King Jim

KING JIM

a novel

(Work in progress...)

Chapter One:

Lucy Jones.

12 years old.

In the bathroom.

Door locked.

If you were an annoying little brother and were spying through the keyhole you would see that she wasn’t sitting on the loo.

Or cleaning her teeth

Or slapping on spot block

Lucy is standing like a soldier in front of the bathroom mirror.

Not because she thinks she’s a vision of loveliness.

Which is what her stupid brother thinks she thinks.

Ooo look at me! I’m soo beautiful! My name is Lucy. I love myself. I am so hot. I’m a princess.

And then she would have had to beat him up.

Which is why the door is locked.

Her brother was 100 per cent wrong. As usual.

The truth is Lucy has got this problem. She can’t match up what she sees in the mirror with what other people say about her.

What she can see is a collection of blobs and blemishes.

It doesn’t matter how many times her mum and dad insist that she has a lovely face.

It doesn’t matter that she once overheard her Gran describing her as having ‘striking good looks.’ Yeah well ‘striking’ like being bashed in the face with something ugly.

Obviously, being family they are prejudiced but surely they’re not that blind!

Of course Lucy is completely aware that compared with starving children, civil war and global warming what she looks like is not that important.

But it would be nice to be a bit less lumpy and bit more gorgeous like Annabelle Louise Rogers. Annabelle Rogers is Lucy’s friend. Sometimes best friend. Sometimes second or third. They sit next to each other in English and Tech. Everyone loves Annabelle Louise Rogers. Everyone.

She has a heart shaped face and nice skin and straight blonde hair and blue eyes and a proper nose.

Annabelle doesn’t even have to try…

Her thoughts are interrupted by someone rattling the door handle.

‘Open up! Open up!’

Meet Lucy’s little brother Peter Anthony

Or PeeBee.

(P is short for pain. B is short for bum.

As in P in the B. Which he is.)

‘Go away!’ calls Lucy ‘I’m busy!’

He bangs on the door

‘Need a pee! Need to go now!’

‘Go Down Stairs.’

‘Can’t. I’m bursting.’

‘Just buzz off and leave me in peace.’

‘Let me in Lucy I really am bursting.’

‘Go. Down. Stairs!’ insists Lucy. ‘I haven’t finished.’

The door gets one last angry kick.

‘You’re horrible and mean. I’m going to tell mum!’

She can hear him rushing down the stairs.

‘Don’t care.’ She mutters. ‘Stupid little boy. ‘

She sticks out her tongue and returns to the Naked Truth Examination Mirror.

Item one: a horrible mouth.

No-one is ever going to want to kiss that are they?

It’s a sort of lizard mouth.

Thin and scaly.

Item two: Horrible hair.

Ginger wire hair.

Of all the genes she had to inherit from Granny 2 why that one? Why couldn’t she have proper long straight hair like her mum.

Lucy hates her hair almost as much as she hates her items three and four:

skimmed milk skin and freckly arms.

Also five

Legs dumpy. Short.

Six:

Ears too small.

Seven: And her nose turns up at the end like a skateboard jump.

Add them all up and you don’t get pretty. You get mutant freak elf child.

And then of course there is that enormous erupting volcano spot on the side of her nose. Which is why she often brushes her teeth with her eyes closed.

The only member of the Jones family who wouldn’t ever waste their time trying to convince Lucy she was a cross between Madonna and Marylyn Monroe was Uncle ‘Ginger’ Glynn.

Appearances didn’t matter much to Uncle Ginger. His clothes were Oxfam his shoes TK Max. He wasn’t one to waste money on such lightweight concepts as fashion even if he had the money. Which he certainly didn’t. Uncle Ginger had always been the poor relation. He was about the closest the Jones family had got to a black sheep. All families need at least one black sheep; it gives them something to talk about at weddings and funerals. To be fair Uncle Ginger was really more of a lamb than a sheep. He wasn’t a serial killer, he didn’t loiter round primary schools selling crack cocaine to seven year olds and he hadn’t wasted all his money on horses and Porsches. His main qualification was the fact that he was a little bit of an embarrassment to the family; no qualifications, permanently broke, seldom in work, not even nearly married.

This made him perfect material for use as a threatening weapon by the parents.

e.g.

IF YOU

Muck about in lessons/Don’t do your homework/ chatter on your mobile/Watch Neighbours/ Have too much fun

YOU WILL

End up like Uncle Ginger.

There were two ways to respond to this.

The preferred parent option was:

Thank you thank you! What brilliant parents you are. Now I realise how foolish I’ve been I will work so hard from now on that my brain will bleed.

The more usual response was

Yeah, so what. I like Uncle Ginger. Uncle Ginger may be poor but he’s happy isn’t he?

This provoked a long exasperated sigh from the lecturing parent, because it was annoyingly true.

Uncle Ginger was the opposite of ambitious.

He didn’t want to be famous

He didn’t want to be a millionaire.

Or own his own airline.

And have a luxury holiday home on a palm-fringed paradise in the Carribean.

He was happy the way he was.

Free to get up when he wanted,

Eat when he was hungry,

Sleep when he was tired, even if it did happen to be four in the afternoon.

Also Uncle Ginger had been a school drop-out.

Not because he was thick. Even his enemies called him Swotty. In fact he was more like was one of those inspiring children you see on tv recruitment adverts. The eager beavers with their arms upstretched who want to know about everything and anything. It was assumed that Glynn passing his exams was a mere formality and then he would go on and be brilliant at university or work in some high tec lab like his dad. But one morning fifteen year old Glynn had a revelation. He looked up from his cornflakes and noticed his father’s sagging shoulders and forlorn expression as he shuffled around the kitchen getting ready to go to work. And that was it. Suddenly he knew what he didn’t want to do. As soon as he was 16 Glynn shut up his books, waved goodbye to his astonished teachers and walked out.

