Alan Sugar

By Kay Richardson

I’m always breaking eggs on the bus back from the supermarket. Eggs that are brought home only to be broken. The irony doesn’t help clean up the yolky mess. The irony doesn’t help placate the bus driver who’s shouting about his eggy bus.

At home:

“Would you like soldiers?” you cry. “Would you like some Sunny D?”
  
On the bus:

“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I’ll pay for more tickets or something, sir.”

People break eggs (at home) for breakfast. Very seldom are they used for cakes. Cakes are made by huge Supermarkets and frozen for our convenience. We do not have time to make cakes unless we are bored housewives. Very few of us are bored housewives. I am not a bored housewife. I am a highly respected IT developer.

I cried when I last broke breakfast eggs. I cried because I knew that the breakfast and egg-making meant that the best evening of my life had finished. The breakfast was like the full stop at the end of the sentence. The sex sentence.

I put the spatula to one side and wiped away the tears with my shirt. It stank of the previous night – stale beer, caustic fags and somebody else’s aftershave. This made me even more upset – I prefer my shirts to smell of washing powder.

“Would you like soldiers?” I cried at the woman’s back. “Would you like some Sunny D?”

The woman didn’t turn from the kitchen window. She shook her head. A black wig perched upon it like a witch’s familiar. I knew it was a wig, and not a tragic haircut, because I saw her put it on. She’d done that in my bedroom. She’d also allowed me to watch her dress. I had been half-eyed, wondering suspiciously.

As her arms bent unnaturally behind her to zip up the dress’s back, she’d told me that I was ‘a dream lover’ and not to ask any further questions.

I hadn’t yet asked any questions.

I scratched the hair on my stomach with contentment.

She told me to make breakfast, but to ensure that I washed my hands beforehand.

Tall, she was. And angular. Like the letter ‘k’.

I did what I was told. Sometimes I enjoy following instructions. Hands were washed, eggs were scrambled.

“Serve them upon a white plate,” she purred, facing the window still. “I’ll take three quarters of the eggs.”

She ate standing, with her hands. The eggs were pan-hot. She didn’t flinch. I thought better than to comment on her lack of manners. One shouldn’t eat scrambled eggs without cutlery.

The eggs tasted of strength and milk.

“Where are your keys?”
 
I pointed through the open door to my chinos, lying still in the centre of the lounge floor, a proud stain of last night’s lovemaking.

“Trousers?” she asked.

I explained the keys would be in the back pocket, where I always kept them.

A sharp, mechanical, inhale of air, and she swept her long left arm to take the cream trousers from the floor in the manner of a horse-mounted cowboy picking up a calf from the dusty prairie floor. The keys were extracted by her spider-like fingers, the jeans were abandoned and I was told not to leave the flat, that she’d be back very soon.

I stood unmoving until her footsteps faded in exterior hall. Decision made that she had definitely left, I sprinted to my bedroom, dived upon bed and shot hands to top of bedside table. There they fell upon their target – my phone.

I’d missed six calls. Eight text messages sat unread. I didn’t open them; no need – I knew what they’d all say. Instead, I expertly traversed the menus to create a new message:

I HAVE HAD THE MOST AMAZING WOMAN. YOU WILL ALL BE SOOOO JEALOUS.

“Give me that.”

Her voice boomed from hall. I craned my neck. She stood (halfway down the hallway) like Lara Croft. Her shoulders were thrown back, projecting bosom towards my eyes. Her right hand held a large, albeit thin, suitcase – a suitcase I hadn’t seen before.

I smiled. She repeated her order. I threw the phone towards her.

She would find the message. And her morning frost would surely melt upon reading such a complimentary communication.

Her left arm darted skywards and plucked the telephone from the air. With a flick of her wrist, it had disappeared into her back trouser pocket.

Slowly, she began to move towards the bedroom. The pace of her walk and the metal of her stare were in no way sexual. This was in marked contrast to the previous night.

Where there was once erotic intent, there was now steel threat. I edged away, across bed. She came to a sudden stop at the threshold of the room. Her left arm moved quickly to the door handle, and with a blur of motion, I was shut in my bedroom, quivering at a closed door.

What was going on? I had read on the internet of women who enjoyed ‘role play’. Was this was it was? Should I join in and act all freaky?

It seemed too good to be true. Perhaps there was more sex to be had. Perhaps this was what happened every morning-after? I was unsure, but such doubts didn’t prevent a stirring of penis under boxer. I tried to recall exactly how I had come to sleep with this sexy eccentric.

The night previous, I arrived at 2000 in my corner of Lee Wetherspoons. It had been the fourth successive night of meeting with Clive at 2000 in my corner of the Lee Wetherspoons. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday had passed like any other night in my corner of the Lee Wetherspoons. Clive and I would talk (largely about Formula One), we would drink (not to excess – four/five pints) and we would tread home, alone, to sleep.

Not Thursday, though. I arrived at 2002 and Clive wasn’t there. There was only a space where he should have been sipping. This was unusual for Clive. He always placed greater emphasis on good timekeeping than even personal hygiene (of which he placed little emphasis).

I ordered a Mild, and sat in the corner alone.

I noticed her shadow fall across the beer. I looked up and gulped.

Staring down at me was the most beautiful face I had ever seen in the Lee Wetherspoons. Her features were perfect, as if sketched on CorelDraw. I couldn’t have imagined a woman that I would find more attractive. She even wore a mole underneath her left eye – something I’ve always thought sexy. Her skin was flawless and seemed to throw off a dull yellow, light.

“What is your name?” she said. I told her, voice faltering with embarrassment. “Good,” she said and looked over her shoulder. “Your friend Clive said he could not arrive.”

And before I could quiz her further, she was sitting in Clive’s seat and we were kissing. Time hadn’t even reached half eight before we were back in the flat and I was hunting for a clean duvet and finding one and I was having sex with her on the clean duvet.

And so I found myself closed in bedroom with a ‘role-play’ playing stunner.

The me of yesterday might not have left the bedroom. I would have assumed that she didn’t like me after all and the sex had been some kind of mean trick. But, and I remember it clearly, in the middle of the night she had told me that ‘I was a superlative performer’ and asked if I had enjoyed sex on many occasions in the past. I told her that I had, of course.

The morning-after saw me newly invested with confidence, however. I did leave the room, quietly, playing along with her mock-violent threat making and icy stares and strangeness with my mobile and sudden large suitcase.

I crept along the hallway and I turned into the lounge on my tiptoes.

The image that I was met with will be forever burnt into my memory.

There she was, not waiting for me. She was crouched upon one knee at the unopened until now opened lounge window. Last night’s dress was pulled tightly across her perfect bottom. The suitcase lay empty at her feet. Her breasts moved up and down with her taking of breath. And in her arms proudly was a rifle. Pushed up against right shoulder, barrel resting in right hand, left hand tightly gripped around stock and trigger. I know my weaponry. This was no gun I had ever seen. This was no gun that existed. The whole weapon throbbed with a neon pink energy for a start. Guns shouldn’t throb with neon pink energy.

Her head remained above the rifle’s barrel. She must have been searching through the sights.

Kay Richardson demands that you visit this place (apparently): http://devonboy.blogspot.com