'The One'

Simondo woke with a screaming headache and wondered what had interrupted his slumber. Lying half awake in a room that was dimly lit from the emerging dawn outside, he rubbed his eyes with the back of his balled fists and could just make out last night’s discarded metallic curry dishes strewn on the cluttered and battered old piece of car-boot quality furniture that his slum-landlord laughingly called a ‘coffee table’.

The beep of his cell phone brought him quickly to a new level of consciousness. He rolled over and checked out the alarm clock; bright red digital numbers showing 05.30am burned through the half dark at him. Reaching out to the side table he groped around for the phone to see who the hell was texting him at this time of the morning. .

“Bugger it”, he said in exasperation as he realised it wasn’t there and that he’d have to get out of bed to locate it. He badly wanted to roll over and slip back into his alcohol binge induced coma, but there was no chance of getting back to sleep with all that intermittent beeping going on. Lying there for a moment he scratched his permanently itchy nether regions before letting out a fart that made the windows of his room rattle. He chuckled because he regularly enjoyed a good scratch and never more so when followed by a rip roaring fart in front of the girls in the office; “it made the slow days of being a computer operator pass more enjoyably”, he thought.

“God what a bloody awful hangover”, he groaned as he lay there allowing his eyes to become accustomed to the multitude of shadows that the early dawn light cast into his room through the single thickly woven burgundy curtain, that when pulled to its limits, only just managed to cover the grimy sash window. Pulling the covers back, he shivered as the cold air hit his body. Quickly locating his discarded once white but now grimy gray underpants on the floor, he pulled them on in an attempt to clothe himself against the icy draft coming in through the decaying wooden window frames. In theory this might have worked but for the huge hole in the rear of his pants that completely negated any benefit he might have gleaned from his action. Johnny Fartpants had nothing on this guy.

Lurching through the debris of abandoned odd socks, worn underwear, beer cans and old pizza boxes, he searched furiously for the perpetrator of the hugely annoying beep that had forced him out of his pit. Its incessant intrusion into his hung-over consciousness was beginning to irritate him and he swore loudly as he stubbed his toe blindly and hard against the coffee table. Holding his toe and falling back onto the old black leatherette sofa, a relic from the 1970’s, he let out a huge groan and swore further as he caught his right butt cheek on the protruding spring that had broken loose through the non fireproof foam and the broken leatherette covering.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph”, he called out in agony, “if that spring’s damaged my tattoo of Ted Bundy then I’ll swing for that bloody landlord”, he promised with a malevolent sneer on his face. It had been a bone of contention between them that the old miser refused to shell out for something that you could safely sit on without injuring your back passage. Standing up, his toe hurt and throbbed, but his butt cheek was more in need of attention given how much he revered his tattoo and what it had cost him – five weekends of double shift overtime before he could complete the whole work; that and not to mention not being able to sit down for three days when the tattoo artist had done his thing. Furthermore, it had been annoying having to think up excuses as to why he needed to stand for eight hours a day when those silly giggling girls in the office made fun of him – all those references to him having piles and needing a rubber ring to sit down wore thin. But that was nothing compared to this, Christ this was a travesty, all that money and agony and for what?; a bloody spring to scar his butt cheek and make a total mockery of all that he’d gone through to have his hero permanently etched on his bum cheek. He rubbed his butt hard and winced as pain shot down the back of his leg. Just as he was about to examine the damage in the cracked dusty mirror perched on top of a table, the beep of the phone reminded him of his original purpose for being out of bed.

Listening more intently now that he was fully awake, his eyes scanned the room and rested on his black leather jacket draped over the back of a dining chair. “Oh bollocks, it’s probably still in there after getting home from doing that eight hour pub crawl with Sy last night”, he spat bad temperedly, as he limped over to check his jacket pockets.

Pulling the phone from his pocket, he squinted to see who’d woken him and been the cause of so much injury in the space of five minutes. Just at that moment, the phone sprang into action and an unknown number flashed up on the screen. He jumped back at the suddenness of the phone playing the Nolan Sisters ‘I’m in the mood for dancing’ theme that he’d especially chosen as his ring tone. What was merely seconds but felt like an age he stood motionless wondering what the emergency was for someone to be so bloody rude to wake him so early. With a flick of the thumb he pressed answer and barked “Who the bloody hell is this then?”, trying to sound menacing whilst stretching his five foot four frame as tall as he could possibly get.

“Hello, It’s me, Hortense, calling about our date”, said a voice that sounded more like a deep menacing baritone voice from a film trailer for an American horror movie.

He felt a warm glow engulf him as recognition set in. “So this was the babe that Sy had told him about, boy was he excited to meet her and the sooner the better. Who cared if she had woken him at such an ungodly hour, from what Sy had said, she could be ‘the one’” he thought excitedly, as he limped back to lie on his bed..

“Well hello there babe”, he drawled back at her with a strong and suddenly acquired mid-Atlantic accent. “When are you free babe?; what day suits you best?", he asked, whilst unconsciously scratching an area he ought not to.

“Free?”, she asked rhetorically; “probably in about five years what with good behaviour thrown in, but for you darlin’, my pretty, I’ll give up my weekends with Mob”.

Thrilled at the prospect of meeting ‘the one’, knowing that she too had a tattoo of Jeffrey Dahmer on her left arse cheek and hearing what he thought might just be the sound of a whip cracking in the background, he capitulated and offered her every weekend she wanted for the rest of his life....All she had to do was accept............. His heart beat with wild anticipation as Barry White's Love's theme coursed through his mind.

He couldn’t wait to surprise her with a gift of his very own favourite Argos’s own brand cologne that he had bought on impulse for her only the day before. Who cared if those imbecilic girls in the office said it smelled of fly-spray, on her it would smell devine..........

"Let me check my social diary and I'll get back to you", she rasped huskily at him. "But first, you have to come over to the dark side, have to promise me you'll vote for MOB, vote for MOB", she repeated as she let out a deep mwahahahahahahahahaha type laugh before hanging up the line...

****Readers please note - Simondo is a fictional character and doesn't relate to anyone alive, barely alive, dead, about to be exhumed, or contacted as part of a seance. As for Hortense............****