The Wish List

  Each never was emphasized with another slap. I wanted to stand up and fight back. Sink my fist into his flabby gut and watch him gasping for air on the linoleum. But I couldn’t. It was all too much for me. Pouring over my head like a suffocating wave. He was too big.

  I was saved by the end of the commercials. Distracted by a theme tune, Franco shuffled back to his throne. He sank into the chair, his thighs barely squeezing between the arms. I squatted on the floor like a battered spider, afraid to get up in case the movement attracted attention.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” he said, patting his shirt pocket for matches. “I’ve started official adoption proceedings. That means I get to stay here forever, and you get a brand-new daddy. Wonderful news, eh?”

  I didn’t answer. It wasn’t really a question. Pain and hatred were battling for attention in my head. The hatred won. You can’t strike someone’s mother and expect nothing to happen. Franco would have to pay for this. I didn’t know how, just yet, but the atom of an idea was spinning in my brain. So he was fond of television, was he? Well, I’d just have to hit him where it hurt. Hit him hard.

  FRANCO WAS A MAN OF FEW INTERESTS, AND SHARING a house with him meant that I knew them all. He could list them on the stubby fingers of one hand. Television, obviously, was the great love of his life. The cathode ray tube sang to him each day for a minimum of eight hours, overpowering the outside world with glamorous escapism. Food was high on the list. Convenience food by necessity, or else it would impinge on time allotted to TV. So, potato chips, chocolate, and delivery pizzas were the main staples. Drink was good. A semi-inebriated mind sinks all the more readily into the mire of satellite stations.

  But this was the private Franco. One that the public never saw. Outside the warped door of his inherited house, Franco Kelly was a pillar of the community. A shaky pillar perhaps, but a pillar, nonetheless. Franco saw himself in the tragic hero mold. Loses the love of his life, but nobly sticks around to raise her brat of a kid.

  To keep this legend going, Franco would strap on a suit and tie every Monday evening and stroll over to the Crescent Bar to chair a committee meeting of his beloved Newford Pigeon Fanciers’ Association. After the toilet and the fridge, the NPFA was probably the only thing that could tempt Franco out of his armchair. Not that he kept pigeons himself—that would have required effort. But you didn’t have to own them to appreciate them, he reasoned. And hadn’t he watched the club video until the tape snapped?

  So, I plotted. The television and the NPFA. How could I combine the two in a suitably evil revenge plot? The answer came in fragments, like the pieces of a complicated jigsaw. There was preparation to be done. The first thing I needed was a video camera.

  I borrowed the video camera from Belch, and set it up outside the back window. I worried a bit about that. Borrowing something from Belch. God only knew where he got a video camera—plus, he would want something in return. Probably a bit of help with one of his more dubious operations. I shrugged off the worry. Whatever it was, it’d be worth it.

  I filmed my stepfather whenever the opportunity arose. I filmed him lounging around scratching himself, pouring beer over his peanuts. Staying in his underwear for an entire weekend. Just excerpts, mind, when his attention was focused on the screen. Two whole days would have been far too harrowing for any viewer. I filmed him arguing with the TV, drooling in his sleep, and basically humiliating himself in every way possible. But it wasn’t enough. Not after what he’d done.

  Step two. Incitement. I set the camera to record that Friday afternoon and ran around into the sitting room.

  “Hey, Fatso,” I said. “Loan me a tenner.”

  Franco stirred from a semidoze. A ribbon of dried dribble cracked on his chin.

  “Huh?”

  “A tenner. You know, ten pounds. You understand that don’t you, chubby?”

  Franco frowned. Was this brat ever going to learn? “Watch your mouth, missy. Don’t make me get up out of this chair.”

  I laughed. A sarcastic bark. “Get up out of the chair? You? Don’t make me laugh.”

  Franco tried for a disbelieving chuckle, what came out was a strangled gasp. He was cracking. “I’m warning you now, missy!”

  “You’re warning me? You’d be better off warning a tortoise, that’s about the only thing you could catch.”

