Consciousness slaps Phyllis like cold water, wresting her from the dream she has every night, the one about being late for school.
Sometimes Phyllis feels unfairly hemmed-in by her own limited imagination. Dreams should be a respite, a chance to do fantastic, impossible or disgusting things, yet the rooms in her dreams all look the same as the ones in her life. And she never dreams of anyone new; only vague approximations of old classmates who never meant anything much to her in the first place, but must have wedged their way into permanent memory at just the right time. Tommy Anderson sneers at her as she bursts, red-faced, into a classroom setting that amalgamates primary and secondary and hospital into one.
The dream is always dull, but Phyllis’s first instinct on waking is to climb back into it, to close her eyes tight and travel backwards into warm nothingness. The new day prods at her with birdsong, traffic sounds and life insurance adverts that scream from an FM radio, refusing to go anywhere, but she tries her best to force the dream. It almost works, but the characters look slightly wrong, their faces keep swapping and their words merge with the real-life radio jingles that rupture the air. She isn’t welcome in the dream anymore. No-one will look at her, they talk amongst themselves until she gives in, flinging the duvet aside and wondering how her own thoughts can be so much against her.
This is how every day begins for Phyllis, except for a single difference that occurs to her only once she is in front of the bathroom mirror, adjusting to today’s face:
“It’s our birthday!”
She clatters uninvited into Glen’s room. Glen, clinging foetus-like to an underwhelming dream of his own, frowns and squints in the same messy confusion every year. His sister is an irritating blur, imposing herself at the end of a creaking, neatly-made single bed that can barely take her weight and that he never saw any point in replacing. It’s the thought of this old bed, and everything it means, that makes Glen realise what Phyllis is going to say just before she says it.
“Glen, we’re 70!”
Glen feels like he’s been shot. He ducks under a pillow. “I’m going back to sleep”.
“But it’s our birthday, I thought we could go for a walk, maybe a trip to the garden centre café, we ought to get a discount there as of today…oh, and you’ve got a DWP appointment at 3.”
Glen recoils, almost slitting his shoulder on an exposed bedspring. “It’s 7am, just leave me for now…we’ll do all that, the café, fine.”
70 shared birthdays. 70 years of well-meaning smiles. Visibly bitter clowns. Identical gifts wrapped in pink or blue. Parties in fast-food restaurants with too many empty chairs. Failed teenage attempts to separate and become two distinct entities. Dousing shyness with drink. Changing the setting to the cinema or the bowling or a park at night-time but still getting it wrong, somehow always wrong and met with well-meaning smiles. 70 years of staring helplessly at the one you’re stuck with as you feel yourselves hurtling faster and faster into a state of isolation that can never be reversed. The gifts getting fewer and more thoughtless, the laughable stockpile of never-to-be-used bath salts and budget-brand cologne destined for a dusty corner in a charity shop stockroom once all of this is finally over. The two sets of wrinkled hands opening card after card after card after card, and as they read each identikit greeting from someone married and happily retired they can picture all too clearly in their shared mind’s-eye the well-meaning smiles, the well-meaning smiles, the well-meaning smiles.
"No tea then?"
"No. Thanks. Happy birthday, Phyllis."
"Happy birthday, Glen."
LJ
credits
from D/U,
released November 5, 2020
Collage by Lisa.
Twitchy, effects-heavy post-punk grooves give way to psychedelic surf-rock delirium on the Toronto quartet's dreamy-yet-doomy second LP. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 25, 2024
Howlin' Banana Records offers up horn-heavy garage rock on this new LP from pop-, punk-, ska-influenced The Madcaps. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 15, 2016
