Scrabbling
From the driver’s seat of his parked car, Chester tapped out a fresh cigarette and studied the contents of the removal truck. A child’s fort of battered cardboard cubes against the cab wall proclaimed ‘Kitchen’ and ‘This way up. Fragile!’. Chairs and tables from all rooms were mixed together and stacked on their backs or upside down, an alien forest of misplaced furniture. He didn’t recognise them at all. A large redbrick house loomed over the hedgerow, threatening memories. When was the last time he’d seen the inside? Best forgotten. He pulled down the sun visor, looked through puffy red eyes at two day stubble in the mirror, pawed a parting into his hairline and tapped ash onto the dashboard, flicking two thirds of the cigarette into the bushes as he stepped out of the car.
The front door was locked and when no answer came to his knock, he walked along the alley and past his mother’s roses, wilted now with months of neglect. At the corner of the garden shed he dug the green and stained spare key from beneath a cracked plant pot and let himself in the back door, stepping out of the warmth of day and into the kitchen tundra, a chill radiating from the parquet floors and marbled surfaces. The tiles were practically frosted. All four doors of the AGA were opened out and there were gaps in the kitchen units, electrical entrails where appliances had once been. Dust danced in the air, pirouetting in beams of sunlight, disturbed by the mass migration of furniture. Chester coughed and spluttered and parted the thick air with wild sweeps of his hand.
The old man was upstairs; stooped in the door to the master bedroom, one foot in, one foot out, somewhere on the cusp of now and then. An empty box in his hand. The sheets were crisp on the large double bed. The night stands held matching lamps. On the nearside table a book lay open face down. The far side held a tortoise shell hair brush and a small silver framed photo. A young couple and their boy. Beside that table, the window overlooked the rose beds. But his father looked hard at something that Chester himself could not see.
‘You’ve not even started in here. Do you want me to start boxing things up?’
‘No-no, there are boxes in the study you could carry down. Oh! Come look at this with me, would you?’
His father took him by the hand, pulling Chester along the hall like an unruly school boy lost in the corridors. A large bay window filled this room with light and looked out over the park opposite the house, dust motes pirouetting in the morning sun to the sound of children at play. Their voices were too close for Chester’s liking; the window was always open a sliver in this room and he felt that the sound of children playing was all very well as long as you couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying. Ghostly shadows of photographs and ornaments covered the walls, the green paint dulled and faded around them. Their benefactors now sat in cardboard boxes around the room, boxes labelled ‘trophies’ and ‘awards’. One box, ‘photographs’ sat open, framed images of his father winning his first regional, coming first runner up at the internationals in ’81 and winning in ’82, meeting the Queen as Sports Personality of the Year. A small pile of frames sat on the corner of the desk, ready to complete the box. The top one showed Chester and his father playing a father son doubles match with another couple. They’d lost that match, and the other boy had gone on to be something of a prodigy. His father picked the photo up as they approached the desk, looking at it over his glasses with a smile.
‘Emile seeded 9th at the last national, y’know?’
He put it with the rest amongst the boxes and turned to the game set up in the middle of the desk.
‘I’m playing this game by fax with Mitch in Washington. I could get ANTLIKE in here for the bingo, but he’d get the triple word score next turn.’
Chester looked at the board. GENETRIX next to TIGLIC with FICHE laid over the top. Words he didn’t understand and, he suspected, no-one did; words lying meaningless and unconnected in their grid.
‘You were always great player as a child.’
He knew there were one hundred and forty-four words hidden on the tile rack. He could easily place LATKE or ANTE. But none of them was LOSS. None of them was SORROW. None of them filled the space between him and his father. He did notice KIT, a type of small violin designed to fit in a pocket, but he didn’t think that counted.
‘Well? What do you think?’
‘I think you’ve got to be out of here in five hours and there’s a lot to do.’
His father shuffled the tiles wordlessly for a moment and then left the room. Chester slid all of the tiles back into their box and folded the board on top. He put the game on the top of an open packing crate and sealed it shut with parcel tape. He stacked it with another box by the door and carried the two out, through the empty walls of the landing and staircase, past the empty living room, through the empty kitchen. Each empty room more empty than the empty room before. Like the hermit crab, his father had outgrown it. Moved on. Left this shell of a home behind on the beach for the next crab.
As he kicked open the gate there was a crash from the back of the truck, furniture mounds crumbling and a final splintering crack. Motionless he waited for signs of life. The long hollow stripping of tape from cardboard confirmed it. He approached the truck quietly and then dropped the two boxes heavily into the back.
‘HEY!’
