SteeringWheelWinter2022 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 12
Judge by ability, not disability
A Blast from the past
January by Maeve Binchey
(First appeared in Steering Wheel in 2007)
Short Story written especially for The Disabled Drivers Association
Well I was never any good at all with gadgets.
Other girls at the supermarket where I
worked could open bottles, get keys on
to key rings. They could put batteries into
radios. Assemble boxes.
I used to say that the five worst words in
the English language were Flat Packed
For Easy Assembly. Barry used to think
that was funny. “Aren’t you a complicated
little thing!” he would say. But he found
everything I said funny back then. And I was
always a mad little thing or a quirky little
thing, a clever little thing. Even a sexy little
thing. But that was then, not now. Now it’s
very different. And the big problem is that
there’s no one to ask why it all changed. If I
were to go ask them then they’d tell me that
I didn’t change at all, that it was just Barry
who changed. Who moved on. Like they
had always warned me he would.
They never liked him, not from the very
start and it wasn’t JUST because he was
married already. If you could call it married.
He was only nineteen, she was pregnant.
Nowadays they wouldn’t have LET them
marry but back then in the Dark Ages
they just galloped them to the Church.
Ridiculous really!
They had absolutely nothing in common.
And I’ve always been very fair about this; I’m
as sorry for her as I am for Barry. Trudi, her
name was, still is, I suppose. I never think of
her at all. She and her son went off to live
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with some relative when it all broke up, and
apparently the lad turned out to be difficult.
Got into a lot of trouble as a kid and more
as a teenager. It wasn’t Barry’s fault, he was
often beating himself up about it as they
say. But what could he do?
He wasn’t there when the child was growing
up. He was miles away with HER relations,
and the Lord knows what kind of influence
they were on him. Oliver was the boy’s
name, a bit of a mouthful but then as I say
they were so young. Much too young to
know what they were doing.
Anyway and every way, my mother never
liked Barry and it had nothing to do with
Trudi and Oliver. She said that his eyes were
too close together. Apparently she had read
somewhere that this was a sign of people
being unreliable. There was no shaking her
in this belief. She would point out pictures of
villains in newspaper photographs. “NOW!”
she would cry triumphantly as if the serial
killer might have lived a blameless life of
virtue if he had been lucky enough to come
into the world with wide set eyes.
My father said that any man who could
up and leave a wife and child was no man
to consider seriously. A leopard doesn’t
change his spots, my father said over and
over as if he had just invented the phrase.
My brother Eddie said that anyone who
worked for the gangster who was Barry’s
boss was either a fool or was on the take.