Eerie Jerry

Learning about it

When my father pulled in, it was time for me to leave the Armstrongs. I really and truly didn't want to, I hated going back home. I don't want to call it home, I'd call it my parent's house. I packed my backpack, put on my shoes and I still wanted to take home my red coloured drawing just to see what either parent of mine would do with it. They never put up any drawings of mine on the refrigerator in the kitchen. I just want to see. Maybe because Mum thinks it's embarrassing for her friends to look at. I remembered three of her friends came over and I had nobody else to watch me. She had no choice, but to keep me at her house while her friends were coming. I was two years old at the time and I did act a little shy when the ladies tried to touch me or tried to talk to me. I would back away from them because I never met them before. I kept seeing the flying white figures and I would tell them about it, but they don't listen and my mother would get a little mad. She would tell me to stop bothering them with my imaginary friends and go play. I did and I played with my little toy car I enjoyed rolling around in the house. When they were all sitting on the couch and I was wondering around the house with a toy car in my hand. I was just playing around and I got a little distracted by something on the television screen. They were watching something and I got a little curious. I walked up to the screen, but Mum yelled at me saying I was blocking the view from everybody. She just pushed me into the kitchen and I didn't want to make her more upset to get out. I just stood there, watching the tellie. One of her friends, I think her name was Sherise, got up off of the couch to get her purse and I completely forgot about the toy car on the other side. Sherise steps on the toy car and slipped on it, landing on her left hip. The women comforted Sherise and they discovered the toy car that made her slip and fall. When my mother found out it was my toy car, she took me by the wrist, put me in my room, slapped my behind a hard five times and told me to not come out until everyone was gone and closed my door. I was upstairs in my room sobbing for a long, grueling three hours, dealing with thirst and having to hold my urine. I was being potty-trained and I wasn't wearing a nappy anymore. Father said I should still wear nappies until I was three, but mother insisted I should be potty-trained two months after my second birthday. I had to wait and wait until my mother opened the door and let me out. But, she decided to clean up the house before letting me out. She vacuumed, mopped and even cleaned the couch with the Dirt Devil and then let me out. She told me she will never have me over here when her friends were here ever again for the way I acted. She said that I acted like an idiot and I embarrassed her so bad and her friend Sherise may have a broken hip because of me and I should be punished. She did punish me by not giving me any dessert after supper and she didn't talk to me after that until two days later. Even my father said that she was being a little too harsh with me, but then, she was yelling at him saying that he was such a pushover and he can't let a little shrimp like me overpower and dominate grown ups like them. She said I should have known better than to leave my car there for Sherise to slip on. My father said nothing after that and just fixed me dinner that night. My mother is mean. When I say mean, I think about everything she had done to me that gave me the marks to carry on forever. Now, every time she has a party at the house, she makes sure I was gone and no more accidents would happen when I was around. It was like she didn't want her friends to know she has a child. I just didn't want to face her again and my father just gives up when my mother was having a problem with me. It's like he wants to help, but he just gets shot down by what my mother says and he had to obey her, regardless. My father was in the driveway in his brown Mazda and Aunt Daisy walked me out the door. She walked with me and opened the back seat of my father's car for me to climb in. "Ta-ra, Jerry! I love you! See you next time." Daisy said to me. "Ta-ra, Auntie!" I said back to her after she buckled me into my booster seat and closed the door. "Well, hey, son. I heard you had your first day of year one, how was it?" my father politely asked. "Bad, I didn't like it." I replied back to him. "Oh, well, that's life." he said back to me. 'That's life' is probably one of the lamest excuses I will ever hear with my own two ears. I prefer 'Things will get better soon' or 'Don't give up on yourself.' Instead, my boring, lowlife father would just say 'That's life.' That's how my father would just view life as one travesty after another, nothing happy. Ironically, as the little sibling of his family, I would think he would be the happiest and his sister would kind of be a little overprotective, but a little bit happy. His older sister is the happy one, but he's the sad sack. He puts his car in reverse and backs out of the driveway and into the road. "Who's picking me up from school tomorrow?" I asked because I had no idea what was happening tomorrow. "Your aunt will and I will be picking you up from her house again." he stated to me. "Why is Mum not picking me up?" "She's working, you know how we are, busy as bees." I sort of expected him to say that because they really are busy with their jobs. Dad works as a nurse and Mum works at some soap shop, but I heard she owns it. She does bring home her artisan soap from work for us to use and it reeks really bad. She would make us use it whether it would break anyone out with allergic reaction or not. Her favourite