The Treehouse & Other Stories

As a youth, his big dream had been to become an actor. He acted in school plays and many said how good he was as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. His English teacher, Mr. Witherspoon, pronounced the production – a collaboration between the local girls grammar school and his alma mater – a triumph. There were notices in the local paper. It was whispered that he had talent. Mr. Witherspoon endorsed this appraisal and advised Edmund to apply to go to drama school after doing his A-Levels.

The argument Edmund had with his father about acting at breakfast one summer morning after he had sat his A-Levels was a vivid and painful memory. On that fateful day, he plucked up the courage to inform his parent that he wanted to become an actor, and that according to Mr. Witherspoon he had a reasonable chance of getting into a good drama school, perhaps even RADA. Actually, what ensued between father and son wasn't so much an argument as a brief one-sided conversation that ended with a paternal edict and a dream mercilessly crucified and summarily dismissed.

Mr. Lyons was a prim, soullessly sensible and correct man, a solicitor by profession, with a mournful demeanour and a tendency to irascibility. He listened to his son's ridiculous and impractical proposition with a less than enthusiastic expression on his dour, bespectacled face. He put down the Times, took off his steel-rimmed glasses, examined them critically against the light, polished them assiduously, and finally replaced them. He regarded his son who was looking back at him, hoping for parental approval of his star-struck dreams. But the parent said nothing. He buttered his toast and applied marmelade. Edmund waited on tenterhooks, hypnotized by the knife spreading back and forth, like a pendulum of fate. Mr. Lyons was fastidious in everything; the process of buttering and applying marmelade was done with patient rigour.

'Well, Father?' said Edmund, unable to hold his tongue. 'What do you think?'

'What do I think?' said Mr. Lyons, taking a leisurely bite out of his toast. After chewing thoroughly and taking a sip of tea, he said: 'I think it is a preposterous notion, an idiotic delusion, an infantile dream. Acting is no sort of profession. Stuff and nonsense!'

'But Mr. Witherspoon says I have talent and you know I got good reviews for my Puck.'

'I don't give a tinker's cuss for what your Mr. Witherspoon thinks,' growled Mr. Lyons. 'Or what damn fool reviews you received for being a fairy! I will neither countenance nor pay for you to go to a so-called school for playacting. It is out of the question. Young man, you will do something solid and practical, and get this absurd folly out of your head. At once, do you hear?'

'But…'

'But me no buts, Edmund!' thundered his father. 'That is the end of the matter. Case closed!'

And that indeed was the end of the argument. Father had spoken. Mr. Lyons gave his son a fierce look, and with a truculent snap of broadsheet pages, disappeared behind the Times.

So, Edward toed the parental line and became a bureaucrat. A rat in a bureau, so to speak. Flailing around in a cage, a slave at a wheel of monotony and drudgery. Desk-bound, 9–5, weekdays. For decades. Two-weeks' break in Clacton in the summer.

He was rushed off his feet, mostly. Never had time for a hobby what with his wife Dorothy clamouring for constant attention and his unquestioning obedience. She had been like a sergeant major issuing non-stop orders for things to be done around the house and in the garden. Commands that brooked neither refusal nor malfeasance. He never had any peace. Especially at weekends. There were always errands to be run. Tedious visits that had to be made to maiden aunts and deaf uncles. All the family rituals they were enslaved to were observed. Religiously. Such as church on Sundays, and a walk in the park after lunch on Sunday afternoons, which was compulsory, come rain or shine; and harrowing shopping expeditions on Saturdays, when every other damn fool was also out shopping, jamming the shops and thoroughfares with bags and packages, and all with the plangent din of Saturday afternoon in the high street jangling in your ears.

Edmund had always obeyed the domestic curriculum and the timetables imposed on him. Dorothy would have had words if he hadn't. He had invariably taken the path of least resistance; it was the Chinese idea of a reed bending in the wind. It had been easier that way.

But Dorothy was six months in the ground. He had nursed her through breast cancer during the 12 months prior to her death. It had been a terrible time. He was sad, naturally, when she passed. They had been married for 35 years. He had got used to her, and it's hard to let go of what you're used to. He had grieved as he could. They had married young but hadn't been blessed with kids. Something to do with her tubes. Anyway, he had always complied with her wishes. In everything. And with no complaints – just a mild wistfulness for how things might have been different. Edmund was, essentially, too kind to be jaded and bitter.

