Outside London Olympia, Belle and I bumped into XX. In the decade or so since we last saw him, he’d undergone a complete transformation.
We admired his golden tan, blond bob, and beautifully shaped eyebrows. We also guessed that he had left his wife.
Everyone who had helped with the clearing of the house boarded the black coach. They were all excited to be taken to the celebration of the completion of this mammoth task.
As the last person to leave the building, I was also the last person to reach the coach – just as it was pulling away. I grabbed onto a trailing rope in the hope that I could either stop the vehicle, or at least run after it.
The rope snapped, and I was left behind, all alone.
There was no room to accommodate CO and AM when they visited. so TPR and I gave up our own bed for them.
The following day TPR joined AM for a lie-in, and she gave me her silver watch. CO was not happy.
‘Oh no, here we go’ I groaned as I faced the mess and decrepitude of my parents’ ‘new’ house.
I foresaw months of clearing (again). The only pleasure that I could possibly take from this would be to sort through broken jewellery with my mother and sister J.
I was visiting a hospital ward. All the beds had old-style iron frameworks, and the matron was fierce. What I couldn’t understand was, why was I visiting people in hospital when my mouth was so painful. I should be lying in one of those narrow beds.
To prove this point, I reached into my mouth. A tooth fell out, followed by several false acrylic fingernails, painted navy blue.
Dressed only in a navy blue towel, I wandered around chilly Oxford cursing the snow – and TPR, now onto the xth affair of our marriage.
The new undergraduates looked both puzzled and proud at their achievement of winning places at one of the world’s top universities. As well as his daughter, one delighted father dropped off a pair of lion cubs for the start of the new academic year.
I hoped that I would be able to find my cousin B and her small son, my sister J, and both my parents at my grandmother’s house in the town, as well as Granny T herself.
On each morning for four days, I visited the meat counter at Sainsburys. A family of four did the same. Unlike me, however, they never placed a single joint in their trolley. I wondered if they might be shoplifters, but kept this thought to myself.
On the fifth day, when TPR accompanied me, we all followed the same routine. I chose some meat for purchase as the family lingered next to me, watching intently. The single difference this day was that we all left the supermarket at the same time.
Just outside the entrance I felt a sudden pain in my kidneys. The teenage daughter had kneed me from behind. TPR leapt to fight back.
‘Leave this with me’ I said, ‘There is a much better way to deal with this.’
I marched back into the shop to voice my shoplifter suspicions to the store manager.
I was working as an au pair for a vile vain woman who treated me as her inferior in status and intelligence. She also employed three young foreign woman in her kitchen at night.
When I learnt that the others were students at Sunderland University, I wondered if I should reveal my true identity. When I did so, one of the students begged to know more about my domain of expertise.
I didn’t get the chance to respond. This was because our employer immediately butted in to boast that she was heavily involved in the aftermath of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21st December 1988.
‘It looks eighteenth century to me. Do you know the architect?’ asked the super-snobby woman seated with her grandmother on my mother-in-law’s sofa.
Whatever gave her the impression that I would know anything about an ancient greenhouse on an island in the middle of lake?
With the others, I observed the arrival of the Rolls Royce from my vintage Riley. It glided around the corner and parked outside the long cottage. A fleet of shiny black SUVs followed, carrying men in matching suits carrying binoculars.
What’s going on? we asked one another.
Then we looked up and saw a massive metal object the size of an up-ended container ship drop from a huge height above us.
I screamed ‘Bomb!’ while everyone else reached to wind up the car windows.
As the ‘bomb’ struck the ground, one of the men forced my car into gear, then pressed hard on the accelerator. We escaped the explosion in a cloud of dust and debris.
Dreamaticus 