Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry
We loved this acutely observed story about the bond between twins
Darren wasn’t looking forward to taking Stuart and Amy out for the afternoon – though, to be fair, his niece and nephew probably weren’t any keener on the idea.
‘Right,’ he said straight off, establishing himself as the alpha male as they slipped into the back of his car. ‘First, I’d like to point out the safety features on this single-engine, double-exhaust sports car. Booster cushions have been fitted for your comfort and safety. Seatbelts must be kept fastened at all times while the vehicle is in motion. So, buckle up and prepare for take-off!’
They looked at him blankly, then at each other. That was the trouble with twins – they communicated their disdain telepathically.
‘OK,’ he continued gamely, pulling away from the kerb. ‘A few ground rules. There will be no eating or drinking in the vehicle. Ditto feet on the seats.’
‘Ditto?’ Amy frowned.
‘Who’s Ditto?’
‘It means also.’
‘Then why not say it? And why are you taking us out?’ she asked grumpily.
‘’Cos he’s our uncle, and they’re bringing Chris back from the hospital today.’ Stuart eye-rolled. ‘And they don’t want us around for a bit.’
‘Yes, I am your uncle, but that’s not true about your mum and dad not wanting you around for a bit… Stu,’ Darren said. ‘I asked to take you out for the afternoon as my treat because you’ve been such good kids, with everything that’s been going on recently.’ He hoped his nose wouldn’t grow so long that it tapped the windscreen. ‘Now, I thought we’d go to Rugeley Castle for a look around. It’s got cannons!’ he added, then caught Amy’s eye in his rearview. ‘And – er – a teapot collection! Don’t touch that!’ he added sharply, as Stuart fiddled with the central locking mechanism.
‘Why can’t we see properly out the back window?’ asked Amy, twisting round to look. ‘What’s that thing on the back of the car that’s in the way?’
‘It’s called a spoiler.’
‘’Cos it spoils your view out the back?’
He gritted his teeth. ‘Wait till we get on an open stretch of road and I put the top down! Would you like that?’ he added, perhaps too desperately.
‘Yeah, great,’ Stuart muttered, only to snort laconically, ‘if we were eight!’
‘Sor-ree, I’m sure,’ Darren snorted back. ‘Forgot you were both nine; practically decrepit.’
They drove to the castle in silence. He’d told his sister Essie that it wouldn’t work, this uncle lark – he was 30 going on nine himself, and didn’t ‘do’ kids. Still, a favour was a favour and, like everyone else, he’d wanted to do his bit for her and his brother-in-law Andy while baby Chris was in hospital.
The castle was actually less of a disaster than he’d anticipated. The cannons and teapots were impressive, and the kids behaved (on the whole) on the guided tour, although when they got to the ‘very armchair’ in which the duke who’d owned the place 200 years earlier had ‘died while waiting for his supper,’ Amy asked the elderly guide, ‘Was he wearing his pyjamas?’ and Stuart wanted to know, ‘Were his last words, ‘What do I have to do to get a cup of tea round here when the place is full of teapots?’’
The guide fielded questions with a deadpan magnificence Darren deeply envied, pausing to tell him in an aside, ‘Bright little tykes you’ve got there.’
As a reward for not firing a cannon or breaking a teapot, he was prepared to buy them a cream tea in the eye-wateringly expensive cafe, but when they spotted an ice cream kiosk by the gates, they were off.
He bought them each a double-scoop in a cone with the stern proviso, ‘You can’t eat them in the car.’
It was turning a bit brisk weather-wise, so he went to sit in the car, trying not to look smug watching them huddle under the kiosk awning. Then it started to rain, gently at first, but finally with real force, water tipping off the awning and catching the back of Amy’s neck. She and Stuart both started dancing around then, screaming as if the rain was molten lava. He got out of the car, spread the map he’d brought on the back seat, and gestured to them to run and get in.
They did so, half-laughing and half-shrieking, chasing melted ice cream down their inside arms. He remembered doing that, vaguely. And then, just before he pulled away, he saw it – a bright mauve dollop of blueberry ice cream on his carefully valeted leather. ‘I told you!’ he shouted, making them both start. ‘To be careful! My
‘Bright little tykes you’ve got there,’ said the guide
car, my rules! This is… this is…’
‘In sportable?’ suggested
Amy in a small voice. ‘That’s what our real mum used to say when she was cross.’
‘Don’t say ‘real,’’ hissed Stuart hastily. ‘I told you, you should say ‘other’ mum.’
Silence. Darren steadied his breath, then turned round to them. ‘Of course you can talk about your ‘real’ mum as just that. Your – new – mum would understand. She’s not trying to replace your mum, and
I know she loves you. You know that too, right?
Baby Chris won’t change that. And
I’m sorry for yelling at you just now. I overreacted. A bit.
Can we move on from this?’
They looked at him with suspicious eyes before slowly nodding.
But then Amy asked, ‘So why are we got out of the way while they go to hospital to bring baby Chris home from the preema-ture baby unit?’
‘You know why, duh-brain,’ Stuart said crossly. ‘’Cos they thought going to the hospital would remind us of going there before, to see our – real – mum before she died.’
