowing Seeds by Keith David Robert McKibbin, Ice cold tea

We only saw the Malcomsons twice a year and I dreaded each visit. There was Boxing Day at ours with my presents on display, then the return visit to their detached house with the big back garden on the far side of Belfast. Our visit was always in early August, when they would regale us about the splendours of their recent continental holiday. Only two days out of three hundred and sixty-five. 
It felt like a lot more.
The summer one was the easier of the two. Dad’s dislike of driving through the city in the dark meant that there was a blessed time limit and you could keep your eye on the magic eight. Easier also because our dismal little caravan week in Portrush couldn’t in any way compete with the icing sugar sands of the Seychelles or wherever else they had been (Wendy’s husband Eric had a great job in the Civil Service). No comparison – so it was just a simple case of listening and nodding in all the right places and not spilling your lemonade on the new suite. Their living room was spacious, and when they visited us their elbows were always tight to their sides, a slightly concerned look, as if they feared our pokey little house was about to swallow them. 
Mum had known Wendy Malcomson for thirty years. They had danced round the lampposts, played squash to a high county level, then gone to teaching college together. It was Mum’s slight edge on the squash court that had sown the seeds of competition in their relationship down through the years. Mum got engaged to Dad two whole years before Eric dropped to his knee – and there’s a candid photo of Wendy at the engagement party looking like she’s chewing on a slug. Wendy’s ring, when it eventually arrived, was twice the size of Mum’s and had so many carats that Dad used to say, “What’s up, Doc?” every time the thing was mentioned.
I suppose it was inevitable that Julian, her son, should inherit some of her competitive fervour.
Losing a game of any sort was something beyond Julian’s realm. He simply could not contemplate it, and so he would blatantly cheat. I remember a board game called Operations where you have to extract parts of the body with metal tweezers without touching the sides and activating the buzz. It would be his turn, and there he’d be with his tongue between his teeth, and it would be – zzzz…zzzz…zzzz – and not a flicker of shame on the bastard’s face.
Dad knew the score and the devil in him bought two identical 500 piece Disney jigsaws which he revealed for the first time an hour after one of their visits. I can remember it in vivid detail. Mickey front and centre with his eight fingers in pristine white gloves, Minnie all coy by his side, Donald looking exasperated as others clambered into the frame. I had practised on it for so long on Christmas Day I could have done it handcuffed and blindfolded. I started slow, making a big show of not being able to find the corners, watching the twinkle of glee on Julian’s face as he streaked ahead. I let him click Goofy’s gormless grin into place before I made my charge. Oh, the thrill and pleasure of it! But what really sold it – what really pissed him off – was Dad, seemingly oblivious to the drama, making intermittent quacking noises from the far side of the room. 
After that there was no direct hand to hand combat. Instead, Julian would take delight in playing with my presents and then (subtlety, I’ll give him that, he had been brought up genteelly) denouncing them in favour of his own. Yet, oddly, my toys – albeit superior versions – would often feature in his birthday celebrations in early February. Dad would wink at me when Mum gave us the rundown after one of their phone calls.
“I’ve no doubt he’ll one day win the Nobel Prize to go along with his Oscar,” Dad chuckled. “But our boy’s the puppeteer, is he not?” and he made us laugh with a Pinocchio style walk, whilst yodelling, “High on a hill was a lonely goat, olayee olayee olayee – ee ee!” My dad could be a funny bugger sometimes. 
The two thousand piece domino set I received one Christmas caused him considerable consternation. The obvious response was to giggle at his dad’s banter about cloth caps and beer soaked tables. But there was a method in my own Dad’s madness. We had recently seen an episode of Record Breakers that was dedicated to domino toppling – hundreds of thousands of the things. These beardy types had spent ages meticulously setting them up in a huge sports hall – big ones, small ones, multicolours, up and down and round and round, dozens of different designs and patterns. It was strangely impressive in a dorky, milk bottle glasses kind of way. Norris McWhirter was there with his clipboard and stop-watch. Roy Castle sang a song about it with his trumpet. Pompity pomp.
I knew Julian wouldn’t have the patience for any kind of set-up, so after they had had their little giggle we took them up to my room to show them the lay-out. The whole floor had been cleared of toys and clothes and me and Dad had spent hours positioning them and praying that the province wouldn’t suffer a freak earthquake. 
I’ll never forget the shadow that crossed Julian’s face when he looked down upon the display. It was weird. Like he thought he’d been hoodwinked.
“Who would like to do the honours?” I asked, and all the grown-ups laughed at my pronouncement, but it was kind laughter and I didn’t mind. I think I must have remembered the phrase from Upstairs, Downstairs. Then, the coup de grâce. “Julian, would you like to? Just a gentle little prod …” 