  Franco threw his belly forward, the shift in balance tumbling him from the chair. I made no attempt to escape. Why would I? This was the whole point. My stepfather punched me on the shoulder. A vicious dead-arm, with the middle knuckle pointed. I cried with pain. I wasn’t acting.

  “I used to play soccer, you know,” pouted Franco, still wounded by the tortoise comment. “That’s where I got the name. Franco-o-o, they used to shout every time I scored. And that was plenty of times, I can tell you.”

  I wiped my eyes with the ragged sleeve of my school cardigan. Keep talking, fat boy. My plan was almost complete. Just one more incident to film.

  It was Franco’s custom to drink himself into a stupor on the weekend. He felt he deserved it after drinking himself into a stupor all week. By midnight on Sunday, World War Three under the armchair wouldn’t wake him.

  So I waited on the landing until his snores echoed up the stairs, then I sneaked down the stairway, crab-fashion, feet wedged between the banisters. I needn’t have worried about stealth. Franco was dead to the world. He had changed into his drinking underwear, and was snoring up at least a force seven. I plucked a smoldering cigarette butt from between his fingers before it roused him, destroying all my plans.

  The TV was still on. Some shoot-’em-up movie.

  Franco’s favorite, but not enough to keep him awake.

  This was the tricky part. If I turned off the television now, Franco would wake up, for sure. I doubted he could sleep at all without the comforting blare from the idiot box. But I had a plan.

  The old television was still in the corner, half-buried under burger cartons and cigarette packages. I dragged it across the linoleum, and plugged it in. Now all I had to do was switch the antenna around and we were in business. There was a moment of hiss, then mono sound erupted from the old set. Franco never stirred.

  I quickly unplugged the new set and wheeled it out the back door. Luckily the whole rig was on castors, so rolling it down to the shed was no problem. The camera was already set up. Now all I needed was the sledgehammer. . . .

  I remember squatting on the window ledge waiting for Franco to wake up. Giggles were spiraling in my throat like caged hamsters. Hysteria I suppose, and fear.

  Franco waking up was a slow process. It could go on for hours. First he might surface for a scratch, or maybe a quick shuffle to the bathroom, then he could sink into a stupor for another forty winks. I had turned off all the radiators to quicken up the performance.

  At nine o’ clock, his eyelids fluttered. A meaty hand patted the armchair for his cigarettes. Having located the box, he twisted one into the corner of his mouth and lit it with his lighter. All with his eyes closed.

  He scraped his tongue along his top teeth and grimaced. The remains of last night’s beer and fast food. A drink was called for.

  Franco pulled his eyelids apart with the heels of his hands. Bloody lightning bolts shot through the whites. He was in a bad way. I knew how this was going. Soon he would descend into a murderous sulk, blaming the world for his self-inflicted hangover.

  Then he paused. Something was wrong. Out of place. He took inventory. He was in his chair. Smoking his cigarette. Watching his . . .

  Franco leapt from the armchair. Oh my God! Shock and disbelief rippled down his face. What was happening? His TV! Gone!

  I shot a close-up of his face, praying for tears. I would not be disappointed.

  Franco fell to his knees in front of the old television. There was a cassette on top of the video recorder. Play me, the note said.

  With shaky fingers Franco fumbled the cassette into the VHS. After a moment’s hiss, two objects came into focus. O
ne was me, the other was the TV.

  “Nooo.”

  The word leaked from between Franco’s lips, like the last spurt of air from a balloon.

  I couldn’t hear my voice from outside the window, but I knew what I was saying.

  “My dear stepdaddy. Because you paid for this TV with my ring, I think it legally belongs to me. So, legally, I can do whatever I like with it. I could sit down and watch Glenroe. Or I could go to work on it with this!”

  My television image pulled a tool from out of shot. It was a long-handled sledgehammer.

  Franco stuffed eight fingers in his mouth. Pantomime terror. “No, you little brat. No!”

  Even if I did feel a moment of mercy then, the me on the television didn’t. She laid into that TV with the gusto of a one-woman wrecking crew. She got really carried away, forgot all about the camera. It was a bit embarrassing, really. Franco flinched with every blow.

