Dialogue: Righto, Mr Maker, let's get it sorted

By JOE BENNETT

When I finally get to meet my maker I mean to have a good stern word with him, her or it. (I like the idea of an "it" running the show, all coloured lights and a titanium carcass with a perspex dome on top that throbs during the more animated bits of conversation, but I suppose I'd better stick to the conventional "he", which, now I think of it, is probably how the original scribes of the Old Testament, the Koran and all the rest settled on a masculine godhead, regardless of what the feminist historians will no doubt squeal about the patriarchal assumptions of the ancients.)

But anyway, if he imagines that when he finally summons me upstairs, it'll lead to the sort of interview that headmasters are fond of conducting with schoolboys who've been caught drinking, he's got, as they say, another think coming.

If he imagines that I'm going to let him deliver a richly intoned monologue on my sins, requiring nothing more from me than a bowed head and feigned contrition and self-incriminating murmurs of agreement, he's in for a hint of a shockette.

Conversation takes two, and before I let him turn his attention to the catalogue of my misdemeanours I plan to open the interview with a sharp question or two of my own. Nor, by way of an answer, am I going to accept any of this moves-in-mysterious-ways flummery. And the first of my questions will be the business of me and my sister.

Sis and I have been so remote both geographically and emotionally for so long that I have to grope for a while before I can drag up her christian name, and as for the date of her birthday, your guess is as good as mine. The separation is entirely mutual. No bad blood between us, you understand, but also, to all appearances, no blood at all.

But then she gets her hands on a book of mine, reads it and today sends me an e-mail. And from this I learn that on the celebrated occasion when I first sucked in the air of an English spring in the Year of our Android one thousand nine hundred and fifty seven, my sister wept.

Sis, who was all of 5 or 6 years old and dressed, I imagine, in white ankle socks and a frock sewn at home from one of those frail patterns of tissue paper - and who does that any more? - took herself all alone down the end of garden and there between the compost bin and the unlovely turnips she bawled her little eyes out.

How can I have got through 44 years without knowing that?

The cause of her tears, apparently, was that in our happy little baby-boomer family unit the score in the Gender Cup at the time stood at 3-2 to the blokes, parents included, and the lump who became me was my sister's last hope of an equaliser before the final whistle.

As it turned out, I not only failed to score, or rather be, the equaliser, I actually notched a goal at the other end, and although it's obvious that that was the only other possible outcome, my sister was too young at the time to have thought it through in advance.

So my arrival made it 4-2 to the blokes in perpetuity and she says it stung. Well, not quite in perpetuity. Shortly after me came the dog and his masculinity stood out like, well, anyway, he made it 5-2. So my sis had no one to share dolls or confidences with except my mother, and she, poor woman, was too busy for the next 15 years cooking large pieces of protein and washing football shorts to be everything she no doubt would have liked to be to her daughter.

Is this, then, the reason for more than 40 years of mutual no-speaks? And is it the cause of all sorts of festering nasties in my skull? And is it why I live a life of misanthropic solitude relieved only by the mute, inadequate company of a few domestic animals? Probably not.

But now that my sister has raised a brood of her own, all more or less ignorant of their distant uncle, and now that they've grown up and deserted her suburban house not half a mile from where we both were born, now, I say, so very late in the day, she gets in touch and opens up a channel of honest and refreshing discourse.

And why so late, that's the question. It could have been so good. Why did it have to be thus? You listening, Mr Maker? Why those tears at my beginning, and nothing else till now? Eh?

No, don't change the subject. I want answers, you hear me. Start talking.

And don't try to lay the blame on me.