“Lawson!!” I yelled, as I splayed my gangly frame out on the floor of the study.
A pitiful looking figure appeared in the doorway and looked in askance at me. I ignored his insolence and enquired as to the whereabouts of my good trousers.
“They’re still hanging from the barbed wire at the rec ground. I saw them this morning as I went for the papers.”
The memories of my monstrous behaviour the previous night emerged all too quickly from the darker corners of my hung-over brain. The convoluted afternoon drinking games with Charlie and his mother in law at their flat in Hammersmith, the ‘Bachelorette Party’ we crashed in Chelsea, the stolen vintage champagne bottles used as tenpins in a quiet suburban street at 2am………………………..
The bit involving my trousers was a blank though. I half suspected Lawson was pulling my chain on this one, but I’d never known him to have a particularly waggish sense of humour, and I’d have been horrified to see him develop one at this late stage. I had consumed rather more than normal to be honest and it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if i’d staggered home in nothing but my grubby longjohns.
“Ok, what about my white tennis slacks?”
Silence.
Lawson was no longer in the doorway. Probably off dis-infecting the dis-infectant he dis-infected the toilet with only five minutes earlier.
“Even those revolting chinos you bought me…..?” I called.
Nothing.
"Some manservant you turned out to be!" I hollered with mock indignance.
I gave up, lay back and stared at the ceiling again, deciding it was best to think about things that made me happy. My cousin Emma popped into my head.
“No Freddie!, bad boy…… I muttered to myself. Definitely out of bounds. Just because Charlie was doing a tad more than lodging with his mother in law, didn’t mean I had to go down a similar route myself. Lord No! She did make me happy though, such a delightful lass, short brown hair last I saw her, a wicked smile and that ‘I dare you’ look in her eyes. She also never had a good word to say for me, which just made me all the fonder of her.
I thought of Fridays in the local boozer, suburban train rides on bright afternoons, playing chess with the cat, fishing on canal banks, washing in the park fountain last summer because one of Lawsons hideously prissy hag friends had decided to stay for a month and couldn’t stand to use the bath after I’d taken my weekly ’rinse’………………….
All these things made me feel a bit better about being hungover and ignored and trouserless and lying on a cold floor, staring at the cracks in the ceiling of a crumbling Edwardian semi in North London .
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