  “Stop. Please, stop. I’ll give you anything.”

  He was pawing the screen now, tears dribbling down his nose. It was pathetic. The man had barely shed a tear at my mother’s funeral. And here he was, destroyed by the death of a television.

  By the end, Franco was flat on the floor, hands over his ears to shut out the destruction. The television was little more than a box of glass and sparks. And I had every glorious moment on tape.

  * * *

  Needless to say, I kept well out of the way for the rest of the day. I can only imagine how Franco made it through until the meeting. Maybe that’s what kept him going, the thought of a night out with the lads.

  When I arrived at the NPFA AGM, he was every inch his public self, except for a slightly haunted cast about the eyes. The boys were set up in the lounge of the Crescent Bar, with the big screen all ready for the race video.

  I counted to three and burst in the double doors. Franco’s first impulse was to lunge, but he couldn’t. Not with adoption papers in the works. You could buy another television. Houses were a bit harder to come by.

  “What is it, Meg?” he said through clenched teeth. “You should be in bed. It’s a school night.”

  “I have your tape, Uncle Franco,” I said, staring him straight in the eye. “You forgot it.”

  Franco blinked. “What tape?”

  “The Dover Pigeon Grand Prix. For after the meeting.”

  Franco checked his bag. The tape wasn’t there. How could it be, seeing as I had buried it at the bottom of our trash can. He took the cassette tentatively, as though it might explode.

  “Thanks, girl,” he muttered “Off home with you now.”

  I pulled a sulky face. “Aw. Can’t I watch. Pigeon racing is so cool.” Flattery will get you anywhere.

  “Ah, let the girl stay, Franco. Be a treat for her.”

  “One night out, Chairman. It won’t kill her.”

  What could my stepfather do? He couldn’t be ungracious in front of his peers, yet he suspected a trap.

  “Okay, Meg,” he said at last. “But we’ll have a little talk about this later.”

  A perfectly innocent statement to all ears but mine. I knew what Franco meant by “a little talk.”

  So they put on the tape. I watched spellbound, as it slid into the recorder, whirring gently into its grove. Surely my plan could not work. Surely someone would stop me. But no. It not only worked, it was perfect.

  For a few seconds there was mild puzzlement, as even Franco didn’t recognize himself. Then the laughter started. It began in the back of the lounge, well away from the committee table. But it spread like the sunrise, creeping up the room, touching everyone present.

  Except two. Franco wasn’t laughing. And neither was I.

  It was comical, in a pathetic sort of way. This bloated big-head exposed as the layabout I knew him to be. There were plenty of pigeon fanciers delighted to have the chance for a giggle at their pompous chairman.

  The laughing stopped pretty quickly during the boxing scene. Nobody thought hitting children was funny. But I like to leave them laughing, so I kept the TV destruction scene till last. Rolling in the aisles, they were.

  I remember a cold satisfaction creeping across my heart. I had destroyed Franco twice. Once on tape and once in person. One for Mam and one for me. He stormed from the meeting, tears of shame coursing down his cheeks. He would resign from the NPFA the following day. By letter.

  Naturally, Franco’s plans for adoption were ruined. He could do what he liked now, but he’d never be my father.

  Belch came visiting the next day. Calling in his favor. He wanted me to stand guard over a burglary. A break-in. My first. I remember thinking that it shouldn’t be too dangerous. . . .

  Lowrie had sobered up considerably.

  “That . . .” he couldn’t finish the sentence. Not in front of a minor.

  Meg laughed bitterly. “You might as well say it. I can see your thoughts anyway.” But Lowrie couldn’t. His own decency wouldn’t let him.

  “That . . . pig,” he said instead.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Still, that was a devious plot you hatched against him.”

  Meg’s eyes were like stone. “He shouldn’t have hit my mam.”

  Lowrie nodded. How could you argue with that?

  “So, can I have it?” asked Meg.

  “Hmm?”

  “The spare wish. Can I have it?”