‘Yes, exactly.’ Darren nodded. ‘Your mum and dad asked me to take you out for a nice afternoon, and then take you home to say hello to baby Chris in person, without all those tube and monitor thingies getting in the way.’
Not that it was any of his business, but it wasn’t how he’d have played things. Kids were not only resilient, they also hated to be patronised. Maybe Amy and Stuart would have welcomed going back to the hospital where their beloved mum had died four years earlier? Had anyone asked them? Parents were always trying to wrap kids in cotton wool when, truth was, you couldn’t. Especially if his own past was anything to go by…
‘You’re looking wibbly,’ Amy informed him, her warm breath fanning his ear as she grasped his headrest with both (no doubt sticky) hands and peered at him. ‘You all right, Uncle Darren?’
He started a bit at his official title. ‘Yeah, as right as I can be, with you two in tow.’ He had a brainwave. ‘Tell you what, I’ll drive you home by the less-than-scenic route.’
Twenty minutes later, he pulled up outside the unlovely block of flats where he and Essie had grown up.
‘I wouldn’t like to live there,’ said Amy, scrunching up her nose, but when Stuart nudged he, she added insincerely, ‘I’m sure it’s very nice inside.’
‘Not unless it’s had a major overhaul,’ said Darren drily. ‘See those communal stairs going up the middle, though? I could race my blue Dinky car all the way from the top stair rail to the bottom without it falling off!’
‘That why you have a blue boy racer car now?’ asked Amy.
‘I suppose.’ The blue car had been his favourite possession, the one thing he had from home when he was taken into care (though a bigger boy, Phil Peterson, soon nicked it off him. Might have been different if Essie had been put in the same care home as him).
‘We used to play a game, me and sis,’ he murmured. ‘Our front window, five floors up, faced the ring road here, so we’d play ‘red lorry, yellow lorry.’ You had to wait until you spotted one of each colour pass each other on the road, and the first person to shout it out won.’
‘Not much of a game,’ sniffed Stuart.
Maybe not. It had been Essie’s way of taking his mind off his hunger or their mum crashed out in the front room surrounded by beer cans.
‘There’s one!’ shouted Amy suddenly, as a lorry with a logo of bananas drove past.
‘But that’s only partly yellow and you’ve got to see a red one at the same time,’ tutted Stuart. ‘Or can it,’ he asked Darren, ‘be partly red or yellow? And what about if it’s a lorry covered in red and yellow stripes?’
All three of them engaged in a heated discussion of possible rules as he drove them back home, serenaded intermittently by one or both twins shouting, ‘There’s one! Look, there’s another!’
‘You’ve got to see a red one at the same time’
‘Your lorry-spotting needs a bit of work,’ he declared as he pulled into their road. ‘Though you’re getting there.’
As for him, he’d spotted Andy’s car – which meant both he and Essie were back from the hospital with Chris.
Essie came out of the house, smiling, followed by Andy with the carrycot.
OK, he supposed he’d have to get out and make like an uncle who ‘did’ babies. Or maybe not. He’d done his bit for today, hadn’t he? He could just wave from the driver’s seat, point to his watch to signal an urgent appointment elsewhere and mime ‘I’ll phone!’ through the windscreen. It usually worked when leaving a place the morning after the night before.
‘You kids get out here, and I’ll be on my way,’ he announced.
‘You’re not coming in?’ asked Amy in surprise.
‘My wing mirrors wouldn’t clear the driveway.’
‘Dad’s thought of that, look!’
He looked. Andy had moved some of his precious pot plants to allow the sport’s car’s front wheels to rest on a corner of his equally precious lawn. Unlookedfor martyrdom, in Darren’s opinion. Then he saw someone else bob out of the house behind Essie. ‘Hello, who’s that?’ he asked, perhaps unwisely, because Amy giggled.
Stuart said, ‘That’s a nurse friend of Mum’s,
Tania something.’
‘A nurse, eh? She’s got the uniform and everything? Er – out you get now,’ he added, recollecting himself too late.
‘Only if you come in,’ said Stuart doggedly. ‘You haven’t met baby Chris properly yet.’
‘Or the nurse lady,’ added Amy brightly.
Grunting, he inched his car into the space allotted by Andy, then instructed his charges they could now remove their seatbelts.
‘Thank you for flying Air Darren. We hope to see you again before too long.’
He got out, feeling very selfconscious as he kissed Essie’s cheek and admired the baby.
Then, to his horror, Amy went dashing up to ‘Tania something,’ yelling, ‘Our uncle Darren wants to know if you’ve got a unifor—’ before Stuart interrupted, bellowing, ‘Red lorry, yellow lorry!’ pointing dramatically into the road at nothing in particular, but at least sparing his uncle further embarrassment.
‘I owe you for that,’ Darren told him later in the kitchen, before Stuart ran off to tell his dad about the cannons, the old duke who’d died in an armchair and the wonky staircase that uncle Darren used to slide down. Talk about rewriting history!
Though later, when he was sitting with baby Chris on his lap, trying to listen to four people at once while eating cake and keeping an eye on Tania’s progress around the room, he wondered if maybe it was time for him, if not to rewrite history, then definitely to think about starting a new chapter.