Now that it was the fashion to return to university to repeat your first degree, I found myself back at the University of Birmingham reading French.
However, by the end of first year I was struggling to study and hold down my job in Edinburgh at the same time. Meanwhile TPR was very lonely on his own in a house full of clutter. The luxury yellow bathroom did not make up for my absence. He desperately needed me to come home.
TPR shouted at me that if I didn’t hurry, we’d miss the boat from Leith to Loughborough.
I should have put in a complaint to my friend RGJ as the manager of this enormously complex shopping centre. It was simply impossible to navigate.
My worst experience of the day was when I got into the lift. It took me to the top of the tower, then transported me to a satellite mall in Leith.
The only way back to where I wanted to be was by an extremely slow Lothian bus service. The teenage girls trapped with me thought this hilarious, but I had work to do, and no time to waste.
It was only 06:00 in the morning, yet all the back gardens were buzzing with activity. When I opened the shutters I saw B next door mowing the grass, and two hunky gardeners digging up our lawn.
Now I understood why my colleagues at Edinburgh University were more productive than me. When my friend took up her new chair there, not only was she provided with a PA, but her department also paid for her parents to move house to Edinburgh to help with all the domestic aspects of her life. I did wonder, however, how accommodating they would be when they discovered that she was pregnant with her third child and would soon put in a request for a year’s worth of maternity leave.
My parents had only been in the house for 12 months and already it was looking shabby. I almost tripped over the split lino as I ran upstairs to check who was sleeping where.
If we weren’t careful, we would soon have an accommodation crisis. In the first bedroom I found HJ and her three daughters squeezed into two single beds. Next door were EH’s friends Mark and Lucy in one double bed, and a single girl in another next to theirs. The latter agreed to move to a single bed in the attic so that the double could be allocated to a couple.
There would now be space for my university pal DM (now DE), if only she would come along. I’d seen her in passing earlier in the day, but she had chosen to ignore me.
Meanwhile I hoped that TPR was coping with buying all the alcohol for the party later in the evening.
There was a parrot up a tree in the garden. A parrot? In central Edinburgh? Yes, a parrot was perched on a branch of the tree against the back wall!
I rushed into the house to grab my camera, but by the time I had returned my quarry had fled.
We’d been chatting happily for a few minutes before it dawned on me that this was an impossibility. My friend had died almost a year ago so how come she had picked up the phone?
As I started to drop more challenging questions into the conversation, the woman on the other end of the line revealed herself to be a fraud. The big question now was “Had my widowed friend been taken in by this wife imposter?”
I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so cheerful after having all her limbs chopped off. My friend peered up at me from the grubby stretcher and said that she was just grateful that they had removed the cancer. I pitied her future life as a head atop a torso.
Dreamaticus 