short Story # 8

Carpets

By Katie Jarvis

As soon as Henry spoke, I knew I would hate him.

He lay there, wrapped in that roll of carpet – a sort of Paisley pattern, it was.

“Smelly,” said Maureen, wrinkling up her nose. Still, she could talk. She claimed she’d lived entirely off ginger biscuits for the last seven and-a-half years, but I doubted it myself. For one thing, I’d never seen her buy a single packet. And for another, when Vera – the one with the overlarge cat flap – had offered her ginger tea, I’d distinctly heard her say she didn’t care for the flavour.

“Pass me false teeth,” Henry said. No please about it.

“I’ve tried cleaning them with Duraglit, but they’re no better,” Maureen confided quietly to me as she handed them over.

Vera had tried to tempt Henry out of the carpet many a time with home-baked fruit scones, lemon cake, and even a Viennese whorl one Sunday when the World Cup was on, but he was too canny. He refused to come out, even that time when the vicar came round to complain about the cribbage peg wedged in the pulpit. He’d been so angry, the pimples on his chin stood out bright red, and Vera had claimed they’d formed an image of the Virgin Mary, weeping. She’d tried to get the local paper interested, but they were already covering a crop circle that had appeared in the shape of one of Des O’Connor’s sweaters. It was the best proof of alien existence I’d ever seen.

We’d tried ignoring Henry, but Maureen had said to stop doing that at once because it was exactly what he wanted. Some people do things for attention, but Henry did them to be ignored, and it was playing into his hands. Not that anyone had seen his hands for years, of course.

Maureen had even come back with a very nice off-cut in 80 percent polypropylene, which could have saved him in a fire. But Henry would have none of it. He never was safety-conscious by nature. Like the time he’d sat on a live chicken. He said it was an accident, but I’d wondered even then.

Vera said we should shock him out of it. But how do you shock a man like Henry? He hadn’t even blinked over that incident with Flo and the pitchfork, and it couldn’t have happened more than two inches from his nose. And Flo’s never been the same since – she can’t pass a farm-assured beef sign without breaking out into that strange yapping sound she does that goes right through you.

Poor Maureen was nearly driven mad by the situation. It was embarrassing she said – I thought quite reasonably – to have a husband permanently wrapped in a carpet roll. It was pushing her over the edge, and this is a woman who’d been teetering pretty near it in the first place. For a start, she’d been keen on self-euthanasia for as long as I’d known her, and was saving up to visit a Swiss clinic she’d read about. I’m sure the Henry-thing simply exacerbated that. I mean, she was quite well, actually, except for a touch of asthma that caught her bang in the chest whenever she bought capsicum peppers. But that came from years of inhaling self-raising flour.

I suppose it all came to a head when we went on that holiday to Malaga. By “we” I’m talking about the members of the Spotted Cuscus Possum Owners Society. To be honest, I’ve never really believed Henry and Maureen owned a possum, never mind a spotted cuscus – they’d always been very evasive on the subject. But that was their loss.

Easyjet was very good about it, though they were adamant Henry would have to go as baggage. If he’d gone as hand luggage, they said, he could have fallen out of the overhead locker and killed someone, which I thought was a fair point. They refused to put a ‘fragile’ label on him though, which worried Maureen. But on the whole, she was quite happy because it gave her a break for two or three hours; the on-flight food was hopeless for Henry. The peanuts played havoc with his warp and weft.

To be fair to Henry, he must have known he was being a bit of a nuisance because he tried his best to strike up a conversation with the handlers as he was swept down the luggage belt. “Do you know any ventriloquists?” I heard him casually ask, as he disappeared into the x-ray machine, but no-one bothered replying. For one thing they were busy – they’d probably spotted that stapler he’d once swallowed in a fit of pique - and for another, it wasn’t the best conversation opener I’d ever heard. Ventriloquists are largely out of fashion now, though Henry wouldn’t know that.

I’m not xenophobic, but I thought the Spanish authorities could have shown a modicum of understanding when we arrived. You’d think they’d never seen anyone wrapped in a roll of carpet before – and, after all, we all need holidays. They were happy to let the carpet go – it was nothing special, though quite hard-wearing – but they were insistent they wanted to charge duty on Henry.

Maureen was very upset – she’s never coped well with stress since that tragedy with the puff pastry – and Geoff told her to think carefully before she paid, because sometimes it was worth just letting them confiscate the goods and shrugging your shoulders. But she couldn’t bear to think of Henry stored in some god-forsaken carpet warehouse, waiting to see if he matched someone’s three-piece, and she paid up in the end, even though it meant using the money for the optional trip to the surgical appliance factory.

One of the other members of our party originally came from Axminster, and Maureen’s relief was palpable when he agreed to try a bit of counselling.

He was a big man, and he didn’t believe in pussy-footing around, he said. He got Henry upright in the roll – Maureen wept to see it because Henry had been horizontal for years – and asked him absolutely directly, “Why do you want to spend your time rolled up in a carpet then, Henry?”

It was an approach that paid off, and I think it clarified the situation for a lot of us. After all, it’s true that with a rug the tassels would get right up your nose. But, without being ungrateful, it didn’t really alter the situation, as such.

Henry was laughing on the other side of his face by the end of the holiday, though – not that he’s got much of a sense of humour – because he was the only one who didn’t have severe sunburn over 80 percent of bodily surfaces, though he was unduly upset about the extensive fading on the north face of his carpet. We had to stop Madge trying to persuade him to have a pair of curtains fitted to minimise sun damage.

Anyhow, I’m pretty sure it was that holiday that began to plant a seed of doubt in his mind.

We came back to the hottest summer Durdle Door has ever known. I realised how hot it was going to be when I saw Doreen’s thermals hung out on the line. She only has one set because she will insist they’re in camouflage colours, though heaven knows why. She always says she kicks herself for not buying a second pair when she saw them.

Well, the sun continued to pound down, and you could see Henry was getting more and more uncomfortable, though he was too proud to show it. He deliberately whistled Elgar’s Enigma Variations backwards every morning, just to demonstrate how relaxed he was. But it was a ruse – we could all see that.

Then one morning, when we were all meeting up for our annual deck chair absorbancy check, Henry just stood up in the middle of the room, cool as a cucumber, and unravelled himself as if nothing had happened.

Maureen gave this little sort of scream, and fainted right away. Vera had to wave a Hairdresser’s Monthly over her for 15 minutes before she came round. It was such a shock.

As for Henry, he was a bit dusty, which is only to be expected, but none the worse for wear.

Of course, the carpet was ruined – I certainly wouldn’t have had it in my lounge after all it had been through – but it was never a pattern I’d particularly admired.

I lost touch with them in the end, which was sad as they were always good for a game of Twister of a dark night – right through Henry’s carpet days which, I suppose, was sporting of him.

But even in his deep pile moments, I never developed what you could call a fondness for him, not after all he put Maureen through.

I sometimes wonder where they are now, and how they’re doing, and whether they ever got round to building the cochineal store that Maureen always dreamed of.

It’s sad, but some people are born to lead humdrum sorts of existences.