AUDREY'S SPECIAL DAY

How far would uperstition drive you into fulfilling a macabree brediction?

Audrey Ambleford had always known one thing, and that was the absolute certainty that this day would come eventually, and it had. Because she knew that on this particular day the inevitable would happen and she would, as Shakespeare put it, shuffle off this mortal coil.

Her certainty was absolute because she’d see it written in the stars so long ago that the memory was fuzzy, and more recently in the pattern of tea-leaf fragments in her tea cup, and to get absolute confirmation she’d consulted Madame Griselda in her booth at the fairground, and Madame Griselda had asked her to think of a number under thirty-two and another number under thirteen and she’d come out with 29 and 7, which happened to be that days’ date. The 29^th July, written in the stars, quite clear in her tea cup and predicted with consummate skill by Madame Griselda.

So, on waking up on the morning of the 29^th of July she started making her preparations for the hereafter. For starters, she was absolutely certain that it would be the very worse of bad manners to arrive wherever the dead did arrive with smelly armpits, so she had a shower, it being July and she detecting aroma from her own fair flesh. She would have preferred a bath, but that had been taken out so that a decent shower could be installed.

She was also aware that July was usually a very hot month and this one was no exception, so she sat on her bidet and made quite sure that foaming hot water found its way into every crease and crevasse of her lower regions so that no wandering soul in the hereafter would be offended by anything on her even if they had supersensitive olfactory organs and could detect the tiniest fart at ten miles.

Having bathed she decided it was time to bid the world an honest and decent farewell. After all, hadn’t she been nurtured by it for the past sixty-three years so hadn’t it earned her gratitude? After all, she’d had a good life, largely guided by some kind of magic. Or other

It was still only the morning of the 29^th July so she had the rest of the day in which to die. She would have been happiest if her demise occurred after dark and before midnight so that she could obtain the maximum benefit that life offers all mortals. The very idea of missing out of, say, an afternoon she found singularly offensive, largely because she had paid her television licence and there was a film on that she really wanted to see and if she died before it started or even during it she would think that fate was offensive, to say the least.

She decided to give her bidet a second go whilst she tried to work things out. What would be best?

Should she spend part of her last bit of life nipping to the shops? It wasn’t that she needed to buy anything because she’d already done that both yesterday and the day before as preparations for her death and her larder was already filled to overflowing, and her fridge and freezer as well. But she had a sudden thought and it would be folly if she ignored it.

She had a library book that really ought to be returned. It wasn’t overdue or anything criminal like that, but it would be if she left it on her bedside table and nobody did the job of returning it for her. If that happened she knew there would be a stain on her character that would leave this life along with whatever vital part made its way to wherever the hereafter, and would and hang like a weight around her spirit until time itself came to a very, very distant ending. She would be marked by her failure to return a library book and leave it lying were she’d been reading it until long after her earthly death.

With such fears driving her, she made sure she was decently dressed with clean underwear (she might, after all, die as she walked to the library. Maybe a car or a bus might plough into her and snuff her out.) There was no indication in either the stars or the tea leaves of at what time on this day she would pop her clogs.

“It’s sad,” she thought as she locked her front door and set out to the library with a partly read library book under one arm, “that I won’t have time to finish the book. It’s quite a good one and I’d love to find out who was responsible for murdering so many people in such cold blood.”

Detective fiction involving mass murders had long been among her favourites.

When she got there, the library was closed because it was a bank holiday Monday and she hadn’t taken that into account when she’d set out. She should have brought the darned book back yesterday, but then, if she had, there were a couple of chapters that would have remained unread, those she had delighted in reading last night.

So what should she do about it? In the end she posted the book through the library letterbox, glad that it would fit without risking dmage to the book, and returning home. There was that film she needed to watch, one that she hadn’t seen before, but there would be a few minutes before it was due to be broadcast for her to give herself a little treat seeing as she was about to die, wouldn’t there? And she so rarely treated herself to anything gorgeous, so how about a last gin and tonic before the end came? Saint Peter’s Arms was on her way home. She would have to walk past it. Or she might try walking into it!

Saint Peter’s Arms was a popular pub most of the time, but late mornings on the 29^th July it was virtually deserted. The landlord looked grouchy, as if he had a hangover or was maybe suffering from something more serious. He might, thought Audrey, need the attention of Doctor Grim, her own physician who she had fallen out with on account of the fact that he’d dismissed any notion that she might be about to die on the 29^th July and pooh-poohed her reference to tea leaves directing her life via the patterns they formed in her tea cup. But he might have that one weakness, and inablity to see into the deeper mysteries of life, but he was a good enough doctor none-the-less.

The landlord dismissed any idea that he was at all ill and told her that his wife had passed away in the early hours and he was very unhappy about it, but if he closed the pub for even an hour he’d be in trouble with the brewery, so here he was, with a dead wife still on her bed upstairs, and a pub to run.

“That’s sad,” Audrey told him, “and to think I’m dying some time today as well.”

He looked at her, decided her sympathy just might be genuine, and gave her a double gin and an open bottle of tonic out of his own sympathy.

It was then that the door opened with a bang and a clatter as a grizzled old man wearing a hood and carrying what looked like a dangerously sharp scythe walked in.

“Alright, Audrey,” he called out to her as the landlord pulled him a foaming pint of what looked like exceptionally fine beer, “I called at your place to trim the back lawn, but you were out, and here I see why! Let me buy you another of those drinks and we can have a chat about your lobelias!”

“Well…” hovered Audrey, but too late if she didn’t want one: a second double gin appeared before her.

“I must go,” she said after she swallowed both strong drinks in quick succession, “I need a wee and I don’t like public toilets, and I need to use my bidet again, you see, I’m going to die today and I don’t want to emit bodily smells.”

The landlord and the gardener both nodded sympathetically, wondering what on earth was so important about her bidet, and they watched her as she staggered through the door and into the sunshine of a July noon.

IT might have made a decent story if she’d started staggering in her drunken state right into the path of a speeding lorry or double-decked bus, but she didn’t. Though she did stagger because she wasn’t used to strong drink, straight into the path of a young woman pushing her pram, and she apologised most profusely as the baby fell out into a chaotic pile of blankets, a dummy, and banged its poor little head on the pavement, and lay on the cold stone right there in front of her.

She was distraught, but what could she do?

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” she slurred, “I need to get home to die,”

The young woman picked her baby up, dusted it down and plonked it back into its pram once she’d picked that up too, muttering about old women derelicts who couldn’t take their drink, before scurrying off.

Audrey was mortified and ashamed, two emotions responsible for her missing the film on the television because she very carefully took a fruit knife out of her handbag and proceeded to jab it so hard into her own chest as she almost lost it somewhere inside her, as she apologised for the accident with the pram. And the truth was she killed herself, there and then, giving the arrangements of tea leaves a certain amount of respectable credibilty.

© Peter Rogerson 05.05.23

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Reviews

[AYVID N]

This is how dangerous a misplaced belief can become! She actually killed herself though there nothing wrong with her physically. That too for a dummy baby. What a silly old woman! I enjoyed the story, the humor and the message. I hope Audrey found her afterlife as she imagined it. That would make her sacrifice somewhat worth it!

[Peter Rogerson]

This was my dig at the blind belief some people have in a variety of baseless so-called faiths.
read moreThis was my dig at the blind belief some people have in a variety of baseless so-called faiths.

[AYVID N]

And the point hit home beautifully in this story. Blind faith can only bring harm and never any good. Thank you for sharing the great story.