‘I am compiling my autobiography,’ my friend Roland stabbed his well-sucked pencil at me. ‘It will be a literary sensation. I anticipate many accolades. Fame. Fortune.’
I put on the kettle, anticipating I might be delayed for some time.
‘A story,’ Roland continued, now waving his Woolworth reporter’s notebook, ‘of a boy dragged up from acute poverty, no shoes to his feet, no food in his belly. Abusive parents, pederast schoolmasters.’
I watched the kettle. It was taking an inordinate time to boil.
‘Then,’ Roland continued unabated, ‘An early life of crime. Borstal. The lash. Prison.’
I fetched the teapot. I knew Roland to be born in Fazakerley. His mother was a district nurse, his father something mysterious in the wool industry. I imagined Roland as the sort of child who had a bicycle at seven and a car at seventeen.
‘I struggle with insanity. Whisky. Opium,’ Roland’s eyes blazed as memories unfurled, ‘Trapped in a den of sexual vice.’
I warmed the pot.
‘But through it all I have my devout Christian faith and the love of Jesus makes me the man I have become.’
I fetched the kettle (always take the kettle to the pot and not the pot to the kettle).
Roland lips smacked at the sight of tea which afforded me the opportunity to interject, ‘But none of it’s true.’
‘That is of no consequence. It is the path that matters,’ Roland reached for the teacup, ‘One should always take autobiography with a pinch of salt.’
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Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 