Happy Birthday and All That by Rebecca Smith Page A

to kiss the grizzled, unshaven cheek, or to shake his grandfather’s very cold, stiff hand. His grandfather’s shoulders looked bony through the layers of vest, shirt, pullover and cardigan. His thin knees were pointy and painful-looking through his trousers. Frank was reminded of the skeletons of some of the smaller beaky dinosaurs, Ornithomimus or Compsognathus, the one that was no bigger than a hen. He and James knew all the names of them from
The Big Book of Dinosaurs,
and his other favourite
If Dinosaurs Came To Town.
Don’t bother, they’re here, Frank thought to himself.
    â€˜Cup of tea, Grandpa?’
    â€˜If you’re making one.’ Frank would certainly never choose to make a cup of tea in Grandpa’s kitchen, which was cluttered beyond even Frank’s disorder threshold. Doing the simplest thing involved negotiating a path through trailing flexes, past the Calor gas heater (always on, even on the hottest days), moving piles of dishes (clean and dirty were hard to differentiate),as well as the boxes of tissues, Scholl ointments, empty glasses cases, letters, Christmas cards and pictures by the children dating back years, and the foot file which was perpetually clogged with pieces of grey debris that always made Frank think, ‘Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.’ Frank knew that his mother was up here, several times a day, trying to impose some order on things, but that Grandpa undid it all within minutes, scattering dirty tissues around his feet, filling the bath with cold water and then hurling his bedding in because he thought it needed a good soak, or balancing the two-bar electric fire on the draining board to try to keep his hands warm while he failed to wash up. The possibilities for creating chaos and squalor, and for setting up accidents waiting to happen, were endless. Frank thought that even Flora would be unable to keep Grandpa in check. Eventually Frank returned to the sitting room with two mugs of tea and half a packet of fig rolls that he had found beside the washing-up liquid.
    â€˜No point getting the best china out, eh?’ Grandpa said, taking a big slurp from the chipped Garfield mug Frank handed him. Frank’s was a Farside Christmas-theme mug, also damaged stock from the shop downstairs.
    â€˜Good for you to have a mugful, Grandpa. Posy told me she heard something on the radio saying that old people don’t drink enough.’
    â€˜What’s that? What are you saying?’
    Frank ignored the question. How could he explain that what he had said was, as so often the case with Grandpa, too banal to merit repeating.
    â€˜So what did you want some help with?’ he asked, loud, clear and slow.
    â€˜Them books. In the bedroom. Arrived yesterday.’
    Frank found his way back across the room and into the bedroom. The BettaKleen catalogues were piled high on Grandpa’s unmade bed, next to a Kleenex Mansize boxstuffed with apple cores, satsuma peel, an empty Digestives’ packet, the filmy wrappings of processed cheese slices, and the papers of several packets of Halls Extra Strong Mentholyptus throat sweets: the detritus of Grandpa’s most recent midnight feast, which, Frank surmised, must have ended in a coughing fit. Or perhaps he just ate packets and packets of Halls for the taste alone. Frank saw that there weren’t just the BettaKleen catalogues to get rid of, but two supplements, a health and diet one (a particular favourite of his) and something new, ‘Your Lucky Magic’. They would weigh a ton. Grandpa would never be able to shift them. Frank cursed the man who had talked Grandpa into this whole network selling thing in the first place. It was despicable. Grandpa had lapped up all the stories about ‘part-time job - full-time money’, about people building pyramids of sellers and then retiring in splendour, of people whose sales won them holidays with spending money. As if Grandpa was ever going