BRENDAN’S QUANDARY

A man, from birth to death.

   Brendan was on his way to school for the very first time. He’d been looking forward to the adventure and had even told the toddler next door that he was going to be a big boy when he started school.

One thing his mummy stressed that was most important was “Don’t forget your name, Brendan.”

“What’s a name?” he asked innocently because the word name was brand new to him. It’d never been said in such a way that he remembered it.

“It’s what we call you, silly,” smiled mummy. She was a very good mummy and only gave him a few nicknames, like Booboo and Googles. So he’d actually decided that he was called by a host of names, Brendan only being one of them. After all, Daddy wasn’t only Dad, he was Roger sometimes, and even occasionally Silly Bugger. And mummy had a plethora of names too. When she wasn’t being mummy she was sometimes Wendy and occasionally Cuddles.

“If the teacher asks you what your name is, you must say you’re Brendan,” mummy told him, “because that’s your proper name and all the other things we sometimes call you are loving jokes.”

“I’ll remember then, mummy,” he assured her, and he did. So when he was at school and a strange lady mistook him for Jonny he looked her straight in the eye and said “I’m Brendan.”

And the strange lady smiled at him and said “if you see Jonny tell his I was looking for him.”

Brendan frowned. He didn’t know who Jonny was, but the strange lady walked off in a hurry before he could explain his predicament, and it was just as well that he didn’t hear the word Jonny once again that day.

And when the teacher called his name out just after a loud bell rang he ran up to her with a huge smile and told her he was Brendan. And everyone was so happy he almost cried with joy.

The months rolled along and he remembered he was Brendan even when a couple of boys called him Bren and a girl called him shorty-pants.

He learned where he lived because that was almost as important as remembering his name. He always got the number right and usually the name of the street as well. And it sunk in so deeply that when he was getting on in life and had lived in a series of different homes with two wives and three children of his own he still remembered twenty-seven Earl Avenue as a very important address.

He even made it into a password when he went on to his computer and it asked him for one. Twenty-seven Earl Avenue was an address he would never, ever forget even though half a century had passed since Earl Avenue was levelled and became a shopping Mall.

Every so often an event occurred and his parents, usually totally absorbed with each other and the mysterious things they did privately when they thought nobody was looking, and that was they had to vote.

And that was just about the only thing that led them to quarrel, which amused Brendan because they even quarrelled quietly and without fur flying like he’d heard other parents quarrelled.

Dad would go on and on about how important it was for the whole country to be rich as Croesus (whoever Croesus was) and if it was some of that richness would end up in their pockets, and they could go to Spain for a holiday instead of Skegness.

“It’s the blue ticket for me,” he would say.

And then mum would smile knowingly and say that whatever wealth landed in the country it would always end up in the same few pockets and they’d be no better off and probably a bit poorer.

“It’s the red ticket for me,” she would say.

And because this happened quite often and the discussions were always the same they became part of his store of knowledge until the time when he was an adult himself and had to choose between them if he himself was going to cast a vote.

He’d always loved both of his parents, but it was mum who had taught him two important things, his name and the address of the house where he lived, and his mum voted red. But then again, it was his dad who had always wanted the family to be comfortable and with enough money in the bank should a rainy day come along, and he voted blue.

It was a quandary, and in the end he decided which way to cast his vote on the gender of his parents. Dad was a man and so was he, so the man had probably the best reason for voting the way he did, so in the end and as a young man Brendan voted blue.

Based entirely on the fact that his father was a man and having nothing to do with the right or wrong of that man’s belief.

When Brendan was forty his father died in his early sixties and, not being able to stand the misery of losing the man who had cuddled her through life, his mother died soon after.

By then, of course, Brendan was on his second wife, he having quarrelled with his first because she was, to his mind, useless, and the three kids were already growing up and threatening to become independent. The oldest one, in fact, was married and had provided a tiny, squawking grandchild for Brendan to coo over.

But he still remembered that address, twenty-seven Earl Avenue and knew he would never forget it, and when election day came round he didn’t have to think about it. He voted for the blue party and then switched his computer on and wrote a blog about how much poorer he was these days and how high was the cost of living.

Blues won just about every election. It was a forgone conclusion, really. And Brendan sometimes wondered if it was their way of making sure their mates were all well fed and had big expensive cars that meant he was less well off than he’d been but if he thought deeply enough it crossed his mind that it might be his his own fault, really.

   At the polling station he’d voted Blue, and that had surely been the right thing to do. Voting Red would have been wrong surely? He’d have been even poorer if they’d won, all that talk of nationalising things like gas and electricity and the trains? That would cost dear, wouldn’t it? And anyway the smart suited men in Government would see that he was all right, surely? They knew what was what, and that was all that mattered.

After all, they couldn’t do everything and they’d had a pandemic to party through. They’d had to, hadn’t they? To keep their fingers on the pulse of thing by meeting together after dark, and working through the night together. While his grandad died in the home he’d had to put him in because he couldn’t do much for himself any more, his mother’s father who had struggled to ripe old age before accidentally catching that blasted Covid disease, a man who had always said he voted Red, and was proud of it. But voting Red had killed him, hasn’t it? Wasn’t that what the government said?

And didn’t they know?

Of course they did, and anyway dad had always voted Blue, and dad had known a thing or two. Hadn’t he? Anyway, Brendan couldn’t bear the thought of being wrong so he decided he must be right.

Brendan died next winter. It was a cold one and the cold ate into his bones, and he died. It would have been nice to switch the heating on, but that would cost too much.

© Peter Rogerson 15.05.22

Reviews

[alanwgraham]

Well done Peter for your affectionate story about Brendans life. You made a good job of finding the right voice for the young Brendan. Of course you have to be selective in describing a whole life but you did well.
All the best,
Alan

[Peter Rogerson]

Thanks, alanwgraham, I've always been interested in the influences that unexpectedly colour our lives. My recent story is yet to be finsihed. There are so far 15 short chapters about Marmaduke, starting from his birth.