eight

I’m walking with Molly, a friend I met through a friend at school I’m not friends with anymore. In fact, I can’t even recall why we were friends in the first place, unless it was just to introduce our own friends to eachother. That’s a good enough reason for me because Molly is ace.

    “I’m going to shave all my hair off,” says Molly with a little skip.

    “Why?” I ask, turning to look at her auburn locks, “what’s wrong with what you’ve got?”

    “Nah,” she says, avoiding the cracks in the pavement, “it’s too dull. Dull, dull…” she kicks a stone into the gutter, “…dull. And besides, it’ll give me a reason to stop going to SlutzCutz anymore.”

    “Yeh,” I agree, “that place isn’t really you. Why did you keep on going there anyway?”

    “Oh, it’s been out of loyalty, really,” says Molly. “You remember Meredith?”

    I don’t remember Meredith. Molly stares up at me.

    “You and her got pulverized on cheap tequila at my house one night and you dropped her while dancing and she split her cheek on the fireplace.”

    I remember Meredith.

    “Ah, yes, I remember her. Big girl, ruined a perfectly good fireplace.”

    She gives me a slap on my arm and continues: ”Well, SlutzCutz is owned by Merry’s sister, Angie. So, I went once and even though I wasn’t a hundred per cent satisfied I thought it would be too obvious and rude to stop so I went again….and again….and again….”

    I stick both hands in my jacket pockets, “Angie’s a good name for a hairdresser. And Linda.’

    As we’re approaching the corner of the high street, Murray comes round it at speed and almost collides with us. As soon as he sees us he holds up both hands.

   ”‘Hi Murray,” says Molly just as her mobile rings. As she takes it out of her bag and turns away, Murray pulls me to one side.

     “What’s wrong with you?” I ask.

    “Cowbell Girl,” he says under his breath.

    “Cowbell Girl,” I repeat. “How’s that going?”

    “I’m going to finish with her.”

    “Why?”

    “It’s a little bit embarrassing actually….” he tries to avoid eye contact.

    “Well, now you definitely have to tell me,” I say.

    Murray takes a deep breath, “We were talking the other night and I just happened to mention cowbells.”

    “I can see how that could happen. I’m always accidentally slipping cowbells into conversations.”

    “I told her about the cowbells and The Rolling Stones and it turns out that Honky Tonk Women is one of those songs that really turns her on…”

    “I didn’t know that. So what’s the problem?”

    Murray takes a deep breath, “She made me wear a cowbell in bed.”

    I shake my head, “Well, that’s a lamentable image I’m not going to be able to get rid of for a few weeks.”

    Murray gives me one of his looks. Molly comes back.

    “I have to get out of here,” she says as she puts her phone back in her bag. “That was Ruth, she needs some emotional support.”

    Murray and I look at eachother.

    “The marriage thing,” asks Murray, “right?”

    Molly nods, “She’s asked you too, huh?”

    “Don’t tell me Ruth asked you to marry her too?” I say.

    Molly winks at me, “She certainly did. Actually, I think she’s on the verge of a breakdown.”

    Murray undoes his top two shirt buttons and examines his chest hair, “Well, we’re all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But most of us choose not to go around asking everyone to marry them.”

    “That’s right,” I say, “some of us just put cowbells on to have sex.”

    Murray is about to throw some insults in my direction when Molly suddenly shrieks: “OH SHIT !!”

    She drops to her knees and scurries behind a parked car. She frantically waves us towards her and we head nonchalantly over.

    “Will you two get down!” she says through gritted teeth. Murray and I crouch down.

    “What’s all this about?” I ask.

    “I’ve just seen Boxhead on the other side of the road,” says Molly. She’s gone a little off-colour.

    “Who?” says Murray.

    “Boxhead!”

    “Who the bloody hell is Boxhead?”

    “She works for my firm – in payroll – and she really freaks me out. I keep seeing her everywhere I go, and she keeps stalking me at work and every time I turn round she’s there…smiling…eeeeeeeeee…like that. And on top of that, her head is shaped like a box. Gives me the creeps.”

    Molly shudders and screws her eyes shut.

    I look at Murray, “A woman with a head shaped like a box? I have to see this.”

