[Extract] If you could count that small, forever
3. SHE PUT IT ON, BUT IT WASN'T LIT
I'd just nipped out for a waz. Get back and Anna says, "I'm not sure the oven's on."
I says, "We've got nowt to put in it."
She says, "I put it on, but I'm not sure it's lit."
"You've got summat to put in?"
I open the oven. It isn't
lit.
I smell the gas before I light the match. I say, "You've put it on but
it isn't lit."
I light the match. It is.
It's not so bad, skin feels too tight and you want to rustle the hair-stubs on your ears. You want to run water on but sometime you're gonna have stop, so you may as well get used to it without. Maybe.
Hair. Pullover. Don't know which smell's which.
And then I want to laugh, and tell Anna how the blue cloud looked, and how I watched flame coming, how first you think it's the edges that look pencilled in that are coming at you faster, then you know it's the middle that is, and how I turned away, then waited to see if I was on fire.
And she says, "I put it on. I didn't know if it lit."
4. TOFFEE FUDGE ICE CREAM
I says, "There's something in the fridge. Toffee-fudge ice cream."
She says "Coffee fudge ice cream?" and comes and digs strawberries out of the 'berg in the freezer-box.
"No, toffee fudge ice cream." I wrap my tongue round the strawberries, to make the toffee taste caramel and metally.
I says, "Mmm strawberries."
She says, "They're raspberries."
She gets a whole load of the ice cream and kisses a lump into my mouth, then we slap at it, her hair flapping in my face and cum like we reach a little shelf on a cliff, and hold hard like we've got to sleep up there. I thought, her being with Phil so long, she didn't fancy girls.
And I says to her, "What's your name then?"
She says like Katia the Russian Gladiator, "I bite your nose." and she does.
5. THE TELLY'S BUST
This place has one of those showers you switch on and get hot straight away, make a bath, playing the shower underwater on my legs, then like a mike, singing, but not so as Anna can hear. Funny, last night, slapping it and after, I didn't get that hair/pullover smell. Now, I'm in the bath it stenches.
Anna finds tins of sardines. Have them with mint jelly. Home made. Looking at the pinboard in the kitchen I reckon they's posh gits as own this place, with kids called Dylan and Isis.
Play their game all day, 'coz the telly's bust, the game where you make words out of Plasticine.
I do little round bits like tabs, and a bottle, Anna goes, "Eggs? Chicken? Easter? Breakfast!" and I neck the bottle and she goes, "Rat-arsed! Whiskey? Beers!" And I pick up the blobs and put them in my mouth and she's "Headache? Aspirin? Tabs? Pills." And me drinking and popping and waving her with my hands through, "Pills...pills...pills" me nodding "pills...headache" me shaking, squeezing my fingers tighter tighter "pills...pills...Pils!"
6. HOME MADE
Later, Anna finds a bottle of sloe gin.
Home made.
Later after lots of plasteceine words, Anna makes a dick and I say "Phil."
I make a wig and she says "Phil" then weeps a bit.
7. THE SUN IS JUST GAS
When it's dark we sit in the kitchen in front of the oven. Roll up our pullovers. Anna finds some coconut oil in the bathroom and we sunbathe our stomachs. Then go topless.
Have a slap down against the cabinets. She won't let my jeans off.
Afterwards, my forehead down on her, nosing in how wet she is, think how her lump there, is a forehead too.
She's sitting back against the cabinets looking in the oven and says, "Amazing that the sun, you know, if you had a glove enough, it's just gas, you could poke your finger through."
8. ISIS NOT IRIS
We're having sardines for breakfast in the kitchen, so we have to answer. Anna
say tells the geezer selling poppies we're friends of Iris.
She comes back in and I says, "Isis."
"What?"
"She's called Isis. And she's five."
"Shit."
We watch upstairs, the poppy geezer back, looking in all the windows with the postman. Make the house clean, then leg it with stuff from the freezer.
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