The Grand Mothers Tale
 

CHAPTER TWO

 
"...........truth being stranger than fiction- I prefer my men to actually be hurt-it brings out a better performance than if they were merely acting hurt"
 
Diana, aged 48  drama teacher and lifecoach
 
 
It's obvious from Romeo's decorum that he is rather the worse for alcohol , if not for wear.
Three sheets to the wind in my opinion. It's rather convenient that he's lying in the footwell between the four taxi seats in a position where I can get near maximum velocity into my kicks and stamps.
All designers have their price and for what I paid Jimmy Choo, Jimmy was more than happy to give me real stilletto's in my stiletto heels.
 
My stiletto heels are real stiletto heels; Romeo is spending his time in the footwell firstly between attempting to kiss my ankles in supplication, then receiving my murderous ministrations followed by covering his hands over the blood that has appeared so disbelievingly to him on his hands and neck. I continue to kick him brutally.He realizes my heavy artillery is in the stillettoes of my shoes and so is almost grateful to receive the kicks rather than the heels. I think he's learned his lesson now and is sitting docilely dry eyed but wet nosed rather like a sick puppy as he realizes that he may have bitten off more than he can chew.
The experience has sobered him up. He searches my face for signs of mercy and as it is important and pertinent to my plans I give him one; a sign that is. Curling my lips upward in a smile takes some effort as he is a somewhat befuddled bloodied Romeo now and the lurches in the taxi each time we change direction has left him looking rather undignified and somewhat perturbed.
 
Still -enough about him. What about me? I'm fine, thanks for asking Dear Gentle Reader, and on course for the showdown with that spawn of the devil that I gave birth to twenty something summers ago.
 
For amusement, I try to dredge up some empathy. But I can't. I try telling myself that I must, as there may be some day when shedding a compassionate tear might be the difference between success and failure of my bold enterprise, but try as I might compassion will not be mine. Then I realize that I've chipped a nail pulling my big stupid Romeo into a better kicking position and as I look into my damaged nail (It's not entirely chipped, a little filing to one side and a re-application of some nail varnish might even disguise the damage completely but even so) a huge wave of sympathy for myself washes over me and my tears flow freely.
 
I have enormous depths of compassion and empathy for myself, Dear reader.
 
He's relieved as I divert my attention from him, to me. I am an expert at repairing my visage and set about doing just that with gusto. I also silently congratulate myself on my foresight to buy tear proof mascara.
 
I catch the taxi driver's unseeing eye in the mirror and know without asking that although he's seen everything he's not seen a thing. He's not seen worse several times before ever -your honour-in fact he wasn't even there at the time. This all seeing never knowing ensures him a paper money gratuity as we exit the cab some ten minutes later.
 
I'm radiant, my make up armour repaired and the façade back in place. I'm voluptuous and erudite, my polished heels click clacking redly and wetly, although it's not raining on these Knightsbridge cobbled streets. For some inexplicable reason my companion is awkward with me and uncommunicative. He doesn't seem at all grateful to me that I've settled the taxi fare and even given our driver a hugely generous tip for no good reason at all. Where is gallantry these days? Surely Romeo should have paid. Believe me - he will later. Men are so fickle. I hold his hand and the look on his face signifies pain and revulsion. To my mind it's me that should be upset; I'm £33.50 out of pocket and have a potentially damaged and chipped nail. Try as he might, he can't extract his hand from my grip.
Fashion Tip Alert Ladies - when holding the hand of a man that's annoyed or disappointed you (that's generally all men-all men all the bloody time eh?) do hold their open palms with your nails; then the harder they try to remove their hand the deeper your nails embed. Practise with an orange at home -it works. Now I know that you wouldn't think I'm capable of sadism but believe it or not I even practice sometimes myself with a blood orange ha hah. 
 
Enough musings. It's late so there is little chance of raising the Commissionaire to answer the door at Casssie's block of luxury apartments. This is where Romeo needs his first impromptu acting lesson.
 
From the depths of my bag I bring out a beauty. Here's one I've prepared earlier. It is a whole Kona Sugarloaf pineapple (more slender than it's African counterpart the Natal Queen, and the leaf spline cluster is longer). Now this one is especially entarred and weighs the requisite 2.3 kilos with a spline handle un-entarred for greater grip. One uses it as a mace or as a stick grenade. I punch random entry-phone buttons mindful of avoiding 103 which is Cassies penthouse. Romeo unwisely meets the pineapple mace with his sorry head. His forehead definitely makes contact and my version of events is that he fell on it three times. The tarmacaddam has grazed him and left grey black streaks on his face and in his hair. Looking at him now I wonder how I ever found him remotely attractive. Still, he has nice teeth and I've deliberately let them stay that way up to now.
 
