Embodying

Chapter Three - Head Full of Furniture

Eddie's Story

If I hadn't had got this job at Tesco then I don't know what I would have done. Probably end up busking or begging on the streets for small change or some other down-and-out thing. I'd like to say that I thank God every day for the opportunities he gave me, but I'm not a believer. Not that I don't believe in God; I just don't believe God's like that. He's there but he doesn't give a monkey what we do down here. He created and then he left us to it.

Take my mum for instance. He created her and then left her to fend for herself with two kids that didn't have a dad. Here's how that went:

Dad: your kids are ugly and so they can't be mine. Look at that red hair. Jesus, woman, if I had red hair like that then I'd throw myself in the river. Lucky that I don't and lucky for you that you don't either. If I were you I'd give the kids to that ginger minger milkman. Anyway, I'm off and you'll never see me again.

Mum told me this story when my sister and me was five. Yes, you've guessed it, we're twins. And no, the milkman's not my dad. It'd be mad to think that my mum had an affair with him. I mean, she's just not an early riser at all and so how could she? No, my dad's gone and I'll never see him ever again and that's that.

My mum's a bit of a strange one. I remember her telling me that my sister had been kidnapped by gipsies and they'd all gone to live in Heckmondthwaite. I told her straight to her face that she was lying and that I could hear my sister crying from inside the airing cupboard and besides, there's no such place as Heckmondthwaite and did she perhaps mean Heckmondwhite that is just half an hour from where we used to live back then and she said that we were both incorrect because it was really Heckmondwike she'd meant. Yeah, I know; you can tell how I got to be so confused as a grown-up now can't you!

The world will never end. Not according to Mr Yard at school. He taught us woodworking. When we were thirteen he brought a cabinet into school and told us to make one like it and if we could then we'd pass his class. None of us passed. Not even one. He got into trouble for that and they had to do an independent review of the other work we'd done. I passed in the end and actually became quite good at woodwork. I even made my own guitar out of sheets of plyboard that I bent and cut into shape. It played great until I left it out in the garden one day and it fell to pieces. Must have been the glue that wasn't good enough. I nicked the proper glue from school and so I don't really know what went wrong. Probably something else. But anyway of course the world will end. Mr Yard might have been a dab-hand at cutting up wood but he obviously knew nothing about the nature of things. All of them end eventually. Everything's eventual. The day ends, the night ends and another one begins instead. Another day with another name. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and all of that. Even a river isn't the same river as it was a few seconds before. It might have the same name but the water that was in it has moved on. The old river was dead and a new river has come into being instead. It was even in the bible: a season for this that and the other. So, yeah, screw you Mr Yard and your world-ending stupidness.

I once read a book that Lark gave me after she'd done with it. Lark? Oh yeah, she's my sister. My older sister; like she hardly ever reminds me. By six seconds. We'd agreed to hold hands as we came out of the womb so that we'd be exactly the same age so I don't know what happened there. Must have got separated somehow. And that's another thing: I never could spell the word separated until I made my mind up to get it right. I think that's all you need to do sometimes: just make your mind up. Like surviving the zombie apocalypse. You've just got to make up your mind. That's what the book was about anyway: making your mind up. It was called ... erm ... I don't know, something like: Make Your Mind Up, Fool. No, that can't be right. It wasn't written by Mr T, who called everyone Fool. I'd have remembered that. No, it was ... wait, I got it: Get Your Ess Aitch Asterisk Tee Together. And yeah, it had that cute little star symbol in it instead of the vowel. I can't tell you for sure which letter was missing but you can probably pick the word out from the following line-up: shat, shet, shit, shot, shut. So this book was really useful for me when I was twenty because I was getting old and I still hadn't chosen the career in Tesco that I chose later on. As a result of that very book, I totally turned my life around. I bought a gun. Yeah, I know: stunned silence! No, actually that's a lie. I threw it in there for dramatic effect. Actually what I did then was got myself a boyfriend.