erithacus' saga: home entertaining

“You live here?” Mary asked aghast as she sat uncomfortably upright on the non-wobbly end of the camp bed while I brewed some tea. She had removed her shoes when they had become stuck in the quagmire at the entrance to the shed. Now dark sludge oozed between her toes, charmingly I thought.

“Well, I live here for six or seven hours a day and in the warehouse the rest of the time. Do you want some tea?” I asked, flashing a white plastic cup from the top of a thermos flask in front of her and hoping her imagination could whisk her away to afternoon tea in an aristocrat’s mansion. I would have offered her something stronger to try to recapture our earlier passion but I sensed her interest had been assuaged. Besides, all I had was some used solvent-based brush cleaner in the bottom of a jam jar.

“You don’t live there. You work there,” she corrected me.

“What’s that?” I asked, pretending to have forgotten what we were talking about, even though Mary’s expression suggested she would not be led unwittingly into the realms of idle chit chat

“I spend sleeping time here and awake time there,” I pointed out.

I went to the corner of the shed, rummaged among some articles at the bottom of a fertiliser bag and pulled out a dictionary. I looked up the definition of the word “live”.

“Live, verb, one intransitive, be or remain alive; have (especially animal) life, two, intransitive (followed by 'on', subsist or feed (lives on fruit)...."

“You’re weird," Mary declared.

Definition number eight: Make or have one's abode. “Maybe you’re right!” I exclaimed.

“Look,” she said irritably, “going back to a dirty, damp old shed for a shag on a grimy bunk bed and reading dictionaries isn’t living,” she snapped, “it’s being a dickhead”.

“It’s not a bunk bed. It’s a camp bed,“ I corrected her pedantically and bowed my head at the disapproval and reprimand she had delivered.

“Do you want me to heat some water up so you can wash your feet?" I asked.

“No. I can wash them with cold water,” she snapped. I took the opportunity to flee from the tension in the shed and filled the watering can from the rainwater barrel. I went back inside and rummaged around under the Rubens for the orange plastic bowl I often urinated in during the night when the meteorological conditions didn’t invite venturing out to had been christened the Jacuzzi. The bowl wasn’t there.

“If you go to the door and put your feet outside I can pour water over them” I said, indicating the watering can by nodding my head. I looked at Mary. She was crying.

“Don’t cry” I said in an unsuccessfully gentle voice, edging towards her in attempt to soothe her sorrow with my nearby lumbering presence. She moved away brusquely.

“Why shouldn’t I fucking cry?” she snarled. “Why didn’t you tell me you lived in this shithole. I would have gone off to the disco with the others! Where’s the toilet? I need to go to the toilet!”

A few moments later, having convinced her that her shoes were not the ideal footwear for the bathroom and Jacuzzi area, I secured fertiliser bags above her ankles with a couple of extra thick elastic bands and led her outside. This makeshift footwear didn’t prove to be ideal either as she slipped and cursed in the Rubus fructicosus thicket. “Shit” I heard and suspected she’d fallen over completely in the Jacuzzi area.

“I can’t see a fucking thing. There isn’t any light” I stretched my arm inside the thicket and flicked the striker wheel of a cigarette lighter.

She came out of the thicket sniffling, but no longer crying. As long as she isn’t crying she must be alright, I thought childishly.

“What a nightmare,” grumbled Mary as she tried to wipe brown slime off her skirt with a piece of fertiliser bag.

“I want to go home,” she stated.

"You haven't drunk your ...." I started but she was in no mood to linger.

The third phone box we came across worked. We rang for a taxi. It eventually arrived and Mary disappeared into the night.