My nails go deeper into his palm and produce the desired effect. Precisely what I want , he is moaning his sorrow, babbling foreign speak into the microphone of the entry door system and several electric surges from bemused and sympathetic listeners within enable the door open and grant us entrance. There is a fine line between pain overload and unconsciousness and I do not want him blacked out. That would be no good at all- just yet. In the lift I study my perfect reflection looking for faults and imperfections but try as I might I find none. I spare Romeo a glance and see a mixture of expressions on his face. Mistrust seems uppermost, the most overriding, closely followed by confusion with pain third on the list. He's probably wondering how much worse this can get for him. Not much longer now - he's going to find that out.
 
Out at 16, we wouldn't want to take the lift all the way to 17 Cassies floor. Her CCTV screen camera is activated by the lift door opening, but Cassie being Cassie hasn't set up the stairwell door that way.

So here I am leading my obedient damaged Romeo up the plushly carpeted wide high stairwell that you could drive a car up with its spacious low gradient -seems like it takes forever but we're here.

Leaning on Cassies unsuspecting plank of expensive oak door. The door is unfurnished, just a slab of the best English Oak that money can buy, unvarnished, unadorned, just Oak. Shame to spoil it. But before I can stop myself the encrusted pineapple swings in an arc to Romeo's face missing his expensive dental work, my iron grip turning him into the blow and my mace of a fruit ricocheting from him to the door.
He slumps unconscious, blood dripping to the velour of the carpet and seeping claret under my daughters door. I extricate my hand by opening his palm and turning the fingers back on themselves away from me until my nails emerge from his bloodless palm. That must have hurt.
 
It's a full minute ( I time it) before he regains his senses. From the depth of my bag I've produced my mobile telephone , withholding my identity I dial Cassies number t till I hear her answer before handing the phone to the beleaguered Romeo at my feet. I whisper, almost lovingly in his ear, "the ambulance womans name is Cassie,  Cassie - you've been in an accident, tell her you're at the Oak Door"
 
Cassie, he moans , je vous en prix , un accident terrible, j'ai un mal du tete plus grand, au secours immediatement I am  an Oak Door, ma man damage vite, vite Cassie j'tu implore Cassie.
 
We're almost inside the Citadel , dear Reader. And then we're in. Quicker than you can say Stella McCartney sucks as a designer. Chez Cassie swings open to reveal my daughter wearing the ugliest shoes you can imagine. I calculate the price - £11.99 tops/ wholesale £0.35 -some little Bangladeshi stitching 150,000 pairs  by hand each day for a few pesos and a bowl of noodles - believe me. Russell and Bromley fake leatherette tartan plaid lined  slippers January 2000 sale of what didn't sell for Xmas 1999. Not even Knightsbridge branch, Fulham at best. Wonder if she purchased them with her family credits ho ho.
 
Stepping over the supine Romeo, I force Cassie back physically over her threshold taking full advantage of her shock and weightlessness. With my heel I flick the heavy door shut and can just make out the re-assuring sound of bone breaking as it connects with Romeo.
 
I fight back the instinct to berate Cassie about her lack of taste in footwear and instead savour my triumph as she gives me that "rabbit transfixed in the oncoming car headlamp" stare.
 
"Cassie, " I resume "I will have my say and you will hear me out !
 
I slept with your husband for you. Not for me. It was never for me. How could you say that?
 
What's up girl - cat got your tongue?
 
Not so clever now. Are you?"
 
Momentarily, I'm disappointed that there's not more fight in the girl. She's a poor clone of me. I sometimes wonder if I brought the correct child home from the hospital. It's an easily made mistake - isn't it? Dear gentle reader. It's not like they can tell you at the time, ha hah and lets' face it -they all look the bloody same-if you can be arsed to look. 
 
And in lots of ways she is a stranger to me, brought up in boarding schools and by Nannies when she was home for the holidays. It makes my blood boil, all the expensive love I've showered on this girl, she's never wanted for anything. Even when my holidays co-incided at times unfortunately with hers  - so that we were on opposite sides of the globe rather than together, I still cared. Listen , I phoned home and I never ever forgot to ask about her. Even when I was busy I still cared because that is the self sacrificing mother I am. Even if I had to queue for the telephone at the ski lodge in Aspen or wait hours till the monsoon winds allowed me a connection from Mauritius or the Seychelles I always telephoned. Sometimes I had to wait agonizing hours before the waiter would seek me out by the pool or my beach cabana to bring me the telephone but does Cassie appreciate it. Nosirree - she does not . I sent her to the very best Swiss finishing school where probably all she learned in the four years there was how to give a blow job extraordinaire. Furthermore, my personal shopper service has never missed sending her a card and an appropriate gift of their choosing on every one of her birthdays - and yet she has the gall to call me uncaring.
 
