Famous (38 page)

Call out something, I guess. In a loud, aggressive don’t-fuck-with-me voice.

Why don’t you try that?

Okay then.

‘WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?’ I yelled into the blackness.

There was no reply.

‘GET OUT OF MY BLOODY HOUSE!’ I yelled. Still no reply. Just awful eerie silence.

What now? I asked the voice of reason.

You’re simply going to have to switch on the lights and see who’s there.

No? Really?

Yes.

Crap.

I felt down the wall for the light switch.

Go on! urged the voice. You can do it!

I flicked the light on in time to see something jump down from kitchen table and run across the wooden floor, under the old sofa. Something brown and furry. And large.

Mother of God, I wondered aloud. What the
hell
is that?

It certainly wasn’t the six-foot, balaclava-wearing man I’d been expecting. I willed myself to crouch down on the floor and look under the sofa. As I did two bright red eyes stared back at me, without blinking, accompanied by a nasty hissing sound. Clearly whatever it was, it was very annoyed at me having turned the lights on and spoiled its middle-of-the-night jaunt.

I stood back up and it scurried out from under the sofa and went hurtling into the kitchen. I yelped and jumped back against the wall. It was enormous! Some sort of steroid-induced woodland creature. With a bad attitude. I suddenly wished I had watched more nature programmes instead of
Friends
.

Obviously I was relieved it wasn’t going to rape or torture me, at least I didn’t think it was, but I was completely unsure what to do next. You just didn’t wake up to find unwanted wild furry animals in your apartment in the city, thrashing about as if they owned the place.

It’s probably making itself a cup of tea now, I thought, still cowering against the wall.

I looked down at the piece of wood in my hands.

You know what you’re going to have to do, don’t you? asked the voice of reason.

What? I replied.

You’re going to have to beat it to death.

Pardon?

Beat it. With the wood.

But I don’t want to.

Truth be known I was afraid it would snatch the wood out of my hands and start beating me instead. It was that large. I crept to the kitchen and saw it cowering in the corner, behind the rubbish bin. It began hissing again. I kept my distance.

Good God it was ugly! Not at all like the furry animals in my childhood picture books. Not very
Mother Goose
at all. And it had claws too. Long ones.

How the hell did it get in here? I wondered. I glanced around the room and my eyes rested on the chimney. Aha. I doubted it was going to pop back out the same way.

What can you do? I wondered. I had decided that beating it to death possibly wasn’t the best option for me. As yet I still hadn’t worked up the courage to kill the spider in the shower. Instead I wisely decided to open the front door and leave the light on, in the hope it would run back outside, away from the light. Preferably before I got up in the morning.

I crept back out of the living room, and shut the bedroom door behind me, lest it have any notions of joining me in the sack. I climbed back into bed, the piece of wood still firmly in my grip.

I woke up with the piece of wood lying across my chest, my arms folded across it, like a knight who had been buried with his sword. I walked into the living room, praying for the furry monster to be gone. Thankfully it was. But not before it had decided to leave me a thank-you note. There were small brown poo pebbles everywhere. Everywhere. It was at this precise moment that Lizzie decided to ring and wish me good morning.

‘Hi sweets. How are you?’

‘Okay,’ I replied, looking around at all of the droppings. ‘Bit of a sleepless night.’

‘Still worried huh?’

‘No. Had an intruder.’

‘A what?’ she screamed.

‘An animal. Not a person,’ I explained.

‘What was it?’ she asked.

‘Not entirely sure,’ I replied. ‘But it’s crapped everywhere.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did it look like?’

‘Brown and furry. And
big
.’

‘A rabbit?’ asked Lizzie.

‘Rabbits don’t hiss,’ I replied.

‘P’haps it was a badger then?’

‘Do we have badgers in this country?’

‘Hmm…not sure actually.’

‘A cat?’

‘I know what a cat looks like, Lizzie, and this was no household pet. Trust me.’

‘Did you give it a key?’ she asked.

‘Chimney,’ I replied.

