3. HUGE BLUEBOTTLE FLIES

Things get more confusing when Ivan's breast itches...

The doorbell rang.

He barely heard it, staring in horror as he was. Staring at that mirror. Trying to work out what was wrong with it and why his left breast itched a tiny, rather pleasant, bit.

So the doorbell rang again.

“I’ll get it, then!” snapped Maureen as she was struggling into her coat which had been on its hook by the door.

“No,” he managed at last, and his voice was still all wrong, like it had been before it had broken around forty years ago.

“Go on, then, you fancy tart!” hissed his ex-wife, and she stomped into the bathroom in order to do whatever was necessary to her face.

So he opened the door before the bell was rung for a third time, and he sighed his anger at the woman standing there. He’d had many a quarrel with her over the past six months, mostly as a consequence of unrealistic electricity bills. He’d phoned her until he was blue in the face, had called in at her office and discussed the price of watts and volts until she’d summoned security to evict him. And now she was actually here on his territory. Knocking at his door. Staring at him straight in the face.

“I want to see Mr Bramble,” she said, her eyes fixed on his.

“Yes?” he said, not quite sure why because at the moment he was more confused than he’d ever been in his entire life, and that breast was itching ever so delightfully again, which was amazing because he was absolutely certain that he didn’t have breasts. Breasts were female things, and he was a man.

“You poor soul,” she said, “if you have to spend one moment more than you ought with that lout of a man! I’m here because of his complaints. Can I come in?”

Ivan stood to one side and let her pass him/her.

He was dressed in the same jeans and tee-shirt that he’d been wearing yesterday, so he looked exactly the same, but she hadn’t seen him yesterday, had she? They’d only spoken on the phone. She hadn’t had a chance to admire his beautiful blonde hair or enticing wiggle when he walked. And he was sure he’d had neither yesterday, anyway.

Or she hadn’t. When she walked.

Maureen either saved the day or totally ruined it by storming out of the bathroom and pushed her way out of the door.

“Tell him I won’t be back!” she grated into his face. Or her face.

And she vanished onto the street and mixed like a heroine from a comic book made into life, storming into the higgledy-piggledy mixture of ordinary every day folk who passed by on the street all the time. Or if not all of the time, during hours of daylight. It was a busyish thoroughfare with a large housing estate at one end and the town centre at the other.

“I see I’m not the only one to form hat kind of opinion of Mr Bramble, smiled the woman from the electricity board. “Let me see, I’m Julia and I’m here because Mr Bramble has complained that his electricity bills don’t reflect his usage.”

“Well they wouldn’t, would they?” he/she asked, “not if the central heating doesn’t work and I’ve got a gas cooker.”

“Ah. You’ve got a gas cooker, so you live here too? And you are…?” smiled Julia.

Why’s she smiling? Why’s she being nice to me? And why is she asking me who I am? Those were the thoughts that raced through Ivan’s mind as he stared open-mouthed at Julia.

She seems a bit simple, but I suppose she’d have to be if she wants to live with the oaf of a man who I’ve come to put straight, thought Julia.

Quick thinking either went a bit further towards saving the day or took a step closer to ruining it as Ivan opened his mouth and closed it and finally opened it again.

“I’m … I’m...” stammered Ivan, and then he came out with it, the biggest fiction he’d told anyone since he’d told the headmaster of his Junior school almost forty years earlier that he hadn’t broken the flush part of the boys’ toilet. “I’m Evana. Evana Bramble,” he lied, and fluttered his eyelashes for the very first time ever.

“Ah. Mrs Bramble. You have my sympathies,” murmured Julia. “Now is Mr Bramble in?”

Ivan felt like saying yes but he was already confused enough and he knew perfectly well that a confused man can easily wrap up common sense until it starts to look like fantasy.

“I’m here instead,” he said. “The heating doesn’t work, you know. The electric meter thinks it does, but it doesn’t.”

“Then we’d better take a peep at this meter,” suggested Julia, “I’m no electrician, but I do know one end of a wire from the other. Where might it be located? This shouldn’t take long.”

“It’s in the cubbyhole outside the door,” said Ivan, now, apparently Evana.

“Then allow me to take a look,” smirked Julia, knowing when she was on a winner. This Bramble woman is as thick as the man of the house is arrogant, she thought triumphantly. “It so happens that I’ve got a key on me,” she added, “they’re universal, you know, one key fits all.”

The two of them went back outside the door to the flat. I’m going to keep my eyes on this, thought Ivan, I don’t trust this woman and all the jiggery pokery she might get up to once my back’s turned. And anyway, why have a key at all if they’re all exactly the same?

There was a small cupboard built into the outside wall to Ivan’s flat, and one matching it serving the other ground floor flat opposite.

Julia opened the cubbyhole door and peered in.

“Has Mr Bramble done this?” she asked, pointing to a spaghetti of wires that seemed to lead everywhere.

“He wouldn’t know where to start, so no, he hasn’t,” replied Ivan as Evana. He was beginning to find it quite interesting replying to a question about what he might or might not have done, but in the guise of a third person.

“Well, somebody has,” muttered the tartar from the electricity company. “You see this heavy-duty terminal here?”

She pointed at the main box, and shook her head slowly. “As I said,” she murmured, “I’m no electrician, but it doesn’t take an electrician to see that something ought to lead from here into your house, because I believe it’s the supply for your heating. Yet instead it disappears along the outside wall here, see how it’s been neatly stapled to the concrete, and, yes, disappears into your neighbour’s front room!”

“What does that mean?” asked Ivan/Evana

“It looks to me very much as if somebody has disconnected Mr Bramble’s heating,” she said thoughtfully, “and has diverted it into the flat next door. Who lives there, would you know?”

“I … we’ve only been here six months,” replied Ivan, “and we only met him a couple of times, ages ago. Let me see, I think he said his name was Compton. Yes, Mr Compton, and he lives alone.”

“I’ll have to get this sorted,” said Julia thoughtfully, “it looks as though I may have done Mr Bramble a disservice because, see, I didn’t believe a word of what he said when he told me the electricity bill was too high. I thought he must be some kind of shirker after something for nothing. Maybe I’ll have to reconsider.”

“Maybe you will,” growled Ivan, but the words sounded more like placid agreement than a threat, which wasn’t what he intended.

I’ll have to get used to my voice sounding like this, he thought.

Oo0oo

It was later that morning that Julia returned with a council worker. Although Ivan’s home was privately rented the flat opposite was still owned by Brumpton Borough Council.

Ivan was determined to find out everything he could, so he hovered around when he heard the door opposite his being hammered, quietly at first and then louder when there was no reply.

“I haven’t seen him for ages,” he said to both of the officials.

“I’ve got keys, but if none of them fit we’ll have to force it open,” muttered the council employee, “because a serious offence has been committed if this cable is what you think it is.” He indicated the heavy duty electric cable leading from Ivan’s electricity meter.

The very first key he tried did fit, and he opened the door.

A swarm of huge bluebottle flies swept out into the fresh winter air, and the smell accompanying them seemed to tell its own story.

A story that was confirmed when they entered the home and discovered a very dead Mr Compton lying on the floor of the entrance lobby with a look of perpetual confusion on his grey face and a host of maggots crawling out of both nostrils.

“If anyone was to ask me I’d say that was Mr Bramble from next door,” whispered Julia, suddenly pale as the snow that was threatened for the weekend, “but he’s very, very dead.”

Ivan Bramble found himself vomiting heartily when he heard those words because he was Mr Bramble from next door and he didn’t feel very dead at all.

© Peter Rogerson 12.12.18