A prank call from her mum left a lasting impression on Alice May Connolly.
I’m four years old, and I’m hiding under the covers at the very base of my parents’ bed because I’m about to get the biggest most professional smack bottom of my entire life.
There has never been a smack bottom as big and red and blotchy with broken butt capillaries as the smack bottom that is about to happen to me. My Mum dialled the Smack Bottom Truck and I’m waiting at the factory to be exported to Sleeping on Your Stomach for the Rest of your Lifes-ville. Or worse.
I’m waiting there, hiding, terrified, and desperately trying to become another fold in the sheets.
My heart is palpitating and my breath is shallow. I’m imagining the oxygen under the heavy duvet slowly depleting like an underwater diver whose oxygen tank has run out and there’s a warning signal coming up from somewhere like beep beep beep.
I’m four and I’m already preoccupied with death. Not that I really get it, but I know it’s bad, and I know it’s probably very close to what is about to happen to me, or at least to my butt. I’m four years old and I’m waiting to die and I bloody hope there is an afterlife or at least can I please get reincarnated as my favourite flower (forget-me-knot) … just anything but the poo I found in the sand pit.
Let me mention that this isn’t just any smack bottom. This is not a short little whack and a “go to your room” from Dad. This is the big time; this smack bottom has been deployed and drafted by Mum and Mum is the big guns and Mum is the one I wronged and I have to pay the price.
So I wait. And I can hear Mum’s footsteps coming up the hallway and she’s got reinforcements. She’s cackling like she’s just sacrificed a goat to the gods that eat children alive first by peeling them by slitting open the skin on their toes and pulling up like wallpaper. I know she specifically told me not to, but I really shouldn’t have eaten that one segment of her mandarin. I tell myself I will never eat fruit again.
Of course, this is all hypothetical because after this smack bottom there is not going to be any more of me left. I will be reduced to a pounded lump of pink flesh like at the butcher nana goes to.
Let me mention that this isn’t just any smack bottom. This is not a short little whack and a “Go to your room” from Dad. This is the big time.
I mentioned at the start my Mum called the Smack Bottom Truck? I wasn’t kidding this is what I was waiting for. After I deliberately disobeyed her and ate a piece of mandarin, she repeatedly pressed the dial button on the cordless phone and made a prank call to the Smack Bottom Company for one extra-large Smack Bottom to please be delivered by Truck to 11 Snell Place, Dallington, Christchurch.
Of course she was tricking. Of course I didn’t believe her. Of course I teased her for being a big dummy and thinking I would fall for that. However by coincidence, at the exact moment she hung up the phone, a huge truck drove past and parked right outside our window.
Now actually Mum is great, she taught me to read before I finished preschool, but when I read the word Army printed in big red letters on the side of the truck, (skipping over the very enormous Salvation which was just a bit beyond me at this stage), I had never felt more betrayed and absolutely petrified. Until two huge muscular men jumped out of the front dressed top to toe in camo gear.
Now, I feel like this is every parent’s dream. Instil pure dread into your child so when they try to do anything "bad" it stimulates their muscle memory and those feelings of terror and fear stop them doing it. I mean, I don’t drink much, I don’t do drugs and I don’t steal (well, anymore), nor do I do like murder and stuff. New Zealand has a culture of binge drinking and I’m not part of it! I can’t even get peer pressured into this stuff.
The following are two examples where I think anxiously waiting for the Smack Bottom Truck has definitely influenced my life.
I once ran into my crush at the Christchurch Agriculture and Pastoral Show. It was about three years after he wrote me a love note and I spent the entire time trying to find him again amongst the thousands of people there that day. He was tall and looked like Ryan Reynolds.
Another three years after that I was the A&P show again, but this time with an actual boyfriend, my first ever, and after we’d examined the prize winning pigs, cows, sheep, lambs, and rabbits we found ourselves in the marketplace. I was inelegantly exhibiting the oversized orange Tui jandals he’d given me and I scuffed them proudly like a badge that said “I have a boyfriend. And I am wearing his shoes”.
He was kind of cool at school and hadn’t seemed to have caught on that I wasn’t really. I tried very hard to be fun and outgoing and hilarious and open to new experiences, which probably meant I was screeching insults at him and his friends and hoping to God it was flirting.
I picked out a couple of friendship bracelets because it would be probably nice for our love to be objectified and he raised his eyebrows at me and kind of wiggled them. I did it back and then his friends all did it and added in some winking and looking at the bracelets in my hand and then at the stallholder and then back me.
I smiled and nodded my head like I was keen as and put the bracelets back and said "nah, I mean I usually nick stuff but this isn’t expensive enough for me.”
Although it wasn’t the presence of God I was feeling, it was more my first foray into unlocking my own world, and stepping out of what I had known.
When I was six years old I began repenting. For all the wrongs I had done up until then I suppose. My father and I were visiting my Great Aunt in Blenheim.
She’s a real hoot; a super gregarious country music junkie, the MC of all the events, jokester. She leaves sing song messages on your voicemail when it’s your birthday.
At Christmas time we used to play the most terrifying game come night time called Ghosties, which was just hide and seek except when she found us she’d pop out her false teeth and howl.
I stood naked in the middle of her living room looking around at the pictures of smiling Jesus hanging on her embossed wallpaper above every door frame. I spread my arms like the bronze cast crucified Jesus as my Great Aunt tucked my singlet into my knickers and told me that’s how you keep really warm.
Then I turned to my Dad and said: “When we get back home I want to go to church.”
Driving back to Christchurch we stopped off at St Oswalds Church in Wharanui. I had this mega spiritual moment because of the sun and the wild flowers and the quaint stone church and the light coming through the stained glass. Although it wasn’t the presence of God I was feeling, it was more my first foray into unlocking my own world, and stepping out of what I had known.
This feeling of power meant that I could actually decide my own path, follow my own curiosities and have agency over my choices.
Anyway, I’m not here to preach at you and try and force you into believing something you don’t want to believe like some arrogant atheist. I’m just telling you what I believe…
Whether it was a horrible prank gone awry, or very slick, well-timed parenting move, I will always have faith in (and fear) the Smack Bottom Truck. And if that’s one of the things that helps me be a good person, then well, good for me.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Phoebe Morris.
This content is brought to you with funding support from NZ On Air.