    We both peer over the top of the car and scan the passers-by on the other side of the road.

    “Can you see her?” asks Molly.

    “Not yet, do you see anything, Murray?”

    He shakes his head, “No….wait a second.” He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a small pair of binoculars.

    “You have binoculars on you?”

    Murray nods smugly, “You never know, my friend, you never know.”

    He starts looking through the binoculars.

    “Anything?” asks Molly.

    Murray swings his elbows left to right, “Not yet Molly-WHOOOOOAAH!!!”

    Murray drops the binoculars and ducks. I follow.

    “What?!” I ask, “what did you see?”

   Murray dabs his forehead with his sleeve and looks at Molly, “That is one square head!”

   I grab Murray’s shoulder, “You saw her? Her head really looks like a box?”

   ”I could iron shirts on that head,” says Murray.

    I peer over the roof of the car again, “Well how come I can’t see her then?” I feel genuinely left out now. Molly and Murray grab an arm each and pull me back down to their level.

    “Stop drawing attention to yourself,” says Molly.

    “But I want to see the women with a box for a head!” I realise I’m whinging like a little brat.

    Murray leans in, “I say we stay here for a couple more minutes then head for the pub down there.”

    “Agreed.” says Molly. She nudges me, “How about you?”

    “Okay,” I grumble reluctantly, acknowledging that I’m not going to see Boxhead this day. But I will, lady, I will.

    After a couple of minutes we stand up and start walking to the pub at the end of the street. Murray breaks the silence after a few moments.

    “Do you think her box is shaped like a head?”

seven

I meet Roper after work at the local across the road and I’m in the chair.

    “So I hear your ex is now seeing Murray,” he says inbetween slurps.

    “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to call her my ‘ex’,” I say. “We only went out for two weeks.”

    “Cowbells?”

    “Cowbells.”

    Neither of us say anything for a few moments, then Roper starts shaking his head slowly. I say nothing, just keep on drinking my beer and watching him sigh a little louder each time. He starts glancing at me and adds strumming fingers to the ensemble. Finally, as I approach the bottom of the glass, he cracks.

    “Would it kill you to ask me if there’s anything wrong?!!”

    “Do you realise that when you get agitated you sweat upwards? I’ve never seen that.”

    He points a finger at me to shut me up, then adjusts his chair. “I have a situation.”

    I groan, “Tell me it’s not about you and Gussie again, pleeeease! Either marry her or murder her.”

    “Hey,” objetcs Roper, “you’re talking about the woman I love.”

    “You don’t love her, Roper, trust me. You might think you do, but you don’t. And I’ve seen your secret stash of paisley shirts from the late eighties so I know taste isn’t a priority for you. And as for Gussie, the only reason she keeps taking you back is because she knows exactly how much of a freak she is and that she won’t get anybody else to keep under those tax disc-sized thumbs of hers.”

    Roper mulls on this for a few moments, then gives a childish smirk, “She looks good naked, though.”

    I shake my head in disgust, “Pause, o men for the low standards of my contemporaries.”

    “Anyway,” says Roper, “it’s not about Gussie. There is a slight issue at work.”

    I lace my fingers and tilt my head to one side, “Go oooooon…..”

    Roper sweeps the bar with his eyes then lands them on mine, “I’ve picked up this…habit.”

    “You’re doing something?”

    “Kind of.”

    “You’re doing someone?”

    “I’m stealing!” he says quite loudly then scans the bar again. Nobody appears to have taken any notice of us.

    “Stealing?” I say incredulously, “Why?”

    Roper puts his head in his hands, “I don’t know why! I’m becoming a kleptomaniac, I just know it.”

    “Well, what are you stealing? Paper clips? Staples? Yellow Post-Its?”

    “I stole a fax machine yesterday,” says Roper, full of remorse.

    “You stole a fax machine?”

    “Yes.”

    “Why?”

    “Because it was there.”

    “Won’t they notice?”

    “Probably.”

    “How are you going to explain it?”

    “Burglars.”

    “Burglars?”

    “Yes.”

    “Don’t you already have your own fax machine at home?”

    “Yes.”

    “So you couldn’t even steal something you didn’t already own?”

    “I guess not.”

