Memiranda flounced floozily across the foyer and flopped into a chaise longue like a wet bottlerocket in the September doldrums fired to scud away a blue and brainy day. The grunts and wheezes of traffic far below filtered up to the top of the building, through the light and diaphanous velvet-beaded curtains, and into her perfect cowrie ears.
“I’m bored,” she said matter-of-factly but none-the-less insufferably. Her companion, a forty-something failure of the myopic and ungainly type looked up from darning his bankbook and responded as if the world made sense.
“I’m not bored any more. I’m panicked.”
“You mean picnic’d, Gorrald. A picnic is a breeze; a panic is a wheeze.” She had an uncanny knack for pronouncing the semicolons in her run-ons, a habit that had cost her three fencing instructors, a husband, and the price of breakfast in Istanbul. Not in that order.
Like a tonsillectomy instead of a tonsure, Gorrald looked put out but not remarkably unexpected.
“Oh, Memiranda, you old coot. You bugswallop. Bored? Lean time is bean time, as read my old grand-neighbor’s tattoo. I’m in an absolute blind one, dear sissy-face, and a bolder ruction I do not need.”
“A wink’s as good as a nod, said the actress to the bishop.” Memiranda was becoming engaged in the conversation now, feeling her sunk costs promoted from pharisee to fallacy before her very blinkers. Memiranda brushed away the thought with the perfectly-manicured fingers of her left hand, all three of them, as well as the two she’d worried ragged at the edges for lack of anything better to do. She made a menial note to worry the rest to nubs later, just out of spite for Mrs Watkinsonshire, her manicurist, secretary, and long-suffering woman-of-all-work. That would teach her to long-suffer. “Anyway, it’s too late for tea and too early for coffee. What’s a lad to do?”
“Shovel coal in Newcastle, presumably. Look, I’m practically in a tizzy here, and you’ve derailed the old locomotive of logos. That’s the price of pints in a shilling ‘round here, old son.”
Memiranda was instantly bored again. Gorrald seldom used words with doubled letters unless he was contemplating actual pecuniary deficiencies. “But darling Gorrald, money trubs are disastrously tiresome. Very last season. Just, have the money, darling.”
“Do you know, Memiranda, I had not considered that as an option. I’d been through the paces and come up nose-to-tail with pesky reality, which seems to discourage-“
Her groan, which began as a disgruntled burble in response to the horseflesh entering the conversation (as it must, as it must! Purity of the turf, old bean!), drowned out the end of his excoriation of the concepts of causality and linear time, and his inevitable ejaculation of the word “twaddle,” a vexatious exclamation he kept in firm and friendly supply in a pouch behind his back molars.
“Gorrald, I do not have time for this,” she paused, savoring the incivility she would commit and the look of dawning wisdom as he realized it would happen to him no matter his response, “twaddle. I am bored, and if I am not entertained, I shall melt into a puddle of litigious conch-jelly-custard.”
The sound of Gorrald’s dignity clattering to the eight by ten Kashmiri blue filled the room like radon, sucking the sweet and breathable air away and into the aether. Faced with the possibility of two more minutes of her conversation, Gorrald took a longing last glance at Memiranda, and became the man of action she needed, though doubtless not how she had envisioned.
He leapt from his chair and defenestrated gracefully, the shards of glass his only friends as he looked out upon the peaceful and bustling city below, wicked and wild and sprouting, and enjoyed the sweetest five-and-one-half seconds of solitude in his life. Quite displeased, Memiranda stuck out her lower lip. How boring, but beyond that, how tedious. Now she would have to go down to the pavement and bring him back up to the penthouse. She couldn’t use the elevator because of the last time, when she’d accidentally spilled Gorrald into the woolens and he’d left a stain. She sighed and went to go find her shoes and her bucket.
| Ruth Gibbs | Reading |
| Ben Gibbs | &c. |