The boy jumped back from the box he had his head in, spinning around and thrusting two tiny hands into pockets. He was no older than six or seven, if Chester was any judge. His hair was windswept and tangled, and whatever jam held it in place also streaked his t-shirt, a deep red oil spill across the yellow and purple stripes. The boy’s eyebrows knitted in the small of his forehead and his head fell to one side, like a Labrador puppy suddenly determined to understand the human language.
‘Hello.’ he said.
The two stared at each other. The child seemed to be waiting for Chester, expected something more from him.
Didn’t we all? He thought.
Chester broke first from the staring competition, wondering where the child had come from. Nobody in the park was searching for him. A neighbourhood kid maybe?
‘Can I help you? Are you lost?’
The boy shook his head violently from side to side.
‘Nope!’
And turned back to searching through the boxes, a new one, completely apart from the box which had so recently contained his jammy head. He fumbled with the parcel tape on ‘Kitchen’ and then tore at the corner.
‘What are you looking for?’ Chester asked after a while.
‘Toy box.’
‘Of course.’
The boy searched under knives and pans. A plate shattered in the bottom somewhere. Chester put a cigarette to his lips and patted his pockets for a lighter. The boy stopped his own search and stared at him again.
‘You want one?’
The boy’s nose wrinkled. ‘Smoking is for bad people.’
Chester put the cigarette away.
‘How do you know there’ll be toys?’
‘Mr. Lockwood lets me play sometimes.’
Leaning on his elbows over the tailgate of the truck he watched the boy tear open each box, scattering the top layer of contents across the floor before moving on to the next. With a sigh he pulled himself over the breach.
‘Try the ones against the wall.’ he said, pointing at a half dozen small boxes all labelled ‘Chester’.
Chester himself carefully peeled the parcel tape from the top of ‘This way up. Fragile!’. Inside, carefully folded in tissue paper, was a long white chiffon dress. He ran his hands over it, peeling back the tissue to finger the lace detail, then placed it gently on top of ‘STUDY’. Beneath it he found all manner of things; several handmade valentines cards with dirty limericks, a notebook where the first few pages were stuck with cinema ticket stubs, his mother’s porcelain pig collection, a small box filled with mummified rose petals, a tourists map of Rotterdam. Only half of the excavated objects made sense to Chester, but like all good archaeologists he had a good idea of what he was looking at before he started digging. He picked out a well thumbed copy of Love in a Cold Climate. Something fell from between the pages: a hospital tag written in French. The year his mother had fallen ill on a business trip. Chester had been young, but they had flown out to be at her bedside for a week before she could travel home, playing board games across the foot of her hospital bed. Dad had gotten very good at word games that summer.
A small raspberry jam smeared nose poked over the lip of the box. The child took in the contents and then raised an eyebrow at Chester. Chester shrugged.
‘Got a Gameboy.’ the boy said, raising it two handed above his head. Proof.
‘You can keep it.’ said Chester.
The child’s eyebrows met in conspiracy again and Chester realised he wasn’t asking permission. The boy looked at his watch; a simple digital screen hidden in a chunky colourful plastic face shaped to look like one cartoon character or another.
‘I should go,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Pokemon.’
Chester nodded. ‘I guess so.’
The boy stuffed the Gameboy into a pocket and shuffled towards the door, sitting down on the tail lift.
‘Is Mr. Lockwood leaving because he’s sad?’
‘I… His wife died.’
The boy looked down at the gum riddled tarmac with a hard expression and considered this for a while. He nodded. Once. This is how it should be.
‘Okay, bye!’
He jumped from the truck and ran out across the road without looking back, disappearing into the park.
Chester looked at the mess left behind in the back of the removal truck. The nonsense of the topsy-turvy furniture and cardboard scattered like snow on the ground. He sat on the floor with his back to the truck wall and flared up a fresh cigarette, an ’84 Beano annual open in his lap. The children still played in the park. The birds still sang in the trees. The green and golden branches still swayed gently in the breeze.
He heard his father approaching from the house and stubbed out, throwing the remains under the car. He jumped up and started searching again through the detritus of family life. His father, Mr Lockwood, dropped two more boxes on the floor and watched as Chester pulled furniture out onto the footpath. First a folding card table, struggling with the locking mechanism upside down in the street, and then two mismatched chairs. He opened a box scrawled ‘Study’ and retrieved the battered game box from within, carefully arranging it on the table. Chester sat down in the canvas lawn chair and gestured his father towards the dining room chair opposite. His father ceremoniously lifted the tile bag above eyesight, gave it two sharp shakes and then, still above his head, pulled seven tiles and arranged them on the rack in front of him. Chester raised an eyebrow and shook his head, taking his own seven tiles as the bag lay on the table.
Mr. Lockwood immediately played OCELOID for 76 points.
Chester stared through the tiles on his rack but couldn’t find the words.
