SHRINK AND GROW

“So, Granny Smith or Golden?”

Nick didn’t reply. He stood in the crowded shop with his mouth open like a stuck pig. An elderly woman with a yappy dog the size of gerbil tutted. The greengrocer repeated the question. Panic flashed through Nick’s eyes. Moans of protest came from the people in the queue.

“Two pounds of Golden Delicious, all right mate?”, said the greengrocer. He rubbed some dirt off his fingers onto his apron.

Nick stuttered and stepped backwards, tucking a lock of hair behind his ear.

“Yeah, or red. No, pink. I mean..”

“Two pounds of Pink Ladies for the gentleman?”

“No, hang on a sec I’m having second thoughts, ‘cause…”

The greengrocer put his hands on his waist and lowered his specs further down on his nose. He gave Nick that mock-reprimanding stare that only people who wear glasses can pull off efficiently.

“Haven’t got all day, mate”.

“I’m going to miss the bloody bus”, said the old lady, banging her walking stick on the ground. Nick had developed a rash on his neck and was scratching the back of his head.

“See, I might have some Granny Smiths at home but I’m not sure”, said Nick.

I stepped in and asked the greengrocer if he could serve the lady first, as I wanted to ask my old friend Nick something. Only at that point did Nick notice my presence in the shop, but this seemed to embarrass him further. He trod on a large man’s toe, causing muffled swearing. He knocked a crate of dates, spilling some on the floor. He picked them up, put them in the large man’s hands and ran out of the shop.

 

Tracy, back in our lower- sixth- form year, used to say that Nick was a crackpot. I suppose everybody thought that. I thought he was a wag. For all that school year we were inseparable. He was my best mate.

“Hare and Hound in ten minutes?”, he used to say on the phone. “Deal”, I’d say. We met in the pub down East Street and prattled endlessly about whether Spock would ever have gone back to speaking to his father Sarek if his father hadn’t needed a blood transfusion and, most importantly, whether we’d rather have sex with T’Pol or Carol Marcus. I always said Carol Marcus. Nick always said T’Pol.

He turned up at school one day with pink hair and kept singing Space Oddity, moving his hands in a strange way. He tried to get some of us to form a band. I jumped at the idea, though I couldn’t play an instrument. Rick Parker said he’d play bass but then Nick said, “The bass player should wear a skirt, if we want to make a real statement”. Rick told him to poo off and the band never saw the light. Another time he turned up with his hair gelled back, a white T shirt and a black leather jacket. He kept leaning on things and staring around with his eyebrows raised. He snapped his fingers and said, “You’ve got nothing to fear except fear itself”. Nobody got the reference to Fonzie in Happy Days, except for me. That was only because of my mother being in love with Chachi Arcola since 1974. She is the only person ever to have bought the DVD of the spin-off “Joanie loves Chachi”. She still watches it when she thinks she’s alone in the house. She sighs whenever Chachi says, “Wah wha wah!”.

But when we got to the upper sixth form Nick went quiet. He didn’t crack jokes anymore. Someone said something about his parents being nuts. I never asked. When I got together with Tracy I started finding excuses not to see him. I crossed the road when I saw him in his scruffy jacket.

This morning at the greengrocer’s was the first time I’d seen him in two years.

 

I told my parents about Nick over lunch.

My father said, “Sounds like a looney. He should go to Doctor Whistlebottom”.

“Doctor who?” we all giggled.

My father is in one of his phases. This time it’s believing he is a psychologist. The source of all his knowledge is a monthly subscription  to “Shrink and Grow”, a very dubious magazine he rants about being the “true psychologist’s” reading. His colleague Ronan introduced him to it when they weren’t listening to the speaker at a motivational team building course they attended in September for Hitachi. Ronan is the same person who got my dad hooked on fortune telling last year, until my mother put an end to it when they had a row after he told her “The cards don’t lie, Justine. They say you should lose a stone before the next full moon”.

Before psychology there was the “Writing Analysis” course he did online. He said he could tell everything about a person by their handwriting. When we got a postcard from the Maldives by Aunt Lucy and Uncle Roger he said you could tell they were “doing it like rabbits” by the fluttering swirls on the “S” letters. Whereas, the scruffy vowels in Elaine’s handwriting in her and Mike’s postcard from Cornwall were a sure sign of a self doubting personality and of possible Alien Hand syndrome.

“What does this Doctor Whistlebottom do?”

“He’s a genius. Total genius. It says in the March issue that he turned a schizophrenic bicycle burglar from Skegness into a completely new man. He is now a well know politician in the local council. And this woman called Myriam, it says that she was dull as a doorknob, jobless and never went out of the house. She is now a confident lap dancer and a bubbly part time bible seller.

He fetched the March issue of Shrink and Grow and handed it to me.

I went into my room and chucked it in the bin.

I dialled Nick’s landline number. He picked up right away.

“Hare and Hound in ten minutes?”, I said.

“Deal”.