‘Oh dear.’

I went into Elsie’s for my morning tea and relayed my night of terror.

‘Damn possums,’ she replied. ‘Always popping down the chimney and never finding their way back out.’

So it was a possum then. Perhaps it was a relative of the one Mands ran over, looking to settle the score.

That night I was rudely awoken once again. I was in the middle of a dream. One of those deep, this-feels-like-real-life-so-therefore-it-must-be type dreams. And in my dream was Jasmine. Why was I dreaming about Jasmine? I have no idea. But anyway, there we were, Jasmine and I, living together in my apartment. Doing things that normal couples do. Cooking, paying bills, watching DVDs. Boring, couply things. And then, as we lay on the sofa one evening, snuggled up together under a duvet, Jasmine suddenly morphed back into Jerry. And then Jerry stood up and pulled down his trousers. And then, well, then he began to pee onto my face as I lay on the sofa. Why was he weeing on my face? I wondered (in my dream state). A minute ago he was Jasmine and we were watching a DVD. Yuk. Stop it! I thought. You dirty bastard! But I was glued to the sofa, unable to move. Wake up! said a little voice inside my head.
Wake up!

And so I woke up. Only to find it wasn’t Jerry peeing on my face, but the roof. There was a continuous drip landing just below my left eye and rolling in a small stream down my cheek.

For the love of God! I thought, jumping out of bed and grabbing a plastic bucket from the kitchen.

It was raining outside. Raining hard.

The next morning, after my date scone, I went to see Bruce at the hardware-slash-pharmacy store. I needed to find someone to come and fix the leak before it began raining again.

‘Oh…let’s see…hmm…there’s Jim. But he’s busy working at the Simpsons’ farm at the moment. Or there’s Dave…but I think he’s working there too.’

I waited patiently for him to come up with more names. Names of people who might actually be able to come and fix it, at least in this lifetime. But there were no more names forthcoming. And then I waited for him to offer to come and fix it himself, but that wasn’t doing either. In retrospect I should have started crying. Back in the city I would have just phoned Hire-a-Hubby and they would have been round in half an hour, leak forgotten.

‘What’s the roof made of, love?’ asked Bruce.

‘Metal.’

‘You mean tin?’

‘Yes, tin.’

‘Big leak?’

‘Not overly. Just a steady drip.’

‘Well how about trying some sealant on it first?’ he suggested.

‘Some what?’

‘Some sealant. Try popping that round the edges of the tin sheets and see what happens.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. You.’

I stared back at him. Obviously he was under the illusion I was capable of fixing a leaky roof.

Half an hour later I found myself straddling the top of the cabin roof, directly above the bedroom, squirting sealant into the narrow gaps between the sheets of tin. This was not something I had ever envisaged myself doing. But what choice did I have? None. It was either this or be peed, I mean dripped, on. One tube of sealant and one rainy night later, it was evident that I, Samantha Steel, had fixed a leaky roof. All By Herself. My mother would have glowed with pride.

All the rest of that week I heard whispers about a fair. Whispers in the grocery-slash-drycleaning-slash-liquor store, whispers in the post-office-slash-bank-slash-stationery store, and whispers in the café.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Elsie, curiosity finally getting the better of me.

‘Why it’s the Floodgate town fair!’ she replied, as though this was something I should have been aware of, or that I would perhaps even care about.

‘When?’ I asked.

‘This weekend. On Saturday.’

Elsie explained that the Floodgate town fair was an annual event with games, competitions and children’s rides. And a cake-off.

‘What’s a cake-off?’ I asked.

‘A cake-baking competition love. You bake a cake, any kind of cake, and enter it and a judging panel decides whose is the best.’

Aha, I thought to myself. That explained why Elsie had been substituting my date scone for a different slice of cake every morning for the past week, then standing beside the table until I’d finished it and asking me what I thought.

‘Delicious,’ I’d replied. Or ‘a little more lemon perhaps? Or ‘maybe a tad more icing?’

