TABOO TALES(erotica)

When I was 2 years old, my father married Anh, a lovely, tiny little Vietnamese lady. I always thought she was my mother, or at least until I was old enough to work out that she couldn’t possibly be. I still called her mum, though, because in every way I needed her to be, she was my mum. I had a sister, or rather a half-sister, Nguye’t, which means ‘moon’, I think, but we all called her Nia, and dad sometimes called her ‘nugget’, telling her she was his precious little golden moon. Mum usually called me Huyn’h, which means ‘Older Brother’ although it sounds like someone sneezing in a distant room, instead of my given name, James or Jamie. Nia usually called me anything she could think of if she thought it would annoy me.

We lived in South London, not far off the South Circular Road, that traffic nightmare that girdles South London like a ligature, and dad would curse it every evening after negotiating it for several hours. Mum would, quite reasonably, ask him why he didn’t just get a bus to Streatham and get the train into Central London, but dad was convinced that if he left his designated parking space at work unoccupied it would be given to someone else, and apparently status in his company was measured by whether or not you had your own parking space, and how close it was to the CEO’s parking space. It took me years to understand this; I used to wonder what happened to his parking space when he was on holiday, did they chain it up, or something? All very baffling. In the meantime, he’d come in every evening, exhausted, road-raged to the max, huffing about the London traffic planners, London buses, congestion, the people who play silly-buggers with the timing of the traffic lights in London, bus lanes, in fact, everything. We all learned to stop listening, or at least parallel-process, so we could drop-in reasonably apt comments in the spaces in the rant where one was called-for, while simultaneously watching TV, without actually paying the blindest bit of notice to what he was saying. After the requisite time ranting, dad would go off and sit in the greenhouse, talk to his geranium cuttings or secretly drink, or whatever it was he did in there, and reappear in time for dinner, usually in a good mood.

When he reappeared, he would be besieged by one or the other of us, needing help with our homework. Dad’s approach to homework was simple. “You should have learned this in school, what do the taxpayers pay teachers for, if we have to teach our kids at home at the end of the school day?” Not helpful. But when he was in a really good mood, he could be great fun.

He once boiled the last 1, 000 years of English history down as follows. “All you need to know about English history is the following; for the last 1, 000 years, English history has consisted of us annoying the French, beating-up the French, annoying the French while simultaneously beating them up, or watching and needling as the French beat themselves up. If you want a definition of how to lose a war, look up the word ‘French’ in any dictionary. Norman Schwarzkopf once said ‘Going to war without the French is like going hunting without your accordion’ says it all, really!”

His attitude to mathematics was the same. “Have you ever seen a logarithm crawl out from under a chair, or bitten into a tangent? Or swung on a trapezium lately? No? That’s because they don’t exist. I refuse to be lectured on imaginary arithmetic by some Greek standing on a hillside 3, 000 years ago dressed only in his underpants, and so should you!”

I dutifully wrote all this down, and then mum had to come to the school and pacify the headmaster, the mathematics teacher, the history teacher, and the history teacher’s French wife. The head gave her some parting advice.

“Mrs. Morrison, please ask your husband not to help Jamie or Nia with their homework in future; his definitions may be very nearly right, but he’s damaging their chances of passing their SAT’s, so please, I beg you, keep him away from their homework!”

I think dad was secretly a subversive, with anarchic tendencies, which is quite a stretch for a security manager in a huge American bank…

When she was young, Nia would take in all of dad’s pronouncements with wide-eyed acceptance, but at quite an early age she picked up on the fact that he may just be feeding her a line, playing her as straight-man for his latest stooge-gag, and she developed the habit of checking with mum when dad gave her some facts, sincerity blazing in his eyes; little Nia’s eyes would flick over to mum, and a tiny nod or headshake would be all she had to give for Nia to either buy it or back away and ask mum when dad had left the room.

She was a pretty little girl, fair skinned, with definite Anglo features, but with a nice mix of mum’s finely sculpted ivory-figurine features too, so no mistaking her heritage, with her long, straight, jet black hair and slanted almond eyes, bright blue, like dad’s and mine. When she was born, Mum had asked me to help her look after Nia, as I was her older brother now, and it was my job to watch over her. Nia had picked-up early on the fact that I was incapable of saying no to her, and used it to browbeat me into doing anything she didn’t want or couldn’t be bothered to do, and dad was no help, he just said “Jamie old son, you walked into that one eyes wide shut. Serves you right, next time I suggest you look before you step in the cacky!”

