Karma

When I was a little girl my Dad got a new car. It was a brand new beige Sigma station wagon.

I know, total chick puller.

Anyway, this car was my Dad’s pride and joy and he looked after it very well. My siblings and I weren’t allowed to eat or drink in it and he washed it all the time.

I guess I was about ten or eleven and for some reason I always had to sit in the middle of the back seat with one brother on either side and because back then the middle seatbelt was only one that went across your lap, it was easy to sit forward and talk to whoever was in the front.

Dad’s classy sigma had beige leather and velour front seats and the shoulders of the front seats were all leather. I used to rest my chin on the shoulders of the front seats while he drove. Which I might add must have sucked, imagine not being able to strap your kids to the seat so they can’t move?

Now I still can’t explain why but when I was sitting forward like that I used to bite the corner of the front seats, like a dog chewing a toy, and after a while I started biting little chunks of leather out of Dad’s prized car. I don’t know either.

I still remember doing it. It never crossed my mind that I was defacing someone else’s property, and that Dad’s new car cost a lot of money. I’m sure I was aware I shouldn’t have been doing it but I did it anyway. What a little shit.

Because it was only us kids who sat in the back, Dad didn’t notice for a long time. By which time there were dozens of little tiny bite marks about half the size of a pea all over the back of his chick puller funky beige leather seats.

Needless to say when I was found out I was in an enormous amount of trouble. I don’t remember what the punishment was but I remember thinking my parents were being totally unreasonable and I’m pretty sure I never apologised.

The point of my story is that last week this happened.

My charming six-year-old son, Luca, etched his name into the side of our car. The same car we bought in the UK and shipped out to Australia because we loved it so much. The same car that I drove around the tiny streets of London for over a year in without so much as a scratch, only to have it engraved with one of my kids names in my own god damn garage by said child’s own hand.

He denies it of course. I worked on him for a week and tried every tactic to get him to admit it was him. But he still denies it and if I mention it now he said “can we just not talk about that anymore”.

So either my son is a pathological liar, and a good one at that. Or he didn’t do it. Given his two younger brothers can’t write and one of them can’t even reach the door handle, that leaves Holly. Who is about as goody two shoes as they come.

It’s payback isn’t it? Dad’s chick pulling machine has come back to haunt me. Thirty years later my parents are finally getting some redemption.

So I am starting to worry. If karma is going to come calling for everything I did in my youth I am in for some rough times ahead.

And by the looks of things, so is Luca.

So I will be patient, and one day when he has children of his own, revenge will come.