Squalling Brats by J.T. Wilson

Description:

When Tom and Fiona Garner visit their father on his fiftieth birthday, they find that his new girlfriend is a lot more than they bargained for. Squalling Brats is a story about prejudice, parental relationships and the difficulty in washing up sieves.

A short story from our Nibs literary line.

Excerpt:

So, I’ve been thinking lately about my relationship with my father, likely because he’s coming up to his 50th birthday and when your dad turns fifty, you become reflective about these sorts of things, I always think. Now, I can’t claim to speak for Fiona, nothing like that, but personally speaking, I always thought we were closer to my mother than we were to my father. Now I know what you’re going to say, I do. You’re gonna say “Tom, of course you were closer to your mum than to your dad, you grew up with your mum, didn’t you?” And of course, you’d be right. But I meant politically, ideologically, things like that, and you’re supposed to rebel against your parents aren’t you, to oppose everything they stand for and put a ring through your nose and all that? And yes, it’s true, we probably aren’t the kids that Dad was hoping for, but really we’re ever so similar to our mother.

I think if I were to give a reason for this, it’s probably because Dad is, well, Dad’s a bigot. Frankly speaking. To be honest I’m not sure how Mum stuck him for as long as she did. I think they met at university, or at least just after it, at a house party where, of course, my Dad (before he were my dad, obviously) was still an aspiring law student and my Ma had just finished a Fine Arts course. A fine arts course, I ask you! I don’t know what she was thinking, looking at a course like that, I mean, it was hardly vocational was it? But then, that’s how it was in the seventies, or at least that’s my understanding of it. If you went to university you went for the love of it. Anyway I’m getting off the point here. My dad was a serious guy, serious moustache, serious brown trousers, serious grey suit when he wanted to impress the bank manager. I’ve got his graduation photo on my desk, actually, as I type this. He looks serious. I think that’s what impressed Mum, you know, and her bohemian pseudo-intellectual Descartian Kerouac flightiness was what impressed him. It inspired her to settle down and inspired him to want to loosen up.

In the end though, that counted against them. I mean, that whole chalk and cheese dynamic is appealing at first, isn’t it, because you’re having to confront your perceptions of who you are and all that horseshit, and in your twenties that’s intriguing enough to justify a relationship. But once you’ve done the whole marriage and mortgage thing, the fact that you’re straining in totally different directions becomes wearying. One of you wants to explore the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the other wants to use that money for, I don’t know, a down payment on a Citroen Saxo or something. Not that there’s anything wrong with a Saxo, of course: they’re surprisingly sporty for an about-town car, but do you see what I’m getting at? Any road, that was the problem with Mum and Dad, they were too different.

They had Fiona of course, and then they had me, I think perhaps in the hope that they’d make a better job of me. I mean it’s easy to see why you’d think that, just look at her. (Sis, I’m just kidding.) But you can have more children than the old woman who lived in a shoe, it won’t hide the fact that you hate each other and in the end, you’re just dragging the kids down to your level. One of them had to get out and in the end it was my Ma. The CSA and that sort of institution tend to favour the mother, or at least they did in them days, so we went with her. We were only about six.