My Uncle Scrooge
Jeremy Clarke
It was blowing a hooligan outside. There was a knock at the door, which was open, and there was this doctor — the biggest doctor we'd ever seen — stamping his big brown brogues on the doormat. He'd come to examine Uncle Jack, who we sincerely hoped might be dying at last. Before he went in, the gigantic doctor shared a joke with us. He was getting out of his car just now, he said, when a gust of wind tugged the computer print-out of Uncle Jack's medical record out of his hand and blew it away. Hoping it was some kind of a portent. I went outside in my slippers to make sure it had gone, but found it flapping madly on a blackcurrant bush.
Having examined Uncle Jack, the doctor's opinion was that, if the infection in Uncle Jack's lungs wasn't checked immediately, he could be lying on a mortuary slab by Christmas Day. All we could do, he said, was hit it with a powerful dose of antibiotic and hope for the best. As the best that we could possibly hope for that dirty, demanding, senile, abusive, wealthy old man was that the infection would rout the antibiotic completely, and that he was indeed lying on a mortuary slab for the Christmas festivities, we felt his statement was a slightly contradictory one — but we let it go.
As soon as the doctor's car pulled away I marched in to Uncle Jack's room, determined to get him to open his wallet. With nearly a million quid in his current account, yet unable to bring himself to spend 50 pence on a newspaper, let alone a Christmas present, Uncle Jack is a perfect example of a miser. There's nothing he would enjoy more, for example. than dying suddenly just before Christmas, thereby saving himself the few quid he might otherwise have been forced to spend on gifts.
But I wasn't going to let him get away with it this time. Mortuary slab or no mortuary slab. I was going to make him prise open that wallet of his and hand over enough money to buy a Christmas present, on his behalf, for the part-time care assistant who looks after him. The calm, polite impoverished woman whom he shouts abuse at all the time, and who assiduously clears up the faeces and urine he uses sometimes as weapons of psychological warfare.
'Who?' he said. I reminded him. 'How much?' he said. Her favourite perfume is called something like Excusez-moi, s'il vous plait. I've smelt it. The Charge of the Light Brigade would be a better name. But how it smells is immaterial. The point was that it costs 30 quid a scoop in the High Street and he was going to pay for one.
'Forty quid, Uncle,' I said. If you give me 40 quid I'll buy it and wrap it up and give it to her on your behalf. 'Forty pounds!' he gasped. He was gasping for air with so little success I thought he was going to snuff it there and then. But he pulled himself together and put on his pathetic old man voice. Well I don't know, Jeremy. Forty pounds sounds rather a lot to me.'
He did everything he could to avoid getting his wallet out. He burst out crying. He pretended to be dead. He agreed to the purchase but said he'd pay me back afterwards. He said he didn't have any money. He said he didn't know where his wallet was. I wasn't going to be fobbed off over this one, though. I was implacable. Finally, with a trembling hand, he drew his wallet out from his dressing-gown pocket.
The wallet's leather exterior was in a terrible state. The epidermis was all gone and not much dermis left either. The condition of the interior was entirely unknown. In the four years since he came to live with us, no one has clapped eyes on it. Although Uncle Jack has never been known to use his wallet, he keeps it on him at all times. When he comes hobbling out of his room, pop-eyed with rage, to accuse us of stealing it, all we have to do is humbly suggest he investigate the familiar bulge in his dressing-gown pocket. At night he sleeps with it under his pillow. To watch Uncle Jack attempting to open this sacred object in public for the first time was like watching the opening of a time capsule.
Inside the wallet were five £20 notes. He couldn't bring himself to hand them over. He just gave a sad little shrug to indicate that I might as well help myself. I relieved him of just the two. But when I tried to buy the bottle of Excusez-moi, s'il vous plait with the two notes, the shop assistant refused to accept them. That type of £20 note, she said, was withdrawn from circulation ages ago.
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