Life on the Edge
Neononckle
First
Chapter
Enjoy
Hello? Hello, is anyone there? Right, I’ll begin. I’m known by the family as Neononckle. When I asked why, my Dada told me I reminded him of a nonckle. I don’t know what a nonckle is, but I know how much my Dada loves me, so it must be good. Anyway, whether I like the name or not, that’s what I’m stuck with, and there’s an end to it.
I’m four years old. Not any ordinary four-year-old, mind you, but a special one; my Mammy, Daddy and grandparents - Dada and Nana - have all told me so. I don’t know whether that means I’m special just to me, or I’m special just to them, or special to everyone, but either way I’m special. So there you have it; I’m a special four-year-old.
I’m not without my problems, mind you - being four is not all plain sailing; it’s not all roses and napkins, I can assure you. I have many things to contend with - school, parents, and grandparents, as well as a sister who can be a pain in the neck, and two dogs that seem to follow her in behaviour sometimes. Overall, I’m learning to handle them, but sometimes it takes the occasional cry to get them to do what I want. On a few occasions when they are particularly difficult I resort to a full-blown strop, but generally I don’t have to go this far - they’ve given in long before then.
The other major problem is writing. I’m only four, remember, and four-year-olds are not renowned for writing books. I’m able to handle the E’s, N’s, and O’s; I’ve had enough practice writing my name so there’s not much difficulty there. But the S’s, Q’s, Z’s, Y’s and X’s - that’s another matter; they give me no end of trouble. They’re a pain to get right - the letters are just too squiggly. So how can I write this book? You can see the problem, can’t you?
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention earlier - I’m also precious as well as special. My Dada told me I’m more precious than all the gold and diamonds in the world. I did ask if that included the moon and stars as well, but he said there’s enough on this planet to make me precious, so I didn’t pursue the matter. I know my mother has a gold ring and my Nana a gold bracelet, but was assured there’s tons of the stuff all over the world and that’s how precious I am. As for diamonds, I don’t go a bundle on them; they’re girly things and I haven’t fallen for that one, but I’ve definitely settled on the gold, though I would have preferred to include the stars as well. Dada did say that he loved me as high as the stars, so I left it at that just to make him feel good - he’s old and needs all the encouragement he can get.
Anyway, it’s time to get on with the story. As I said, being four has its problems, but slowly I’m overcoming them. The pressure at the moment is just bearable - only just, mind you - but bearable, so I’m not grumbling; well, not too much anyway. Back to the problem of the book: I’ve asked my Dada to stand in for me and do the writing; I only hope he’s up to it. He mumbles a lot, but I don’t think he’s at the stage where he needs to borrow my napkins just yet. Anyway, they would be too small for him; he pees an awful lot, especially after drinking beer.
This was a big decision of mine because sometimes he doesn’t listen and thinks he knows best. I’ve had to curtail that runaway attitude of my Dada on many occasions, but latterly he’s responded well, which helped me make the decision that he was the right man for the job - I only hope I won’t live to regret it when I grow up.
Oh yes, another thing; my Dada is not too hot on the old spelling, but he assured me there would be no problem if he used the spell check on the computer. Just to be on the safe side, I’ll ask my Mammy to check it over, but I won’t tell Dada. It’ll be our secret - they get so sensitive at his age to criticism.
Let’s get down to the start. I cannot remember being made or how I was put together in the first place - all that belongs to grown-ups - but they said I was a love child. I expected they kissed or something, and there I was in my Mammy’s tummy. My Mammy explained that I’m made from both her and my Daddy, and I will know more when I get older.
“But I’m already four,” I protested.
However, my mother said, “It’s still too young.” I mentioned earlier that parents could be a problem. I hope you can see what I mean. They must at times be handled like a piece of porcelain and are always prone to chip with age.
On many occasions I felt my parents were abusing my basic human rights, going back to the time I was conceived - that’s before I was born, mind you. I have a right to know where I come from, and if I knew the number I would phone ChildLine to make my protest known. My Mammy has already taught me how to use the telephone and I can count up to ten and more, so she knows I can do it if pushed.
But this blackmail got me nowhere, in fact the direct opposite, so it was futile to take it any further. My mother needed a greater frightener to reveal how I was made and I couldn’t think of one, so I wet my pants in retaliation but said it was an accident and resolved to have it out with Dada. He’s far easier to handle than my Mammy, but needs to be asked the most basic of questions several times before he responds.
Anyway, after I was made my mother carried me in her tummy for about ten months. I don’t know why she did that. It seems such a stupid thing, but grown-ups are sometimes stupid. It would have been far better if I’d been born straight after the kissing, which would have made it easier on my Mammy’s body, and for her to explain. She could then have avoided the subject and saved herself a lot of embarrassing questions.