"Cassie, sit down". I tell her. She sits obediently like a mindless robot. I take a seat opposite her on my one of the pair of matching soft white leather recliner- action sofas and count slowly to twenty while she sobs into a snotty tear sodden scrap of tissue paper she's pulled from up her sleeve. Has the girl got no self respect. Studying her, there are dark rings around her reddened eyes and she has the most unattractive beginnings of frown and worry lines upon her inferior copy of my perfect face.
 
I resist the urge to catalogue the sofa's (£799 world of leather, buy one -get one free. Hurry while stocks last, advertised by ageing past it DJ Alan "fluff" Freeman*. It's not the sofa you're buying, you tiny fools - it's the money on finance - you idiots. Nothing to pay till 2006 and then the whole bloody lot at godzillion per cent so you're grandchildren are still picking up the installments evermore till they're  old and grey and even then it won't be settled because the clever penalty clause you didn't read will ensure there's something you missed.)
 
I don't even mentally price the glass and chrome monstrosity of a table that separates our sitting sofas like its a huge glass lake: IKEA Brent Cross £356.70 - why do the Swedes do sums ending with 70 pence. Is it part of their foul masterplan to pineclad the Western world - I don't know. Why cant they do a price, something .99  like everyone else.
.
Talking of Swedes, that Sven Goran Erikson, the thinking womans totty or what? he could have me over my kitchen table swinging from the light-shade with green ostrich feathers sticking out of his bottom hole, me covered with marmite, flight of the bumblebee playing in the background........................... .
 
I digress.
 
Apologies. When you're in a room this vulgar your thoughts start to wander. I'd like to shake some taste and artistic appreciation into Cassie but that's not why I'm here.
"You're not going to like this Cassie but I'm pregnant, pregnant with your husbands child. You mustn't blame yourself though Cassie . (My inner dialogue- You mustn't blame yourself though Cassie -let me do that , I'm good at it, very good  ha ha)
Mark, your husband, confided in me that you were rather naïve and gauche between the sheets but it wasn't that which compelled him to look elsewhere for affection. It's so important that couples communicate Cassie and I think this is where you let him down. This may sound harsh Cassie but you were never in the starting line up for " Brain of Britain". Were you?  Some men , particularly powerful international movers and shakers like your husband can't abide a wittering woman wittering on about the things that only she finds interesting, and that's you isn't it Cassie? Perhaps you could try, try harder to be a little bit more like me and to take other peoples feelings into consideration, not put yourself  first all the time."
No answer but interestingly she's started to drool, thick white spittle out of the corner of her mouth. It's sticky and doesn't flow. I watch in fascination  for quite some time. As a child I was fascinated by  circus jugglers, laughing particularly loud and showing my appreciation best when they miscalculated their grasp on the flaming skittles and grabbed the fiery end. Their muffled curses usually sent me into fits of laughter. Disappointingly Cassie doesn't seem to have any more tricks in her repertoire, just this drooling. I'm about to register my disappointment at her inability to keep her end up of this conversation.
Lord knows, I enjoy a monologue as much as the next god fearing virtuous woman but Cassie, this just ain't fun. Then I  realize why Cassie's so out of it. On the IKEA excuse for a table, glass is just so tacky ,don't you think,  there are the two opened bottles of pills that she's been helping herself to. Interesting combination methinks, reading the label, Quaalude and Seconal, uppers and downers. Blinking flip Cassie -can't you even get that right- the one canceling out the other. Bit like a dog breeder crossing Lassie the TV collie with a rottweiler-you get a dog that bites your arm off -then goes for help , ha hah.
 
Time for some calculations now -and we're not talking about calculating money for once. Concentrate with me. I might need you to confirm back to me some of my matriculations.
Assuming both bottles were full to start with. I count carefully, averting my gaze from the offensive IKEA table (was it home assembly-if so, someone's forgotten to put the washers under one of the screws)
36 Q's and 60 Hypoboles (the Seconal) were in the bottles, so by my reckoning she's taken 14 of the Quaalude and just 9 , because there were 51 left, of the downers, the Seconals.
And she's been taking them steadily for say the past 2 hours and forty minutes co-inciding with a certain phone call. Therefore 14 times 20 milligrammes up, minus 9 by 30 mill down and assuming only half active at this stage , time exposure 160 minutes , so lets' say 80 minutes on full power, gas turned up to 200 degrees, Cassies body weight 143 lbs (65 kilos) and a slow processing metabolism she has (although curious to say her periods are irregular) and assuming I phone for the ambulance now (which I'm not going to do just yet - Dear Gentle Reader) then she is in no immediate danger of dying. Her pulse rate just slightly over normal and her eyes show signs of life as I pull the lid back. This is a cry for help. If she'd really wanted to end it all she would have managed that with 32 Quaaludes only, but like I said before on many occasions my Cassie .....  what a technician, as much use as non-stick glue. More's the pity she's not going for the big D , but as Saddam Hussein once said-"you cant have everything" -or was it YassarArafat? 
 