But things were different now. He was alone and what was known as 'footloose and fancy free'. And he did feel freer, lighter, less encumbered, less pressured and put upon. It was time to do something, time to suit his fancy – time to act decisively, and with conviction. To do what had always been a dream: retrospectively, to defy Father, and now, Father Time himself!

Edmund had often wondered over the years how his life would have turned out if he had disobeyed his implacable parent and pursued his ambition of treading the boards. Who could say? It had always saddened and frustrated him that he had blown his chances by not having the courage of his convictions, by being lily-livered and allowing himself to be browbeaten by conservative tyranny. But whose to say you can't redeem your ambitions and overturn fate? It's not over, he thought. No fat lady has appeared. The final curtain has not fallen. There's life in the old dog yet, etcetera. He felt resolute. Tonight, on the cusp of his 60th birthday, Edmund Lyons had found the courage of his convictions.

As the minutes counted down to usher in his sixth decade, he wrote a letter to his bosses at the council informing them that he wished to take advantage of early retirement. He felt he still had at least 20 good years in him. But there was no time to lose. Seize the day and all that. After he had written his letter of resignation, he looked with satisfaction at the entry in his diary: Rehearsal, Friday 7 pm, The Importance of Being Ernest, local AmDram Society.

Edmund smiled. He felt elated and had a sense of great personal triumph. As the clock chimed in his 60th birthday, he lifted a glass and toasted his new role as a footloose, fancy-free diamond geezer.

The Early Life of Sisyphus Sykes

They called him 'Phus the Wus' at school. Later came a crueller variant – 'Sissy Pussy'. A sissy and a pussy rolled into one! Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes was a gangling four-eyed nerd, a problem from the get-go. To start with, he had been reluctant about being born; they had had to cut him out of there. Strangely enough, he had appeared with two inchoate front teeth, and his first act in the world, after they had swabbed off the blood and gore, was to give his mother a nasty nip on the nipple. He went on the bottle after that.

By the age of 11, he was 5-foot 7, and his two front teeth had grown to Bugs Bunny proportions. He was pallid and resembled a malnourished stick. But by far his strangest feature was his huge head from which sprouted a tangle of bedraggled blond curls. He found it hard to keep his head up, which hung down over his chest, causing the upper part of his spine to bow a bit, similar to the way a sunflower droops because its stem is too weak to support the weight of its head.

His mother had named him Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes because she thought it sounded 'classy'. She chose the middle name when she remembered, vaguely, that there had once been some very clever man called Freud who was a Sigmund. And it was operatic sounding, too. But Betty Sykes had never attended an opera; she was mixing up her Sigmunds and Siegfrieds. To her Wagner was an outfit that made brake pads, and Figaro were the olive oil people. The Italians certainly knew their onions when it came to olives: 'For more than 100 years Figaro has, and continues to be, committed to quality and health.' They should write an aria about it and get some famous tenor to sing it. Betty swore by Figaro olive oil. Its gospel was written in brochures and on bottles, so it had to be true.

Betty Sykes came from 'wop stock' (as she said herself, always with a giggle), up near Woodstock. She liked to boast 'I'm the wop with a lot!' 'A lot of what?' people would ask. 'Intelligence,' replied Betty. Folk were mystified; she was not exactly what you would call 'intelligent'. Even her father said she was 'dumb as nails, but a swell gal.' Before she married Tom Sykes her name was Betty Brown. She thought Betty Sykes was a slight improvement on the prosaic Betty Brown and its annoyingly alliterative folksiness. She deemed the naming of names an important process, a sacred responsibility. She was determined her son would have a great name, a name that resounded, a name to conjure with.

'How about, Tom?' her husband suggested, plonking an oily spanner on the kitchen table. This was a couple of weeks before Betty gave birth. She was getting desperate to hit on a name; time was running out.

'Idiot! That's your name,' snapped Betty. 'And get that darned spanner off the table!'

For some reason, neither of them had considered girls' names. They were convinced they were having a boy. Tom retorted that it was not uncommon for sons to take their father's and even grandfather's Christian names. He pointed out that his father had been Tom, and so his kid could be 'Tom Sykes the Third'. Tom reckoned it lent an air of importance, 'kinda like royalty' – Tom Sykes III. He said people were impressed by that sort of thing. Betty thought about throwing a plate at her husband. Tom smiled gormlessly, retrieved the oily spanner and shoved it in the breast pocket of a garment that had once been bright blue but was now an oil slick. Betty demurred, and being a woman of some determination, she got her way in the matter of naming the kid.

