“You look beautiful when you’re mad, Nurse Timkins. Your eyes blaze like all those stars out there.”
“You mustn’t kiss me, Doctor. I’m supposed to be sterilised.”
“I couldn’t believe that lips so sweet and pure could ever bear the stigma of stapyhylococci.”
Dream Snogger is just about to put his beautiful mouth to work when the telephone rings. I don’t mean the telly telephone but the one in our hall. I wait hopefully for Natalie to answer it but I am wasting my time. God help him if it is some adenoidal little pimple factory wanting to know if my kid sister is going to the youth club—or Teen Scene as the new vicar now calls it. I try and catch her eye as I stalk past but she is staring at the screen with her thumb in her mouth and her skirt up to her panties.
“Don’t scratch yourself like that,” I say primly.
“Why not? I’ve got an itch.”
“It’s not nice.” I pick up the telephone. “Hello!” My voice is meant to sound about as welcoming as Moshe Dayan being invited to judge the Miss Egypt Beauty Contest. There is a pip, pip, pip and the line goes dead. I return to the front room.
“That was Mum,” I say.
“What did she want?”
“She hasn’t got through yet. What’s happened?”
“They can’t wait any longer so he’s doing an emergency operation without the father’s consent.”
“And using the black girl’s kidney?”
“I think so. Do you smell anything?”
“Only that awful perfume of yours. You don’t wear that at school, do you?”
“Of course not. I don’t want to enslave them.”
“Smells like something burning. You didn’t leave anything on in the kitchen, did you?”
Natalie shakes her head. “No.”
“Well, don’t just sit there. Go and have a look.”
“Why me?”
“Because I just answered the telephone.”
Natalie nods towards the telly. “It’s better if you go because I know what’s happening and I can tell you. If I go—”
“Oh, stay there and mind you don’t scratch another hole in yourself!”
“Charming!”
I make tracks for the kitchen and the smell of burning gets worse with every step. Don’t say the rhubarb has caught fire. I glance at the dials on the cooker and wrench open the oven door. Crikey! I haven’t seen so much smoke since Dad borrowed an indoor barbecue set. I grab a couple of wet tea towels and drop the burnt offering in the sink where it sizzles merrily. It looks as if it might once have been a steak and kidney pud. In the hall the telephone rings.
“Telephone!” shouts Natalie helpfully. I make a quick list of the ten ways I would most like to kill her and snatch up the receiver. Pip, pip, pip, pip …
“I’ve found the steak and kidney pud, Mum,” I speak the second the pips stop.
“I’ve no time to talk now, dear,” says Mum. “Listen carefully. There’s a steak and kidney pud in the oven which should have come out half an hour ago.”
“I found it, Mum.”
“You must take it out immediately.”
“I have done, Mum.”
“Do you understand, dear? I can’t talk because the train is just about to go and your father is shouting at me. There’s a steak and—”
There is a muffled squawk and a noise that could be Dad yelling something I am grateful I cannot understand.
“Hello? Mum?” I can still hear station noises in the background and I imagine that Mum must have left the phone dangling as Dad dragged her away. I am about to hang up when I hear a sound like someone breathing and a voice full of eastern promise purrs from the receiver.
“Hullo, how are you?” says a man’s voice.
“Hello,” I say. On the spur of the moment it is difficult to think of anything else to say.
“Dear lady, how happy I am to be speaking to you. You do not know me but I am of strong build and reaching towards the upper limits of those considerably in excess of five feet tall. I am only recently arrived in your country and would be most happy if you would go out with me. I have had many happy reports of the friendly disposition of the ladies of London and I would like to put them to the test.” His voice drones on and I have half a mind to call Natalie.
“I’m sorry but I’m married,” I say. I mean, there is no need to be unkind, is there?
“I eat husbands for breakfast!” insists the voice at the other end of the line. “My ardour is unquenchable. I am a lion! By the holy waters of the Ganges I will—”
I put down the receiver with a shaking hand. I know that there are some funny people about but why do they always have to pick on me? Only the other day the middle aged man sitting opposite me in the tube whipped open his mac to reveal something that looked like a small garden gnome weathered by a million years of non-stop rain. By the time I had opened my eyes he had got out at Clapham North.
That was not an isolated incident. Strange men are always rubbing themselves against me on public transport—and some of them are not so strange either. I thought the fellow with the bowler hat who had his umbrella jammed against my reception area was unaware of what he was doing—until I saw that he did not have an umbrella. Why does it always have to be me? I know girls who spend their whole lives waiting for a man to flash himself at them. I only have to look at a man below a line drawn at right angles to the top of his zipper and I have an evens chance of copping an eyeful of crotch insulation. I have the same effect on men’s willies as a summer shower on a lawn full of thirsty worms.
“I didn’t know you were married,” says Natalie as I come through the door. “Geoffrey put you in the family way, did he?”
“I was getting rid of another crank,” I say.
“You mean Mum?” asks Natalie.
“Her as well. She put a pie in the oven for us.”
“And Geoffrey put a bun in the oven for you. It’s our lucky day, isn’t it?”
“Do stop going on about Geoffrey. I just watch him play tennis sometimes, that’s all.”
“And soak up the ritzy atmosphere at Eastwood Tennis Club. Was that Mum’s pud we smelt?”
“Yes. Steak and kidney.”
Natalie pulls a face. “I wouldn’t have been able to eat it anyway. Doctor Dish has just whipped out that black bird’s kidney.”
“Is she all right?”
“She is at the moment, but she’s not going to last, is she?”
“Why not?”
“Stands to reason, doesn’t it? If you’re black you never last long on this programme. Specially if you’ve been going out with a white fellow. It saves all the embarrassment. See? She’s going to snuff it. The little white light has stopped bleeping.”
“I’ve seen them come back after the little white light has stopped bleeping.”
“Not black ones, you haven’t. Anyway, it’s two weeks since somebody kicked the bucket so we’re due for a spot of the deathbeds. It makes the whole thing more realistic, doesn’t it?