the fat burbies
Daddy was out when I saw the burbies through the kitchen window. Burbies is short for suburbans and it’s the word me and Daddy use for anyone who doesn’t live in our village. We don’t get burbies very often because our village is very small and it’s far away from everywhere else but sometimes people end up here if they’re lost.
There were two burbies this time, a man and a lady. The man was tall and fat and smoking a cigarette. The lady was short and fat and wearing a glittery jacket. They were standing at the bottom of our drive next to a bossy red car, looking around in an angry confused sort of way. The lady said something to the man. The man took out his cigarette and trod it into the floor. Then he pointed up at our house and said something to the lady and then they walked up our drive slowly.
I was very excited. Burbies had never come to our house when Daddy was out before. I went to the front door and waited there until I heard the door-bell ring and then I opened the door straight away.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘Can I help you?’
The burbies looked down at me in an odd way. ‘Is your daddy home?’ said the man. His breath smelled like smoke.
I smiled at him. ‘He’s out buying eggs,’ I said. ‘Can I help you? My name’s Zachary.’ And I held out my hand for the man to shake.
The man didn’t look at my hand. ‘When will he be back?’ he said.
I didn’t say anything. I carried on smiling and holding out my hand for him to shake. The man looked at me weirdly and then said, ‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘He wants you to shake his hand,’ said the lady.
The man frowned at me and then shook the ends of my fingers. I put my hand back down by my side and said, ‘In about ten minutes probably. Would you like to come inside?’
The man and the lady looked at each other and for a moment I thought they were going to go back to their bossy red car and drive off so I said, ‘Please come inside. I’ll make you a drink and when Daddy comes back he can help you find your way.’
The lady smiled at me. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much, Zachary.’
I led them into the house and then I closed the door. ‘Please sit down,’ I said. ‘We have coffee and tea and water and orange juice.’
‘Could I have a glass of orange juice, please,’ said the lady. She sat on a chair and smiled at me. ‘This must be a very nice place to live.’
‘Yes, it is,’ I said. I looked at the man. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘I’ll just have a water,’ said the man. He sat down next to the lady and the lady frowned at him. She whispered, ‘Be a bit more polite, Simon, the kid’s being good enough to let us stay in his house.’
The man’s face went a bit red. ‘Please can I have a water,’ he said to me. ‘That would be great.’
‘Of course,’ I said. I got out the water and the orange juice from the cupboard and started to pour orange juice into my Mickey Mouse cup but then I realised that the lady was probably too old for Mickey Mouse so I poured the juice into one of the special fish glasses instead. I gave it to her and she said ‘Thank you very much,’ and I said, ‘You’re welcome.’ I gave the man his drink in an ordinary glass without any fish on it because I didn’t like him as much as I liked the lady.
While the burbies were sipping their drinks and looking away from me out the back window I got the big heavy saucepan out of the cupboard. I had never done this before but I had watched Daddy do it quite a lot of times so I wasn’t too worried. Also I am quite strong, especially for my age. I sneaked around behind the burbies with the saucepan in my hands and then I hit the lady over the head very hard like I had seen Daddy do. The lady didn’t make any noise, she just sort of crumpled onto the table and then the man looked at her and then he looked at me and then he opened his mouth like he was going to shout at me but before he could shout at me I whacked him in the face. His face went all bloody then but the man didn’t fall over, he stayed sitting up and held his head in his hands saying ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ’ and so I hit him a few more times and then he fell over forwards onto the floor. There was blood coming out of his head onto the floor but I didn’t mind. When I first saw a burbie bleed it made me feel sick but then Daddy told me that blood is just human juice, no different from any other juice like orange juice and that made me feel better. I don’t mind blood any more but the only problem is that it makes a mess that is sometimes hard to clean up.
I checked the burbies’ pockets like Daddy always did and I found a wallet with some money in it. Then I took off their watches and I took off the lady’s jewellery and I put it in a little pile on the kitchen table. Then I poured myself some orange juice and waited for Daddy to come home.
Daddy opened the door about three minutes later. ‘Hey, sport!’ he said to me and then he saw the burbies on the floor. He looked up at me.
‘You do this all by yourself?’ he said and I nodded. Daddy grinned at me and messed up my hair. ‘Good job!’ he said to me. ‘Good job! Two burbies all on your own! What you got?’
‘A wallet with some money in it and two watches and a necklace and a pair of earrings,’ I said.
‘Good work, good work!’ Daddy said. ‘I saw their car outside and wondered what it was doing there. What a haul!’ Then he said, ‘So sport, were they good burbies or bad burbies?’
There are two kinds of burbie, good burbie and bad burbie. If a burbie is rude or mean, then he’s a bad burbie and Daddy takes him away in his car to throw in the lake. If he’s polite and nice, then he’s a good burbie and we let him go after he’s woken up.
‘The lady’s a good burbie,’ I said. ‘She said “Thank you” and smiled at me which is why I let her have the fish glass. But I don’t think the man was a good burbie, because he didn’t smile at me and he didn’t want to shake my hand.’
‘I see,’ Daddy said. ‘So the man was a bad burbie, you’d say.’
I thought about it and then I said, ‘I think he was in the middle.’
Daddy crouched down and looked at me. ‘Because you’ve done such a good job, you can choose,’ he said. ‘Chuck him in the lake or let him go?’
I had to think again, then after a while I said, ‘Let him go. Because if we chucked him in the lake I think it would make the lady sad.’
Daddy nodded. ‘Good thinking, sport. Good thinking,’ he said. ‘Now we just need to wait for them to wake up.’
The lady woke up first, about seven minutes later. She stroked her head and moaned a bit and then she saw me and Daddy looking down at her and she said, ‘Oh God.’
‘It’s okay,’ I told her. ‘You can go after the man has woken up.’
The lady looked across at the man then and she said, ‘Oh Simon, oh God Simon what have you done to him,’ and I tried to explain to her that blood was just human juice, no different from any other juice like orange juice but she wouldn’t listen and she started crying. I went out then because it makes me upset when the good burbies cry and I only went back in when Daddy called me. The man was standing up and his face was covered in red and when he saw me he called me a bad word so Daddy hit him in the stomach and said, ‘Don’t you talk to Zachary like that.’ Then he said to the burbies, ‘If you ever tell anyone about what happened here then I’ll make you sorry, do you understand that? And if some policeman comes snooping around here he’ll get the same treatment you did, you got that?’ Daddy always says that to the burbies who we let go. Twice a policeman has come around and rung the door-bell and both times me and Daddy have been really quiet and pretended that the house is empty and after a while the policeman goes away.
So the burbies left our house and sort of walked-ran back to their bossy red car and as they went I waved at the lady but she didn’t smile or wave back, she just looked at me like she was scared of me. But I’m used to that now so it doesn’t bother me very much.
‘Let’s go back inside,’ Daddy said. ‘You did a good job.’ So we went back inside and me and Daddy played cribbage and I won both times and I was happy because I was with Daddy and because I had done a good job.
