500 words a day

919 words 1st december 2009

A weird day but not that weird compared to Josh. For me seeing your Mum cry and your dad wearing a dress and singing in a really high pitched voice was pretty weird but when I told him about it I felt  bit of a wuss, as if I was just saying – guess what my Dad is a really good fighter – or something equally naff.


Josh just shrugged his shoulders and said something like, headless, raised his eyebrows and walked off, knowing I’d follow him hoping for another tale of the weird and wonderful life of him and his family.


The headless one I’d already heard loads of times but he knew how impressed I was by it. It became a bit of a shorthand for him, so he didn’t really need to say anymore too make me know and acknowledge that , yes, he had the most bizarre and fucked up and awesome life of any of us and no matter what I came up with, even if my dad had been naked and taking a dump in the middle of Sainsbury’s frozen foods aisle, nothing could top his wealth of wonderful experiences.





I guess a social worker or someone might not quite see it in the same way, he was always saying I needed to keep it to myself because he didn’t want to go into care or be taken away from his parents however freakish they were, or their relatives and friends and associated acquaintances and friends and people they met from time to time who stayed over night and then seemed to move in. Maybe that was part of the secret of his amazing success in the weirdness department, the house. It was huge rambling giant of a horror story house, with 3 or 4 floors, loads of those pointy wooden gables and it was about as wide as 4 normal houses. There were always at least 20 people living there and whenever you visited the smells sounds and things that you saw were enough to fill a whole episode of x files or weird tales of the unexpected or the twilight zone or other such wondrous programmes.


Today though, he needed me, me were going to the school to try out for the interview panel. The interview panel was some new initiative by the school to show how they cared for and considered the views of the pupils and were always striving to make sure that the school met the needs of those they served, or some such waffle. What it meant was they were inviting applications from pupils to sit in on and participate in the interviews of future teachers.


This was too golden an opportunity to miss so Josh had decided he must must mist get on the panel. He knew though that if he just turned up and was his normal weird self, he’d have absolutely no chance whatsoever. He was new to the school so they didn’t know him that well as yet, but he only had to act the way he normally did, like putting his feet up on the desk or farting whoever was there, or picking his nose and flicking it, or standing up in the idle of class and starting to sing and trying to get the others to join in or wearing some of his parents weird and wonderful clothes from all over the world, like the Fijian lava lava, which to me looked like a denim wraparound skirt but to Josh’s Dad was a genuine cultural garment of the Fijian men, Josh was utterly clueless in all this normal stuff. So today the tables were turned. I was the one to be looked up to. I, the supernormal nerdish geekish respectable egghead, I knew exactly what the school would be looking for having been trained by my super-nerd head teacher father from the day I was born and had ample opportunity for daily coaching and regular feedback form the same head teacher.





I was the super-coach to his nervous newbieness and he was shitting himself and looking quite uncomfortable at the turn in fortunes.


To be honest though he hadn’t really taken that much advantage as of his status as captain of the weirdness department and the way I looked up to him so much, in fact I sometimes wondered if he was planning  something some massive prank to really cash in on this, but after a few days of knowing him and his mentalist family, I realised he wasn’t quite in that league, he didn’t really understand all that sort of tit-for-tat-prey-on-the-weak-especially-the-geek kind of behaviour. He’s spent do much time with his family an their bizarre habits and it was only this year, when the dreaded social workers called round and succeeded after 6 or 7 visits in actually meeting him and his parents, that he had to come to school, had to demonstrated he was normal enough not t be taken away into care





SO it was extra important this one.. Not only did he love the idea of interviewing the potential teachers and devising all sorts of odd and amusing questions to foist on them but he though it would do him good, make the social workers think he was getting all normaled up, if he did something that was so-called respectable.





So we had a practice interview every day for the last week. I played Mrs Fishborne, the deputy head and he played Josh the weirdo trying to be normal.











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Steve Wybourn





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