Day 3

09.22 With only toenail fungus for breakfast

Subject: Good News

Dearest Darling Forsythia,

I am given to understand that Mumsy and Sudsy have wholeheartedly agreed to spend their entire summer holiday at Smutlins. The ‘loyal friend’ in me is all for allowing them do what they want, after all they are both approaching their dotages and have paid their dues. On the other hand, my inner Devil (the Captain of my Ship) prefers that they upgrade to the vastly more expensive Little Willy’s Nudist Spa, just down the road. And to think, they were once noted for their dignity ands grace. Perhaps I can count on a few words of encouragement from you?

I am having some difficulty with my regularity and would appreciate a few suggestions.
***

11.23 With a stomach that’s devouring itself

Subject: Your suggestion

Dearest Darling Forsythia,


Regards your email, some suggestions are completely unwarranted. I shall refrain from comment, but should I be tempted to ask for your advice in the future, please do me a favour and tell me to shove it somewhere warm and dark.

The second paragraph in your email was a celebration of the obscure. What on earth did you mean when you wrote, “as much as your idea intrigues me, I will not attempt anything just now. Such close proximity to pregnancy has sapped my youthful illusions?” I sincerely hope you will interpret this at some point, as I cannot for the life of me find a point of reference in any of our previous correspondence. Had you, perhaps, sent it to me in error? Was the letter meant for Mumsy?

I’ve been thinking. Perhaps some sort of business venture would satisfy our voracious needs and keep boredom from our doors. Do you have any ideas? Keep in mind the need for practicality and to remember our diverse circumstances.

PS. I have a dreadful feeling that I might have left both my iron and oven on. Could you please expend the energy to break into my house and have a look around? I’ve being smelling the most disturbing odour. I’m terrified I will catch fire at any moment, and the thought of dying in a glob of melted plastic and circuitry and microchips and electronic thingies is beyond imagining. Plus the fact that I just remembered I had a venison pie in the oven, stewing away in the most uncommonly fragrant, unctuous sauce. Please, please, please, rescue it and shove it into my tiny prison. And could you do it with your naked fingers? Insert the succulent pie into the DVD portal? To be in such close proximity with your waggling digits once again would be ecstasy! But enough of my reverie. Urgency is what is required. Hup! Hup! Hup!
***
14.29 Faint from Hunger but Feeling Happier
Subject: Highly acceptable

Dearest Darling Forsythia,


Yes, I accept your offer to spearhead the opening of the world’s first Multinational Nudie Bakery and Ice Cream Bar, and yes, we should proceed with unseemly haste. And yes, we should fuck all regulatory bumps and grinds. It’s my view that politicians are extraordinarily gullible and will agree to anything, provided that one adopts an extremely reasonable tone and looks professorial. How lucky we are that you are a lawyer! Always remember, free market politicians didn’t plunder the world by screeching and rolling their eyes.

I thought you’d be interested in the last thing I said to your beloved Mumsy over the phone before she boarded the plane to wherever she and Sudsy were going (they never tell me where, just that it’s very important and that they’re exhausted). I didn’t feel she was giving enough thought to her new grandchild, and so I sang a little song to her. Naturally, my first thought was, “should I exhaust what little creativity I have in lyrics for a woman who not only will not appreciate my genius, but who’s tone deaf as a turd? But then I thought (proving once again that a mind is a dangerous thing), “what the fuck?”

It goes like this (yes, I realise it’s short, but so is my temper. Stay with it. And if it makes you feel better, you may sing along):
Marjorie Benzedrine, born in a bowl,
Sweet little Marjorie looks like a troll.
Marjorie Benzedrine, is that your behind?
Or an elephant’s testicles completely entwined.
I love you dear Marjorie, your allure is so sweet,
Pickled with beetroot you’d taste like me feet.
(chorus)
Fall-dee-rall-dee-rall-rall,
A gizzard in the sky,
Barfing in your jim-jams,
Your bottom full of pie.
(etc)

Since you are (as you never fail to inform me) an extremely busy person, I have decided not to include the entire seventy-seven verses. As it is, I have probably wasted your designated down time in its entirety. Therefore, if you want to hear more, you will have to beg. Either that or make up your own lyrics and suffer the consequences.

