It's sick
Jeremy Clarke
Iwas standing in my Mum's kitchen last week when I coughed. I coughed so violently that I retched, and the retch set off waves of nausea. I held out as long as I could, but was overwhelmed and vomited into the kitchen sink. I was sick three times then felt fine again. I then had the problem of what to do with the mess in the sink. We'd had tuna fishcakes for lunch, which I'd wolfed down in a hurry as usual, and the lumps were too large to slip through the little circular sieve thing in the plug hole. So I ladled them into a saucepan with a wooden spoon. Not as easy as it sounds, this, as they were slippery with digestive juices.
I thought I was unobserved. But my Uncle Reg had been watching me through the kitchen window. Uncle Reg, a sort of sawn-off Hemingway, has lived abroad, in Kenya, for many years, but has had to return to the land of his birth to undergo a complicated surgical procedure on his brain. The surgeon should simply have removed the entire brain and had done with it. The effect on his behaviour would have been negligible and might even have proved beneficial. And the simpler procedure would have cost our country less. But the doctors have made their minute adjustment, and inexplicably, given that Reg is as boring and opinionated as before, the operation has been pronounced a success.
Ex-army officer Reg has visited England just once, for a month, in the last ten years. And he's constantly been banging on about how this country has gone to the dogs and how he can't wait to get away again. He can't leave, unfortunately, until the consultant examines his head and gives him the all-clear. The main indicators of this decline Reg cites as rising levels of crime,
immigration and drug abuse, and the poor state of the railways. The root cause of this decline, he says, is the new sexual permissiveness and absence of moral absolutes.
Reg likes a cheap cigar. Apart from Liquorice Allsorts, they are his only public vice. He's not allowed to smoke in the house so he strolls in the garden to smoke. The garden is divided into four parts by high ancient walls. On his second afternoon, a warm one, he came across my sister and her new boyfriend lying naked under the old apple tree. I understand they were embracing. Visibly shaken, Reg said afterwards that he didn't know what belonged to whom. I said I thought that sort of thing was perfectly normal amongst the Kenyan ex-pat community. This was a 'load of tripe', he said. The settlers had for the most part led decent, hard-working lives.
About a week later, out for his postprandial smoke, he came upon my sister rolling a joint beside the blackcurrant bushes. I was in attendance. 1 say, is that what I think it is?' he said stiffly. 'It is,' said my sister, carefully inserting the roach, 'My God!' he said, clutching his bandaged head. 'I'm surprised at you both.' My sister and I said we had always been under the illusion that the use of illegal narcotics has always been very much a part of the distinctive expat culture out in Kenya. James Fox's White Mischief had got a lot to answer for, he said.
The TV programme Sex and the City had him sadly shaking his head and saying, 'Poor old England!' This became his refrain. 'Poor old England!' he says whenever we are stuck in a traffic jam, or when yet another piece of crass government propaganda is disseminated as news by the BBC. He means it, too. He is deeply saddened.
One Sunday afternoon he thought he'd plumbed the depths. He grabbed my arm and frog-marched me to his bedroom. He had something to show me, he said. He led me across the room and pointed into the waste-paper basket. 'Look! A bloody syringe!' he said. 'Have you fools no shame? And in your mother's house, too! I shall have to tell her, you realise that.' I picked the syringe out of the bin and examined it. Uncle Reg stepped back in alarm as if I had picked up a poisonous snake.
It was an insulin syringe. The last person to use that room was diabetic. The bin hadn't been emptied. I told Reg this, Convinced he was recuperating in Sodom, however, Reg wasn't wearing it. 'A likely bloody story,' he said.
I scooped up the last of the sick from the kitchen sink. Glancing up, I saw Reg looking in through the kitchen window at me, He'd been watching me while finishing off one of his cigars. He looked concerned. 'Everything all right, old man?' he said through the glass. 'Bad drugs, Uncle,' I said. 'Nothing to worry about.' I emptied the saucepan outside onto the bird-table.
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