The birthday party by Johnny Barclay
“Why do we have to have a conjuror anyway?” Dolly knew it was too late to ask this question but she asked it all the same. Jimmy looked into his wife’s face with love and understanding.
“It’s what Toby wanted and we promised him this little treat.”
“Oh, I know, but why oh why did it have to be Leonard? I know he’s Toby’s
Godfather and your best friend from school but really …”.
“Listen, Dolly, not much we can do about it now. Almost everyone’e here – Toby’s friends and most of their parents too, Gran and Grandpops to help with the games and tea, and Auntie Maureen and Uncle Joe to make up the home team.”
* * * * *
“Lovely day for a party, lots of grub and booze for us. Perfect. Come on, Mandy, help yourself.” Leonard’s voice was loud and carried. Even from school he had always been one of those people who never seemed to know what they were going to say until they said it. Dolly looked at him. At least he’s smiling she thought, and the parents are smiling back in a watery kind of way. But they all know.
“Time for games,” Jimmy announced and started up the music. Even though the air was filled with the promise of disaster as there was always a level of uncertainty with children’s games, the party went according to plan. Musical bumps and then musical chairs, pass the parcel and then shrieks of laughter to accompany grandmother’s footsteps in which, of course, Gran played the star role. Meanwhile Leonard was kept at bay by Mandy who distracted him with tasty tit-bits from the dining room. Fortified by tea – jelly in crinkly paper cases, smarties galore, iced gems, sausages and birthday cake with lashings of lemonade to drink – the children were nicely, if stickily, warmed up for The Magic Show with Leonard and his assistant, Willoughby, a large floppy rabbit. Not real, mercifully, but a glove puppet with whom Leonard had spent plenty of time practising ventriloquism during his time away.
No one could deny that Leonard had a way with children. They hung on his every word and laughed and laughed. There was an easy rhythm to his style – much smiling with big teeth – endearing and captivating, but also sad that he seemed so much at home entertaining the young and making them laugh. It all felt so right to him, if no one else.
But now he was back with Mandy again. She understood. She would say it’s a sort of illness like cholera or typhoid, though possibly not as deadly or catching. No one was much surprised or anxious when Leonard dropped Grandpops’s watch into a black bag and then smashed it to bits with a hammer. Trust went that far. The children were agog of course and even more so when it reappeared without a scratch in Gran’s handbag, her subsequent Edith Evans impression being rather lost on most of the audience.
“We had to start somewhere,” Mandy whispered as she and Leonard said their goodbyes and set off for home.
“Let’s hope we’re now on the road to recovery.”
Lovely nostalgic piece with an elephant that is invisible even though you know its there. The nature of Leonards ‘illness’ is unstated, could have been anything from a prison sentence for child molestation to something else equally nasty. Kept me wondering!
This a good interpretation of the brief. It becomes obvious to the reader that there is a significantly large elephant in the room, even though we may not be absolutely clear about the details. It’s something to do with Leonard, that’s for certain. Dolly is unwilling to have him at her son Toby’s birthday party, but her husband Jimmy, Leonard’s old school-mate, is more loyal and forgiving. Then, as the unease builds, we learn that Leonard has had some ‘time away’. ‘But now he was back with Mandy again’ and she, his wife, hopes they’re ‘now on the road to recovery.’ I like the lack of specificity in the piece. We aren’t told exactly where Leonard has been and this increases our discomfort. Has he had a mental breakdown? Has he been in prison? And I found that there was an unspoken, even worse question hanging over the situation. ‘No one could deny that Leonard had a way with children,.’ Is it possible that he had been found guilty of offences against children… shades of Rolf Harris…? Maybe I’m overthinking it, but the fact that my mind moves in that direction is a tribute to the effective spookiness of the piece. The innocent setting of a child’s birthday party makes the secret of Leonard’s past all the more intriguing… and possibly worrying.