Wednesday 1 October 2008

THE TRAFFIC WARDENS' ARMS Part 2

Sharon wore a leather kilt for the floor cleaning that was necessary after she’d glossed her ceiling. Chewing her tongue, humming along to the speeded up bagpipes playing through her headphones killed the time until she decided she deserved a tea break. Waiting patiently by the kettle, not watching, until it boiled, she praised God when it did. Pouring water on the meticulously placed teabag in her favourite cup, she frowned at the hairline crack running from its rim to Princess Diana’s hairline. When she’d finished her tea, she ritualistically enfolded her cup in a number of tissues of different sizes and colours before locking it back up. Along with an embossed leaflet about the guessed width of a giraffe’s neck and the darts trophies stolen, by her brother, from jumble sales.

Bored with the radio, Gulliver went jelly shopping to shrug off his feelings of being like a brick in an armchair. He squeezed packets of jelly stacked on supermarket shelves with arthritic fingers, exclaiming with almost sexual gratification to himself. He bought a jar of Brylcreem, which he opened in the store and applied liberally to his hair, before returning to the jelly. He chose eight different flavours and bought three packets of each, his lips and chin glistening under the store’s fluorescent lighting as he salivated at the checkout. The cashier’s name was Sally according to the badge on her right breast, her face a sea of freckles with a split for a mouth that demanded money. Smiling, Gulliver wiped his lips and did his flies up, then blew his nose and fumbled for the right money. Leaving the store, he felt euphoric; he was ‘jellied up’ and on a roll. He’d go home, lie on the sofa and eat the jelly. With the radio switched off!
Indoors, Gulliver carefully unwrapped each of the packets of jelly, tossing the packaging in the bin before devouring the contents with great self-satisfaction. After eating a few packets, he felt full so, not being greedy, he stopped consuming, sat still and spent the next few minutes in greasy silence simply thinking about the recently consumed jelly. Then, suddenly, he suffered a horrendous attack of arthritis.
‘It serves me right for eating all that jelly,’ he told himself; despite the fact the abrupt affliction was medically unrelated. With a typically English trait, Gulliver ruined his previous jelly revelry with severe, self-inflicted guilt lashing.

Having finished floor cleaning for the day, Sharon rang the giraffe-neck-width-guessing chat line (at a rate of 48p a minute) to dissipate her loneliness a little. After her call, she painted her fingernails and decided to go for a walk. She closed her front door on the smell of gloss paint and, outside in the street, bumped into her friend, Jane. When Jane got up she linked arms with her friend and the two women walked together until bumping into their mutual friend, Zoe. She, too, linked up and the trio perambulated in unison. They were heading in the direction of the recently ablaze wig tunnel and Jane was whingeing. She was upset because she’d split up with her boyfriend, who’d become a traffic warden.
‘Never mind,’ said Sharon and Zoe.
Before adding that they’d warned her about him all along, but they didn’t like to say they’d told her so.

To read The Traffic Wardens' Arms in its entirety visit:
http://ambulant-literature.org.uk

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