The fucking song has been swirling around inside my head ever since you named your sweet, fragrant flower of a child after a butter substitute (and please don’t remind me again that you are reading this on your corporate computer, which doesn’t permit the use of beautiful words like ‘fuck’. If you visited me more often, I could deliver them to you in person). But back to darling Marjorie Benzedrine. I sense from what you haven’t said, that she is destined for a life in politics and, hence, will required a friendly slogan or two appended to her name. Imbedded in the lyrics are many prime opportunities for self-promotion.
By the way, if you must know, I have conducted a considerable amount of scholarly research on this matter. Armed with only the name Marjorie Pimple and clouded images of her doing the hokey-kokey in your womb, I searched hither and yon for the source of the song and its deeper subtext. Much to my horror, I was unable to locate references to it in the Qu’ran or Mishna or Gemara, or even in the concordance to the Gospel According to the Prophet Beeble. I even studied Rashi’s more esoteric midrashim, before striking gold in The Lost Thoughts of Yose of Yukrat.

To digress, I heard about the fog over Da Vinci Airport this morning. It coincided with the arrival of Mumsy’s plane. I warned her yet again about eating an in-flight bean casserole. Is my fault no one listens to me? I feel like Cassandra.

Perhaps she and Sudsy could visit me next time she’s in Paris. I could whisper sweet nothings in her shell-like ear, providing, that is, she’s willing to detach it and stick it into the computer. Otherwise, she’ll hear nothing but a hollow gurgling.

***

18.26 Consumed by severe cramping
Subject: Holy Dammit

Dearest Darling Forsythia,

Sshhhhhhhhhh… Be very, very quiet.

It’s squatters. I’ve got fucking squatters!



At first, I thought it might be the pizza deliveryman. I don’t think I told you, but two nights ago I got dreadfully hungry and ordered a pizza from one of those “we’ll deliver in under twenty minutes or die of some unknown sexual deviancy” multinationals. Well, they took my money fast enough (that God for credit cards and that I finally remembered both the number and expiry date), but then it appeared they either couldn’t or wouldn’t simply email the fucking thing (never, NEVER ask a teenage assistant manager to do anything worthwhile). Finally (after making a couple of veiled references regarding his sister) I persuaded the oink to carefully write down delivery instructions – necessary, given the somewhat usual circumstances in which I find myself. One thing I made perfectly clear was that they shouldn’t simply knock on the door, wait two minutes, and leave. I tried to explain – in my most patient manner – that I was physically unable to answer the bell. “Furthermore,” I said, using words of one syllable and a beautifully slow, modulated and over-enunciated speech pattern, “I require that you slice the pizza into wedges of no more than two point five inches wide, and that you insert these wedges, one at a time, into the CD-ROM port of my extremely beautiful, expensive computer.” Only I didn’t actually say my extremely beautiful expensive computer in so many words. Not to a pizza delivery oink, and not in the dead of night.

Anyway, I rang off and waited. And waited. And waited. Fifteen minutes. Nineteen minutes. And then, we were just edging towards The Big Twenty, when, yes, the doorbell rang – or rather buzzed. And kept on buzzing and buzzing and buzzing until something went wrong with the mechanism and it started to squeal. Then silence. A full four minutes of silence, and then the buzzing (or squealing) started in gain, this time accompanied by a youthfully incoherent voice shouting, “anybody home? I’ve got your fucking pizza for youz!” More silence, followed by loud knocking, after which I distinctly heard clumpy cloggy footsteps beating a retreating from the door, after which I heard the depressing putt-putt-putt-splutter-hiccough of a motor scooter bumping down the street (and then a crash/thud as it collided with a parked car and a wheelie bin.

