Chapter 8 – The Ex-wife Nightmare
Tarquin had had a very bad night. He was awake for a lot of it, on and off, and when he was asleep he had dreamed of encountering one beautiful woman after another, each of whom had introduced themselves as his ex-wife and then darted off to the ladies’ restroom, and never coming out. When he awoke, all he could think of was who the hell were those women? And how crowded the restroom must be.
No matter. After a light breakfast of gruel and tap water, Tarquin headed off to the mall with his shopping list, it being marked on his Winnie the Pooh calendar as a designated shopping day.
At the mall, he went into The House of Fraser, which he noted was not actually a house but a shop. Browsing at the perfume counter, where he liked to loiter and enjoy the smells and the vanity parade, the assistant – a lass of indeterminate age, but underneath the make-up definitely somewhere between 0 and 75 – said “Tarquin, how are you? I haven’t seen you since our divorce. Do you still have that rash?” Tarquin looked at her, checked his records, and decided he had never seen her before in his life. He left the shop, a little bit shaken, a little bit stirred.
In Boots, where he needed some chemicals to re-stock his medicine cabinet, he could not find the ointment he needed for his secret parts, so he approached an assistant, who said, “Tarquin! How good to see you. I haven’t seen you since our divorce. So you’re still having to use the cream, are you? What a pity.” Tarquin looked at her, checked his records, and decided he had never seen her before in his life. He figured he could probably get the ointment in Superdrug, so he smiled weakly, turned on his heel, and hightailed it out of there as fast as he could, a bit more shaken, a bit more stirred.
Long story short, and in an effort to prevent this account becoming more tedious than some might think it already is, everywhere he went he endured exactly the same kind of encounter with shop assistants who greeted him in exactly the same way as those aforementioned: in Superdrug, in W. H. Smith, and in Tesco.
By the end of the morning Tarquin was a blob of jelly, his head was rotating in endless full circles on his neck, and he needed alcohol. Boy, did he need alcohol. He hurried into The Queen’s Arms, and thanked the Lord when he saw it was a male person behind the bar. At least he wouldn’t claim to be a former spouse! How wrong he was.
Back at home, he dialled his therapist’s telephone number and waited for an answer, and to while away the time he tried to remember the ladies to whom he had been married, and what they looked like, but he had a very bad memory for faces, and started to get a bit of a headache. The phone rang and rang. And rang. Did they not have an answering machine for those occasions they’re not able to take the call? he thought to himself. He gave up, hung up, and went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror to check if he was still there. Yes, there he was: tall, slim, with a bit of a haunted look in his eyes, and in sore need of being taken under a caring wing.
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Conrad Titmuss
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