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will soon be home for Christmas, what a pity you can’t make it, but so looking forward to seeing you on the twenty-eighth. He didn’t get sent to the Gulf in the end something to do with a slight accident he had with an aircraft carrier while out sailing with friends. Anyhow, he was put in charge of a Fisheries Protection Vessel and was on patrol near the Scillies when he intercepted an open-decked dory with two Spanish anglers on board. They claimed to have been swept out to sea when their outboard motor broke down and had been drifting for several days without food or water. Rodney says they ignored his repeated instructions to heave-to and was left with no option but to blow them out of the water. Of course, the Admiral is delighted that Rodney has seen some real action at last.

  Your new job sounds very exciting. Do write and tell us all about it. It’s so rewarding working with children. I remember that as a young actress there was nothing I enjoyed more than the shows for children.

  Must close now as the post leaves in twenty minutes. The Admiral, of course, is writing separately.

  My love as always

  Mummy

  PS When writing to us try to put the letters in the correct envelopes. The Admiral hates muddle-headedness, as you well know.

  I must have fallen asleep. I was woken by an hysterical scream and thought for one heart-stopping moment that I was back in the store with the northerners. I threw myself out of bed and cowered behind it. Hurt ankle and heel in process.

  I heard H running upstairs and entering their bedroom. There was some muffled sobbing, a few indistinct words and then, ‘IN YOUR KNITTING BASKET!’ Oh dear, they had found Cloudesley’s daytime hideaway, but how? He was asleep on my bed. There was an angry knock at my door.

  ‘Hello, Mr Higginbottom,’ I said cheerily. He was holding up half a mouse.

  ‘Your cat has been in t’wife’s knitting.’

  ‘Cloudesley? No, couldn’t have been,’ I said earnestly. ‘I put him out every day.’

  H said nothing, but just stood there holding the demi-rodent by an ear. Then it occurred to me that Cloudesley was indeed waiting in my room when I got home. ‘But how can you tell?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘This,’ he replied flatly, pointing to the remains of the rodent.

  ‘Oh that. Well, it could have crawled in by itself and died there,’ I suggested hopefully.

  ‘It’s been chewed,’ H pointed out rather unnecessarily.

  ‘Well I have heard that mice will resort to cannibalism if they’re really hungry.’ I wasn’t sure if this was true, but I was playing for time.

  ‘It’s the last bloody straw, lad. Next time the cat, or you, or preferably both, can bugger off.’

  I apologised profusely and said that it wouldn’t happen again. I closed the door gently and had a man-to-man talk with Cloudesley before examining the ankle which was now throbbing painfully after the crash-action off the bed. It looked far too unpleasant, so I quickly covered it up again.

  I packed the Santa suit into a carrier bag and left the house quietly to go to the launderette. H and the whippet were peeping at me through a gap between the curtains in the front room. I pretended not to notice as I hobbled past the window. I limped into the launderette, loaded the suit into the machine and fed it the five pound coins. Nothing. I gave it a gentle tap. Then a thump and finally I kicked it hard which I shouldn’t have done for two reasons. One, my feet were in enough pain already. Two, I was being watched by two members of the Constabulary out on patrol. Having been warned about vandalising property I explained my predicament and they said I should try the Chinese restaurant next door as both businesses were owned by the same man.

  The proprietor of the restaurant was sympathetic and explained that the dry cleaning machine hadn’t been working for weeks since it had been vandalised. I asked if I could have my money back, but he explained that he didn’t have the keys to the machines as he had contracted out the collection of the money to a security firm and they wouldn’t be back for another week. Well, couldn’t the Restaurant refund my money? No, they were two separate businesses and he had a policy of not subsidising one by the other, it was, on the advice of his lawyer, a question of transparent accounting. I limped to the pub whistling the Chinese Laundry Blues.

  A couple of pints began to numb the pain and it was cheering to be invited to join a game of darts. So, I stayed too long, drank too much and ended up limping home drunk. But I went to bed happy. Until, that is, I realised that I had about three pounds fifty left out of my wages.

  Dreamed I was the Pied Piper of Hamelin, only the rats won.

  SCENE 7

  It was raining. Dawn crept unwillingly over the rooftops wishing she could go back to bed. I have never liked Sunday. It is a day for remembering those things you’ve put off doing all week and on Sunday, unlike every other day, there are no excuses left except, if you’re that way inclined, church. That’s why god stayed in bed that very first Sunday. It was the thought of having to clean up after his six days of creative bedlam that kept him under the cosmic duvet.

  I lay in bed wondering what to have for breakfast. I couldn’t go to the Black Cat as I had virtually no money. I ran mentally through the contents of the cupboard by the small Belling stove: half a packet of Ryvita; half a small jar of Marmite; two slices of bread of uncertain age; small tin of baked beans; possibly a bit of margarine; three quarters of a box of tea bags; empty jar of Nescafe; about twenty tins of cat food.

  I crawled out of bed, limped over to the basin and took two Panadol. My feet, ankles and head hurt like hell and I vowed not to drink so much again. I filled a small pan with water, felt my way around the room to the stove and put the water on to boil for tea. I parted the yellowed net curtains and looked out over the grey, rain-slicked rooftops. Nothing stirred in the street outside. The only signs that Cloudesley and I were not alone in the world was the sound of the toilet being flushed by one of the Hs, and the children squabbling next door. I could have felt clinically depressed, but the thought of my lunch date with Rowena and the possibility of work from Goldman lifted me just enough. Perhaps, I thought, I should try to find Goldman’s number in the phone book so that I would have some good news to tell Rowena.

