Wuthering Dormice (aka Bike) Part 812 by Angharad

I was asleep when Simon came to bed smelling of whisky and cigar smoke–I know because the twit woke me up. He was ever so slightly pissed, how do I know? He couldn’t get his pyjamas on. Why? He got both his legs stuck in one leg of the pyjama pants.

Half asleep, I had to get out of bed and pull his pyjamas off and guide his legs in or the first time he needed to go to the loo, he’d have woken me up. Essentially, Simon prefers beer or lager to spirits, but if they’re giving the latter away, he’ll drink his share–then fall over. Tom, who’s drunk whisky all his life, can usually cost you a lot of money before he falls over, so you usually give up first. In complete contrast, wave the cork around and I’ll fall over just from the smell of it–I have minimal tolerance of alcohol, and so does my body.

Simon thought getting stuck in his pyjamas was the funniest thing ever. Mind you this from the man who thought a dormouse disappearing down the front of my blouse was the previous funniest thing ever. I don’t wish to appear judgemental, but I think judging mental was about right–his behaviour was mental.

“Ha ha, I can’t move, Cathy Babesh, you’ll have to–ha ha–help me, oh thish ish sho funny.”

“Funny, you call it funny to be woken up by some inebriated moron, who’s too stupid or drunk to undress himself?”

“Absholutely! Ha ha.”

“Well I bloody well don’t. I’ve got a good mind to leave you like that–all bloody night.”

“Ha ha,” he thought that was funny too. Actually, I felt like shoving him downstairs like that, see if hitting every one of them on the way down would sober him up. Of course the angrier I got the more awake I became. And the inevitable happened, he eventually fell into an alcoholic stupor and slept all night whereas I was wide awake and slept very little.

“Gee bloody whiz, Simon, it’s three o’bloody clock. What have you been doing apart from drinking?”

“I love you,” he slurred at me, “gi’sh a kish.”

“No way, you drunken skunken, you smell like an old ashtray someone’s tipped half a bottle of Scotch into.”

He just laughed, I think his brain was stuck in giggle mode and I felt like slapping him to see if it would cause the needle to jump onto a more useful track. I didn’t because the way I felt, I might have knocked his head clean off his shoulders and I couldn’t face cleaning up the blood tonight.

“I’ve been doin’ bushinesh,” he beamed.

“What emptying a distillery?”

“No, that wash to schebrelate the bushnesh.” His slurring got worse and I knew I had five minutes to get him into the bathroom and back to bed before he became comatose until the morning–unless he’s been on beer and then he’d need to get up to wee several times, usually waking me in the process. Then he’ll tell me I’m not sleeping enough!

I’m sure if I did kill him, I could claim provocation–‘No, me lud, he didn’t beat me up, he just kept waking me up. Sleep deprivation and MI5 just got to me and I lost it.’ Any judge worth his salt should be able to agree with that. Lack of sleep does all sorts of silly things to one–this one at any rate, and irritability verging on homicidal is one of them. To put it in context, it makes PMS look like a stroll in the park. Bear with a sore head? Yep, like half a ton of very pissed-off grizzly–now you get the picture. I knew I’d be good at wildlife analogies, it simply needed the most appropriate one–I mean an irritable dormouse? A worked up weasel or spiteful shrew? That’s a laugh. A shrew is Britain’s smallest mammal, it spends practically all its waking life eating or looking for food–it eats things like insects and worms–invertebrates. It has too to fuel its frantic existence. I remember when I was a kid reading some suggestion that a heart only has so many beats in it and therefore a pigmy shrew, whose heart beats hundreds of times a minute has the same cumulative number of heartbeats as an elephant which has a relatively slow beat, over the course of a life time. A comparison of a life counted in weeks against one which can reach fifty or more years. The bigger the animal, the slower the metabolism and consequently, the slower the heart.

Aren’t biologists wonderful–better than drunken w...no...I mean bankers. Biologists get to explore all parts of the globe studying its life forms–then I suppose, bankers do too. I mean some of the funny place names–I came across one recently, can you believe Wauwatosa actually exists, I found it on a map. I can’t believe they’ve got banks there, because let’s face it, with a name like that you’d think they were still waiting to invent money there, wouldn’t you? I expect it’s some trading post kind of place where the Indians or Eskimos trade in a few Sarah Palin skins for a few beads or an I-pod, or some other bagatelle.

I lay there listening to Simon snore or snort, I do believe he was still giggling in his sleep–what about, for God’s sake? He’s a banker, he doesn’t have enough cognitive functions to process humour. Then again, we had a cat who appeared to laugh, so maybe it’s some form of alcoholic rictus, with a repetitive wheeze which just sounds like a laugh.

Whatever it is, it’s driving me nuts. After another hour of wakeful anger, I rose and went into sleep with the girls, who were in a room off ours. I clambered in with Meems, who opened her eyes, smiled and went straight back to sleep.

Can you believe that when we woke up, I made as much noise as possible because Simon groaned that he had a head-ache. He wasn’t used to drinking these days, since his incident with the paracetamol, his liver didn’t enjoy it one bit–not that I’m one to boast, except my liver recovered better than his, and I can use the tablets and drink if I want to, most of the time I don’t–I don’t particularly like the stuff.

He can’t prove it was my idea for the girls to go and jump on him, nothing was written down, honest. However, once Meems landed on his full bladder, he had to get up use the loo.

“You’re a cruel woman,” he accused me over breakfast.

“Hard-hearted Hannah, that’s me.”

“I was working,” he insisted again.

“Yeah sure,” I replied sarkily, tucking into my bacon and eggs–I didn’t really want it, but it annoyed him to sit and watch me eat it, while he stared occasionally into the cup of black coffee in front of him.

“I was, we cut a deal with the government.”

“How can you deal with a government who’s bankrupt?”

“No they’re not, not now anyway, I helped to show them how they could wrap some of the negatives in more positive ways.”

“Don’t tell me, disguising things like toxic assets into more marketable commodities?”

“Were you eavesdropping?”

“No I wasn’t, but forgive me, isn’t this what caused the crisis in the first place?”

“Um–not really, that was sub-prime mortgages.”

“It was the Yanks selling us all those toxic debts.”

“That’s a very simplistic view of things, Cathy,” he groaned and held his head.

“Yeah, but if you lot had been a bit more simple in your approaches, or perhaps I should say, honest, this crisis wouldn’t have arisen. Let’s face it, crap is still crap no matter how you package it.”

“Cathy–ooh my head–how can you eat that stuff?”

“It’s lovely, here have a sausage, here you can dip in my lovely runny egg. Simon–Simon where are you going?”