Goodbye Crackernight by Justin Sheedy

Author:Justin Sheedy [Sheedy, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
ISBN: 9781742984674
Publisher: Justin Sheedy

Sleep-overs!

Except for at the Smiths’ house, these were a source of immense excitement. Though only a mile or two from Howard Place, spending Friday nights at Adam Cook’s house was like visiting another country. Leaving the convent after the bell and going somewhere other than home held a special magic for me, but going to Adam’s was something extra. Even at the time, to me his home was an alternate reality. They were ‘rich’. They went skiing. They had a speedboat. They had a pool table! They had a dishwashing machine!

Adam and I would stay up and watch war movies, then spend rainy Saturday mornings playing commandos up in the trees lining his street; these wet, cold conditions making it seem all the more like occupied France.

I had a ball at Adam’s, though his tiny sister used to get under our feet, causing me on one occasion to grow up a little and in an instant. We were trying to play pool, the little girl crawling under the table, reaching up and moving the balls, causing her usual havoc. We were making a lot of noise, the situation escalating to the point where I hollered, ‘Get … her … out!’ I then heard Mrs Cook cry out from the kitchen, exasperated, ‘She lives here, Justin!’

I stopped stone dead and realised I’d just been a complete dickhead, disrespectful of another’s space. The little girl had every right to be doing what she was doing, just being a little girl in her own home. Evidently I learned from the incident as I was invited to sleep over many times after that.

The only downside to sleep-overs was missing Friday night at home with Mum and Dad. At Howard Place, watching the comedy of Dave Allen had long been a Friday night institution, an absolutely essential part of which was me being all fixed up with a big mug of milky coffee. This had been a ritual since I was still too small to make one for myself yet and by the age of nine was part of my very fabric. The single time Frances forgot to make one for me, I burst into tears.

One long weekend, Adam Cook’s father took us on a cruiser on the Hawkesbury River. It was a great three days, but on that first Friday night I’d felt acutely homesick and I told Adam this. (Mr Cook took me seriously for a second, thinking I’d said ‘seasick’.) Clearly what Dave Allen and milky coffee embodied for me was security, as did Saturday nights cuddled up on the couch with Mum and Dad watching The Two Ronnies.

Juliette loved sleep-overs and had me entranced with her tales of the fluffy-pyjama frenzies that went on at her girlfriends’ homes. Tantalising to me were her accounts of short-sheeting beds, making up ghost stories and scaring her friends, writing notes and putting them under the boys’ bedroom door then giggling and running away. Damn, I wished I’d been there … Looking back on it, I think Juliette’s accounts awoke in me my first ever notion of ‘life passing me by’.

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