And then to see them all topple and splay out exactly in the fashion me and Dad had designed. That wonderful whirring, rippling effect. The feeling was electric. Every single one of them flattened. They all burst into spontaneous applause – even Julian, but only because he knew how churlish it would look if he didn’t.
Shortly after his next birthday, Wendy breathlessly reported that him and his Dad had successfully toppled all six thousand dominoes (three boxes of them) stretching from his room, all the way down the stairs, and into the new kitchen with the mahogany centre island with the special built in storage. 
Boxing Day 1980 marked the last ever visit. After that it was just Christmas and birthday cards and the occasional phone-call. Families can grow apart like that sometimes. 
It was my best present ever: the Evel Knievel stunt bike.
Mum had been warned not to leak anything down the phone in the weeks before Christmas. I might add, in case you have never heard of him, that Evel Knievel was an iconic America stunt rider of the 1970s. Rock star crowds gathered to watch him fly his Harley Davidson over London double decker buses. They’d run the tape in slow motion and you’d see his stars and stripes cape fly behind him like a super hero. Julian and his dad were heavily into motorbikes. He was always yammering on about a Kawasaki Z1000 he was going to get when he was older. If you showed the slightest interest, and even if you didn’t, he would start on about its air-cooled four-cylinder engine and the horsepower it could produce. Apparently, it could reach speeds of up to 130mph.
They arrived around noon baring wine, selection boxes and Wendy’s famous Christmas pudding – which to be fair was delicious. Julian was annoyed because he had wanted to bring his brand new Grifter bike to show us. A Raleigh Grifter was a bike to be coveted. They had proper mud guards and three speed gears that were controlled by a handlebar mounted twist grip. They were as close to an actual motorbike as you could get. I would have killed for one, but knowing Mum and Dad’s financial situation I hadn’t even bothered to ask.  
Julian clearly wasn’t overawed by the Evel Knievel stunt cycle toy. He did at least show a polite interest in the box which promised Top Speed Jumps, Wheelies, Crashes, and Much More – and so there was nothing else for it. I set up the jumping and landing ramps – Blue Peter and Grange Hill annuals – and attached him to the plastic red energiser. Then it was just a matter of turning the crank to wind up the back wheel and letting him rip.
“Very impressive!” Eric said, sounding not very impressed at all. But then another thought occurred to him and he perked up. “I wonder what percentage the man himself gets for each unit, you know, for each doll.”
Everyone pretended to think about this for a moment before moving back to the living-room. Everyone except me. I didn’t care how much he made on each one. The way I looked at it, if you broke every bone in your body jumping over buses and cars you deserved a few fringe benefits. What I did think about, quite a lot, was the shared smile that had passed between Eric and Julian at the mention of the word doll.
“You’re so lucky where you live,” I said to Julian in the back garden, far out of earshot of any adults.
“Why’s that?”
“Well, because of the hills; it’s flat as anything around here. When I get my Grifter, you know what I’m gonna do?” I gestured for him to lean forward and whispered fervently into his ear. “I’m gonna be the first to do it. What do you think of that?”
He threw back a shrug; but I noticed that his eyes were bright and eager.
About a month later Mum took a phone-call in the hallway and Dad held his hand up for silence when he heard the strange pitch in her voice. We both scrutinised her through the obscure glass, unnaturally hunched over, cradling the receiver to her face with both hands as if she was listening for its heartbeat. 
Julian had broken his neck.
Apparently, he had taken the Grifter up to the top of the Cavehill Road and then flown down it as fast as he could. It was as if he was trying to set some kind of speed record. Eric later tried unsuccessfully to sue Raleigh but the brakes were found to be in perfect working order and it all came to nothing. The problem had been at the bottom of the hill when he had run over a rotten old plank – a sort of a ramp I suppose – lost control and landed on his head. These were in the days before cyclists wore helmets.
Mum and Dad visited him in the Royal Victoria Hospital but I never saw him again. Our pokey little house, with its narrow hallway and bulky electrical sockets, wasn’t wheelchair friendly, and there was therefore no reason for the reciprocal visit. 
That was a long time ago. If he’s still alive, I wish him well. 
Sometimes I think of the Grifter I never had as a boy – but I have no regrets. 
Last month I treated myself to a present that had my teenage daughters in fits of laughter – cracking midlife crisis jokes and making Easy Rider references. It’s a vintage Kawasaki Z1000. A beautiful machine. Apparently, it can reach speeds of up to 130 mph! 
Not that I’ll ever know. I’m always very careful on her.

 Keith McKibbin is an English teacher working in Glasgow. He is married with four daughters and two beautiful granddaughters. His favourite short story writers are O. Henry and Raymond Carver. He has been published in both the Bath and Edinburgh short story competitions.

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