soaps are honey oatmeal, black raspberry vanilla, lilac and shea butter with lavender. She would bring some backstock home for us to use and like I said, I hate it. It would stink on my hands for hours and I would try to wash it off with dish soap in the kitchen. I used some black coloured soap to wash my hands once and they colour would not come out until I had to take a bath. The honey oatmeal really sounds like something I would rather have in a biscuit than use it to clean my hands. When I do tell my mum about my hatred for soaps and leaving the marks on my hands, she would just tell me I'm overreacting. The black raspberry vanilla was a white soap bar with magenta and blue colouring, it kind of looked like a sweet. I tried to suck on it once to get a taste and I just got sick as a patient at my father's job. When my mother saw I did that, she laughed and even bragged to her friends and family about it and they had a good laugh too. I'm I just a clown to her? I'm just something to laugh at while they were talking about their favourite romantic drama on the tellie and where they plan to travel for the holidays. My mother never takes me when she does go, she would leave me with the Armstrongs or with my father. I would rather be with the Armstrongs than my own bloody parents who care more about themselves in life. What kind of a mother laughs at her own son for mistaking a bar of soap for a sweet? Is this my introduction to what the maternal parent will be in life? I had more questions than answers in my young life and I'm only five. "Did you have a good dinner?" Dad asked as he broke my train of thought. "Yeah." I said back. "What did you eat?" "Uncle Henry made pizza and we helped." "Oh, yum. I bet that was nice of him." It was more than nice, it was fun, probably more fun than in my whole life. I felt like the child I should be when I'm with them. I don't feel like a child at school, I just feel like I'm isolated. "Auntie Daisy is picking me up tomorrow?" I asked just to confirm it. "Yes, me and your mum are working." "Okay, sounds great." As he went through many turns and stoplights to get to Chester Road, which leads into The Firs, which is our nieghbourhood. Our house was number eighteen on the left-hand side that was a small stone house covered with big rocks with faded colours made into the outer walls. The rocks were all jagged and in different shapes such as rectangles, scalene triangles and almost like circles. We do have windows that open and close. Most of them were on the front side and some were on the back side, there were not a lot on the sides. We don't have a cellar, but we have a hot-water tank in the utility room. Mother tells me to never touch it or it will burn my hand off. It looked dangerous anyhow, I wouldn't touch it for any reason, but she would watch me when she wanted me to unload my hamper of laundry into the washer. After my clothes were washed, she would tell me to put them in the dryer. She taught me to do me laundry when I was four and wanted me to have some independence in doing it. But, after that, I was on my own with her helping me. Every time I had to put a load of my laundry in the wash, she would just take a peek and make sure I don't use too much soap or touch that water heater. I used too much soap one time and she got really mad and said that soap wasn't cheap and pounds don't come from pixies. She bought another jug of that soap when there was still more left in the other one I used. I just shook my head at that thought, she craves more power than nurturing her own child. My father pulls into our driveway and we see my mother's black Jaguar in the car port, so she is home or maybe not if she took a taxi to go somewhere. "Alright, son, let's go in." he says as he stops the car and gets out. I unbuckled myself and got my stuff together and got out of the car as he waited for me to come out. I opened the door and I had to walk it closed where I'm so little. He walks up to the porch and unlocks the brown oak door and opens the golden handle. We both walk in and I take my shoes off and walk over to the cubby to put them in. Dad does the same because if Mum saw shoeprints all over the house, not only would she get mad, she would go on a cleaning spree for two hours and it would reek of lemon or whatever air refresher she would use, it was insane. We didn't see her as we came in, she was probably in her room with the door closed. "Do I have to go to bed now?" I ask my father. "Yep, it's a little too late for any antics tonight and your mother wants you asleep when you're done getting cleaned up. Come on, let's get to the bath." He leads me upstairs and takes my backpack, puts it in my room and walks into the bathroom with me. I get undressed and he runs the bath as he stopped up the drain for the water to sit. He added a little bit of shampoo into the water for bubbles, I love the extra suds, they're fun to play with. "Okay, it's ready." he says as soon as the bath filled up with lukewarm water and some suds from the apple scented shampoo. I climbed in and felt relaxed after that long, stressful day. I got soothed by the water and my father scrubs me with the soapy cloth in my face, behind and in my ears, behind my neck, and in other crevasses of my body. "Your mother said when you're six, you need to learn how to shower. She's fed up with a big water bill on baths." he speaks to me. This is a new word to me. "Shower?" What's a shower? I felt stupid for asking that, but I never took a shower and I don't know what one is. "A shower is that ting up there." He points to the big metal head with little dots inside a small circle encircled by a big circle. "You know how Mummy washes the sink with that sprinkler