This was:

Madness, stupid, thoughtless, foolhardy, or un-bloody-believable according to Glynn’s parents.

Lucy was quite impressed. Imagine saying no to Gran!

And then there was his house, Pant Glas, the centre of Glynn’s world.

Lucy remembered the first time she’d seen it.

It was when she was ten. He had been going on and on for weeks about some house he’d discovered and was trying to buy. In the end, one wet Sunday afternoon the whole family piled into his land rover and went for a tour.

According to the estate agent’s ‘blurb’- Pant Glas was a 'traditional stone and slate farmhouse with many original features in need of modernisation.’

This was such a porker.

Pant Glas was a total dump.

When they’d finished scrambling up the track and first caught sight of it, Lucy’s parents had been so appalled their jaws had dropped open. Uncle Ginger didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he must have assumed they couldn’t speak because they were overwhelmed by wonder.

Pant Glas wasn’t a house; it was more a collection of big mossy rocks randomly piled on top of one another.

There wasn’t an unbroken pane of glass in any of the downstairs windows. The roof was a precarious jigsaw of rusty red corrugated iron sheets. There were jackdaws nesting in the chimney. The kitchen floor was invisible beneath a crusty black carpet of sheep poo. And the smell! It was like the boys' toilet at school, times twenty two!

But Uncle Ginger looked as happy as if he’d just won the National lottery.

Where other people could only see doom, gloom and disaster Glynn saw sunshine hope and opportunity.

They might as well have been looking at two completely different buildings.

‘Check out the stonework on that fireplace.' He purred.

'Look at the grain on those old beams. Beautiful or what?

‘Hey come and check out this view. Look at those mountains…. Can you believe it?’

Glynn was in love…

Three years later Pant Glas looked like a proper home. The sheep had been banished, the jackdaws evicted and the roof made waterproof. The outside had been painted with deep pink lime wash. The windows were glossy blue. He’d rebuilt the old Rayburn in the kitchen, and he was very proud of his new spiral staircase. ‘Look at the finish on that. Welsh oak that is. ’

‘Hmm. You’ve done a great job!’ said her dad, trying not to sound too surprised.

As far as Glynn was concerned this was paradise. There were mountain views in one direction and the distant glittering sea in another. His nearest neighbour was a friendly family of badgers. He could do what he wanted, make as much noise as he liked. He could dance around naked in the middle of the night and there was nobody going to complain.

Except of course Granny One who refused to even get out of the car because she was worried she might 'catch something'.

Lucy smiled.

Good old Uncle Ginger.

And another thing she liked about her Uncle Ginger was his attitude to sport.

Unusually for a Welshman and unlike all the other males in the family, Glynn had zero interest in rugby. (And it must be added sub-zero knowledge.)

That’s just about acceptable for a welsh girl, but for a welsh man it’s almost a social suicide note.

Rugby is what real men and real boys and their proper girl friends are expected to do. Watch it, play it, put on the red shirts and the dragon hats and the stripy scarves and then talk about it. Endlessly. Over lunch. In the office. In the playground. Down the pub.

Glynn kept very quiet. He didn’t know the difference between a line-out and a Cornish pastie.

On the other hand he was completely fluent in multi-national corporations, global warming and the evils of MacDonalds. Any mention of the queen or the royal family (‘the bloody useless royal family’ to give them their full title.) would have him sitting up wide awake and banging the table..

Uncle Ginger’s solution to almost everything was to abolish the royal family, sell off all the royal palaces and force the queen to live on a council estate in Merthyr.

He certainly wasn’t the only Welshman to have such feelings; his attitude had probably been shared by generations of republican Joneses but for Glynn, it was a passion. He wrote angry letters, he argued in bars and if any royal was rash enough to step over the border, Glynn was out there at the front of the crowd heckling and shaking his placards.

This not only made him unpopular with the police it made him unpopular with his own mother. Lucy’s Gran had recently and inexplicably gone over to ‘the other side’ and become a royal groupie. Instead of shuffling about in the post office and forgetting things like proper old people, she spent hours and hours lurking on ebay snapping up tea towels china plates and other royal memorabilia.’ Glynn’s occasional public protests reduced her to shaking, spluttering rage: ‘Stupid boy! What on earth does he think he’s doing? Disrespectful, irresponsible…’

For the older members of the Jones’ family Uncle Ginger and ‘irresponsible’ went together as naturally as Caerphilly went with cheese. Lucy reckoned they were all secretly jealous. They envied his carefree life style. Just because he never bothered to phone up three weeks in advance and get his visits marked down on the kitchen calendar, didn’t mean he was irresponsible. But adults just didn’t appreciate his good qualities. He was like a protruding rock in the smooth flowing river of their lives.

You mean he’s gone?

Yes.

But where to?

Dunno.

Didn’t he say anything?

No. Yes. He said ‘Things to do, people to see.’

Anything else?

Er.. Goodbye? Lovely to see you?

And that’s it?

Yup.

Is he coming back.

Didn’t say.

I swear that man lives on another planet.

In one important way Uncle Ginger was one of the most reliable people Lucy knew. Some adults promised a lot but then forgot. Uncle Ginger was more sparing with his promises but if he said he was going to do something or be somewhere; he did it.

Which is why what happened on Lucy’s 13th birthday was so surprising and upsetting.