Truth Or Dare

The Birthday Party

It wasn’t that it was raining. It wasn’t that Nick was slurping the milk off his cereal spoon on the other side of the kitchen. It wasn’t that the cat was snoring and by the smell of it had left a deposit somewhere untraceable. It was really that it’s tricky to throw a children’s party when you have a hatred of children.

Alice Kaye had a hatred of children. Not a particularly malicious hatred. Not the kind of hatred that fuels mad desires to commit heinous crimes. Just a comfortable understanding between her and herself that snot-nosed whiners putting on baby voices were never going to be quite her cup of tea and that was that. Know thyself, she had always thought. And she did. So when Nick, beautiful Nick (albeit with appalling cereal-eating manners) had given her three, she had undertaken to love all three writhing shriekers but still had to deal with the rest. And the hatred, of course, was for other people’s sprogs.

How could such tiny creatures leave such enormous messes? Why did they have to leave chocolate buttercream on the floor, on the table, on the washing machine, on the cat? Why did they have to run like small elephants down her newly-carpeted stairs, making Nick chuckle? Why was that so funny to him?

She was getting worse at hiding her grimaces as gleeful yells emanated from the living room.

‘Lighten up, love,’ Nick had said helpfully through a mouthful of Shreddies. ‘They’ve almost finished Pass the Parcel.’

Alice sighed. She was games master, of course. She would have to think of the next one, and Christ on his bike only knew what children were supposed to enjoy playing. ‘Can’t you do it, Nick? Just this once?’
‘Sorry love, I’m the pony, remember?’
‘Fuck, Nick.’ She couldn’t think of anything worse. ‘Are we allowed to leave them unsupervised? What if they break?’ She was only half joking.
Nick raised two bushy eyebrows. ‘Break? Jesus, Alice. They’re kids.’
She cleared his cereal bowl.
‘I wasn’t finished with that.’
‘I have to go in, don’t I?’
‘Baby steps.’

Alice gritted her teeth and strode into the living room.

‘Mummy!’ cried Bobby. ‘Mummy, can we have crisps?’

Why would they never just wait for what they were given?

‘Mummy!’ chimed in Al. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Kate stole my prize!’

‘Kate?’ she tried.

Little gap-toothed Kate gave a gap-toothed grin. ‘Gel pens are for girls.’

‘That’s gender normative and gives rise to very bad perceptions in later life, Kate,’ Alice remonstrated, trying to take the packet in question. Little gap-toothed Kate began to cry. ‘No! No, sorry! Please don’t cry.’

All around her little voices began to chirrup. ‘Why doesn’t Kate get the pens?’ ‘Al cheated, anyway!’ ‘I want the toilet!’ ‘When is Dad coming to pick us up?’

Christ, thought Alice. I’m a failure and a half. Can’t even organise a bloody kids’ bloody party.

‘Nick?’ she called through the door in panic. She was met with footsteps trudging up the stairs and an amused ‘you’d better think quickly, sweetheart.’

Pin the Tail on the Donkey? No, why give children sharp things?
Scrabble? Too boring, too many dull nouns and no triple word scores here.
Duck, Duck, Goose? But how do you play that again?
Wink Murder? No, they’d start feigning dramatic deaths and the noise would be insufferable.

‘Mummy,’ piped up Jenny, her voice like a frail reed in a thick peaty bog of children’s hubbub. ‘Mummy, can we play Truth or Dare?’

Well, thought Alice. It can’t be that bad, can it? Just make sure they don’t leave the living room. They’d all come up with crap dares anyway. Now Alice in her time had loved a dare. As a newsreader on BBC Spotlight she had been known to carry dares out live on TV, flipping off a video of the Queen and going without trousers under the news desk and once, just once when the camera wasn’t turned on her, fondling the sound editor during the Sports section. Before she’d met Nick, of course. And they weren’t exactly going to come up with dares of that calibre.

‘I dare Sammy,’ started Al, jabbing a pudgy finger. ‘To eat five jammy dodgers!’ The room fell about laughing.

Sammy performed the dare, dribbling crumbs and giggling hysterically.

‘Kate!’ he cried. ‘Truth or Dare?’

Little gap-toothed Kate peered over her packet of gel pens, Hello Kitty staring blankly from her t-shirt. ‘Truth!’

This was difficult. Sammy thought hard, screwing up his eyes. Eventually it came to him. ‘What is the funniest thing you have ever done?’

Little gap-toothed Kate looked worried for a second before smirking a wide smirk. ‘One time,’ she said conspiratorially. ‘One time I was with Bobby under the tree, and I –‘ she tried to hold in her laughter. ‘I farted!’

The room couldn’t bear it.

But it was little gap-toothed Kate’s turn. And little gap-toothed Kate was out for revenge against this haughty woman who had tried to rob her of her stationery. She frowned at Alice. ‘I’m asking Mrs. Kaye!’

Alice panicked. Was this normal? She didn’t really know how these parties worked. But she would never back down from a dare.

‘I choose dare.’ She squared up to the little girl.

Little gap-toothed Kate was having none of it. ‘You can’t. You are an adult and I am a child. It’s not fair.’ Alice would have argued back but could hear Nick and his judgement traipsing around upstairs and felt the familiar suspicion that she was not a very good mother. ‘You have to choose truth.’

For a short period, many years ago, Alice Kaye had dated a Tortured Poet. She had melted at his charm, his self-knowledge and his, you know, emotional sensitivity. Truth is vulnerability, he had said. And she had probably simpered and nodded and, you know, believed. He’d had black-rimmed glasses and just the right amount of stubble and a constant stream of platitudes on hand. And how she had fallen.
And she and her girlfriends had dismissed him and his glasses and his stubble and his platitudes, laughed over flat whites and found her the next one. And eventually she had met Nick. And eventually she had had three children. But for the very first time in years and years she was painfully aware that the Tortured Poet might just have had a point.

Because Alice had a Fear. A crippling, insidious fear. And she wasn’t sure that it was founded on very much but it simmered constantly under her work, her romantic life, her social life. It made her a jealous, unhappy person at times. It woke up parts of her that she would very much have preferred to leave dormant.

Alice Kaye had a Fear that she was boring. She dressed well, read the right books and was attractive enough for people to pay her attention. But secretly, deep down, always there, she was afraid that she was actually just really, inordinately dull. And what a fear! Not that she might be unmasked, but that there might be absolutely nothing there to unmask. Faced with her nemesis in little gap-toothed Kate, she began to tremble. All the truths, the questions, the prods that could show her for a blank-minded, uncaring individual. What’s the funniest thing you’ve ever done? Christ knows. Tell a joke. I can’t. What makes you tick? Cynicism. What do you like? I don’t know.

Kate sized up her prey, leaned forward slightly and fixed Alice with a beady little stare.

‘Can you make your tongue touch your nose?’