  Lowrie scratched his chin. The bristles were beginning to poke through again after his facial.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “You can have it. And what’s more, I’ll add whatever strength I have to the punch.”

  Meg grinned, and there was nothing angelic about it.

  Belch stared at his hairy hands.

  “I’m fading away,” he whined. And that’s not just a descriptive verb. He actually was whining.

  Elph ran a systems check.

  “Your ecto cranium was perforated in the explosion.”

  “Arf?”

  “There’s a hole in your head,” sighed the hologram. “We’re leaking life force. There are only a few minutes left before we are pulled back to headquarters.

  “What happens then?”

  Elph consulted a memory file. “You will go to work as a spit turner on the dung plain. I will be . . . I don’t know what I will be. There’s no precedent. But I would surmise that it will be something bad.”

  “Isn’t there anything we can do? There must be some way of stealing some of this life-force stuff?”

  The hologram buzzed through his hard-drive infernopedia. “Negative. There is no permitted method.”

  Belch’s wet nose quivered. “Permitted? No permitted method.”

  Elph looked uncomfortable, which isn’t easy for a hologram. It involves a lot of pixel rearrangement.

  “There is one way. Totally forbidden. The possible ramifications are enormous.”

  “Arf?”

  “It could cause a lot of trouble here on Earth.”

  Belch shrugged. “So what are they going to do? Unplug you and make me a spit turner?”

  “I see your point.”

  Belch couldn’t believe it. At last he’d made a point! “So, what is this forbidden way?”

  Elph hovered across the room to Franco, who was blissfully unaware of all this supernatural intrusion.

  “To put it in moron’s terms, we need an extra battery. I’ve run a scan on this life-form and he has twenty-six years of juice left in him.”

  Belch licked his lips. “Twenty-six years?”

  “Of course, running two entities and a parallel-port hologram would bring that down to . . . twenty-six hours. But it’s better than nothing. All you need to do is possess him, and siphon off some of his life force. You’ll find it just above the eyeballs. Bright orange. You can’t miss it.

  “Right. So let’s do it,” Belch paused. “One more thing. I want him to see me.”

  “Whatever for?”

  Belch raised his furry paw-hands. “Because what’s the point of being like this if I
can’t scare anybody?”

  Elph nodded. He understood perfectly. He was, after all, a demon hologram.

  Franco was in a foul mood. There was a gap in the curtains and the light was reflecting off the TV screen. It was affecting his viewing pleasure. Fixing it would mean getting up out of the chair. Franco decided to wait it out. There was only news on at the moment anyway.

  Suddenly he had a vision. There was a werewolf-type creature standing before him. It just materialized out of thin air. Franco wasn’t worried. He’d been expecting hallucinations for some time. He’d seen it on the science channel where people who deprived themselves of reality often saw phantom images. Franco regarded this experience as an extra channel.

  “Hello, doggy,” he said reaching out to tickle it under the chin.

  The creature growled and batted away his hand. For a moment they connected, and Franco saw everything. He saw and understood everything.

  “Oh no,” he breathed, the wastefulness of his life stretching out behind him.

  “Oh yes,” grinned Belch. “It’s me. I’m back and I’ve come to eat your soul.”

  Franco began to scream. He continued to scream as the creature invaded his mind and began feeding on his essence. He continued to scream even as he was banished to a musty corner of his own brain, and no one could hear him anymore.

  Meg’s fingers were fading too.

  “Not much time left,” she observed, wiggling the ghostly digits. “How do I look?”

  “A ghost of your former self.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Sorry. I’m a bit nervous. We are going to assault someone in broad daylight, after all.”

  Meg curled her transparent hand into a fist. She just prayed she’d have enough strength left to knock her stepfather’s block off.

  “No chat now,” she warned. “I just want to whack him and get out of here.”

  “No argument from me.”

  They were outside the gate now. Or, rather, where the gate used to be. All that was left now was a single drooping hinge. The rest lay partially buried in the grass. The walls had deteriorated too. Wild ivy shoots were scrabbling across the stucco, and the paint had long since faded to reveal a dirty concrete color beneath.