Cabin Fever! I’m never usually up before noon, owing to an over-indulgence of electric soup from the night before… but drinking from my own cellar has slowed me down a bit. In consequence I am up before the sun is over the yard arm, pacing the floor of my bedroom like an expectant father…. but what it is I’m waiting for – I have no idea?
Sometime later I hear a ringing in my trousers only to discover my phone, with Mitzi the mad hooker on the other end once I push the green button… To my horror I can actually see her leering down at me from a distorted angle and it put’s the wind up me I can tell you… The flotsam and jetsam that forms the background to her ghoulish visage looks vaguely familiar….
‘Where are you?’ I enunciate carefully as English is not even her fifth language…
‘Downstairs’ she says, matter of factly, stubbing a gasper out on my finest Ercol table…Oh bloody hell – The mad bitch is in the house….
I go to the top of my stairs and yell down at her….
‘Go away you insane woman, we’re not allowed to get within 6 feet of each other!
’It’s OK – you stay up there, I stay down here….
No it’s not OK… apart from anything else all the booze is in my mother’s G-plan sideboard not to mention several bottles of vin ordinaire in the fridge…
‘You’ll have to leave….’ I repeat.
‘No I don’t. Nowhere else to go….
’But you may have the virus! What would happen then? I yell desperately…
‘You die, I get house….’
I couldn’t fault her logic. I imagined myself dying by inches in bed, while Mitzi sat downstairs smoking and endlessly watching aspirational telly. After I was dead she would leave my body to rot upstairs while she resumed her normal life… I would just be a smell in the bedroom neighbours would complain about when the wind was in the wrong direction…
I was sobering up fast and had to act…
‘Look… just eff off!’
‘I no go… I will be homeless and no money. It hard to be a sex worker when you have to keep 6 feet from client….’
I could see her point. In the end my thirst broke the deadlock…
We sat on opposite ends of my DFS Winter Sale sofa. I eyed her suspiciously over a restorative whiskey and ginger….
‘Are you sure you haven’t got the plague?’ I asked suspiciously…
Mitzi shrugged ‘Sure why not? I have everything else!’
She turned on the telly by accidentally stamping on the remote… A pasty faced BBC type informed us that the Olympics had been cancelled. In a sea of misery, it didn’t seem such a big deal… There were no decent odds to be had laying the family silver on any athletics event for a sporting chap like me. Too many bloody favourites.
It was the Derby I was really going to miss…
Bulk and The Devil 