2. THE KITCHEN MIRROR

A new day and a new shock.

The night passed, and if Ivan Bramble had enjoyed or suffered under any dreams, he couldn’t remember the least smidgen of what they might have been. Yet he had an uncomfortable feeling that things had even gone wrong whilst he slept. It was a familiar feeling and made him suspect that even the nights were against him

He often felt like that about his hours of sleep: as if, somehow, in the prone position of slumber he’d undergone some huge and draining physical exercise that left him exhausted before the new day began.

He was barely awake, barely leaving the nirvana of night, when the radio alarm came on with a disc jockey wittering about some nonsense or other that had absolutely no relevance whatsoever to his own life, and then the news headlines beginning with an item designed to send dread into any decent man’s heart, concerning the lack of anything remotely truthful in the political world.

The news, he thought, is never encouraging. It always makes me wonder why things quite simply can’t be better and more honest.

He shivered. It was cold and the blasted heating wasn’t working but he still had to pay for the electricity as if it had been on all day and night, and then if he didn’t do something positive he’d be thrown out into the streets without even the luxury of a sleeping bag for him to snuggle into when the snows came heavy and the park bench was cold and hard. Yes, he’d be forced into paying for what he didn’t have.

Oh, and last night I left the sodding ex sleeping on the sofa… what am I going to do with her? Why can’t she leave me alone like exes are supposed to? I mean, what does the syllable ex mean? It refers to the past, something that’s done and dusted, like that Monty python ex-parrot.

He sat up in bed and shivered.

The air that he was dragging into his lungs might have come fresh from the North Pole it was so cold.

I bet the pipes are all frozen, he thought, and don’t frozen pipes start leaking when they thaw out? They used to, I remember that from when I was a kid…

It didn’t take him long to get dressed, and his fresh clothes felt even colder than did the early morning air.

I’d best go and face up to the dragon, he thought. He often saw his ex as a dragon, though when he was being nice to her he called her Maureen rather than Smaug, which is what he would call her this morning if she’d helped herself to his last rasher of bacon.

He wandered into the bathroom for a wee and to do his teeth, and it wasn’t until he was actually sitting on the toilet that he began to suspect that something might be wrong, or if not actually wrong, quite unusual. He was sitting on the toilet! Not standing, taking careful aim and squirting, but sitting, as if that was the most natural thing in the world for him to be doing!

He didn’t think any more about the peculiarity, though he did frown, and then he cleaned his teeth, quite vigorously as was his custom. He liked his breath to be fresh. Maureen’s had sometimes been a bit off first thing in the morning, and it had put him off her for the rest of the day. Who wanted yo go around kissing a woman whose breath smelt like it ought to be gently rising in the stench-filled steam from the bottom of a parrot’s cage?

He grinned to himself. An ex-parrot’s cage, he thought.

There were noises coming from the kitchen, which was off the living room in his awkwardly small flat. But they were cooking noises, and he frowned.

What was it she had said last night when he’d been too tired and fed up with the day to take much notice? She’d intimated that she would be homeless if he didn’t take her in… was that it?

How could she be homeless? Wasn’t she living with the toff Gerald? Isn’t that why she’d left him? After a torrid affair with the school teacher, the history man who would, if Ivan’d had his way when he thought about it back then, become history himself? He hadn’t had his way, of course. Ivan wasn’t what you might call a violent man.

Ivan was, if anything, quite a softy. At least, that was how he saw himself when compared to the great mass of humanity, some of which went about shooting each other for no better reason than because they were bored. He read about it in the papers, and it sickened him.

He made his way towards the kitchen.

The rattling had stopped, and in its place was a growing aroma of bacon. Fried bacon. And he could just about hear the kiss of eggs splattering in the pan.

The dragon had pinched his last rasher of bacon, and that was probably his last egg frying in the pan too. The b***h! He was looking forwards to that rasher of bacon and that egg!

“Ivan,” came her voice, trilling through the deliciousness of food cooking, “Ivan! I’ve cooked you some breakfast...”

That took the wind out of his sails. That was the last thing he’d expected to hear, and he was quite enjoying anticipating the sense of grief he’d be bound to feel when he caught her eating his breakfast.

“I’m coming,” he responded, and his voice sounded all wrong. It didn’t sound like his voice at all. It sounded like an amalgam of the voices of all those dreadful official women who had wormed their way up his nose yesterday, the electric woman, the rent collector, the b***h in the chip shop, the various police women, his landlady and her notice to quit, as well as, finally, the dreaded ex.

He hated those women, all of them, and he hated his own voice. He always had. So he repeated “I’m coming!” just to make sure it was him responding.

It didn’t sound like him. He must have swallowed a spider during the night, or some other pesky insect that was hoping to find warmth in his cold flat and had been seeking refuge there only to end up being drawn into his mouth and sucked down his throat when he breathed. Probably his mouth was the only warm thing in the bedroom.

People do swallow an awful lot of spiders during their sleep. He’d heard that or read it somewhere. And spiders must do something to the vocal cords if they get swallowed. Like curl up with all their hairy legs tucked under them, and building a nest out of silk.

He cleared his throat to eject any spider still lurking there, but even the noise that made seemed all wrong.

“It’s ready!” called Maureen.

So he stumbled into the kitchen, trying not to look too disgruntled and moody. She’d always said he looked grumpy in the mornings, even when his heart had been singing and he’d been giggling inside.

She was standing by the cooker, a fish-slice on one hand and about to slide his breakfast onto a plate. She was dressed nicely for someone who claimed to be homeless, wearing that tartan wrap-around skirt that had always made her look, even at fifty, half-way between a caring maternal beauty and a teasing but wanton hussy. He’d always liked her in that skirt.

She turned to face him, and the smile of welcome slipped from her face when she saw him.

What’s wrong? Have I left my flies undone and is my willy hanging out?

“Who on Earth are you?” she asked, “I suppose you’re his latest tart, are you? He never did have much taste and I’ve no idea what I saw in him! Well, if you are you can take this, and I hope it chokes you!”

And she pushed the plate of bacon and egg towards him and stomped out of the kitchen.

It wasn’t until then that he caught a glimpse of his reflection in his unnecessary kitchen mirror.

“I must do something about this,” he mused, looking at his long, blonde and no doubt fragrant hair, and it took him at least half a minute to realise that something must, indeed, be very wrong because last night when he’d gone to bed he’d been bald as a coot.

© Peter Rogerson 11.12.18