    “That’s pathetic. I should rat you out right now just for the sheer stupidity of it.”

    Roper grabs my cuff, “Wait!You can’t tell anyone! You’re my friend, I told you in confidence.”

    I shake my head, “Well, I don’t know. It’s pretty shocking stuff.”

    ”I’ll do anything. I can’t let Gussie find out, she’ll leave me for good.”

    “You’re not really selling this to me, Roper.”

    His eyes light up, “I’ll steal you something.”

    A slight interest stirs in me, “Like what?”

    Roper scratches his head, doing a mental audit of his entire company. “I’ve got it!”

    I’m a little excited now, “What?”

    He pauses, then looks me square in the eyes, “You can have the fax machine I stole.”

    I’m a little deflated, and a touch insulted.”But you stole that already.”

    Roper looks puzzled, “So?”

    “Well, it’s not the same. I want something that’s fresh off the back of the lorry.”

    “But I’ve already got a fax machine.”

    “I told you that!” I get up to leave. I hear Roper call out after me.

    “You can let me know what you want me to get for you then!”

    “Yeh,” I call back, “I’ll fax you.”

six

“So, are you still seeing that woman?” I ask, wiping the froth moustache from my top lip. “What was her name?”

    “Pandora,” replies Murray, shaking his head. “No, that one went west just like the others.”

    “What happened?” I ask, although I can’t quite decide yet whether to act interested or whether it will come naturally. I’m not much of a friend.

    “There was just too much of an age gap,” says Murray.

    “I thought you said you wanted to try a much older woman.”

    “I did! She was fifty, that seemed a pretty decent age gap.”

    “So…….?”

     “She said she wanted to try for a baby, like it would bring us closer together.”

     “And you don’t ever want to have kids…”

     “No I certainly don’t!”

     “And you thought because of her age it would never become an issue….”

     Murray holds up his hands and looks at me as if I don’t understand his logic. “Well?”

     “What circles does your mind move in,” I wonder out loud.

     Murray sips his beer and then his eyes light up. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a little note book. He waves it in front of me.

     “Do you know what I did last night?” he asks with a big smile on his face.

     “Drank heavily to numb the pain?”

     “I made a list of every woman I’ve had sex with and do you know what I found out?”

     “They all drank heavily to numb the pain?”

     ”I counted eighteen in all…”

     “Nice work, and they say graduates of Charm School just end up flipping burgers.”

     “…and I realised that thirteen of them all had names that end in the letter ‘A’.”

     ”Oh, boy.”

     ”That’s really strange, don’t you think?”

     “I can honestly say I am truly stunned by that piece of news. So what are you going to do? Screw a few  ‘Y’s and ‘E’s to balance it out?”

      Murray squints in my direction, “You’re not impressed, I can tell.”

      We both shake our heads and finish our drinks. As we’re leaving, Murray turns to me, “Are you still seeing that farmer?”

     “What, Helen?” I ask, and I suddenly realise how long it’s been since me and Murray met up. “No, that ended months ago.”

     “Why, what went wrong?”

     “She had too many cows.”

     “What’s wrong with having too many cows?”

     “Nothing,” I sigh, “except they all had cowbells around their necks.”

     “So?”

     “Well, it always sounded like they were fluffing the intro to ‘Honky Tonk Women’.”

     We stand on the crowded pavement and try and pick out a taxi in the drizzle.

     “So,” says Murray after a few moments, “do you still have her number?”

     I look him in the eye, “You want it?”

     He shrugs, “I didn’t get into the Stones until ‘Emotional Rescue’.”

     “I suppose you can have it,” I say. “After all, she is an ‘N’ so it can’t hurt.”

five

Ruth is a great driver. She looks fantastic in her brand new sports car. I always felt a bit too small in the seat back in the days when I used to drive. If I bought a car now, I don’t think I could stomach driving in London. I’d have to go back to hating pedestrians and cyclists and I don’t think I have that much hate left in me anymore.

    “I want to get married,” says Ruth suddenly.

    “Why?” I ask.

    “Why?” she says as though I’ve asked a very stoopid question. “I think marriage would suit me. Don’t you think it would suit me? Because I think it would – I know it would. And I’d be validating myself. I’d be a fully paid-up member.”

