Wednesday 13 June 2012

The law of unintended consequences 3


Hannah assumed she’d woken up in someone’s spare room. It was small, had a flat-pack wardrobe and flimsy spare room curtains. . The walls were in pastel lilac. There was, mercifully, no potpourri. She didn’t think her hangover could cope with potpourri; coming to in some unknown person’s spare room was tough enough.

Her clothes were neatly folded on a chair beside the bed.  She peered rather anxiously beneath the floral sheets and was relieved to see she was still wearing her knickers but disconcerted to find she was also wearing a rather prim, floral nightie. It had lace finishing at the neck. She didn’t check the hem.

Hannah tried to conjure up the events of the previous night that had brought her there. She remembered just the first two bars, and then the club. They’d switched clubs, more than once she thought, and sometime Sheila had dropped out, and then Joanna. And there’d been some guy called Rory, but he’d been seen off by an enormous... For a moment she gasped in horror but then looked around her. No huge gangsta male would have a faultlessly Ikea back-bedroom like this. It looked decidedly Born Again.

She shrugged and got up to put on her dress, leaving the awful nightie on the coverlet. She’d go downstairs, make a few apologies, find out where she was and get a cab back home. Her dress was up over her head when the door open and a huge man walked in, covered in bling and scars.

“Put your nightie back on,” he bellowed, “You supposed to look like a house mouse not a tart! They pay extra for house mice.”

The distant echo of some late night compact sounded faintly in Hannah’s back brain. That last slammer had been a slammer too many.