THE UNMAKING OF SHEILA BOTTOMSMACK

There's just got to be someone too evil for hell....

Sheila Bottomsmack was as foul and reprehensible an old woman as you'd hope to find anywhere. True, once she'd been a young woman, but never the pert bosom variety and never anything but foul. As a toddler she'd had a fondness for spitting at people, and everyone knows that spitting is an indicator of almost total vulgarity. As a schoolgirl she'd purposefully wet her knickers so that they stank when she sat next to the prim and proper Rosie Coldwell whose parents complained bitterly to a timidly understanding teacher. As a teenager she'd become known as the Bike of the Remove, the Remove being a class specially designed to control the least controllable of brats, and it was they who invariably passed the most unpleasant of sexually transmitted diseases between themselves via the good offices of Sheila Bottomsmack's repulsive flesh.

And the years passed. Years do, you know. People grow, they mature, they accumulate wisdom - unless, of course, their name is Sheila Bottomsmack. The Sheila Bottomsmacks of this world grow old in an entirely different way. Friendless because people like that don't get or deserve friends, they become embittered by just about everything.

Sheila Bottomsmack was particularly embittered by the empty, mindless routines that her days had assumed. She got up in the morning, looked at her toothbrush and decided that her discoloured teeth were best left the way they were and ignored it, opened the back door and kicked next door's dog (which, being a dog, hadn't yet learned that one place it shouldn't be first thing [or even second thing] in the morning was in the vicinity of the foul old woman's back door), and filled a cup with last night's cold tea so that she could pull a face at the stewed and bitter flavour of the stuff and mutter to nobody that there was a time in the dim past when tea had been tea.

That was her morning routine, and other routines (which have no place in this saga so I'll ignore them) followed. But this little history deals with one particular morning, so I'll move on to that.

She woke up with a buzzing in her head. It wasn't the sort of buzzing that was external to her, and she knew it. She couldn't aim a heavy object at this or that electronic item in order to dislodge the buzz because that buzz existed entirely inside her own head. She swore (under her breath, which was a change for the better) and buried her head deeply under her pillow (a revolting piece of bedroom furnishing if ever there was one, thin, damp and smelly with its pillow case discoloured by various dribblings and other less determinate stains). But the buzzing refused to go away.

In the end she thought it might drive her mad, so she got up, intending to dislodge it with cold water from the kitchen tap. She had a tap in the bathroom, but it hadn't worked for years, so she ignored it.

The buzzing, though, stayed.

“Heavens above!” she squawked, failing to open the back door in order to kick the neighbour's dog, “Heavens above, save me!”

Head wet from the cold water tap and with drowning head-lice dripping everywhere, she sat at the kitchen table and started weeping, which was something she hadn't done since the nineteen fifties when she'd been convicted of murder and told she would hang from the neck until she was dead, a sentence that was commuted by a kindly drunken Home Secretary to life imprisonment at the very last moment. But that had been a very long time ago indeed, and she'd forgotten about the tears along with the vicious murder (of her mother over a can of beans). The life sentence had passed, and she'd been released, cured, they said, but of what they weren't sure.

But she was weeping now on account of the buzzing. And suddenly, in an instant she couldn't understand, the weeping and buzzing dissolved away.

“I wouldn't make all that fuss if I were you,” boomed a sudden and very manly voice from everywhere. “It can't be helped, you know.”

“What can't be helped?” squawked our anti-heroine.

The voice cleared a non-existent throat. “That you've just died,” it informed her.

That made her try to open her eyes, and she imagined that she looked around, seeing her familiar kitchen through what ought to have been drying tears.

“I'm very much alive, thank you very much!” she shrieked, and knew as the words came out that she wasn't. A few things were wrong, like the clock going backwards and the cooker wobbling in front of her.

“No you're not,” boomed the voice in an unreassuring way. “You're dead and starting to decompose. And I've come to try and work out what to do about you.”

“Who are you?” hissed the corpse.

“You know who I am!” scoffed the voice with a heart echoing chuckle “I'm your Maker, I am, and I've got the job of trying to decide how to unmake you! It's not usually a problem but there have been a few tricky cases over the centuries. I mean, Caesar! I hadn't a clue how to unmake him until it crossed my mind that he had a penchant for the fair sex, so I interred him with a dozen fish-wives in the smallest possible celestial room for eternity. That soon sorted him, that did! He was a dribbling maniac within a fortnight! Then there was Hitler. A little man with a diseased ego, I ended up making him into a rabbi in the inner cloisters of Hell where all the fundamentalist Jews go. But you're more of a problem. Yes, indeed you are! I do believe you're too evil for Hell, and there aren't many more places on my map!”

“There's nowt wrong with me,” moaned Sheila. “I've always been a good 'un, and that's a fact. I love my fellow man, that's what I do...”

“You killed one of them once,” observed the voice, “and that's definitely against the rules,” it added.

“It was my ma, and the beans were bad!” exploded Sheila, seeing that she was edging herself into a corner, but unable to stop the process.

“Yes, that’s what I'll do!” boomed the voice, suddenly excited by its own brilliance. “I've been wanting to do this since Adam! And now I will! I made Eve out of one of the fool's ribs, so it's poetic justice if I turn you back into a rib!”

“You what!” screamed Sheila.

“I'll turn you back into a rib,” sniggered the voice, “and just outside the door is a fine fellow of a dog... he's hungry for a rib, he is. I'll feed you to him!”

“You can't!” blurted Sheila.

But her Maker did just that, and the silly dog outside her door spent the whole day chewing a rather rancid old bone and licking its canine lips.