I sometimes wonder how many more surprises this world has in store for me and why it is that at my great age I have not yet experienced them all by now.
The other day another googly came looping towards me. My wife Kitty woke up angry at me for something that had not happened and she knew it, and yet….
She apparently had an unsettling dream wherein I was the star villain. I was caught in flagrante delicto with several women from a low-rent massage parlour. In this imaginary story I turned down all my wife’s entreaties to leave the appalling premises and just stared at her with, as she says, a smarmy grin.
This was too much for my very sensitive Kitty, so she woke me with a blow to my innocent temple area. I at that moment was having a wonderful dream about my years at camp, when having won the diving championship for the eight and unders, basically for not having drowned after an enthusiastic belly-flop, I was about to be handed a medal by the owner’s wife, with whom I was deeply in love as only an eight-year-old boy can be.
Suddenly my ephemeral world exploded with red fireworks and deeply felt pain. I opened one eye to judge the surroundings, as one must be careful under these sort of circumstances, and saw Kitty’s bejewelled hand rising to strike me again.
“Ho!” I said and I put some mustard on it, as it was not yet nine bells and I was about to be struck a second time. It is one thing if over the eggs and bacon your companion takes exception to something you have done followed by the inevitable consequences, but before the orange juice is uncivilized.
Then my old girl burst into tears. Now I ask my loyal readers, what was I to do, as I had no idea what was going on. One moment the engaging Mrs. Buoy was handing over the silverware for a diving contest, the next I was given a thrombosis, and now my wife of some 50 years was crying over I knew not what. When I enquired about it all, she simply said I was a beast of the first order and needed to be flogged at the earliest opportunity by her dear late father. The room swam before my eyes as I rubbed my bruise.
I recall another occasion when I was the innocent party to an enormous injustice. It happened at a tea dance at my old school, Ridley. A tea dance was a late afternoon party where our headmaster invited the headmistress of a girls’ college to have her habituées join his boys. These were much-looked-forward-to events in our miserable existence.
I was desperate to put my case across to the first girl I found concerning a possible charity kiss, especially if she did not have so much acne that I could not tell if she had a moustache or not. After a few minutes of eyeballing the frightened female inmates, I feinted towards a chinless blonde but pulled up short at a pug-nosed redhead with glasses who was my real target as she seemed hard up and perhaps open to the Smythe-Brown charm.
Just then some thug (Turner minor) spilled purple punch down the front of my future kisser’s dress, which sent her into a blind fury. I stepped forward to be of assistance, the white knight as it were, and helpfully started rubbing her décolleté with my school handkerchief.
For my trouble she kneed me firmly in my hopeful groin, causing all forward motion to reverse itself. As I sat on the gym floor with my mouth open in astonishment, I asked myself through my pain if someone had done that to Gandhi as he helped his millions of followers and had he rolled around on a wooden floor wailing about the outrage of it all? Possibly but I could not recall it from my history class. The dance was over for me as I retired to my dorm in a King Lear frame of mind. I limped for days after.
Kitty finally told me her dream about my supposed habit of frequenting massage parlours in the company of unsavoury women, looking for a “happy ending,” as they say. I suggested to her that in future after having a nightmare of this sort perhaps she might ask me about my predilections before coming to blows. I demanded redress as I was struck for no reason and so far had not heard any apology on her part.
This is where it got tricky, for she said it was a back-handed compliment since it proved how much she cared for me. If she did not give “two hoots,” she would not have brained me so vigorously in the first place.
No more proof of her love was necessary in her mind, except a small hand squeeze, which she did on her way to feeding the now pressing cats, Pericles and Bertram.
Marriage remains a mystery, but I love her.
Copyright Christopher Dalton
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