In point of fact, Tom couldn't care less. More than anything in the world, he was interested in transmissions, and tuning them. Everything else, in his mind, was secondary to the Holy Grail of a perfectly tuned transmission.

And so, indeed, it came to pass: 10 days later, Betty and Tom had a boychild, and he ended up being christened Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes! Betty had been dusting when she heard the name 'Sisyphus' waft out of the radio. A talk was being given on Greek mythology by a man with a German accent. Betty hadn't paid much attention to the Greek mythology part. In fact, the German professor, who rejoiced in the name of Adolf Wolfschlegelsteinhausenberg might just as well have been talking Greek. She simply heard the name – Sisyphus! And what a name it was! Three serene syllables tripping felicitously off the tongue – Si- See-Phus. Betty was in ecstasies. It was as if she had struck gold in the Klondike, or discovered the cure for cancer. It came to her as a revelation, a real Eureka moment. 'Praise the Lord,' said Betty, crossing herself, for she was a religious woman. She danced around the house like a ballerina with a bump, twirling her duster coquettishly at the lamps, trying out the name 'Sisyphus… Sisyphus…' Yes, a perfect triplet of tongue-delighting syllables. Si. See. Phus. Betty was sold. She thought Professor Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes sounded 'real classy'. Or maybe Dr. Sisyphus S. Sykes, the famous brain surgeon. Or perhaps a great spy who would sign his name mysteriously – S. S. Or did that have Nazi overtones? Betty knew the Nazis were bad guys and the good old U. S of A had won the war with chewing gum, Luckies and pantyhose. John Wayne had said so. What a rugged fellow!

Betty's mind veered in all kinds of weird and wonderful directions. She was a simple woman, an ex-pom-pom girl. A big fan of manly types, such as burly John Wayne. But she had ended up with Tom Sykes! Big Betty Brown… Great jugs, poor student! She lost her virginity to a quarterback, who became an optometrist in Syracuse. Incidentally, soon after setting up shop in Syracuse, the ex-quarterback got killed in a spectacular train wreck, and hence became an ex-optometrist who had once been a quarterback. His new Cadillac came off badly against an express train that came hurtling through a badly lit crossing. What a mess! The ex-quarterback/optometrist (his name had been Brad) was not a pretty sight when they recovered the bits of him from the wreckage. He didn't look so square-jawed and handsome anymore.

But Betty had moved on and become religious. Jesus had saved her. Apparently. 'Saved you for what?' one sarcastic boyfriend inquired. 'Are you the leftovers?' Arnie, for that was the caustic wit's name, instantly became an ex-boyfriend. And he got a slap in the mouth for being fresh, followed by a kick where it really hurts.

The truth is, Betty never got to hear about Brad's mishap with the train. The magazines she read didn't cover train wrecks. They had to do strictly with fashion, perfume and female agony. Betty Brown was not a great reader. Period. She dated a number of men before selecting Tom. They were desultory affairs. The men, being idiots, were after only one thing! They drank beer, farted, talked rubbish about 'beaver', and couldn't piss straight into a can. In a word – useless.

Then, at the age of 23, she discovered Tom. And, frankly, he did take some discovering. Sometimes, Betty wondered if she had married Tom Sykes out of pity. He was a sad case. All he could talk about was transmissions. He bored people to death with transmissions… transmissions… solid engineering… blah, blah, blah… Cummins engine… smooth transmissions… etcetera, ad nauseam…

Normally, he was as docile as a pig in shit but when it came to transmissions he became intense and voluble. His eyes would bulge out of his head and the veins in his neck would stand out and pulsate like hideous blue worms, as he babbled on about the tremendous world of transmissions. Tom Sykes could have made a fortune as a one-man House of Horrors. He did have his uses though. The thing about hang-dog Mr. Sykes, the thin guy with the turkey neck (diametrically opposite in the Brad Pitt Handsome Stakes), was that he was hung like a donkey. True. Although, his true amour was transmissions; sometimes he got a hard-on listening to the purr of a perfectly tuned transmission.

