by Alex Womack
Gaelic coffee
It’s been
raining for days. Mum’s sick of wet clothes and footprints everywhere. Us and
the dog and the cat, we’re all in trouble. We put on all our rain gear to go
shopping. On the way to town she tried to cheer us up by getting us to imagine
it was chocolate rain. She could use more chocolate she says, hinting at some
for Christmas. Muddy water flows downhill in the gutters. We go along the back
road and down a stepped lane between old buildings to Woolpack Yard.
Even though
the rain’s stopped, brown sludge is spreading in the market place. At the
Farmers’ Market people squelch in the thick liquid. The stalls are full of boxes
of cheeses with smells, jars of jam, cakes and pies and meats in all shapes. The
Christmas trees are getting sticky. When Mum’s not looking, we scoop up a bit of
the goo, it smells nice, it tastes good.
Two collies
hop out from a land-rover-and-trailer of sheep. They lick the gunge, wagging
their tails, ignoring the shepherd. He scratches his head under his soggy
cap.
Across the
road, at the livestock mart, sheep stand in the slow-moving slush and baa now
and then. Cattle stamp in gooey puddles, restless because of the strange smell.
We could tell them it’s chocolate but you can’t explain to a cow, whatever sort
of noise it makes, Mum says.
The council
road cleaner with a shovel, tries to clear some pavement but the stuff simply
keeps flowing, creeping like lava. Someone laughs and says “Makes a change, a
chocolate flood!” We wonder if there will be mint too, slithering from the
factory and we sing Sticky stripey, sticky stripey!
A group of
little children paddle in. One slips and sits in it, another trips over him and
lands on her hands and knees. She gets up, hands out in front of her. We thought
she’d cry. She just licks her hands. The one on the ground tastes some and
starts giggling. The rest of the group begin to eat too. The minders can’t get
them to stop. They’re getting messy.
Mum wades
round the stalls and gets the things for Christmas. We trudge along. It’s
difficult to get our feet out of the chocolate. Mum said pretend it’s brown snow
and walk like you do through snow. But it’s not the same. We try snowballs.
That’s a bad idea, except for eating them. After a bit we feel sick and moan a
bit but she ignores that being busy helping our Katy, who is very sticky by
then, and not dropping the cheese and pies and things.
The little
kids are fed up now, one’s sick and others cry. The Christmas tree lights come
on. The air gets colder and the chocolate begins to set. We stamp about on it.
Mum’s talking to her friend who collected a bucket full of chocolate. We say
let’s buy a bucket. We set off home then.
On the road up
to our house the chocolate is spread thin over kerbs and draincovers. When we
kick it off, it looks like bits of broken Easter egg. The friendly cat
two-doors-down is in a bad mood. It’s on a window-ledge glaring at the
chocolate. It hisses when we stroke it. At bedtime we look out at the dark.
Walls have cats sitting on them, put out as usual, but not stepping on the
chocolate.
In the morning
I say I dreamt there were tiny sprouts falling from green clouds, and Tom said
Silly Sam. He says mince pies grow in the garden, so we creep out straight away
in our pyjamas.
There are no
pies or green clouds, or chocolate!
Absolutely
everywhere is white. It’s not mint, it is snow! There’s no cats, just pawprints.
The dog gets
out and we chase it in circles. Mum catches us and pushes us back in before we
freeze. We can do a snowman after breakfast.
Author's note
have
rejigged Kendal markets for this story.
I wrote it
before a chocolate factory in Westonnen, Germany had a chocolate spillage due to
a "small technical defect". Guardian 12. 12. 2018.
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