The other day, when I called Kit for dinner, he didn’t immediately come running like a cat hearing a can opener. I called again. Silence. Thoughts of various calamities came to mind, involuntarily. Had he wandered onto the carport, and been run over? Had he fallen into the bin and accidentally been put out with the rubbish? Or, had he been snatched from the balcony by a short-sighted pelican, mistaking him for a pilchard?
Eventually, a muffled squeaking could be heard from his bedroom. I arrived at his door as he burst through a pile of clothing.
“Phew! Made it,” he squeaked, clearly not referring to his bed.
“Dinner’s ready. Where were you?” I asked, “And why are you wearing your bicycle helmet?”
“I was all the way over there,” he explained, pointing to the other side of the room, barely three metres away. “I think that pile of toys is going to fall soon, so I had to go the long way, around the edge of the room, for occupational health and safety reasons. I had to climb a few obstetricians.”
“Obstacles,” I corrected.
“Yeah them.”
I took in the scene. The room appeared to have been decorated by a wild racoon suffering from claustrophobia.
“It’s time you cleaned up this mess before you get lost and starve to death in here,” I admonished him.
After dinner, we joyfully agreed that Kit would spend the next day cleaning his room. He was surprisingly amenable to my request, if not actually joyful (the aforementioned joy was all me).
The next morning Kit began his titanic task. I supervised and poked around.
“Do you really need to keep this?” I asked him. He examined my proffered artefact.
“No; that’s not mine. It’s just a dead beetle. I think it got lost in here,” he surmised.
“I can imagine,” I agreed.
Eventually, it became apparent Kit had a purpose for cleaning his room, the ultimate goal of which was not having a clean room.
As he disappeared behind a pile of toys, he could be heard muttering, “It’s got to be somewhere.”
“That seems likely,” I remarked, “What exactly are you looking for, the floor?”
“Very funny,” he said, “I left it under this cushion.”
“Left what?” I enquired.
“A jam sandwich,” he replied, “A couple of weeks ago,” he added for clarification.
“Kit!” I chided, “That is disgusting. We’ll get ants. ”
“I hope so,” he said, “Fresh snacks!”
When I told Kit the sandwich was going straight in the bin as soon as he found it, he couldn’t think of any reason to keep cleaning his room. So, I promised a trip to the park with a bowl of sugar as ant bait, if he finished the cleaning. He then zealously cleaned and tidied every last corner. The sandwich turned up under a different cushion. I will eventually get around to cleaning it (the cushion, not the jam sandwich.)