The Weekly Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3465 by Angharad Copyright© 2024/2025 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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I awoke shattered but needing to see how Tom was, he was my father-figure and had been much better at it than my birth dad. I rushed into the bathroom unaware that Stella was downstairs on the phone to ICU to ask how he was and how his night had been. I was rushing, my body still damp as I threw the towel on the bed and pulled on my clothes. Stella came in with a cuppa and told me that he was comfortable and still very much alive. I hugged her and burst into tears, the emotion finally getting to me. She just hugged me and cooed at me.

"If anything happens to him, I'm not sure what I shall do," I sort of snivelled into her shoulder.

"Well, it will happen one day," she said back to me, "But I don't think today is the day. They say he's comfortable and holding his own. So get yourself some breakfast and we'll go and see him, perhaps you can zap him with the blue stuff and he'll be out training for marathons by tea time."

I laughed at the absurdity of it, however, I did wonder why the idea of the blue light hadn't entered my head until now. I had saved him before perhaps I could do it again. I dried my eyes and went dowstairs and was bust reboiling the kettle when Danni arrived, she was dressed ready to do whatever, "How is Gramps?"

"Comfortable and holding his own."

"I've told him about that before, I hope he washes his hands afterwards." I ignored her joke and popped more toast in the machine for her to butter and eat while I made a pot of tea.

"I need you to come with me to see if we can zap him with the blue light."

"Okay, when?"

"Now, as soon as the kids are off to school. She shoved a large lump of toast in her mouth and nodded. I could hardly criticise her as she was eating quickly to come with me. I ate my toast and a banana more sedately but I had a few minutes start on her.

Sarah arrived and asked how Tom was and I repeated what Stella had told me. David came into the kitchen and asked how Tom was and I felt like a newsreader on a continuous news channel. He offered to take the children to school and after I kissed them all goodbye, Danni and I headed for ICU to see if we could help our much loved relative.

Tom tried to make me go to the university to defend my budgets and his plan for leasing university accommodation to a vetted general public. Students paid less rent but compared to private landlords, the rent we were proposing was very reasonable.

I helped him drink a cup of tea, he wasn't hungry, unsurprisingly, and then I sat on one side of him and Danni sat on the other and we tried invoking the blue light. He zonked and the machines seemed to go bonkers, causing nurses from all over to come running. The reset them all but neither Danni nor I stopped the healing. It all slowed down to a more sedate speed and I felt the energy travelling from my hands to his and Danni was smiling, so she was feeling something too.

We stopped after about an hour, during which I was feeling shattered and I thought I'd better go and check what was happening at the university. Danni and I gave his sleeping form a kiss as we left. We bumped into a non-plused consultant who was asking his nurse why an old lady he was treating was still alive, and in fact thriving. We smirked as we heard him and wondered if she picked up a bit of the blue stuff too. "But why is she still here," he asked the nurse, "she's got so much wrong with her that it would kill an elephant?" The nurse was equally confounded.

"It's obviously not her time to go," I threw at them as we left as Danni nearly fell over laughing. "We did some good then?" I asked the world.

"Looks like," said my foot-balling daughter and laughed again. "When do we need to do Gramps again?"

"Tonight, on the way home, I'll give you a lift."

She agreed and I drove to the uni where Diane was asking over the funeral arrangements for the VC. I hit the roof, "Please wait until he's dead , last I saw of him he was thinking of signing for their university football team."

"Oh well, they said he was nearly dead when the ambulance arrived."

"Well, you were misinformed. Where's my tea?" I dismissed her and she scuttled off to the kitchen to make a brew. She was back ten minutes later with a cup of tea and apologised to me for her insensitivity earlier. She had been sincere but had been misinformed by other staff including his secretary. I told her to tell her colleague of and not to jump the gun again, because if I warned her, it would be rather bloody and lead to a disciplinary. I heard a while later telling someone to be more careful and that Vice Chancellor Agnew was recovering well in hospital.