Well, my dear Forsythia, you’d better believe I wasted no time in ringing that pubescent git at the pizza takeaway. “Where,” I shrieked, “is my fucking pizza?”

“There were no one at home,” droned the adenoidal tones at the other end.

“I fucking left fucking instructions,” I roared. “I want my pizza. Do you understand? I ordered it, I paid for it, I gave you precise delivery instructions, and I fucking want it. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”

“We can’t just go around breaking into people’s houses.”

“Then why in the fuck did you agree to do it in the first place?”

“Didn’t”

“Did too”

“Didn’t. It’s against company policy. I never go against company policy. It’s more than my life’s worth.”

“Well, someone the fuck did, and that someone had a voice remarkably like yours.”

“I’m the only one here that answers the phone, and I didn’t.”

You’re fucking lying. Someone did. And somewhere in Paris there’s a pizza floating about with my name on it. It’s my pizza. I want it. And if I don’t get it, I’ll curse you forever. You’ll have diarrhoea and it’ll ooze over every fucking pizza that comes out of every oven in every one of your outlets from New York to Shanghai. Now, what are you planning to do about it?

“Dunno.”

“Would you please ask someone who does?”

At this point, I am afraid I rather lost it and told the dear child I didn’t really care one way or other what they did or did not or could or could not do, and that if I didn’t take delivery of my pizza – or a close proximity thereof – within the next twenty minutes, I’d sent someone very large and disreputable to dismember his greasy gonads. At least, that is the gist of what I said – not that it did any good. The spotty youth yelled something extremely rude, the meaning and implications of which I couldn’t grasp, and slammed down the receiver. And since then, my dear Forsythia, I have been waiting and waiting, afraid to move in case my order if filled, afraid to use the telephone lest I miss their call telling me that my beautiful lunch is on its way.

That is – or was – my condition, up ‘till an hour or so ago, when I heard a strange and tentative rattling at the door. Naturally, I shouted “come in”, being the polite sort. “Come in. The door’s not locked.”

The door opened. I know it opened because of the distinctive squeak – you remember it, don’t you? Caused by Mumsy leaning against the hinges the day she’d eaten too many crème buns and couldn’t catch her breath? Anyway, I heard the squeak and some odd shuffling, and I bellowed as loudly as I could. “I’m bloody starving. Stick the fucking thing in to the computer as you were instructed and leave me alone. And…(I quickly added before the delivery person could take offence), “bring me a beer while you’re at it. There are a couple of bottles in the fridge by the drinks cabinet. Pour some into three or four small saucers and shove them into the portal after the pizza. Help yourself to one while you’re at it.” It always pays to be generous where delivery persons are concerned.

I shouldn’t have wasted my breath. Not only wasn’t there a pizza (although there WAS one later – but that is another story), but my intruder was not even a delivery person, much less an employee of a multinational pizza chain. My intruder was actually two intruders. A fucking, foul-smelling git and his gittess du jour looking for a nice, warm, clean, well stocked, expensively furnished, rich kid’s doss house.

So, my demented Forsythia, here I am. On one hand I’m terrified they will decide to hock my beautiful new computer for a handful of euros and half a dozen hashish beignets, in which case God only knows where I’ll end up. Or, they might get it into their heads to trash the house and throw me and my present domicile through the window. No matter what, I am doomed. Simply doomed. Bloody fucketty fuck spluck doomed. Did I tell you I smelled a joint? And not of the English beef and Yorkshire pudding variety, wither. Doomed, I am. Utterly doomed. Fuck fuck fuck!

I am sorely tempted to make myself known. Or course, by so doing, I run the risk of being mistaken for a poltergeist or something worse, in which case I shall most likely be exorcised into oblivion or, at the very least, humiliated in some very, very bad way. Please, please, please advise me. You’re smart. You always know what to do. I don’t know how much longer I can stand this.
PS. I’m desperate.