Still, I had to admit, being Nia’s personal slave and chief bottle washer had its rewards. When she wanted to be, she could be absolutely adorable, and she was a very nice kid when she forgot she was a miniature fiend in human form. When I eventually moved to secondary school, at age 11, I felt a definite pang. My routine at primary school had been to wait for Nia until she’d finished her last class, then get laden down with all her stuff, projects, school bags, sports bags, welding equipment, bowling ball and spare sink, and schlep it all home for her like a good little Sherpa, while she would be off buying vast, clinically damaging quantities of sweets from her seemingly inexhaustible supply of pocket money.

Moving schools meant I’d only ever see her in the early evening, as I finished later, then would have to get two buses, so instead of getting home at about 3:45 pm, it would be nearer 6 o’clock before I got home, or later, if the buses were playing-up, just in time to say goodnight to her; her bedtime was 6:30 pm, even though she was 8 years old; mum and dad were a little old-fashioned about children and their bedtimes. The first day at my new school was traumatic enough without this sudden hole at the end of it, where I should be walking Nia home, and suddenly I wasn’t. It was a funny feeling, and not in a good way I realised I actually missed the little swamp-donkey, missed her flaunting all her spending money, the sweets she’d bought, or, if her flying monkeys had slaughtered some munchkins in the next village and put her in a good mood, her prattling on about her day.

When I got home, mum sensed I’d had a mixed day, and sat me down, hugged me, asked about my day, and gave me a bowl of home-made mango ice cream as a reward for not imploding. As I was telling her all about the school, the sheer number of people there, she said “Nguye’t miss you today all day, she was crying for you.”

I looked at mum in disbelief. “No, really? Why? I was going to throw a broomstick gag in there, but I saw mum was serious, looked sad. “She is still only little girl, Huyn’h,” she said, in her careful English, “and she miss having older brother there in case she need him. You go and see her; she ask for you especially to come see her when you get in.” As I am constitutionally incapable of refusing mum anything, I went and knocked on Nia’s door, went in.

“Nia, it’s me, are you OK?”Belonging to NôvelDrama.Org.

“Jamie? JAMIE!!” and a little body hit me amidships, Nia jumping up and down, holding on to me, her hair braided in a thick queue at the nape of her neck, her long nighty all the way down to the ground, looking cute and wholesome, like a character in a Disney cartoon.

“Jamie, I missed you, mummy took me to school and had to come and get me, I missed you all day, why did you have to go to another school, can I come there with you tomorrow, I MISSED YOU!!”

I had to stop her and catch my breath, and I hadn’t said a word yet.

“All right, demon-child, calm down!”I told her. “First off, get back in bed it’s past your bedtime, and secondly, sorry, no you can’t come to school with me, you have a school of your own, and you’re not old enough to come to my school. You’ll see me every night, though, before you go to bed, and at weekends, isn’t that enough for you?”

She stared at me for a second, and started sniffling, then tears ran out of her eyes, and then her face rolled up and she really let rip with the crying. And it was real, Nia-in- distress crying, not her usual ‘I want my own way’ crying. What could I do, I’m a sucker for her when she does that, but I also knew the difference between when she really was sad and when she was being the manipulative little baggage that was her ground-state.

She hugged on to me, crying like her pet dog had died, so much so that mum poked her head round the door to see what was going on, backed out when she saw me cradling the little girl while she sobbed, excessively so, I thought. I fished out a handkerchief from my pocket and tried to mop off her face, but I was fighting a losing battle between her eyes and her nose, which was chugging out truly amazing quantities of something truly nasty.

“SSSHHH Nia, it’s alright, you’ll see me every evening, you’ll be OK, Monkey-girl, I promise!” I soothed her, once her crying had died down to hiccups, wondering at this sudden outburst of affection, and guided her back into bed, pulling up the bedclothes around her, before trying to leave.

“DON’T GO!” she shrieked, so I had to stop and sit on the bed and talk to her some more, tell her about my new school, all the boys there, how many people were at the school, while her eyes grew big. I ended up reading to her, ‘The Worst Witch’ or something like that, until she finally dozed off, then slipped out of her room, holding my bulging handkerchief at arm’s length.