Here's the 1st chapter. Please buy the rest for 77p by typing 'Dawn Dave Scurlock' into amazon.co.uk. The 100th buyer will recieve a free copy of The Chronicles of Macilroy

 

Dawn of the Dave

 

December 23rd

Preface

 

‘Come on!’ I shouted, pointlessly it seemed, at the relatively new Digital Radio Sally had bought me for my birthday. It was being impertinent. It knows that I hate it when its signal plays up. But oh no, just to get at me, it was playing its little petty games again. ‘Work, you swine!’ I ordered, speaking straight into its speaker so that it could hear me better.

‘Reports...fishing and Naval fleets in the Atlantic Ocean...a peculiar weather front,... clouds of a colour and shape none of them have seen...remarkable medical benefits for these crews ...Minor illnesses...cleared...matter of hours...old scars...disappeared after even the briefest exposure to the warm rain emanating from the cloud, which the Met Office...is equal to the size of France.

However, radio contact with the...lost in the last hour and communication experts are working to contact them...signal is operational but there appears to be no response from the crewmen...’

‘Damn it!’ I gave up and threw the radio into the empty fire place having taken considerable umbrage with the digital git. I’m a reasonable man but even I have my limits.

I switched on the television and, although initially distracted by ‘E.T. starting now’, I forced myself to switch the news channel on.  

The bushy eye-browed anchor woman promised that we would probably get one of the worst thunder storms across Britain in almost sixty years as a result, but nonetheless the Met Office, in association with the General Medical Council, were urging members of the public to step outside during the storm and ‘soak up the benefits’ of this phenomenon which might never happen again.

Why couldn’t she report weather like they did when I was a kid? It’s Christmas for Pete’s sake! How about a bit of snow, huh?! Come on ‘Jennifer’, Jennifer the cocky news woman with that pretend sympathetic frown of yours as you tell me my evening is about to get totally flushed down the pan; give me a bit of hope, a silver-lining, a glimmer of light at the end of the thundery tunnel.

But you won’t, will you? No, not you. It’s all right for you, isn’t it? Tonight you’ll probably be locked inside a store cupboard with Clive from reception, both of you drunk on BBC Christmas staff party punch, fumbling in the dark for those soft, squelchy body parts that your wives and  husband’s should have exclusivity to. I doubt that you’ll even be able to hear the thunder from that stationary cupboard on the third floor, thrusting about like sad over-grown teenagers trying to forget that your hairs have gone grey and both your respective set of boobs, man and woman’s, have begun to irretrievably sag.

Well, I for one was not going to sit around waiting for the deluge to descend, health benefits or no health benefits. As James T. Kirk in the much maligned Star Trek 5 put it ‘I don’t want my scars taken away. I need my scars!’ Ah, Shatner, will the Academy never realise your brilliance?

I’ll just shout to Sally about the weather, I thought. She’ll probably moan. She seems to possess certain negativity towards life and the world in general that luckily I’ve never suffered from myself.

It’s sad really, but ever since my mother forced me to go to Sunday school when I was eight I’ve been afraid of rain storms. Noah and all that. Even if it starts spitting a bit I get a nervous feeling that sooner or later some old geezer with a long white beard and a super-inflated sense of self-importance is going to sail past me and head down the high street in some sort of Swedish flat-pack boat with storage space for even the most bulky of pachyderm.

So off I went to the basement. I had the portable flat-screen TV, the mini-fridge with mandatory chocolate and diet-cola (the perfect balance for the over-eater who just loves to lie to him/herself), and I’d have Sally for ‘company’. I’m uneasy about the term ‘company’ as I’m not sure you could define as ‘company’ a high-maintenance woman, six months pregnant and with mandatory pregnant-woman corresponding tetchiness, who is only coming down to the basement in the first place because she hates being left alone upstairs in a storm while I go off and ‘enjoy myself’ in my ‘little bloody man-den!’.

I swear to you, whoever said woman is at her most lovely during pregnancy is a git of the highest order and needs a good sharp kick in the shin.

I love my wife, so please don’t mistake my whinging for signs of a growing unease in the stability of our commitment to one another. It’s just that, if possible, I wish I could change her, not much, just a little. Sound’s awful, doesn’t it? They say men see the beauty of women and worship their general perfection and that its women who look at men, see their imperfections clawing at the surface and aim to change them. Not so with us. In Sally’s case I believe she gave up trying to change me years ago as I am, in her words (spoken so often) ‘a malignant, unreconstructed, unchanging git’. However, for myself, I still have a little hope that the better elements of her character can one day vanquish the other ‘arse’ elements that take just a little of the shine off my day now and again.

I could hear her grumbling on her way down to the basement, dragging our duvet with her. I thought that if I made her a tea she’d probably let me share it with her on that old couch I dragged down there the summer before.

 

Sally drifted off to sleep about an hour and a half later. She wanted to stay up for some programme with that skinny jean-wearing bloke, you know, all square glasses and mugs telling insecure people that they can avoid years of much needed therapy if only they would wear clothes from Debenhams with the right belt. He drives me mad. ‘What’s that m’ darling? You’re husband left you after you developed depression and gained two stone? Poor thing! I think I can help. Have you considered adding a fake gold broach to your day wear, topped off with some killer heels?’

It was the evening before Christmas Eve and raining. When I was a kid we had snow up to the kitchen windowsill on Christmas Day. One year we all had to muck in and dig my grandparents’ house out, it having been buried up to the first floor window. Sally’s bump was moving about. I could see the feet of the baby moving about inside, pressing against her stomach, looking like it wanted to break through, probably trying to escape like the rest of us. I wanted to know the sex but Sally wants it to be a surprise. Infuriating at first and I must admit I got a bit childish about it, saying things that nearly led to me being a weekend dad. But I suppose it added to the excitement, not knowing. I tried to imagine the things I’d do with a son or a daughter. The baby stuff gets to be all in white when you don’t know the sex, so no sickly blue’s and pink’s puked all over what was, until three months before, my office, my space. I had to share with Sally, in her ‘untouched’ office in the converted attic. It was all pink laptop and IKEA flat-pack office furniture. Sally called it modern, slim-line and most of all that word which forever has me thinking of reaching for the sick bowl every time she says it – efficient.

I loved my office. There was a dark red Chesterfield sofa, a mahogany bookcase and a folding writing bureau. A dark-green shaded table lamp on my battered mahogany desk with its leather insert rock solid from a century of paperwork and pen pressure. You’d walk in there and there’d be this smell – rich and musty, the way bookshops should smell, or would smell before everyone started trying to copy the Americans. Why any nation would look to a country that promoted therapy, right-wing religion and personal armaments as equal virtues, as a role model is beyond me. However, I don’t want to come across as anti-American. Twain, Kerouac, Luther King, Spielberg, Shatner and Cheers...there has to be some good apples in every barrel, hasn’t there?    

I tried to sleep, although it wasn’t easy with all that wind, rain and lightning outside.

 

Bloody typical! This will come as little surprise to anyone who may be reading this in the years to come but on Christmas Eve 20-, humanity finally reached the day that the whole world went to hell in a wobbly wheeled Tesco trolley. My sad little account will probably be nothing compared to the Churchill-like diary entries of the great and good that undoubtedly always survive in times of disaster whilst mugs like me get fed to the monsters, but I believe that the events of that Christmas Eve, and of the period that followed, might be of interest to historians to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Views: 71

Add a Comment

You need to be a member of National Theatre Wales Community to add comments!

Join National Theatre Wales Community

image block identification

© 2024   Created by National Theatre Wales.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service