It's 3am. Not normally a time you would be loading the washing machine.
I went with Wilma to her appointment with the alcoholism clinic. There's normally a three-month waiting list to get referred -- this is how pissed we all are in Lancaster -- but she's in a bad way and her doctor has fast-tracked her an early first appointment, which consisted of being her given a bottle of Librium pills and a chart of how she's got to dose herself with them.
Back at mine, we had a couple of bottles of wine, the last hurrah before she has to stop drinking at midnight. Everything's going fine and we're chatting away. She's the size of a studio flat but she has got quite nice tits, and with a preamble I cannot recall, she takes her top off and I start fondling them and sliding my hands inside her black bra. We both enjoy it and it gets a bit kissy.
We go to bed, where we do not have sex. I don't fancy her, and I have this idiotic but tenacious idea in my mind that I don't want to be unfaithful to Wendy. The knowledge that we will never have sex does nothing to dislodge my pointless fidelity. Wilma and I are sexlessly spooning, and I am nodding off, when I notice that peculiar form of warm wetness that comes from embedded piss. I am outraged that she has done that, on my futon mattress. I get up, wash myself, change my clothes, and stomp off downstairs. I write her a note.
Wilma. You have pissed in my beautiful lovely futon mattress. You are never coming round here again, ever. You just piss piss piss. On my floor I can cope with, but in my bed, NO. I will always be your friend but I am never ever going to have you in my house again.
I sat in my kitchen, twisting my clasped hands in resentment, then thought "why the fuck am I sitting here?" I went up to my piss-scented bedroom and roused her and told her she's got to leave and that she's never coming back. "You've overstepped the mark, you really have Wilma." Not a word of apology, but "where are my clothes?"
You can't wash futon mattresses, part of the reasoning being that you're supposed to not fucking piss on them. They're heavy enough without the addition of a couple of pounds' worth of a friend's urine, but I manhandled it down from the second floor to the cellar and out into the yard, where I've hooked it over the line.
Earlier, in the pub, Lancaster's Most Unconvincing Transsexual was droning on about the death of her (his?) former boyfriend, with that draining expectation that others are going to be interested in a long recitation of the details of the distress caused by a stranger's demise. Vic was equally boring about some ludicrous scheme to grow and sell pot, into which he has wasted two grand. I was reminded of something that a man in a pub in Glasgow said to me the other week: "They see people like you as easy meat."
No-one was listening to anyone. I was trying to tell the story about Wilma pissing on my kitchen floor, and never got to the end of it, constantly interrupted with the immediacy of the drunkard's chat. "Oh, are you off?" said Unconvincing Transsexual. "Yes, you're not listening to me, so I can't be arsed. I'll see you soon."
I'm tired of all this drunken, pubby, mutual self-examination. I'm tired of my own voice and that of my friends. I want to go to Newcastle and do this course and be busy and tested, and make sociable, tasty meals for me and Kim, and amuse myself at night by making my stories about unzipping Wendy more elaborate, and to write over-sexualised postcards to her and then rip them up in the morning.
The application for the CELTA course which will further such hopes is quite difficult. The grammar and the vocabulary sections are easy enough with a bit of Googling to aid my extensive knowledge of English, but the pedagogical sections are more testing. "How would you teach the difference between 'skinny' and 'thin', bearing in mind that your students' command of English is limited?"
