My birthday game of pass-the-parcel was reaching its merciful climax, the parcel reducing in size with each stripped layer of magazine pages. The oozing blood from my multiplying paper cuts refused to soak into the paper, sliding easily across the gloss. Soon a dab of my blood was on the hands of every child in the circle, like a gory version of that mad stat about cocaine on every fiver. Out of pain and fear of spreading blood diseases, I now began passing with my elbows, saving my hands from further cuts, and the paper and my friends from more of my blood.
We reached the final layer, and I knew Richard was desperate to have me open this one too, cementing my persona in the party as a spoiled brat, hogging the treats while marking my territory with blood, like a dog with a UTI.
After three literally blood-curdling revolutions without the abrogation of silence, the parcel reached me again, blood smearing across a Cosmo article about ‘How to Please Your Man’. At the time I remember thinking how sorely I ought to read that later, given how displeased I knew my party guests to be.
I also knew that Richard would no doubt be pausing the music on me for a final time, and in a moment of desperate haste, I grabbed the parcel with my elbows and flung it to my left, hoping to drop it into Tanya’s lap before Richard had a chance to press ‘pause’ on the CD player.
I turned, elbows at five and seven, and due to my incredible speed, and likely not being aware of my awesome strength at that age, I struck Tanya hard across the temple, the passed parcel following and bopping her playfully on the nose.
She went down like a sack of shit.
A heavy sack of shit. Like if some shit had informed on the mob, and they launched it into the Hudson in a refuse bag weighed down with bricks, lest the shit should escape or rise to the surface for the prying eyes of any proximate cops not on the take.
This alone was bad enough, but the contact of the blood-smeared parcel gave her the appearance that my strike had drawn blood. Not impossible given my preternatural strength at that age, but I knew the blood was my own.
The music came to an abrupt halt, since that’s how CD players work. You could fade it out by lowering the volume knob I suppose but in that moment Richard was less concerned about smooth musical transitions.
Tanya, ever the drama queen (she is now a mildly successful actress I believe), began to wail in either pain or a transparent plea for sympathy. The sound caused my parents to run back in, Dad’s laminated tie flapping flaccidly at his belly, while Mother and Tanya’s mum ran over to assess the evidence, take witness statements and see that justice be done.
In her desperation to placate the only female guest, and apparently only victim of physical violence, at the party, Mother started to open the ultimately passed parcel’s final layer of bloodied gloss, ready to distract Tanya from her pain with the final gift.
Unfortunately, as previously stated, tradition dictates that the final gift is usually reserved for the birthday-haver, with all previous treats between layers saved for the non-birthday-havers. The situation we now found ourselves in was a perverse subversion of this tradition, with all previous treats having gone to me, and the final one saved for a random party guest. In addition, although not explicitly stated, one might suggest that tradition typically dictate that precisely no blood be on display during the game. But once again, our version had been flipped, and we now had the exact opposite amount of blood out in the open (‘some’ being a possible opposite of ‘none’, alongside ‘a lot’ and ‘all’).
The parcel was unwrapped as Tanya’s tears mixed with my blood on her face, in a fairly cute pinkish sheen. Hastily, Mother presented Tanya with the final gift of… a Tamagotchi.
This was one of the items I had begged Dad and Mother for. It was a present meant for me specifically, with them knowing they would end the game on me, and perhaps having forgotten in the maelstrom of shredded Good Housekeeping and plasma.
But it was a high value item, and even in the moment of realising her mistake, Mother decided to stick to her guns, and allow Tanya to take it as penance. Her crying faded, with a smooth diminuendo that the CD player could learn a thing or two from. She turned the box over in her hands, sniffing back her tears and nodding her assent to questions like ‘Do you want this?’ and ‘You won didn’t you?’
In that moment, my ferocious mind accelerated in emotional maturity and I realised it best if I didn’t argue. I had learned my lesson regarding my reckless conduct and the concordant result for myself and Tanya:
Victims get rewarded.
Minutes later Tanya was gone; having succeeded in a gift-pilfer she had no need to continue hanging around, desperate to get home and feed her virtual pet, and virtually clean up its virtual mess. I was already convincing myself I didn’t want the Tamagotchi, as a way of softening the blow. It’s a tactic I’ve heard that men employ in online dating; immediately insulting their romantic target upon rejection, changing the narrative by convincing themselves they never actually wanted or liked the person who they had moments earlier been putting at least some effort into bedding. It’s the ‘you can’t fire me, I quit’ of the dating world, and it’s genius.
Utilising this tactic, I began to ask myself ‘who wants to pick up virtual shit anyway?’ I could pick up as much real dog shit as I liked. We had a literal dog-shit machine in the form of our dog. And there were plenty of other dogs out there with shit perched on the edge of their active sphincters, just waiting to eke out and be snatched up by an eager collector.
I now realise I didn’t know how good I had it back then. While other children farted around picking up pixels on a screen meant to represent shit, I had the real thing on my doorstep, sometimes literally. To feel the weight of it in one’s hand, the warmth seeping through the plastic bag, the flies buzzing around like airborne jewels. That was life. That was living. Those were the days.
To be continued next week.
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