Lifetime Guarantee
A Willerby Story
It was three in the morning, and rain was beating hard against the bedroom window.
Max woke with a start and turned to the bedside alarm to look at the time.
For a bleary moment he allowed himself to believe it was only the weather that had woken him, but then the inevitable came.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
Sunita stirred in bed beside him as he shrugged on his dressing gown.
“Is it them?” She mumbled.
“Yes. Go back to sleep.”
“OK, sorry love,” Sunita, said and rolled over. “Wish they’d learn to come in the day.”
…
Max’s misfortune began when he was in his mid-teens at his balloon stall at the Willerby summer fete.
He’d learned the basics of balloon animal modelling two years before from YouTube for his sister’s fifth birthday party, and she’d been so delighted by his dogs and giraffes he’d kept it up.
She told her friends about her clever big brother, who told their parents, who told Max’s parents and soon he was balloon modelling everywhere.
“It’s part of being a member of the community,” his dad told him when he moaned about the loss of another of his weekends. “This is why we moved here in the first place. It’s the village fete next week and you’re the Balloon Man now. There’s no escape.”
Max did some token grumbling, but he didn’t really mind.
It was sort of nice to have a job to do and sitting in the porch of his house listening to music as he fashioned the dragons, swords and unicorns he’d added to his repertoire beat the tearoom or lugging pots around the plant store with his mum.
All fetes attract eccentrics, mostly nice, some not.
The year before a middle-aged woman in a fleece and cracked glasses had become irate with him for being unenthusiastic about modelling at her village’s fete the next week.
“It’s only in the afternoon,” she said. “Your mum and dad could drop you off and pick you up no problem.”
“I’m really sorry,” Max told her, “But I’ve got rugby.”
“You could miss that just once, couldn’t you?”
“Not really,” said Max.
“Well then suit yourself, sounds like that’s what you’re good at,” she said over her shoulder as she stropped off down the street towards the bric-a-brac.
“Oh, don’t worry about her,” Max’s dad reassured him later, as he took a break from serving pork batches. “If it’s who I’m thinking of, you’re far from the only person she was horrible to. She was having a right go at Dennis over the teas going up 50p this year. Look – most people can’t help who they are, and when someone is difficult it’s usually about them not you. Try to remember that. And don’t let it ruin your day. Anyway, look lively - you’ve got more customers coming.”
Max got back to work twisting balloons, giving wide grins to the loud children and softer smiles to the shyer ones hiding behind the reassuring legs of their mums and dads.
“Every balloon guaranteed,” he said. “Another for free if it pops.”
It was cloudy but it stayed dry, and Max was soon so busy he lost all track of time until suddenly it was four and the flood of children was a trickle.
Then, finally, just as the first drops of rain fell there was just one family left, a father, a mother and a boy and a girl.
“How much is a balloon?”, the father asked, shapeless in a grey anorak in a low voice barely above a whisper.
“Just a pound,” Max told him, his stomach grumbling as he thought of the post fete barbecue at Dan and Sally’s house, wondering whether he’d be thought old enough for a beer this year without there being an embarrasing fuss.
“We would like balloons,” the two children said in unison, dressed identically in the same style grey anoraks as their mother and father.
“Balloons.” The mother said.
“Balloons,” repeated the father.
“Sure,” Max said looking up at them. “One each?”
The grey boy and girl stepped forward, nodding gravely as they held out their small oddly wrinkled grey hands.
But then the mother placed her hands on the shoulders of her children and gently pulled them back.
“The balloons will burst,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “And we will have lost two pounds.”
Max shifted uneasily, wishing the weird family gone but reminding himself of what his father had said about people not being able to help who they were.
“If it pops then come back and I’ll do another for free,” he said as brightly as he could manage.
“Ah,” said the grey father.
“Ah,” said the grey mother. “Any time?”
“Yes, why not?” Max said. “Call it a Willerby lifetime guarantee.”
The grey mother released her children as the grey father nodded.
“A good deal,” the mother said. “Thank you. We will take two dogs with the lifetime guarantee.”
Max reached for his pump and bag of balloons.
“What colour?”
“Red,” said the grey boy.
“Blue,” said the grey girl.
Then, after a cold, leathery handshake that made Max think of stone and earth, after the pumping, twisting and pinching and the money in the pot the Grey family walked away with their bright dogs, away down the street in the rain as the rest of the village packed away stalls, chairs and tables.
Later, sheltering from the rain in the pavilion on the green with a burger and a can of lager, Max told Mauve the old lady who lived next door about the odd end to his day.
“You gave them a lifetime guarantee?” She said, sipping a gin and tonic. “You might regret that.”
…
The Greys returned the next morning just after breakfast while Max was weeding the flower beds as part of his attempt to disguise the hangover his parents knew he had but were pointedly not mentioning.
He was listening to a football podcast and only noticed them after he stood to straighten out the knots on his back.
The family were standing close together under the cherry tree in their matching grey anoraks.
“One has burst,” the mother said. “And we have the lifetime guarantee.”
The boy held out the deflated limp latex.
Max took out his earbuds and thought of getting his mum or dad, but something in the steady, calm way they looked at him made him do someting else.
“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll get my stuff.”
…
They were back the next day.
And the one after.
And the one after that.
The Greys kept coming.
…
Close to his wits end, after a month with school about to start again, Max found a company on Amazon that made extra strong modelling balloons and the gaps between the Grey family’s visits increased to weeks and sometimes even months, which made the situation easier to manage.
But eventually they always came back, found him wherever he was – at school, on holiday, in hostels and beach huts on his gap year in Australia and South East Asia, in the morning before university and lectures, late at night outside pubs, clubs and kebab houses, even at his wedding where they stood patiently by the cake until the speeches were over.
They never aged, never changed, were always the same.
Max tried many times to reason with them but whenever he did it were as if he were speaking a language they could not understand.
“We have a lifetime guarantee,” they said many times over many years in their low, grey voices.
Max tried refusing, tried throwing away his pump and balloons, tried remonstrating with them, but when he did this, they didn’t leave at all, would instead politely and gently stalk him, waiting and whispering wherever he was until finally he relented and made a red dog or a blue dog or sometimes both.
It was disconcerting and maddening, and for years in his thirties and forties when life was busiest he was obsessed with ridding himself of them, spending frustrating hours he didn’t have spare on the internet and in strange bookshops and libraries.
But then, in a windy out of season November holiday in Anglesey, on a whim while Sunita and the twins were doing the charity shops, he visited a kohl-eyed and tattooed fortune teller in her early middle age in a cabin at the end of a spray-lashed grey pier.
She read his palm and cards and told him, matter of fact in a tone without much interest or concern, that he was cursed.
“Can you lift it?” He asked her, excited.
The fortune teller shook her head.
“No,” she said. “This is beyond my pay grade. But it’s only a very mild curse, really. People get a lot worse. To be honest I’d rather have what you’ve got than my IBS.”
“What should I do then?”
The fortune teller shrugged. “Probably best to just live with it. Apart from that, your fortune looks pretty good.”
It was enough, and Max left the cabin with a resigned acceptance he recognised later he must accept as peace.
…
Nobody but Max – of course – ever saw the Greys, not even Sunita or his children.
But after they moved back to Willerby just after Covid, Sunita learned enough of the village to know Max was telling the truth, and that made it even easier to bear and manage
The Greys were what they were.
They couldn’t help it and meant no harm.
Many years later they came to his bedside in the hospice.
They looked at him for a while and then melted away back the way they’d come.
For the first and last time, they asked for nothing from him.
…