Betty Sykes was a good woman in many ways. A God-fearing woman. She liked her messy and transmission-obsessed husband to be out of the way until the evening. At least, transmissions paid the bills. And there was enough for shopping, an undertaking Betty was dedicated to. She was also very proud of her ample chest, which she referred to as 'her intelligence'. No one quite knew why her 40 D cups equated with intelligence. A foible? A vanity? But she did try hard to be a good mother of what turned out to be a challenging child. A walking Greek tragedy. However, the sum of Betty Sykes' knowledge came out of catalogues and fashion magazines; and they didn't cover Greek mythology in those. At any rate, the boy wound up being called Sisyphus. And so began the uphill struggle of his life.

* * *

People said he was an odd child. 'His head's too big.' 'My, my, isn't he thin?' And, 'What a queer fish!' All kinds of less than complimentary remarks were tossed around about Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes. But he absorbed the slings and arrows with quiet fortitude. The boy was prone to misfortune, but persistent in the face of adversity; he would always rise before the count of 10, struggle on, and continue riding life's punches.

At the age of three, he began delving into the very few books his parents had, straining to decipher the hieroglyphics – the A B C. Unfortunately, Betty and Tom didn't buy him any children's books; all they had was an illustrated encyclopaedia (1953 edition), a few cook books, piles of literature about automobile transmissions, his mother's extensive library of catalogues and fashion magazines, and the Gideon Holy Bible.

On one occasion Sisyphus discovered some interesting reading and pictorial matter on a shelf in the garage next to: 'Automotive Transmissions, Fundamentals, Selection, Design & Application'. The periodical next to this was called Playboy; it exercised greater pulling power over young Sisyphus than 'Automotive Transmissions Fundamentals, Selection, Design & Application'. Playboy was revealing: some ladies in it weren't wearing any clothes at all, and there were others in swimsuits sporting funny bunny ears and tails. In the centre of the magazine, which folded out, there was one bunny who was obviously the most important bunny of them all. Her name was Cindy.

Sisyphus, who was nearly four, tried the word out: 'Puh-lay'… 'Play'… That sounded good. He liked playing. Next: 'Muh- ate'… 'mate'… 'Playmate!' Sisyphus was triumphant. He had deciphered the word. He liked this word and wished he had a 'playmate' of his own. Not necessarily one with 38-inch breasts. Any friend, really. However, he had been told many times that he was 'too odd to have any friends'. He looked at the playmate again. Would she make a good friend? She had long blonde hair, blue eyes and an interesting arrangement on the front of her body. But this was marred by an oily thumbprint slap in the middle of one of the protruding parts. The things on Cindy's chest reminded Sisyphus of two lovely round sandy-white hills that rose and ended in a beautiful pinky brown peak.

In the picture, Cindy was smiling. White teeth sparkling in a perfection of gums. Her mouth, luscious cherry lips parted slightly, pouted at the camera. Sisyphus was rather taken with her. He wondered if she would like his collection of dead beetles. He had one particularly fine specimen. Cindy would surely be staggered by his stag beetle. Sisyphus was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the magazine open on his lap. His too-big-for-his-body head loomed over Cindy's image beaming like a sunflower. He thought the stag beetle would look smashing posing on the topmost pink part of one of those hills that stuck out of her chest. He reflected that his mother had big sticky-out bits, too, but his flat-chested father didn't.

Tom stole up from behind. 'I'll take that,' he said, snatching the mag away from his startled child. Unfortunately, Cindy's head got ripped in the process. Tom went and found some tape and fixed Cindy's lacerated hair-do. He tried to wipe the oil off but failed; Cindy now looked like a tar baby. He stuffed the mag back on a high shelf – way back. Satisfied that Cindy and her fellow bunnies were out of reach, he turned to his son. Tom, who had been wrestling with a tricky transmission problem, smiled stupidly and said: 'Now, Sis, you won't tell your ma about this, will you?'

He called his son 'Sis'? He did! Like Johnny Cash's A Boy Named Sue, it was wildly inappropriate, as Sisyphus was not female and couldn't be Tom's sister. But Tom wasn't a great thinker. It was just convenient, a linguistic short-cut that saved some breath. He couldn't be bothered to come out with 'Sis-see-phus'. This annoyed the hell out of his wife Betty, who would cherish the name until her dying day.

'Did you hear me, son? Don't tell Ma!'

'Why not? The ladies are funny. With bunny ears, tails and all…'

'Yeah, they're kinda cute,' agreed Tom.

There was a long silence, during which Tom was distracted by a transmission detail.

'You made a mess of Cindy,' said Sisyphus at last.

'What?'

'Cindy! My playmate. I was going to show her my stag beetle.'

