Tuesday 5 May 2009

Episode 13 - Goodbye Grandad Gold

Grandad Gold lay on his back in the Abyss. It wasn't too uncomfortable, he thought to himself. It helped that he couldn't actually feel anything.

"I'm off, then," Granny Gold called down to him. She looked very far away up there, just a tiny head peering at him.

"Right-y-o. Off to get some help."

"No, just off," Granny Gold said.

"But I'll see you again in a minute - with the ambulance crew?"

Granny Gold smiled. "You can think that if it helps. So long."

"Wait!" Grandad began to call to her, but realised he had no idea what her first name was. He had always called her Granny Gold. How odd. "Wait a minute... Granny Gold... Goldy.... Goldykins..." He racked his brain for a suitable pet name. "My little nugget. My eighteen carat darling. My -" he stopped abruptly. She had gone.

He waited for the ambulance. He knew there was one in Plastic Street - a square, shiny white thing that occasionally emerged from the hospital, did a few pointless laps and returned, empty. Strangely he had never seen any patients in it. No one was born or died. Was that unusual?

His thoughts drifted back to his own childhood and for a moment he was lost in memory. Only for a moment, though. He only had one memory of his childhood: a dazzlingly sunny day in a park throwing a ball and laughing, vague blurred figures standing just out of the picture representing his parents. He realised with a sort of dull inevitability that he didn't know their first names either.

He supposed it was age. Other people probably had great childhood memories. But at least he had his love for Granny Gold - oh, it was absurd. How could he not know her name after all this time?

And then it hit him.

"Plastic St is our past, present and future!"

There was no time. She was Granny Gold, he was Grandad Gold. It had always been so. He couldn't remember his childhood because he had had no childhood. The one memory meant nothing; it could have been a picture he once saw, or even a false memory conjured up to represent what he imagined his past must have been like.

Brandon coming to live with them; that was the only thing that had changed recently. Oh, and falling off this cliff.

Slowly, gingerly, he tried to move. To his surprise, after a few false starts he was able to climb up to a standing position. It must have been the shock of the fall that had paralysed him. He felt himself all over, then looked round for his Elton John glasses. There they were just a few feet away. He put them on. He felt good, like Elton John. Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road. Goodbye Plastic St.

He glanced up at the cliff, then turned his back. Looking through stars, he began to walk.