Mum was forever doing really stupid stuff.
I mean, we kids used to love a lot of it. The funny stuff, that is. Dad just couldn’t take it, so he took off. We didn’t really miss him. He had no sense of humour. Mum would suddenly come up with one of her hair-brain ideas, right out of the blue, and off we’d go again. Some of it was deliberate, some of it not.
There was the time we were all; me being the only girl, and my two younger brothers, anyway, there was this time we all went to the shopping centre to get a few things. Mum made us all where balaclavas, her too. All the time people were staring at us, but all we could do was giggle. Mum really enjoyed that.
Some people said she was just plum crazy, certifiable, others said she had a death wish. We kids took no notice of any of this, after all, she was our mum. We were not at all popular with the neighbours. One time, the guy next door complained about mum’s laughing. He said it was maniacal and up set his wife.
Mum got angry. She got her own back by taking the jug of chilled water we kept in the fridge, called to him over the side fence, when he approached she tipped it all over him and yelled at him to chill out. Then she laughed, maniacally.
Anyway, the day came when we all came in a bit late, it was almost dark and we were expecting to get told off.
When we got in we found that the house was stinking with this really weird smell. It was all through the place, in every room. At first we couldn’t find mum, but she was upstairs closing windows. She came down explaining that we could smell propane. She told us how much she loved the smell of it. We just figured she was doing one of her peculiar things again.
Next thing, she went to the fuse box and cut the lights. We got a torch each and had fun wandering from room to room looking around and seeing how different things looked. Then she went to the cupboard and brought down the box of candles.
It was at that point that I realised… there was simply no hope for any of us…