    “Of what? The Tedious Twat Brigade?”

    “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. Sorry.”

    “What?”

    “You don’t like weddings.”

    I shrug my shoulders, “I don’t have a problem with the idea of the union of two people in love blah blah; it’s the frilly, frothy, rosy-glow, show-home, ‘we’re-starting-together-so-buy-us-a-juicer’, saccharine-drenched nightmare that comes with it I have the issue with.”

    “So you’re never going to get married then?”

    I shake my head, “I never said that. But if I do, I’m going to skip the ceremony and speeches and just turn up for the disco. Can’t get enough of ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘Come On Eileen’.”

    “You’ve been to some classy weddings.”

    “I rest my case.”

    Ruth flips the indicator to turn right and we stop and wait for a hole in the oncoming traffic.

    “Well, I feel left out,” says Ruth with a slight tinge of genuine sadness, “and I don’t like feeling left out.”

    “Well, who does?” I reply, a little too flippantly. “It doesn’t mean you have to saddle yourself to something that statistically won’t last the distance.”

    A car flashes it’s headlights at us and Ruth swings the car through the gap and into the pub car park. Her tongue rolls over her bottom lip as we pull up to the wall. She sits up and tries to peer over the bonnet.

    “Do you think I can come forward any more?”

    “Nah,” I reply. “You couldn’t get a Rizla in there.”

    Ruth turns off the engine and looks in my direction.

    “Marry me,” she says.

    I’m about to dismiss this until I see the expression on her face.

    “Say that again?”

    Ruth takes a deep breath and goes all wide-eyed.

    “Marry me.”

    “…………………………no.”

     Ruth blinks once, swallows, and then pulls a packet of menthols and a lighter from her handbag.

     “Do you want one?” she asks, lighting up.

    “No, thanks.”

     She sits back and exhales slowly.

     “At least,” she says after a few moments, “I know you hate weddings anyway. So I know it’s not just me you object to.”

     I nod slowly in agreement, “I’ll have sex with you though, if you want.”

     She gives me a withering stare and gets out of the car, “You wish.”

    I do indeed, I think to myself as I open my door, I do indeed.

four

I’m arriving to work later and later each day. Nobody cares to mention anything about it anymore. I do have a kind of freedom as far as time-keeping is concerned; so long as I get something done it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. I arrive at a quarter to one today and then I go to lunch at one.

   I meet an ex-flatmate at the Greek restaurant across the road. Roper looks rougher than usual. This can only mean that he’s back on with his on/off girlfriend, Gussie, who he hates. I don’t care about her either way if I think about it, although her eyebrows do tend to follow you around the room.

   “You remember that Al Capone costume I gave you,” says Roper.

   “No,” I say.

   “Well I need it back. It’s not actually mine, you see.”

   “Why would you ever give me an Al Capone costume?” I ask. Maybe to some people I look fancy dress deficient.

   “Lee Bevan wants it back,” continues Roper.

   “Who’s Lee Bevan?”

   “He’s a punk. A real nasty punk. Works in the warehouse of the firm I used to work for. He lent me the Al Capone costume for a New Year’s once. I never returned it. Now he wants it.”

   “And I suppose if he doesn’t get it, then you’re going to get it?”

   “Exactly,” says Roper. He sweats so much it goes in my drink.

   “Well, I don’t have it, Roper,” I say. “Sorry.”

   Roper looks devastated, “Are you sure?”

   “Quite sure.”

   “Pinstripe two-piece with elasticated trousers?”

   “Nope.”

   “Plastic hat….?” he mimes putting on the plastic hat to see if it jogs my memory. Right now I feel like jogging back to work.

    “You must have lent it to someone else,” I say, trying to bring this conversation to a conclusion, “I have never gone anywhere dressed as Al Capone. I went to a seventies theme night dressed as John Lennon once, though.”

   “I’m a dead man,” groans Roper.

   “Come on,” I say, “over a stupid costume?”

   “I screwed his mother on the weekend too.”

   “You’re on your own on this one,” I say. I stand up to leave and as I’m walking towards the door I suddenly get this vague recollection of using some stripey cloth to scoop vomit into a hat while squatting naked from the waist down in a bathroom in South London.