AUNT'S LEGACY

When Blakelock’s aunt is cremated, she goes out with a bang. Not one of her friends or relatives know that she has been fitted with a pacemaker and the loud report that it makes when the furnace fires up isn’t quite drowned out by the electric organ. The few who have come to see her off are trying to sing along to its music in the crematorium chapel. The half hearted nature of the congregation’s effort is more to do with the choice of hymn rather than unwillingness to partake. “Onward Christian Soldiers” or “Fight The Good Fight” would both have diluted the bang. “What Our Father Does Is Well”, a rather obscure harvest hymn with a difficult to follow tune, does not promote a natural harmony or the vocal gusto to muffle the unexpected sound. The undertakers from the Co-op are given the blame for the pacemaker oversight and its resultant small explosion but no mention is made to the bereaved about the unfortunate incident and how it interferes with Blakelock’s aunt. The operator of the fiery furnace, the guy at the coal face so to speak, gets a nasty shock when the lid of Blakelock’s aunt’s coffin takes flight and the dead aunt herself tries to vacate her last resting place by suddenly sitting up just as the flames are taking hold. The operator needs a cup of sweet black tea to help restore his equilibrium and he is allowed to go home early entrusting the rest in line that day to one of his colleagues. Some say he will never be quite the same again. The explosion of Blakelock’s aunt’s pacemaker is attributed by the congregation to a coincidental vehicle backfire on the busy road outside, where life carries on as normal as Mohammad, the driver of the A1Lawn At Bargain Price van (“green shoots r us”) speeds past the crematorium gates unaware that Blakelock’s aunt is being burnt to a cinder and her pacemaker is about to explode. The six year old green van is long overdue its service and as Mohammad pushes his booted foot to the floor, the tired engine responds with a noisy and fume fuelled hick-up that sounds like an old blunderbuss being fired. Mohammad curses as Blakelock pretends to sing the words, “Though nor milk nor honey flow, in our barren Canaan now,” and the Good Lord takes the exclamations from both men in His stride as Blakelock’s dead aunt briefly sits up, shocked in her tracks, on her way to meet Him herself.


Blakelock hasn’t really bothered with his aunt and so it is a surprise to discover that she has left him a bequest of £100,000. Blakelock decides that his inheritance, his aunt’s gift, should be marked in some appropriate way. The old lady would probably have liked that. So Blakelock thinks about the various options that are now open to him. He could purchase some rather fancy piece of antique furniture or a work of art with which to commemorate his aunt. He could invest in some fine wine, something he thinks that would have been close to and given succour to his aunt’s heart. It was said that she had enjoyed the better part of a half bottle of red Burgundy every day and that had, together with the pacemaker and the pills, kept her heart condition on the right side of wrong until the very end. Blakelock considers the leg of a racehorse but agrees that this might lead to bad money after good no matter if the leg he invests in decides to be the fastest leg there is. If the other three or just one of the other three is slow then the whole project is doomed from the start or indeed collecting ring.

After about two and half weeks after receipt of his late aunt’s money Blakelock decides on a Hummer. Of nearly all the things he might have chosen to spend his aunt’s money on, a Hummer is not the most obvious. The Hummer is not just an ordinary vehicle but a rugged statement that tells everyone who sees it that here is a car that is much more than a car. Blakelock is not concerned about miles per gallon. He jokes that it is more a case of gallons per mile. The Hummer wags two rude fingers to the carbon footprint and on the basis that Blakelock’s aunt hadn’t apparently shown any signs of believing in the existence of global warming, Blakelock justifies to himself that his aunt would be pleased with his choice of how he should spend her money. Blakelock’s aunt had lived in an old house without the benefit of many modern trappings. Insulation and double glazing were just words as mysterious to Blakelock’s aunt as Higgs Boson or Quantitative Easing. Her old radiators were left to rumble on, Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn, at a steady sweltering eighty degrees and the coal fires that burnt furiously in her various grates added their considerable pollution to Blakelock’s aunt’s personal volume of greenhouse gasses.

As if to add further arrogance to the Hummer statement, Blakelock chooses a brand new red vehicle which is in marked contrast to the old green van driven by Mohammad of the A1Lawn At Bargain Price franchise (“green shoots r us”), a vehicle which doesn’t let the grass grow under its wheels because Mohammad (Mo the lawn to those that know him from the local Mosque) runs a busy business assuring weed free lush swards for his satisfied clients whilst trying to fulfil the increasing demands of his more fundamentalist brethren. The green van is being used to stock pile a dangerous amount of fertiliser without attracting any undue speculation from nosey neighbours, lawns and fertiliser being natural bed fellows.