Tom had figured the problem must be with the differentials. Then he remembered that he had to apply himself to convincing Sisyphus not to talk about those cute, scantily-clad bunnies with his mother. 'I can tell you, Sis, that Cindy won't take no interest in no stag beetle. No way!'

Sisyphus was incredulous. 'Really?' he gasped.

'You betcha! Now, PLEASE DON'T TELL MA!!!'

'About what?'

'About the bunny girl stuff!' Tom fished a grimy rag from his pocket and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

'But why? Ma has the same things on her chest as those bunny ladies. Wouldn't she like them?'

Tom was getting desperate. His mind was reeling in this titanic intellectual struggle with his nearly-four-year-old son. He tried again. 'Look, it's a man thing. So, let's keep it man to man, Sis. OK?' said Tom, hopefully, winking at his son.

Sisyphus like this idea. 'OK,' he said.

Tom heaved a sigh of relief and went back to dealing with the transmission problem. Even at home, after work, and on weekends, he was obsessed with transmissions.

Betty was the general of the household. The dictator of everything domestic. She gave the orders and wore the trousers. And she selected the trousers and clothes that were often either too small or too big for Sisyphus and Tom from her voluminous 2,000-page catalogues. Betty was also a scourge with knitting needles! Her 'boys' were obliged to wear her nightmarish creations: hideous scarves 10 yards long, and sweaters made for the average gorilla. But Betty was a great cook and fed the family well from her ample kitchen that was notable for having probably the largest domestic fridge in the galaxy. It was a tank, truly massive – a tank full of food! She was, 'the wop with a lot' (as she said herself), and she produced pizzas and pasta in industrial quantities. It was a mystery how Tom and Sisyphus remained so svelte, while over the years Betty grew quite rotund. Even her breasts put on weight and her brassieres were staggering feats of cantilevered engineering.

Mrs. Sykes was an avid follower of fashion, a determined shopper, especially if there was a sale on anywhere within a 50-mile radius. When he was little, Sisyphus was compelled to be her companion on these marathon retail expeditions. They looked a strange sight out and about. Betty was becoming a little too buxom around the hips, while Sisyphus made a garden rake look overweight. From a distance, when mother and son were walking side by side, you might have formed the impression that a rather large lady was dragging a thin bundle of twigs along.

Some of the places Sisyphus got dragged to were dire. His least favourite was the barbers. He had to sit on a plank because he was too small to sit in the chair. The place was called Benny's Barbershop; the proprietor bore a resemblance to Adolf Hitler and had the same toothbrush mustache. He wore a brown coat and stank of tobacco and whisky. The dominant colour in the place was brown, and there were those heavy tobacco-brown seats that went up and down by means of a foot-pedal. The barber himself was colour-coordinated with the establishment: from his sallow face and sour expression, down to his yellowed fingers. And he behaved somewhat Nazi-like. 'Sit up straight, Junge!' This would be preceded by a clip round the ear, or a painful pinch. Benny's Barbershop was a gruesome experience, a feared and hated venue.

Many years later, via the newspapers, Sisyphus came to learn more about the barbarous barber. The proprietor of Benny's Barbershop that he knew wasn't called Benny at all. The original Benny had died in 1932, five years after he had set up Benny's Barbershop. The ghoul who cut Sisyphus' hair was a man named Horst Richter – born in Heidelberg, in Germany. He appeared in the 'land of the free' after the war, and later bought Benny's Barbershop from Benny's son, Lenny.

Sometime, much later, it turned out that old Horst was indeed a Nazi, although he assured everyone that he had been a completely insignificant one. He had once shaved a high-ranking S.S. officer – a proud moment for Herr Richter, and he had Heil-Hitlered enthusiastically. Apart from being handy with a cut-throat razor, he had also been a lowly guard – somewhere or other! He protested that he knew nothing about the gas ovens, and that he was a simple barber. 'Go ask Herr Topf,' said Horst, cryptically. Nobody knew who the hell this Topf fellow was. Then, some bright spark looked him up and discovered that Herr Topf (und Sohn) was the guy who owned the company who made the ovens for Auschwitz.

By the time they busted him, Horst was a decrepit old man. The strain of all the unwanted attention brought on a heart attack. At the time of his death, Herr Richter was standing on a platform in a subway station in New York. His old Nazi heart stuttered and he felt dizzy at precisely the moment the metro rattled in: Horst fell headlong into its path and came off badly. It wasn't clear whether the heart attack would have been fatal; the train certainly was.