ting after she does the dishes?" I nod. "Imagine doing that to your body. It's how it's like, but you stand while doing it." Stand while getting bathed? That doesn't sound very relaxing. What about the suds? "Um, wouldn't that hurt?" I asked him. "No, no, it wouldn't. It's like rain only you don't wear clothes. Trust me, I will show you when you're six and you can be taught how to run your own." "Oh, ok." I just sat down and let him shampoo my hair and scrub it into my head. He was going a little hard. "Not too hard." I say to him. "I'm going as gentle as I can, son." It didn't feel like it, he just kept on going that same pace on my head. "Alright, let's get that off. Close your eyes." He takes my blue cup I use to wash my head off. I squint my eyes shut and a wave of water just cascades me as he washes off all of the suds from my hair. After three times of pouring over my head, he finishes. "Ok, you're done. Time to get out and brush your teeth." I stand up and he pulls up the brown coloured stopper and lets the sud-filled water out of the bath. As I stand up, he wraps a clean towel around my body and I step out of the bath. He grabs my toothpaste and toothbrush to get it prepared for me. He squeezes the cinnamon flavoured toothpaste on the white bristles of my orange and black-striped toothbrush and I get to brushing my teeth. I was only taught once how to brush my teeth and that was when I had all of my baby teeth come in. I had no more help after that one time and my father taught me. I would swallow some toothpaste sometimes, but it was for kids, nothing toxic. I go up and down, side to side and even brush my tongue before I spit out my toothpaste and rinse out. He has me floss my teeth, but he helps me with that. He's scared that I would choke on it, so he insisted on helping me floss and Mum said that was fine, but he wasn't allowed to help me brush my teeth. She wanted me to be independent at a young age. But, why? "Ok, let's get your pyjamas on, it's bedtime." I went to my room and he followed. I felt like I didn't need his help picking out my clothes. "Dad, you don't have to help me." I said to him. "You can do it yourself?" he asked since he would help me with some things. "Yeah, I can do it myself. I'll get dressed and go to bed." "Ok, good boy. Well, I won't see you until tomorrow night, so goodnight." "Goodnight." I closed the door and I had to get my pyjamas and lay in bed quick because I learnt that ghost was coming to talk to me about this 'spirit speaker' crap I had to know. I waited until he went downstairs to sleep on the couch before I could talk to this ghost. I got my yellow underwear and grey pyjamas with colourful rocket and star designs all over them. It was a long-sleeved nightshirt with blue cuffs on the wrists and on the neck. It also had matching bottoms with blue cuffs around the waist and on the ankles. I climb into my bed and waited and waited for him to come back. I looked at the clock of my dingbat alarm clock toy I named Sparky and the clock said 8:52 p.m. on his stomach. I sighed, I was supposed to be asleep by now and I'm staying up for somebody who was probably never going to come. After more wide-awake time passed, I looked at Sparky and the clock said 9:15 p.m. Ugh, screw this, I'm going to sleep. As I close my eyes and try to fall asleep as I turn over multiple times, I hear something. "Jeremy. Jeremy, it's me." I open my eyes to finally see the ghost floating in my room. "Hmm? Where were you?" I asked in a loud whisper. "I lost track of you, I'm sorry." he tells me. "How did you loose track of me?" My curious mind wanted to know since he was supposed to follow me home as a ghost. "I was telling my friends about you, look, son. Can I talk to you about this?" "Yes, I must know." I kept my voice lowered, so none of my parents would hear me. I have a hunch my mother is not asleep in the other bedroom, but her tellie is on. "Ok, Jeremy, my name is George Watkins. I was a merchant in my living life, but I became a thief afterwards. You are the child we were told about." "We?" I asked him, I had no idea there was more than one party involved in my business. "Me and the other ghosts." George said to me. "Listen, Jeremy, I want to help you with your power and keep you away from danger." Danger? To me? This did arouse my attention. "The living doesn't like anyone who can claim they can talk to ghosts. They won't believe you and they will lock you away in the funny farm if you try to convince regular people that you can see ghosts." Funny farm? That sounds like an indoor place with bounce houses. I went to one once with the Armstrongs and had fun. But, my parents didn't like it because they said it was festering with germs. "What are you trying to say?" I ask George. "What I'm trying to say is we mean you no harm, Jeremy, I just want to be your friend. I'll help you with your gift and you won't have to feel so alone. Alright, chap?" I nod, I finally have a ghost who actually guided me with all this ghost tom-foolery. He will help me and somebody does believe me! "You promise?" I asked him. "Yes," he assured me. "I will help you in any way, Jeremy." I smiled and I finally got an answer to my ghost-seeing issue, it was something that made me different from everyone else and I welcomed it. I feel some sort of power I have. "Thanks, George." I said with glee as I kept my voice low. "You're welcome, child. Now, go to sleep, I'll see you when you're alone tomorrow." I nodded and laid back down on my bed and I couldn't shake the feeling of having a friend, even if he wasn't alive, he was better than nobody. I heard more ghosts pass and fly by while they were in and out of my room talking until I drifted off to sleep with peace.