Sometimes you dream so hard and so long that the dreams don’t want to leave when you wake up. You’re eyes creak open like rusted garage doors and the muscles that should throw you from your bed like a breakfast cereal ad point blank refuse to act accordingly. It’s almost always raining on days like these. A body’s not stupid like a brain. It knows when to give up on a day and stay firmly in the land of the sub-conscious. Doctors are always telling us to listen to our bodies; maybe the doctors are right.
George Sanderson had a bad feeling about the day as he finally convinced an eyelid to open and peered without depth at the water on his window. Having the name George in 2003 meant that George generally had a bad feeling about most days. Having the right name can make all the difference in an age of product identity and social perception. The same went for everything, the right hair, the right clothes, the right vocabulary. One little thing could taint a person’s whole image. Just one stupid little thing.
George mustered all his energy, took a deep breath, coughed violently, lay back, groaned, took another deep breath and forced himself out of bed in one swift movement. A white naked thing stared in amazement and shock at him from the mirror. George sat down quickly on the bed so as not to alarm it too much. From this position, he could just see his head and shoulders in the mirror. He scowled at himself and wasn’t all that surprised to be scowled back at.
Just then his second eyelid sprung open bringing with it depth perception and a slight dizziness. It was time for tea. A particularly good point of single living is being able to make tea in the nude (albeit carefully with the boiling water and all). Tea in the nude and drunk alone tastes better. It’s a scientific fact or if it isn’t there should be a campaign to make it so. Tea drunk and various things scratched in a manly way and the day was looking up. George strode into the bathroom, as all men should. Striding into bathrooms lets the world know who’s boss.
Morning bathroom ritual begins with the staring in the mirror, lots of intermediate smelly stuff and ends with staring in the mirror. It was as he was approaching the home stretch, with armpits exposed to the spray can that he noticed it. Sitting there, hanging there, just being there, small but huge in his attention. A skin tag. He knew it was a skin tag because he’d read about them in a health magazine. He just didn’t realise they were so damn ugly.
George stared, stared some more and poked it with a finger. It waggled. He squeezed it but it didn’t feel squeezed. It didn’t feel like a part of him, it was like something that had been attached during the night. He pulled at it and it stretched. He pinched it with the nails of his thumb and finger, made sure he had a good grip and yanked as hard as he could. A sharp pain like taking off a plaster that’s been on too long and the tag was in his hand. A reddy-pink blob with a white string thing coming out of it.
Then it did start to hurt, and bleed quite a lot where it had been attached under his arm. George the self-surgeon dropped the tag in the sink and went looking for plasters and TCP. There was a very loud, almost dog like yelp from the kitchen. George had found the TCP.
There are drawbacks to living alone, when the day at work has been a day that would test the patience of the four horsemen then to come home to a smiling face and listening ear would be an almost spiritual thing. George came home to find the doormat covered in ‘Royalty Balti’ menus. Literally covered, the delivery boy hadn’t bothered with his route again and had dumped the whole lot through George’s letterbox.
It was late, it was always late when George got home from work, but that’s what happens when you live sixty miles away from work. Dinner was bought frozen, nuked and consumed without an understanding of any of the processes. A bottle of wine was drunk without tasting it and it was time for bed. In the bathroom the energy saver light buzzed annoyingly. In the sink something red moved. Something red with a white stringy bit raised the white stringy bit like an antennae and waved it at George. He peered closer, the stringy bit waved more excitedly. George stood back and it grew quieter.
A good time for sitting in the kitchen with a strong cup of tea, thought George, sitting in the kitchen with a strong cup of tea. In front of him in a little plastic container and a drop of water was the skin tag. It seemed quite happy about seeing George again. George smiled at it and went to bed.
Another morning, another night of dreams that wouldn’t go away. Morning ritual was performed and then deja vue, it happened again. Musk for men spray at the ready and there they were. Two this time. Twins of waggly red growing out from under his arm. George checked the other arm. Only one there but it was huge, well, fairly big anyway. More pinching followed by more yelping and skin tag was joined by some pals. The new blobs sat still and blob like but skin tag waggled his little white stringy bit like it was going to be banned. George guessed it was very happy, but there again it could be very pissed off. George shrugged and went to work.
Days went by, as days are want of doing. After a week the skin tags were getting crowded in the container and had to be moved to the washing up bowl. Spring was coming, the sun was shining and George could hardly wait to leap gazelle-like out of bed every morning and check the old pits. The dreams were subsiding and work was good again.
After two weeks George had to move them all in the bath where they wiggled and waggled to their blobs content. George was feeling good, people were noticing, saying how much weight he’d lost and apparently a bit of height as well but what was height when the world was this good. After a month, George had to buy a whole new wardrobe but it was fairly cheap in the children’s department. He was saving too, only half-price on the train now.
Then one morning when George was just about to step on his box to reach the sink he heard a voice.
‘Yo’, it said. George turned round slowly and peered into the bath. What had been a mass of squirming blobbiness the night before was now a person, a pink blobby person but never the less a person. To be even more exact it was George, or at least something that looked exactly the same as George.
‘Hello’, said George in a friendly sort of a way. Blobby bloke smiled. George picked off that mornings crop of tags and held them out. BB smiled again and nodded. George passed them over and went to work. Over the following days their morning conversation was limited to pleasant greetings and little chats about the weather. Although one evening BB did get out of the bath, help George up onto the high chair with cushions on it and they had dinner together. George was grateful for that, he’d had a bad day at work, what with people almost stepping on him all the time and having to buy another new wardrobe from the toddler department. Especially embarrassing when they wouldn’t believe he was old enough to have a credit card. Or even speak. His reply of ‘at the bank, hag’ hadn’t gone down to well to the question of ‘where did likkle man find the cardy-wardy?’.
BB was very sympathetic and nodded in all the right places. He even carried George to bed, which was nice. In the mornings he helped pull the skin tags off, as George wasn’t really big or strong enough anymore.
One morning as the leaves of autumn began to look embarrassed and fall off the trees in shame, BB woke up in his bath. Stepping out he felt something squidge under his foot. Something like a reddy-pink blob with a white stringy bit coming out of it. BB picked it carefully off the sole of his foot and flushed it down the loo. Tonight he would sleep in a real bed.
hellsbell
i love this one. you’re writings are fantastic. this one reminds me of the sarcastic manner in which douglas adams wrote the hitch hikers guide!