  I limped downstairs in my PJs and sat on the bottom step flicking through to the Gs as the whippet eyed me nervously. I didn’t bother to count all the Goldmans. I went to the letterbox to bring in the Hs Sunday paper. I had to tug hard and as the outside bit had been in the pouring rain for the best part of two hours, the thing tore in the middle. I heard the soggy plop! as the outside half slumped onto the worn granite doorstep. I left the dry half on the umbrella stand, yawned and climbed the stairs back to my room. I looked for my cigarettes, then remembered I hadn’t smoked for years. Turned the radio on, turned the radio off. The sound of the lavatory being flushed a second time indicated that the bathroom was free.

  The sight of two sets of dentures in tumblers on the vanity unit did nothing for my morale as I stood over the bowl.

  It is - last stage of all

  When we are frozen up within, and quite

  The phantom of ourselves,

  To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost

  Which blamed the living man.

  I shivered deeply and sneezed.

  The water was boiling when I returned to my room. I made the tea and drank it in bed with Coleridge. I might have imagined myself in Xanadu had I not glanced up for a glimpse of paradise and seen instead a single, naked, fly-spotted light bulb.

  Eventually I dragged myself into the day. Having washed and shaved I went through my medical routine which was becoming increasingly complicated and irksome. Lacking anything else that was remotely antiseptic I cleaned the wounds up with aftershave, something I will not do ever again. I considered a breakfast of baked beans on dry Ryvita, there was no marge after all. I dismissed the idea on simple epicurean grounds and on the philosophical stance that appetite is the best guest at a dinner tab
le. Rowena was sure to have something sumptuous for lunch. I wondered if there might be a launderette we’d be passing on the way to her place where I could at last clean the Santa suit.

  I sat on my bed holding the carrier bag containing the costume and waited.

  Rowena arrived right on time, but I had fallen asleep. A harsh rapping on the door and H shouting that there was somebody to see me woke me instantly. I leaped up, cursed my feet and ankles, checked my hair in the cracked, desilvering mirror and then opened the door. H, toothless, was standing outside.

  ‘I don’t want any more of thith,’ he hissed.

  ‘What?’ I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘You know t’ ruleth about thtrange women in your room,’ he said nastily. I was riled.

  ‘One, there ith nothing thtrange about Rowena,’ I mocked, ‘she ith a perfectly normal and charming young lady with whom I am having lunch. Two, she ith not in my room. Excuse me.’ I swept past him as best I could and hobbled down the stairs with as much dignity as I could muster. Cloudesley shot out of the door as I opened it and the whippet cowered at the sight of the rain.

  Rowena was waiting for me in her car, a brand new Porsche. I threw the Santa suit into the back. I noticed as I did so, that the street was no longer the rainy Sunday mortuary that it had been, but was now alive with thousands of eyes peering through weeping gaps rubbed clear by wrinkled, arthritic fingers in misty window panes. Net curtains blinked shut as my gaze fell upon them, only to open again slowly as my eyes moved on. I climbed into the car, banging my ankle on the low sill. I winced. Rowena kissed me on the cheek. I imagined that I could hear the gnashing of teeth in every house in Mafeking Avenue, every house, that is, except my lodgings where the teeth were still in tumblers of Steradent. Even so… but no, not even the Hs’ dentures, that would be too bizarre.

  ‘But you’re limping, darling,’ Rowena said. Then, ‘God what an awful place! Do you really live here?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I grimaced.

  ‘What?’ She asked driving off at great speed, eager to get away from the place.

  ‘The limping,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, good,’ she said and left the matter there in favour of pursuing the awfulness of the place. I tried to change the subject by telling her about Brian volunteering to build the set for Scent.

  ‘Terrific,’ she said and then asked how much rent I paid to that dreadful little oaf.

  ‘There’s a rather nice park over there,’ I pointed out as she negotiated a roundabout at something like ninety miles an hour. ‘You like driving, then?’

  ‘Helps me relax,’ she replied. ‘Doesn’t that place ever depress you?’ She asked, a little unsympathetically I thought.

  ‘There is no comfort in adversity more sweet than art affords. The studious mind poising in meditation, there is fixed, and sails beyond its troubles unperceiving,’ I quoted above the guttural hum of the Porsche.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ she said checking her mirrors as she pulled away from the lights in a cloud of blue smoke from her tyres.

  ‘Amphis!’ I shouted.

  ‘What about Memphis?’ she asked making a fast left-hander.

  ‘Amphis!’ I repeated more loudly. ‘He was a fourth-century comic poet.’

  ‘I think I’d rather go on the game than live where you do,’ she pronounced.

  ‘What’s for lunch?’ I snarled.

  ‘Oh, it’s fairly simple,’ she replied offhandedly and went on to describe a meal that I couldn’t have afforded even the toothpicks for. ‘I thought they’d bulldozed all those sorts of places years ago,’ she went on, seemingly unable to help herself

  ‘I’ve no wine, I’m afraid,’ I said feeling guilty not to be contributing to the day, but more in an effort to change