No ambulance will be calling at this home until my brilliant end game is well under way and I can feel the delicious bubbling surge within me as it all starts to come together. Right on cue Romeo slithers in to view -one of his legs is at a crazy painful angle to his body , almost as if a huge heavy door had all but spring snapped shut on him. His eyes are filled with pain and registering everything, but I'm sure that his brain is struggling and failing to take in the scene. I loom large over Cassie, dip in my bag for the Pineapple and holding the impossible to fingerprint from dry green splines  I place the fruit into Cassies unprotected midriff hard, she projectiles her white drool in a perfect arc, at first waist high, then rising , then falling onto Mediterranean matey blinding him, a perfect gob shot. I am ecstatic. Right first time  but then that's me so often , isn't it?
 
I walk into Cassies room, donning my chic black kid leather Gucci gloves and enter Cassies offset en suite dressing room to inspect her gaudy collection of unappealing clothes and chattels. Only my hand me downs (strangely bagged off in hangers-away from all the others at the far end off the rail - she must really like them too -mustn't she? Hence their special placement) find favour with me.
 
It's her footwear that I must find. My quest is to establish if those slippers that my daughter was wearing were the best right choice, and as I cast my eyes over the sorry motley mishmash of footwear jumbled  in confusion at the floor of her wardrobe I am saddened and disheartened to report back to you. Yes I have learned that  those slippers on her feet  were no worse than anything else she possessed.
 
I leave the scene of mayhem, Romeo blacking in and out of inarticulate consciousness. I search briefly within my carry-all and bring out a police issue DNA tracker swab. Very handy. Without unbuckling Romeo's belt I push the swab deep into the recesses of his underpants and strike gold. Fashion tip-men get off on pain. A coroner I know regales me with stories of men that have met an untimely painful end and have the hugest blood filled erectile crests in their undergarments as they pass from this world into the next. Not only that but they ejaculate too, it makes sense, they enjoy watching WWF wrestling on TV, hanker for Lesbian mud wrestling. They also ejaculate and that's what I'm after.  I proceed to further my lucky dip and  pull up strings of  wetly drying white stuff which is most certainly not Cassies vomit. Her vomit is cloyingly attached to his face and hair. When I have enough collected I repeat the exercise but this time transferring the gloopy semen on the giant cotton bud into my own daughters body cavity and surrounds. I think you know just where I mean, Dear Gentle Reader.
 
I exit as quietly as I arrived and I am back in the street. From the first public call box, no, actually it was the  second (you see Dear Gentle Reader, the first public telephone box I almost entered did smell very slightly offensively of urine), I make the important life saving calls.The first one is to my astrologist service to see what the heavens have in store for me over the next seven days. £1.50 a minute but well worth it, they're very good -you know, you get a personal reading and it's very often spot on. For example one time I was told that I would be going on a journey and meet a tall dark handsome man. How could they know that I'd booked a South American cruise with a most delicious stud of a young footballer that very day using his double platinum credit card, I get my 7 and a half minute fix of personalized astrology and hang up, bemused at the fact that apparently my best friend has a secret that they want to tell me. I don't have friends-you see, let alone a best friend and why would they want to tell me and why would I want to know their secret? Beats the shit out of me. I then go on to make the other calls.
My next calls, factual and abrupt, no name, no pack drill are to the police, ambulance and fire brigade in that order. Although I give the police slightly the wrong address and there is no need actually for the Fire Brigade but why pass up a free call, eh?
 
The happiness of a job well done, an exercise completed with merit fills my soul and there is a lightness in my step as I hail a passing taxi. Looking at my Cartier diamond encrusted timepiece I note it's gone 2 in the morning. Dear Gentle Readers - thank you for your company , but I bid you fast away to your beds. You need your beauty sleep far more than I do. A last thought - I would personally pay a substantial premium to be able to sit in a London cab that had clean seats. I place my carry all bag under my bottom and perch precariously upon it for the journey home.
Honestly, the things a girl has to do.      
 
 
 
* had him-nothing to write home about -wouldn't go down on me-I seem to recall.