We haven’t had an embarrassing kid’s story for a while so here is the tale of Moochy and the monster under his bed.
Moochy, my eldest son hated going to bed and never more so than when he felt there was something happening that he was missing out on. In those times he would invent all sorts of reasons for why he could not go to sleep or had to keep getting up. This story takes place on one of those occasions when he was about four.
One beautiful spring evening we were staying at his Grandparent’s house in southwest London, near where me and his mother both lived before moving about 60 miles away. Anyway, we had arranged for some of our old friends to come around and hang out for a while. They were due around 8 and so just before that we put Moochy and his younger brother, Spud, into their pajamas, tucked them into bed and turning out the light, bade them goodnight.
No sooner had the first visitors arrived than a little blond four year old appeared and told us.
“I can’t sleep; there’s a monster under my bed”.
We were used to this. We told him to go back to bed, stop messing around and anyway there are no monsters in his grandmother’s house. He pouted and went back to his bed.
Five minutes later some more friends arrived and The Moochmeister was back out again.
“The monster under my bed is making noise, I’m frightened!”
We smiled, our friends were there after all, and told the itinerant boy that he wasn’t missing anything and that he should go back to bed again. More reluctantly than the first time, he went back to bed.
At this stage we were the first of our group to have children and so we were patiently explaining to all our pals that this was normal behaviour for our son and he wasn’t really scared of anything more than missing a good party. Our friends just smiled indulgently and Moochy appeared yet again.
“The monster under my bed keeps moving. I don’t want to sleep with the monster!” He announced to us all.
I stood up from where I had been sitting. His large Blue eyes filled with fear as he looked up into my face.
“Dammit child! There are no monsters under your bed.” I hissed. The room around us fell silent and Moochy’s eyes started to cry. Everyone was watching the scene.
“B b b but there really is a monster.” He said like Oliver asking for more.
“Here,” I said, snatching up a torch from the sideboard “I’ll show you”.
As expected in the pitch-dark bedroom all was silent except for the quiet breathing of his brother, who clearly did not believe the monster nonsense either. Moochy and I moved to stand between the two old wooden beds. We crouched down on all fours so that we could shine the torch under bed. I pointed the torch into the blackness and clicked it on ….
There were two huge green eyes looking back at me. Under the headboard a hiss issued from a blackness that reached from the floor to bottom of the mattress.
“Holy ****!” I said forgetting about the four year old now trembling and trying to hide behind me.
The blackness suddenly shifted and an enourmous ebony cat launched itself from underneath bed. It leapt the sleeping Spud in a single jump and bolted out the door. I ran after it stubbing my toe on the bed and adding more choice words to Moochy’s education. Back down the hall the immense cat ran and as the last of our friends arrived, it shot past them, through the open doorway and out of the house.
We never saw the cat again, our friends had us down as very improper parents but Moochy seemed to forget most of trauma and only remembered for ages how daddy scared the monster away. Oh yeah, and we never doubted his word again.
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Bazza
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