The face in the trousers.

My uncle was a very funny man. Laughing and playing football with me every Thursday evening, and during the school holidays, most mornings. We’d dance, him, me and the ball until the blue sky faded into purple and our shadows reached out across the field into the trees that surrounded us. We didn’t speak much, him and me. He’d always have a joke or anecdote, but we’d never speak. But that wasn’t why I described him just now as a very funny man. But I can tell you right now:

One bright and sunny morning at the beginning of the summer holidays, our house phone rang. My mother couldn't hear it as she was in the garden, and I was in the bath. I didn’t want to leave my watery den, so I sunk lower until I felt like a crocodile. The phone still rang, and it sounded as if it was getting louder. Ring, ring. Ring, ring. RING, RING. RING. I found myself hurrying across the hallway, down the stairs and across more hallway, clutching the skinny green towel to my soaking skin. ‘Hello?!’ I cursed into the phone. ‘Hello, good morning little Mike, and a good day to you?’ my uncle replied. ‘Hello’ was my kinder response. ‘You’ll never guess what?’ I was challenged. ‘What?’ was my answer. ‘I just lay down on my bed to make a call, and as I hung up I looked down at my left trouser leg. The creases, they look like the man in the moon.’ I was starting to shiver, and the hairs on my legs felt heavier. ‘You what?’
‘I’m not going to move. The man in the moon is in my trousers.’

And an hour later, after summoning my extended family to his bedside, we all agreed. A little face poked out of his trousers, looking up at us.
‘But,’ my Great-aunt Lucy said, ‘this is like looking at the clouds and seeing a dinosaur. It’s chance, you silly man.’ But my uncle refused to believe this. The man in the trousers was real, he said. He was never going to move his leg again, as he didn’t want to hurt him.

Seventeen years later my uncle was still where he lay. We’d take turns to bring him food, and my Granddad, a few months before he died, had rigged up a system of tubes so that my Uncle could see to his bathroom requirements, and my other uncle, the grumpy one, Bill who was a plumber, had made him a little sink to wash his hands in and brush his teeth. Another year later my uncle died, still wearing the trousers, and would you know it? His leg had slipped off the side of the bed, and the face had gone. The creases had flattened and bent it away.

Like I said, my uncle was a very funny man. I hope it doesn’t run in the family.