THE BOTTOM SLAPPED TWICE

So that's what life is all about...

It had been a trying time and his rather low level of awareness suggested two things. Firstly that it would end soon or if it didn’t, he would, and secondly that it would be best if he forgot all about it post-haste.

He had no name which might have been awkward had he been bothered with names, though a few had been suggested. His mother (Angela) favoured Ricky whilst his father (Dom) was rather keen on Peter, but they were a loving twosome and when Dom suggested they wait until the angel was actually born and saw what he looked like they’d decide.

Angela had a long labour and at first she rather favoured Beelzebub as a name for her pink blob of flesh, but being a woman the pain soon subsided and she insisted nobody had looked more like a Ricky than her torturer did.

So Ricky he was. But back to him and what was passing through the tiny brain that he possessed.

The warm juicy inside of his world had changed into a tunnel that had very little that might be called pleasant about it, and on the other side of that tunnel, which had seemed to go on for ever, was the sort of nothing he immediately disliked because it was neither wet nor warm.

It was when he was about to give up trying to work stuff out and go to sleep for a really long time because thinking was so hard, that his bottom was slapped. He didn’t know that it was a slap that caused that jerk of pain because he hadn’t yet learned exactly what a slap was or that it was called a slap, but a slap was what it was all right, and in response to it he started to breathe. He had to. There’s no way he could have cried loud and protestingly without a great deal of breath in his lungs, though he didn’t work it out like that.

What he worked out was pain needed to be repaid with pain but wasn’t quite sure what to inflict it on, or how. So he made a lot of noise instead. He discovered how to create a major number of decibels with his vocal chords, and did just that until a soft and squidgy n****e was forced into his mouth, and he sucked.

And in a sense that was the beginning of the end for Ricky, which his father agreed the baby should be called.

Not that he didn’t have quite a lot of life after that. He failed to die at birth, and even failed to realise that death was an option wisely taken by the occasional new born, but he continued to actually thrive. He sucked that squidgy n****e until it was sore, he pissed on whatever hygienically dry thing he could find to piss on and eventually learned that he got more kudos by passing stinky brown stuff through his rear end.

“Isn’t he a clever little darling,” cooed his mother who had totally recovered from the hours of labour he had forced her to tolerate.

“If you say so,” growled his father, who was less happy having his senses mauled by a tiny lump of noisy flesh.

And so time passed.

School presented few problems. He grew big enough to be called plump, which prompted the bored teacher of all things manly, like football, to think he’d make a good goal keeper for his under tens team, and proceeded to test him out by kicking a damp leather ball at him until he ran away and hid in the boys’ toilet. Damp leather footballs can come keen if propelled by a five foot seven well-stomached man with a bored disposition at young nine year old flesh.

When he was sixteen he was foolishly naughty in the company of a handful of other boys, and broke the law by entering licensed premises, lying about their ages, and getting drunk. The good thing about that is it was a one-off and he resolved never to get drunk again because, put simply, there wasn’t one nice thing about it.

After school and aged eighteen he went to college because thirteen years of school hadn’t taught him enough and for gainful employment he wanted to sit behind a counter at the local library and press a rubber date stamp onto labels in books which school had, in no way, prepared him for..

Then, aged twenty two he met Diane. She was gorgeous. Everyone said so. Her fair hair, long and beautifully controlled as she deliberately swept it erotically over one shoulder, and her practically perfect legs which she displayed as prominently as she could bearing in mind it was the nineteen sixties and there was a fetish for mini skirts just about everywhere. And other bits and pieces of her body ate into his brain when he contemplated them in the privacy of his dreams, and so he married her when he was twenty four.

Diane was as good as his own mother had been, and proceeded to get pregnant. He barely understood the process or why his input so pleasurably offered should cause it. The education of such personal things as love and marriage had been limited to a discussion on why bees flutter about in search of nectar and the bit about the accidental transfer of genetic material from one bit of a flower to a different bit of another flower quite passed him by along with words like stamen. Therefore in less than a decade Diane had five children and put her foot firmly down when it looked as if he might be thinking of producing the wherewithal for a sixth.

He stayed at the public library wielding the same rubber stamp until computers made it obsolete, and forced himself to retrain for the smart world of technology and micro chips and Bluetooth mice. It bored him. He couldn’t see what was wrong with pens, paper and the printed word, but got on with what he could anyway, not being one to kick up the sort of fuss that would get him called a dinosaur.

Then, when he was sixty five he finally retired and became a grandfather several times over.

He still loved Diane with his mind if not his body because she had decided, years earlier, that enough was enough, in fact was too much, and he could keep the rest of it to himself. She explained this to him but he got lost when he tried to understand what enough might refer to.

Retirement was a joy because a) he didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn and weave his way on his bicycle through traffic to the public library (where he was head librarian and a well respected fountain of knowledge) and b) he could consume the contents of the daily newspaper that he favoured at his leisure. And to add icing to the perfection of his cake, Diane liked having him at home as long as being at home involved quite a few activities in the garden.

When he was seventy nine he had a heart attack whilst planting potatoes, and only just recovered. He spent a period in hospital and stents were mentioned, though despite his librarian past he wasn’t quite sure what a stent might be and didn’t like to ask.

Under orders to keep s active as a man his age could, he left hospital and kept active by walking to the Red Lion public house and learning to enjoy shandy. He had never been a big drinker and shandy was quite strong enough for him, thank you very much. There was no chance it would get him drunk, which he avoided at all costs.

When he was eighty three and he was sitting at the dining table his heart finally decided that enough was very much enough, and Diane, in absolute horror, became aware of him slowly collapsing with a twisted look on his face.

Slowly, as if in some form of slow motion, he slipped to the floor, face down, and his ever-loving wife did the only thing open to her.

She wanted him alive. There were potatoes to be dug and her back wasn’t what it had been.

So seeing the way he was lying there and hearing the gurgling sound something inside him was making she gave his bottom a sound slapping with her good hand. The thwack might well have been heard a mile away in the Red Lion.

Whether Ricky felt it or not can be up for debate. There was a vestige of memory in a mind that was rapidly emptying itself into the ether, of a tunnel, of leaving a moist and wonderful environment for the cruel monotony of life, and it’s quite possible that he rather hoped that he might be returning whence he had come. But the slap, if it worked at all, decided his future for him and his heart, already frighting against life, finally and almost willingly, gave up the ghost as his wife’s loving hand descended for the third helpful time. And in response to that when his heart stopped its diurnal toil he stopped breathing altogether.

No chance of any rebirth, of returning to when the first slap his bottom had received, of course. He had seen his mother buried half a century earlier, her womb going into the earth with her, and he had wept as he stood by her grave, and now at this nondescript hour and lying on the floor his circle of life was complete. His bottom would never be slapped again. That just had to be that.

© Peter Rogerson 29.04.22

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