‘So you’re entering the cake-off then?’ I asked.

‘Am I what, luvie. I’m not having that trollop Deidre Watkins win again.’

Deidre Watkins was the reverend’s wife. A small, bird-like woman with round spectacles who liked to waltz into the café every morning and say things like Oooh, scones didn’t rise so well today, did they Elsie? Look a bit like they’ve been run over, don’t they? In other words, Deidre Watkins was a bitch. And it appeared she and Elsie were fierce rivals in the annual cake-off.

‘Why don’t you bake one too, love?’ suggested Elsie.

Bake a cake? Having only just stopped routinely burning things every time I set foot in the kitchen, I didn’t think this was such a great idea. Plus, baking was something domesticated women did. And my father of course.

‘Go on,’ she urged. ‘You can come round to my place on Friday night and we’ll do it together. It’ll be fun.’

It looked as though she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Again.

‘Won’t I need to practise?’ I asked.

‘I guess that depends on how well you want to do,’ she replied. ‘But if you just want to have a go, then Friday will be fine. If the first one’s no good then you can just bake another one! We’ll have time.’

‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘But I’m warning you, I can’t cook to save myself.’

First line dancing on a Friday night and now cake baking? What the hell has happened to me?

So, that evening I went round to Elsie’s house for a glass of wine and to select my cake recipe. I had never baked a cake before and I wasn’t entirely sure she really understood this.

But before I left the cabin I had a phone call from Mands.

‘Guess what, dolls?’ she cried. ‘We’re coming to visit you this weekend!’

‘Fabulous!’ I exclaimed, amid nasty flashbacks of their last visit.

‘Oh but…’

‘Oh but what? she asked.

‘It’s the town fair this weekend.’

‘The town what?’

‘The town fair. It happens every year. And I have to go.’

‘Sounds like a blast,’ said Mands. ‘Count us in.’

‘Okay,’ I replied, nerves suddenly rising.

The idea of Mands and Lizzie let loose at the Floodgate town fair was not a comforting vision.

As soon as I put the phone down from Mands, it rang again. It was my father, with his weekly media synopsis and usual soothing words of Don’t worry love, it’ll all be over soon. I’d told him there was no need for the updates as Mands and Lizzie were keeping me well informed, but he liked to feel as though he was part of the loop. I knew for a fact that his updates were filtered. And he never told me when they used the nose picture.

‘Your mother and I would like to come and visit you love,’ he said, wrapping up his rose-tinted rundown.

‘Great,’ I replied. I was so desperate for visitors that even this sounded like a fabulous idea.

‘How’s this weekend?’ he asked.

‘Oh…well, Mands and Lizzie are coming this weekend,’ I replied. ‘Can we make it another one?’

‘Of course, love,’ said Dad. ‘I’ll just check with your mother and get back to you with a date.’

After much deliberation and aimless searching through Elsie’s stacks of recipe books, I decided to make an orange and cream cheese cake. A slightly ambitious choice for someone who had never baked a cake before. Elsie opted for a blackberry and brandy sponge cake. To be honest I think she just wanted to get some brandy in it somehow.

‘You know what, love?’ she said, as we sat at her dining table, surrounded by recipe books. ‘I think it’s about time you had yourself some visitors.’

‘Funny you should say that,’ I replied. ‘My two best friends are coming again this weekend.’

‘Yippee!’ she cried. ‘They’ll be here for the fair.’

‘My parents were going to come too,’ I added. ‘But I’ve put them off till another time.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘No room.’

‘Hang on, love,’ she said. ‘How about your parents come and stay with Bob and me? That way you’ve got everyone here together for the weekend.’

‘Oh Elsie, that’s very kind of you but…’

‘No buts. Bob and I would love to have your parents to stay.’

And just like that I now had my two best friends and my parents converging on sleepy little Floodgate for the weekend. The thought of my mother descending on the place was enough to render me sleepless for the next three nights. She was a worse prospect than Mands. Way worse. I just hoped and prayed she would control herself, and her tongue.