But grown-ups go the long way about everything and make a feast out of the smallest of morsels, building the simplest questions into gargantuan proportions. To be fair, I suppose I am very small, but nevertheless you would have thought they could have gone about explaining the subject a lot easier - but it wasn’t to be! It was swings and roundabouts before we even got to the start, and I’d lost interest long before then, and was colouring a picture of a horse.
Right then, as I said, I was stuck with my mother for ten months, joined at the belly button so to speak. That’s a long time to be stuck constantly inside anyone, even if it happens to be your mother; and what made it worse, I had no say in any part of it. Do you know, she was even breathing for me, which I think is a bit of a liberty.
I never saw my father or my Dada or Nana for the whole of that time; that’s another thing I intend to bring up with ChildLine, being deprived of my father and grandparents for nearly ten months, kidnapped in my mother’s stomach. That’s got to be good for a bag of sweets to keep my mouth shut. One thing I don’t understand, though, is why she couldn’t wait to get me born and out of her stomach? Why keep me there in the first place if she was that keen to see me out? Another grown-up thing I don’t understand. They’ll have a lot of explaining to do when I reach five and am grown-up enough to understand these things.
Back to the stomach, or should I say the cave: there was no light; it was very dark, oh yes - except when my Mammy went for a wee. I did get a bit of light then, but not a lot - in fact, so little it’s not worth talking about. I only mention it to show she wasn’t totally selfish at that time, even though she had many mood swings.
One time - I nearly forgot this - she went through a period of drinking lots of water; my Daddy called it a pregnancy fad. Apparently, these fads are quite common and are designed to make husbands feel uncomfortable and to keep them on their toes, having them running out in the middle of the night looking for a pickle with buttercup jam on or something to keep them happy. The woman knows there can be no retribution at this time, and they milk it like a dairymaid in days of old before those big machines, until the udder is sore and dry from the pulling. They do say that many men go bald over this period, something to do with hormonal imbalance and testosterone, but again that’s for grown-ups to work out. The only balance I need to worry about nowadays is how to keep it in until I get to the toilet, and that’s hard enough at my age.
My Daddy goes to the pub when he needs a rest and orders a pint of beer and complains to his friends about the pressure the pregnancy is causing to him. My Daddy said men complain a lot more than women about pregnancy on account of the extra stress on them and the prenatal strain they are constantly under. But they keep it away from their wives, which I think is a very considerate thing to do, and mention it only when at the pub where they get the maximum understanding and sympathy, while cradling a pint of beer with their mates, practising the cradling technique for when the baby is born.
The common complaint is their wives don’t understand them over this period. One man, poor devil, even had to reduce his hours at the pub to five nights a week instead of the normal seven; apparently, the pressure on him was pitiful to behold as he was forced to stay in two nights a week with his wife.
“Women don’t see this side of their men,” the barman commented, “or they wouldn’t be so heartless,” and it was generally decided, most men nodding around the bar in agreement.
“If only the wives could see how we suffer without complaining,” one man sitting at the end of the bar remarked, looking deep into his pint glass.
The continual drinking of water by my Mammy meant what goes in must come out, sometimes behind trees, behind hedges, behind walls if she was caught short. For a little while I did think with all this daylight she was exposing me to, I may have to resort to factor 30 suncream, but the fad stopped as quickly as it started and my Mammy quickly moved onto some other fad, to my immense relief.
My Daddy also started to drink more over this period, and frequently disappeared into a hedge or around a tree, but that’s understandable. I, being a boy and all, could not help but admire his strength of character in handling a very difficult pregnancy. It wasn’t easy you know, trouble from start to finish, my mother being all over the place and sick most mornings. It’s always the man who suffers on these occasions; my Daddy reckons women, talking generally, will never admit to it.
This suffering could only be shared with their fellow mates down the pub where there would be oodles of sympathy, providing there were no women around who could overhear them, or all hell would break out. But even when the men were in their bastion of relative safety, there was still the pressure of being overheard and misunderstood, so they needed to be as careful as if they were Protestants in a Catholic country that still practised burning of heretics.
I was still in her stomach, remember. I had legs and arms and was totally in touch with all my mother’s moods and emotions and went through them all with her. The crying, the laughter, the ups and downs - it all affected me to a greater or lesser extent.
If she cried, I felt sad; if she was nervous, I was nervous; when my Mammy laughed, I laughed. I was part of her body and she mine, and I could read her like a book. We were one person with two minds. My Mammy was forming my personality even before I was born; my love was growing for her daily as my little body grew in hers, and I often heard her talking to me and tapping her stomach to give me reassurance.
The only way I could answer was to move, to show I was happy and understood. It wasn’t the words she used - language was a foreign notion to me, I couldn’t even gurgle - it was the tone I was able to pick up on, the vibrations she used to convey them. Each word had warmth, a nuance of love in every letter, and I responded in the only way I knew how, by kicking her until her stomach rumbled like a volcano, a volcano of love, that could only happen between mother and unborn child. But here I am getting sentimental and I haven’t been born yet.
