Foggy forgotten weekend

I started drinking at two o’clock on Friday afternoon. It started slowly. Then with the mystical curve when alcohol transubstantiates bread into time, suddenly it was Sunday night, sixty hours had gone missing and all I could remember was that I had missed Holy Mass. My family were still alive and after various telephone calls I found that the sky hadn’t fallen in upon chicken lickin.

Today had been the longest day to die whilst waiting for the sun to set and to find some sort of anonymity as I shuffled towards the-worst-pub. Wilson is tanned after his holiday, Liam is pleased to have him back but both are a little nervous about yesterday’s plane crash. Three pints of numbers and the day is turned around into a night that is full of promise.

I have just won two poker tournaments on the bounce and Miles is blowing his horn; you lovely lovely crazy man blow, scream down your reed and take me somewhere that seemed impossible when I awoke this morning.

The Flower Girl

For the last thirteen weeks, at eight twenty-seven in the morning, I have caught the Number One bus from the stop opposite the-worst-pub and travelled into town. Wendy with the Morrison’s badge, whose stomach is larger than her breasts, smiles at me occasionally and nods a good morning. I never sit down. I prefer to toss my small rucksack into the baggage hold, hold on to one of the vertical supports and stare out of the window onto the opening-up world of the shops outside; thus avoiding catching the eye of the able bodied born-again-Christian woman who sits in the disabled seat and pounces on the unaware with promises of salvation and a life everlasting.

Relieved at getting on the bus and knowing that now, only an act of God can prevent me from clocking in on time for yet another seven hours of unremitting boredom. We pass Tesco-metro, the church and then if I am lucky I find the thirty-something brunette bending over and arranging flowers in the buckets outside the florists. If the traffic lights are on red and the bus is in the optimum place in the queue, I can gaze, quite unnoticed by the fifty pairs of eyes behind me, onto the early morning soft focus erotica in front of me. With her back to the road, she bends forward from the waist, her legs perfectly straight as her shortish skirt rises ever upwards as she fluffs the bouquets in front of her. Then, when the bucket she is working on is finished, she turns her nimble fingers towards the next. Instead of standing up and taking a step and starting again, she twists sideways so that she is now in profile; her arse raised, her back is table-top flat as if leaning over an imaginary desk waiting for her skirt to be lifted up over her hips begging to receive her pre-decided punishment. And then the lights change, the bus lurches forward and then just as suddenly judders to a halt at the stop outside Blockbusters to let the old woman with the small terrier climb aboard. I really wish that she would put her teeth in!