Once upon a time there lived an old couple, Amy and Eric. They lived a quiet, peaceful life with their dog Old Economy deep in the heart of a peaceful and beautiful country far far away. They lived comfortably, quietly and modestly and everything seemed fine, but they were all three of them getting older. And Old Economy was getting older quicker than either Amy and Eric, as dogs do. He slept longer and closer to the fire and Then one day, quite suddenly, one cold, white dawn Old Economy died.
It was a very sad day and neither Amy nor Eric knew quite what to do. They tried to comfort each other, they tried to carry on regardless, they tried thinking this was the way of the world or the way of their God, they tried not to pretend that there was a huge gap in their home and in their lives. They sort of wished that they could get back to when Old Economy was young and they were young and they could go out walking with Old Economy running after rabbits and squirrels and pigeons and generally terrorising everything in the natural world and having a glorious time. That’s what they really wished. They wished they could close their eyes and dream back time.
But of course they couldn’t do that. Old Economy passing away had reminded both of them that they weren’t as young or as fit or as rich as they used to be. They thought too much. Or not really thought. They brooded and missed the old times and couldn’t really think about the years ahead because those years didn’t seem anywhere near as good as the years that had gone. Life was still great, sure. But life wasn’t as great as it had been. If only life could be that great again. In their hearts they knew this was a foolish dream, but a comforting and fine dream anyway.
So to cheer themselves up they went to the circus. The lights, the crowds, the popcorn and hot dogs, the trapeze artists, the clowns, the colours and the music were all wonderful. They did the trick. And one of the best things was Spanky the Bear. A big golden brown bear with a wig on his head that made him look almost human, he rode his little bike round and round the ring and liked it when his lady keeper rolled up a copy of Forbes and whacked him on the behind with it. Everybody laughed at Spanky. He made life simple and problem free for as long as he was riding his little bike round and round.
Amy and Eric came out of the big top and into the night air feeling like life had turned a corner, that they could breathe again, that everything would be okay. They stopped for a second, adjusting their coats and gloves, watching the crowd disperse and listening to the voices of people all around them heading for home, happy and feeling good about themselves. And in a corner they saw the bear keeper lady having a cigarette and a break after the show, so they went over to talk to her and to tell her how much they liked the circus and how much they liked Spanky in particular.
The bear keeper lady smiled and said thank you but seemed a little subdued and sad so they asked her what was wrong. She said it was Spanky. He was getting old. Everybody had loved Spanky but he wasn’t as popular now as he had been and he was getting so fat that his rather large ursine behind wouldn’t fit on the seat of the little bike any more. She thought that he didn’t even seem to like it as much as he used to when she hit him with the rolled up magazine. In fact, the time was coming fast when Spanky would have to be retired and sent to that great bear pit in the sky.
This was too much for Amy and Eric. Spanky had given them a glimpse of a new happiness, a new life – to be exact a new happiness through forgetting about life and just being reminded of the old life. So they protested and said this could not be and the bear keeper lady said it had to be and they said it was a crying shame and the bear keeper lady said what could she do and they said…. Well they said what came into both their minds at the same time and seemed to be the obvious thing to say. What they said was that Spanky could come and live with them, that he could take up the painfully empty space left by Old Economy and they’d be very glad to have him. And, strange to say, the bear keeper lady didn’t object and dropped Spanky off with them the next Tuesday when the circus left town.
They loved that Spanky had come to live with them. He was easy to feed – he loved cheeseburgers, lots of cheeseburgers – and he put on his wig and rode his little bike round and round in front of their house and their hearts filled with contentment to see that they had rescued him and he had rescued them.
But there were problems. He was, after all, inhuman. To start with, there was a lot of, let’s call it, waste material that was as foul and as ugly as only circus-bear waste material can be, and it came out of seemingly every orifice that Spanky had. Frequently. Night and day. Often at 3 o’clock in the morning.
Obviously he couldn’t help himself, but the crap – let’s call it actually what it was – that spouted from Spanky was of a very high order of disgusting. Maybe all the cheeseburgers had something to do with it. And, of course, he never cleaned it up. In fact, it seemed that whenever he saw one of the rank misdemeanours he was guilty of, his first impulse (which, of course, he always obeyed) was to commit another misdemeanour on top of it to increase and emphasise the horribleness of his contribution to the household. He seemed to enjoy that.
Then there was the problem that he thought he could fix things. Maybe growing up near ordinary human beings Spanky had seen how they would change a lightbulb or close an umbrella or park a car, and he thought in his own darkened way that he could do these things just as well or better. His way of fixing things usually meant taking a sudden interest in them, taking them apart, bending, chewing, sitting on, throwing away or losing parts until the thing was no longer workable, trying to put the thing back together so that it looked like it had before (never quite the same though) and then looking round challengingly once it dawned on him that it no longer worked with a look that suggested that, in his opinion, someone had secretly crept up behind him and totally spoiled all his good work. So the fridge was minus a door, the remote control had been chewed into a corrugated banana shape, the computer he insisted worked best in the bath and the washing machine had been turned upside down and beaten to an asterisk shape.
That was bad enough, but it was the noises that he made that were the biggest problem. Amy and Eric could have coped with a house full of dysfunctional electrical appliances and rooms that smelt like the death of kindness. It was their business and just their business. But Spanky liked to growl and roar and bark and snarl very loudly, often and for no reason. The noises he made were really frightening. Of course, Spanky was physically very harmless and couldn’t have fought anyone. He’d pretended to a couple of times at the circus but real fights, no. The bear keeper lady had told Amy and Eric that Spanky couldn’t fight even if he’d wanted to because of bone spurs on his legs, but you wouldn’t know that just to look at him. True he was fat and old and flabby. But there was a look that came into his eyes that was pure meanness, and if a bear could have hired a crooked lawyer or someone similar to do his dirty work for him, you’d swear that bear would have been Spanky.
The sounds that came out of his mouth were so terrible that the neighbours found them hard to tolerate. They came round to the house to complain but Spanky scared them off. Parents wouldn’t let their children play near or even walk past Amy and Eric’s house because they were so worried about what Spanky might do. The toxic environment that Spanky had created in Amy and Eric’s home was apparent to everyone with a nose to detect it, and so people began to avoid Amy and Eric altogether, including family and people who normally had a pretty special relationship with the old couple.
Things were getting bad. Amy and Eric were broke because they’d spent all their money on Spanky and on erecting a massive new wall at the bottom of their garden which they told Spanky was to keep trouble out but was in reality to keep it in. What were they to do?
They sat by the fire one night while Spanky was having one of his frequent naps and looked at each other. They could see what the other was thinking and they both knew they were thinking the same. Spanky was a horrible bear who had made their lives a lot worse. They had been tricked into adopting him. But, in the end, vile old bear that he was, he was their vile old bear, they loved him, and love is what matters in the end.
