6. Lice and a Staircase

THROUGH THE GATES OF TIME Part 6

Magga held firmly onto Uggah’s body, her arms almost encircling his chest, and she couldn’t help the tears of confusion that formed in her eyes and started running down her face. She had walked from her own sane world into one where nothing except Uggah was familiar. Indeed, nothing was understandable.

“This Hellhole evil,” she grunted, and he knew exactly what she meant. When he looked around everything he could see was alien to him, had nothing to do with the real world he and Magga inhabited. And the light around them was was so bright. A brilliance that was way beyond his understanding was pouring from a circular something above his head, and to add confusion the rectangle was still flickering with a myriad different things, sometimes what he took as a strange and unnerving form of almost human faces: males without beards, females with lips so red he wanted to kiss them despite the fact they were alien.

And yet they were there, so real he could see them clearly, on a rectangle that was beyond his understanding. They were flickering on it, shining on it, glowing and flashing, all so rapid it defied logic or sense. He felt ill. He became dizzy and with that day’s meat threatening to erupt from him in a flood of vomit. And the dizziness increased until it was all of him. Thankfully the vomit receded, and slowly he slid to the floor, leaving Magga standing alone, her arms round the air where his body had been and with so much confusion on her face that she had no idea whether she was alive in a strange world of dreams and nightmares or dead on her own familiar Earth.

She tugged at Uggah, but he lay on the carpet (she didn’t call it a carpet though she would dearly have liked to have something like it on the floor of her home), and his eyes were shut. He was shaking like the madman Shagga when he was having a fit, and she understood why.

How long the two of them remained like that with the alien sounds of conversation going on around them and the dreadful lights blinding her she could not tell. Of course she couldn’t, she had no way of measuring time, no concept of it other than it passed in hearbeats. But whether measured or not, time passed.

Then what she would eventually learn was a door opened and the female, the so smooth and pretty female, returned with a strange assorted bundle in her arms.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asked, indicating the still prostrate Uggah jabbering to himself on the floor.

“Shock, I should think,” replied Roger, frowning. “I’ve no idea what’s going on here and where these two nudists have come from, but they’re here, it’s Christmas Eve, your entertainer was paid for an hour of saucy dancing for you and his hour is just about up and he hasn’t done so much as a chasse.”

Sammy looked crestfallen, but there was no way he could strip down to his imagined caveman outfit (he wore it under his day clothes) when there were apparently two genuine and totally naked cave persons present.

“I’ll refund,” he said, “and I reckon you should fetch the police.”

“You brought the woman in with you,” pointed out Roger.

“As I said, I’ll refund,” repeated Sammy, and he turned to go, “I don’t know what you two are up to or why you need to have naked savages in your front room, but you’d best do something about it soon or things might go wrong properly, and then you’ll know what’s what,” he said.

“What are you doing?” asked May.

“I’m going home where my husband is hopefully waiting for me,” growled Sammy, “it’s Christmas Eve, after all, and you sort your mess out if you can!”

And without any further ado he made his way to the front door, and left.

“That’s one problem solved,” May told Roger, “and next time you want to get an exotic dancer to entertain me, make sure it’s not a bloke with smelly armpits!”

“I didn’t notice...” began Roger, and then he shrugged. Maybe his expensive dancer had smelled a bit of sweat. Maybe tonight was a second or even third booking.

“What are we going to do with Adam and Eve here?” asked May. “Look, I’ve got a spare pair of your boxers and a tee-shirt we can pretend is a pyjama top, and I’ve brought an old nightie of mine too.”

“I like those boxers!” protested Roger, needing to establish ownership even though, in truth, he wasn’t bothered. He had plenty anyway.

“You never wear them,” replied May, “I made sure of that. I usually see what you’re dragging onto your carcase in the mornings, and as far as I can recall it’s never this pair. Now come on. We don’t want to wake the kids.”

“What do we do?” Roger felt pathetic and indecisive at the same time.

“You dress him and I’ll dress her,” said May, who could be decisive even when everything seemed to be going against her.

“I suppose I’ll have to,” muttered Roger, a trifle sullenly, “I don’t know why they had to arrive here from nowhere, anyway. And why here and why us?”

“They’re not from nowhere, Roger,” she said, “everyone was born somewhere, and you may not have noticed, but they seem to be as shocked as you and I at the mess they’re in. Just get those pants on him because I’m getting a bit jittery seeing everything the poor man’s got!”

It didn’t take long for Roger to realise it’s easier to dress another person if they cooperate, and this naked and rather aromatic being wasn’t doing that. Not to start with, anyway. But Roger was gentle with him, recognising the look in his eyes as total confusion, and bit by bit he managed to pull the old pair of his own boxer shorts onto the other’s body without tearing them until they were roughly in the right place for the man to look part way decent.

The tee-shirt wasn’t much easier, but after he spent some time exasperatingly demonstrating his own tee-short and how it fitted him, he managed to get the stranger dressed with a little cooperation from him when he understood what was happening. Meanwhile, May had lowered the nightie she had brought down with her, and with considerably more ease, pulled it over the naked woman’s tousled and far from clean head.

“She’s got lice,” she said to Roger, “head lice, hundreds of them.”

Roger hadn’t noticed, but when he looked he discovered a similar infestation on the head of the man he’d just dressed, which made him feel like scratching himself.

“We need to give them a shower,” decided May, “before we let them anywhere near the bed in the spare room.”

“You mean, they’re staying the night?” groaned Roger, “now that they’re dressed, wouldn’t the kindest thing for us to do be to show them the door and let them fend for themselves. After all, they’re adults.”

“With the simple minds of children,” May told him, “they’ve probably never even seen a road, let alone a car or a bus. How long do you think they’d last out there is something as commonplace as a television set turns your man to jelly?”

“It’s Christmas Eve and the buses have stopped running,” growled Roger.

“Stop nit-picking,” murmured May.

“We’ll both be doing that for the rest of the year!” Roger told her, still scratching his head as if to emphasise what he saw as an enormous problem.

“Then it’s to the shower with them, and quietly,” decided May, “come on: let’s show them what stairs are!”

But she was to discover that stairs were quite an unknown factor in the lives of their unwanted visitors. Both were scared tuff of them.

© Peter Rogerson, 25.11.20