Sour sweets

If we think of uncle Ollie at all, we tend to picture him sitting at the back of his old garage in that seedy office permanently filled with the hum of some car engine left on in order to listen to the coughing and panting that helped with the diagnosis of some problem or other, and punctuated by the tick-tack of a remarkable clock whose hands stood for the voluptuous legs of a rather more flexible than modest young lady. We tend to remember him there with one of us in his arms kicking furiously and threatening to call great-auntie Felicity.

We threatened but in truth had no intention of making good on our threat because we were aware it was better to leave great-auntie Felicity in the blissful ignorance so befitting to her sainthood aspirations – eyes aimed high towards the almighty and his almightiness, and thoughts occupied with how best to serve him without sullying herself with worldly realities. Not even with the Good Lord’s help would she have had the fortitude to bear the shame of knowing herself the mother of the son she actually had instead of the one she imagined having. What’s more, realising our threats would have meant the certain death of our particular golden egg laying goose.

They did look like golden eggs those lollies Ollie used to give us on Sunday mornings while we waited for great-auntie Felicity to put on her thick black pantyhose and orthopaedic shoes, and find her glasses and her rosary. Mum would stay with her while we accepted Ollie’s invitation to go down to the garage and get a fistful of those remarkably sour lollies on which Ollie’s survival seemed to depend. They were amazingly versatile, serving as bait to bring us into his arms, as entertainment to sweeten his whiles listening to the funny noises that his customers wanted him to take care of, and as sedative to calm down the irate car owners while they waited for him to finish jobs that he ended up botching in front of their very noses when he couldn’t postpone them any longer with slick phone calls. We were witnesses to some of these shoddy jobs and even abetted in others by handing him, with all the seriousness of nurses in an open heart intervention, the esoterically named tools that he asked for and we had already learned about thanks to the many previous sessions in that cave of wonders. Sooner or later these customers would come back demanding a refund of the very real money they had paid for a rather fictional reparation. Ollie would suggest with great politeness that complaints should follow the legal route, which turned out to be a very effective way of putting an end to the discussion as well as to the business relationship that had, however shakily, been enjoyed up to that point.

That was the one constant in Ollie’s existence: bumbling along and ruining all he touched. He seemed to always be pricking himself with the pins with which he tried to adjust the seams of the life he had been handed without anybody ever taking his measurements or asking for his opinion, and which didn’t suit him at all. He was an only son, an early orphan, and the sole heir to the family gardening business for which he had not the slightest aptitude. He had the good sense to sell it before it went bankrupt and invest the profits in a car garage because, for lack of a better one, he appreciated the unprejudiced and undemanding company of the machines. But few clients were willing to entrust him with their jalopies after the first time when he still deserved the benefit of the doubt. He was briefly married and long widowed, and compensated the loneliness of his faithful dedication to a saintly mother by practicing divertimentos for two hands on pianolas so small they didn’t even have keys. Yet, for all his enthusiasm, he got more boos than wows at each new attempt.

One wonders what exactly he expected to achieve with those pursuits always accompanied by our mockery of his failures and our threats to call his mother whenever he saw himself closer to his goal. He did his best to place his hands on strategic spots of our anatomy as if by chance. We did our best to thwart him. In the end, apart from getting to appreciate the firmness of our bums, imagining their smoothness at the far side of the panties, and venturing any one of his fingers towards the space between our legs, he could have aspired to little more. From time to time, he also tried to make us sit as close as possible to his own crotch, but we doubt that he ever got to feel us up with that other odd digit coiled inside and undoubtedly starved of stimulation during the week under the omnipresent motherly gaze. The only reprieve came when our mum took the pious gaze and its pious owner to church on Sunday.

Uncle Ollie didn’t join us at Sunday mass. Not that he was an atheist (God forbid!) or a freethinker; it was just that he went with his mother to the other six daily masses every week. For pity’s sake, he was furloughed on Sundays. Our mum was then the one in charge of helping great-auntie Felicity settle in her prie-dieu where she would spend on her knees and, miraculously for such an ailing woman, without fainting the almost full hour of the service, except for when we would all line up together in front of the altar to take communion.

To avoid having the consecrated host mingle with half-digested sugars in its way to our more or less pure souls, our just reward for risking virtue and reputation by going down to the garage with Ollie had to be postponed until after the last amen. It was then that we ate the lollies accumulated in the ample pockets of the long Sunday skirts, where they ended up after more than a little juggling. The pocket-filling process had to be carried out while, on the one hand, dodging uncle’s restless hands and, on the other, attentively following his lectures on the mysteries of car mechanics. On leaving the house, shoes laced up and rosary in hand, great-auntie Felicity would always find us jumping obstacles chased by her son. She would contemplate the scene with great tenderness as if we were all the same age and it was perfectly normal to see us romping together. We would leave Ollie there, panting and happy after one more lost battle.

Ollie always smiled. He gave the impression of being the most fortunate man in the world, which was probably what held him afloat because his happy disposition provided him with new clients to replace the ones he kept losing. He never even showed any signs of being disappointed or frustrated after those skirmishes with us for which no referee in his right mind would have proclaimed him the victor, unless one considers it a victory to have made us the most engine savvy pre-teens on the planet. Most likely, Ollie never recognized, explicit or implicitly, to be at war with us in order to conquer terrains that we were never going to cede freely to such a dirty old man no matter how many lollies he sent our way.

Although Ollie was not really an old man; not then and not even when, at 52 and still practising his favourite pastime with any girl that sporadically crossed his path, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of arthritis that bounded him to a wheelchair before the age of 56. Great-auntie Felicity was by then basking in God’s glory and, lacking other family that could carry out the tasks of getting him out of bed and washing him in the morning, feeding him at the right times, and putting him to bed at night after a very productive day of TV watching, he went to a public nursing home where the nurses, however young, would never learn of the all-consuming passion that lies under all that passivity. What a sad destiny for him to find himself not only renouncing meat as he liked it – very rare, but also unable to attend to his most intimate needs. His poor member, one of the few parts together with the eyelids and little more that, lacking joints, are not affected by the condition, is likely to raise its ugly head from time to time only to wonder why the hell nobody pays it any attention – not even on the holydays that the previous day’s confession would have made so temptingly immaculate.

There would be those who’d like to interpret this disgrace as the penance uncle Ollie pays for his sins of concupiscence and having offended God and the female sex. For aesthetic reasons, we prefer to see it simply as the fitting finale of a life that came to him strewn with hurdles from the beginning. And yet he clings to his policy of ignoring annoyances because, in his version of the world, what is not acknowledged doesn’t exist, and what doesn’t exist doesn’t hurt. Stubbornly true to himself, he still appears wholly immune to adversity.

Every time we visit him compelled by an unappealable suggestion from mum, we find the same Ollie – smiling right and left as if he was the most fortunate man on Earth.