It still dominated our morning and I stopped taking calls from well-wishers/ ghouls, who wondered if they could profit from the situation. I simply left a message telling all and sundry, that he was recovering well and expected to be back within days. That shut most of them up and gave them something to think about, as Tom's position was unassailable, and therefore so was mine. I was too worried to look for dissenters, there would be time for that later and I was always a target for those who fancied themselves at usurping me.

Trish phoned half-way through the morning, "What's this I heard about Gramps?"

"He's in ICU after a heart attack, I'm sure he'd love to see you."

"Why? He's got you to look out for him and my work just keeps piling up."

"Surely you could take a day off just to visit him?" I asked her.

"May be in a week or three," she responded.

"We're at an important point in the calculations."

"This still with the ESA?"

"Yeah, still on Mars Rovers."

"I happen to think that Gramps is more important than some vanity project."

"Sorry, Mum, gotta go," and she just rang off. It seemed that Trish no longer needed us and until she did, she just ignored us. I mentioned it to Danni on the way back to the hospital, Danni just shrugged and told me she was the thinking much the same as me, we were surplus to requirements. It happened to most parents at some point, perhaps not as brusquely as Trish did it, but then that was Trish. I tried to remember the little girl who was so needy when we first met, she was very different now and I wondered if it was always going to happen or was it all my fault. I didn't know but I wasn't going to go on a guilt trip on account of it.

We parked at the hospital and I reminded Danni to clear her mind of any negatives before we saw Gramps again. "Oh, so does that mean Trish?" she asked and I blushed like a tomato. However, by the time we were in ICU again, Tom was in good spirits and told us that Stella had visited in her lunch hour and said I was naturally worried, or worrit as he put it.

I'd told him that as I had visited the university for most of the day, all sorts of rumour abounded but my trail of disinformation had them all running around in circles. He laughed at that and said, "If ye canna beat them, baffle them, eh?" I just shrugged. My first priority was making him well again, taking a few scalps was secondary and there was plenty of time to do it. I knew most of the main dissenters and always kept my blade sharp. and ready. Baffling them was all that was necessary for now, the bloodshed would come later. All I had to decide was if I was going to play, or if Tom retired, to follow suit. After all, I could still study dormice from outside the university, even if I had to buy a large swathe of countryside in Hampshire and a build a new base or convert a nice farmhouse. It wasn't the end of the world, but losing Tom would be.

"How is the project going?" I asked Danni as we left the hospital.

"Still having a problem with identifying everything, why?"

"Why is it a problem? You have all those field guides of mine or keys to identification."

"Yeah, but some of them are quite technical."

"You mean you want someone to show you how to use them?"

"Yeah, it would make things easier."

"I'll take Friday off and we'll have a session with microscopes and the books."

"What about Gramps?"

"I haven't got enough microscopes for him as well."

"No, are we going to zap him in hospital?"

"Oh, right. Let's see how he is on Thursday shall we?" And that was how we left it. I hadn't done work with keys for a long while but I knew some found them intimidating, I did when I got my first ones when I was about twelve or thirteen. They scared the pants off me as I was trying to identify invertebrates from ponds. It was Dad funnily enough who picked up one of my guides and asked me how it worked. I didn't have the guts to tell him I couldn't do it, though I suspect he'd realised this already. He told me the next Saturday he was off we'd work through one of them. I was horrified. I took one into school and begged the biology teacher to show me how to use it. I remember he laughed.

"It shows you're ready to move up the ladder with your studies, sadly not at this place, you were always ahead of them. He pulled one or two samples of beetles he had and showed me over the next hour how to use the key to identify them. It wasn't rocket science it was plodding with the need for the occasional dissection, usually of male genitalia, occasionally female ones and even more rarely other bits of the insect. I got the hang of it and Mr Pewsey, my biology teacher acquired one or two more challenging species and he would give me a bit of time after school to go through the process. He was lovely and mentored me until A levels. He told me that if I didn't panic I should do well as he thought I was up to undergrad level in much of it.

Anyway my dad was impressed as he couldn't make head nor tail of it that Saturday, so I just showed him what I'd been taught. He gave up and admitted that ecology was more scientific than he'd been led to believe. He gave me twenty quid, which paid for another guide or key and somehow for once, we were both happy. It didn't last but it was nice while it did.