The question that plagues me

Theres a kind of humour that I’ve sort of grown out of. The broad, quirky self deprecating type that most people find amusing like admitting to wanking to Smurfette. Its funny in the way Joey and Chandler were funny but this story isn’t about that.

This is a story that has hounded me and when I tell it it gets a laugh but I’m serious when I say it has plagued me. I have woken up at 4am and replayed it over and over again wondering just what happened.

As a kid, around 7 or 8 we went to Butlins. Somewhere in the UK. I have no idea where because as a kid you’re not going to England; you’re going to Butlins. Same way as a child when an adult would ask me where I’m from I’d say ‘Ireland’ when the answer they wanted was Tallaght or Dublin. You have no idea about the scope of geography.

For those who don’t know, Butlins is/was a holiday camp for middle to working class families where the parents could sit themselves down in the huge drinking hall and be free from the kids except for the regular returning to get another pound coin for the arcade. I loved it. That summer I discovered Pac Land . Having played Pacman for years I just couldn’t believe how wonderful this new game was. They also had a huge swimming pool with windows in the sides, facing the drinking hall so if the parents bothered to turn their heads they’d see their blue faced kids pounding on the glass trying to get a wave.

There were loads of activities all overseen by The Kids club. Which thinking about it now had to be ran by teenagers. ‘Bubbly and outgoing guys and girls needed for child friendly holiday resort’. They laid on lots of things to do, arts and crafts, races and the like. It was fun but I’ll always remember the complete downer of being told sit down at a desk in what looked like a classroom on my summer holidays. ‘This isn’t a shower….it’s a fucking gas chamber!’

They paired you up with other kids. I went on my own one day and got matched up with some English kid. We talked the way kids do in awkward spurts and disjointed ramblings about He-Man and football stickers. I remember thinking he was a square because he never saw an ice pop stick sharpened down to a point by rubbing it on a kerb. I always had one tucked in my sock in case things got messy.

So this days activity was a ‘treasure hunt’. You were given a photocopied sheet, no it was actually spirit print, those cheap but fun purple copies. I remember my school start using them and we all knew it was a cost saving measure. The items we had to find were….

I knew I was going to win. I can’t remember the prize, I think it was a pencil and a can of Coke but I wanted to win. A treasure hunt. I’d be the number one treasure finder. As we filed out calmly I noticed there were kids who were much older and taller than me, they must have been at the age between being a kid and a teenager and weren’t having fun or not admitting to it. I remember the last family holiday I went on when I was 15 and we all realised it was over. I couldn’t sit and drink Fanta. That was the time I shot my goo into my eye in the shower down in Tramore.

So we’re filing out calmly, me feigning disinterest and then darting off in the opposite direction from where around 12 kids where being led by the Leaders on a group treasure hunt the fucking losers. How could they win if they’re searching in a group? My ‘friend’ said we should go with the group and I told him we’d have better luck going the complete opposite direction and he still hesitated. He must have remembered the shiv in my sock because soon he was foraging with me.

We found three of the items immediately, a match, a pebble and a cigarette butt. We still needed a flower and a bottle top. We searched all over the place, grabbed a doozy of a flower from some display but couldn’t find a bottle top. I was getting agitated. What was the time limit? How long had we been gone for? I searched like a lunatic in a bin as he looked on worried. And then it hit me. I had to play dirty.

I had money and there was a Supermarket within the resort so I’d just buy a bottle, drink it and then present our haul and bag the prize. I remember the two us looking very guilty and nervous as we approached the checkout thinking that the Kids Club had issued an APB banning all kid from buying drinks in case of cheating. I’d go on to feel that exact same terror countless times in my teens as I tried to buy alcohol in Super Valu. It went smoothly and we left with a gaudy two litre of some cheapo Orange drink like Fanta. It had two colour printing on the label. It was cheap. I started chugging it. Frantically.

I passed it to him and he took a timid sip, I could tell he felt like he was breaking 100 laws that day. He passed it back and I lashed into it again but it hardly made a dent in the thing. I don’t remember if I demanded he drink it or if he was trying to end this sordid affair as quickly as possible but suddenly he was gulping it down like it was the antidote.

And this image is ingrained in my head. His face red and his eyes watering, either from the cheap fizz or the awfulness of the situation.

We ended up pouring it down a shore. We ran back to the clubhouse at full speed. I siezed him just before we crested the corner. “WAIT!!” I yelped. And I dropped the bottle top on the ground and stomped on it. “It looked too new”. He wasn’t impressed and I was digusted. I could imagine his dopey life, his scalextric packed neatly under his bed, his undoodled copy books and when he was a teenager his Ma wouldn’t let him put posters on his wall and he’d grow up to play pitch and putt. I hated him the little sap.

The clubhouse was closed. We waited a while in silence. He wanted to go. I told him to wait. We waited. But then he left. Fine, I thought. Fuck him. I’d get all the glory. The lone crusader.

But nobody came. It felt like an eternity. It was.

Was I far too early or far too late? Had we collected the items in record time or spent far too long on the bottle top? I looked at the grubby treasures in one hand and the 50p in the other and decided to leave for a game of Pac Land.

It bugged me for the rest of the holiday. Was I too early or was I too late? Had my dishonesty made me win or lose spectacularly? And it bugged me for the rest of the Summer. Then the rest of the year. Then the year after that. Was I too early or was I too late?

And for the rest of my life. I lie awake and mull over the things in my life and the kinks in my past and it’s usually the first thing that comes to mind. Again and again. You can laugh but these are the words of a tortured soul.

Posted in Blog, illustrated blogs by Bob on Jul 19th | 6 Comments