Lies

‘So that’s the story of how Lynn Bartholomew became the first woman to win Wimbledon with an underhand serve,’ I said when I’d finished, and I smiled with all the conviction of a second-hand car salesman trying to look angelic.

She pushed the dinky gold-rimmed spectacles that cost, don’t-tell-your-dad, back up her nose. Her nose is not yet formed enough to hold them in place so it’s like watching one of those mechanical statues that lift their hats up and down on a timed cycle. She had returned to watching THE expert storyteller, Spongebob Squarepants.

Charming, I thought. But, I knew the little men running around inside her head would be pressing buttons, making calculations, scouring through manuals, and sooner or later, they’d admit defeat and she’d ask some questions.

‘That Patrick is stupid,’ I said in-between crossword clues.

She didn’t even flinch, she just pushed the spectacles up.

‘Your Mum’s lying you know,’ I said to get her attention at another mental pause doing the crossword.

She turned around to give me a dirty look.

‘Those spectacles don’t make you look more intelligent,’ I said.

I got another dirty look as she left the room.

The back door banged just as I turned the telly over. I waited a couple of minutes then I got up to close the back door. She just slams it and never lifts the handle back up to close it proper.

Later that night in bed, the Mrs and me were reading our books when something she had read made her think, and she whalloped me over the back of the head with the book.

‘You – stop telling the wean lies,’ she said.

‘What,’ I said with an innocent tone, and chuckled inside.

I knew the wean would ask questions eventually, she always does.