Читать книгу William Walker’s First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story - Matt Rudd - Страница 83

Doorbell. Then, a second later, a key in the door. Then, another second later, Arthur Arsehole and two blond people (in trouser suits even though it’s Saturday) standing in my living room. I am still lying in my living room in my clothes from yesterday. Shoes and everything. As I struggle to sit upright, I follow the trouser-suited gaze over beer cans, curry trays and other squalid bachelor detritus. From the look on their executively blond faces, it could have been tin foil, teaspoons and encrusted heroin resin. Or a leper colony.

I smile nervously.

They smile nervously.

I apologise.

They mutter no, no, noes.

Arthur Arsehole looks as furious as an estate agent can look.

The aroma of leftover madras and stale beer is not as effective a sales tool as freshly baked bread. Still, the blonds go through the motions: they point at our stainless-steel cooker hood, caress our heated towel rail and tape-measure our bedroom. Meanwhile, I struggle to tidy myself and my living room up.

It is as the church bells across the road ring a painful 10 a.m. that the shock of unexpected expected guests subsides enough for me to notice that I have a dreadful, dreadful hangover. Beer then wine, fine. Beer then whisky then beer then whisky then whisky, then beer, whisky, whisky, whisky, Drambuie, Pernod—not a chance.

The sudden onset of pain and nausea is almost unprecedented. My head throbs so alarmingly that I have to check to see if the throbbing is visible in a mirror. If I lie back on the sofa, it subsides slightly, but then comes the urge to vomit so I must sit up again. By the time the blonds return from their tour, I am considering gouging my own eyes out with the coffee spoon. As they mutter goodbyes, I stand up and try to apologise to them again. This sudden movement coincides with a full-frontal waft of Arsehole’s aftershave, and I have no option but to retch. I throw up mostly in my mouth, a tiny bit on one of the trouser suits. They leave. I throw up again.

It takes three hours to recover enough to become mobile. During this time, I develop a surprisingly ferocious self-loathing. Without Isabel, I am a sad, lonely man who gets drunk pointlessly and still plays computer games at the age of twenty-nine and thirteen-fourteenths. I eat junk food and fail to ablute properly. If I was American, I would live in an Appalachian trailer park, shout ‘Jerry, Jerry, Jerry’ at the television and cultivate maggots in the folds of my stomach.

As I lie in a foetal position, clinging desperately to the base of the toilet, I hatch an extensive plan to restore my self-respect. The minute, the very minute, that I feel better, I shall shower and change and clean the flat and go for a run and write a letter to my godmother and start reading Dickens and go out and buy a present for my sister and change the Hoover bag and stick the bit that’s fallen off my backgammon board back on.