PAY ME (part one)
PAY MEHe slept in the back bedroom of the small end bungalow that was our home place, a room into which the high hedge let only meagre light, even on the sunniest day.
My aunt took him home with her from a seaside holiday. Invited here for my amusement, he struck a ghoulish tone that discomforted us beneath our laughter.
My grandmother, in her drawn-out Border brogue, would say: “Sure that oul’ thing’ll only scar’ the child.”
And so, after commanding an initial place of sideboard prominence, he found himself confined in a drawer of a dressing table in a corner of the back bedroom. There he would lie waiting for his rest to be disturbed by someone, usually me, making secret pilgrimage to the grim collection point he presided over.
He was a plastic skeleton in a novelty moneybox.
He was the dread numismatist of my childhood.
The rectangle of thin tin was fashioned like a coffin. Painted on its sides were cobwebs dripping with fat spiders, flittering bats with wet, red mouths. A black cloth concealed the coffin’s contents from sight.
And there was a button, marked in scarlet, with the instruction PAY ME illuminated in shivery capitals.
I remember a particular day when, having lifted the moneybox from the drawer, I stood poised with a brown penny hot in my small hand.
An emaciated light squeezed its way between the almost closed curtains. In the backyard I could hear my mother and granny working at the mangle, its grind and the skite of water from the scrunched clothes throwing out familiar, reassuring sounds.
I placed my coin carefully on the button, and pressed down.
A creaky whirr commenced, the workings of the toy’s internal mechanism ingeniously suggestive of a wooden lid resisting its slow opening outwards.
Then, out from under the jet black cloth, came a long, luminous arm of bone, the hand hooked clawlike to drag the coin down into the dark innards of the coffin where it rattled eerily to rest.
And, as the hand retreated, from under the top of the cloth cover appeared a livid green skull that seemed to nod acknowledgement of the token before bobbing back into the folds of its uneasy sleep.
The skull’s tilt forward brought its empty eye sockets and its stripped grin level with my child’s line of vision. The effect, burned into the retina of my imagination’s eye, was one of recognition.
I should have let it go at that, and slipped away into the sun. But I wanted to copy the daring of my older brothers. So, offering no coin this time, I reached my finger forward and pressed down again and again upon the button.
The skeleton’s arm shout out in search of its reward, dropped back with nothing, shot out again. And as the claw of bone scraped along the tin in frustration, the skull rattled back and forth to complete the mime of thwarted anger.
I was hypnotised by the rhythm set by the tiny deaths-head, and the guilt and fear that suddenly filled me permeated the plaything with menace. A message passed between us in a language that would resist full translation until years had elapsed. Trying to trick me was a big mistake, the skull seemed to say. If you don’t pay me, now you’ll pay me later.
I hurried away while the skeleton was still in motion.