The thing about a red Hummer is that it does attract attention, some of it unwanted, a lot angry, some of it jealous and quite a lot based on envy. Blakelock secretly likes the more favourable attention, the head turning looks he can see in the vast wing mirrors as he hums passed. He particularly likes it when the swivelling heads are pretty and female. Blakelock hasn’t enjoyed so much attention from the fairer sex and his new red Hummer brings him a ticket, a ring side seat, to a whole new experience that he finds difficult to resist. Sophie is one such but not content with just looking, she wants to touch and in getting closer to the rugged vehicle, she could become closer to its owner.

"Would you like a go in it?” Blakelock says to the young woman when he returns to the new shopping centre car park and sees her stroking the bonnet of his big machine.

"If that’s OK, yeah I would,” says Sophie very excited at the prospect of being let into this brash new world of petrol head heaven. She has enjoyed a Truck Fest or two and the Battle of the Monster Machines at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff sent her into an unusual trance for several of the following days. Blakelock takes her for a spin and enjoys showing off around the car park. It is as though the Hummer is patrolling the lines of parked vehicles inspecting them rather like a general might review his troops. The Hummer looks down on most of them, is the king of the lot, loud and proud and majestically red as it rides through the rank and file.

"Wow,” says Sophie when after having cruised most of the lanes Blakelock brings the big machine to a screeching and rocking halt in one of the parent with child parking bays.

"You should see it off road,” says Blakelock and immediately Sophie wants to. She agrees to meet Blakelock again the following Saturday when Blakelock promises to take her for a decent run with a bit of off-roading thrown in as well. Reversing out of the parent with child parking space Blakelock doesn’t see the A1Lawn At Bargain Price van and the red Hummer slams into the side of it with the sort of force a fast rhino might employ when hitting a slow poacher. There isn’t a big smash but more of a dull crunch and the sound of thin metal being bent and torn. The A1Lawn At Bargain Price van suddenly has a new tattered logo. Several of the letters have disappeared into the gaping holes in the van’s punctured side. The strap line is distorted and doesn’t read any better and the new message seems to be saying something it shouldn’t. Mohammad looks like a wild rabbit caught in the headlights as he springs from his assaulted van to confront what ever it is that has interrupted his progress through the big shopping centre car park.

"What in god’s name are you doing?” Mohammad shouts at Blakelock who is already inspecting the rear end of his Hummer. The damage to the big machine is minimal and it does seem incredible that Mohammad’s van has sustained such scars without as much as a scratch on the Hummer.

"You’ve buggered my van right up.” Mohammad protests loudly.

Sophie is full of mirth. She has seen the whole thing and is probably the cause and distraction for the incident. Blakelock was showing off in front of the new admirer by revving the several horsepower under his foot’s control into a fever pitch before de-clutching and sending the red vehicle lurching backwards into the passing van.

"Ha, ha,” laughs Sophie as she reads the new description on the damaged vehicle.

"Alla at Bar.” She pronounces the strange new words as they have been arranged. She reads them out slowly, in an uncertain childlike manner with no understanding of their meaning. Mohammad spins around as though he’s been hit by lightening. He cannot believe what he is seeing.

“It’s Alla ak bar. Not Alla at bar,” he exclaims incensed at the female’s ignorance. He squints at the letters, takes in the full meaning of the battered new inscription. The letter K could be a letter T, but there is no doubt in his mind about the new message. He looks as though he has seen God and certainly feels as though God is at this very moment speaking to him.

“Shoot us.” Sophie sings out rather more positively, relaying the only two words in the new strap line on the green van.

Quick as a bird with a worm Mohammed wrenches open the rear door and pulls out a twelve bore shot gun which he levels and fires at Blakelock and Sophie in such a casual manner that it looks for all the world as though Mo the lawn is about to perform some top dressing rather than simply comply with his treacherous training.

“Allah ak Bar,” he shouts his battle cry as the little balls of lead shot start their hurried journey towards their unfortunate quarry.

The two blasts at such close quarters splatter into the recipients like sugar on pancakes and they dance and spin like bleeding puppets in an extraordinary enactment. The sound of the first shot is, thinks Blakelock, similar to the noise he heard at his aunt’s cremation. He doesn’t hear the second, but as his and the young woman’s dying blood drips almost unseen down the red paintwork of the peppered Hummer, Blakelock thinks that he really should have gone for the antique, the wine or even the leg of a horse rather than the big American beast.