Lunch

I was awake at 9am. I fell back to sleep until 10.30. Such is life. I dragged myself from the crypt after that.

I was sitting out on the back veranda drinking coffee when David called. I was feeling like shit. David wanted to go out for lunch, today. "Oh." I forgot, I thought as his name flashed up on my mobile phone screen.

I really felt like shit, but it even sounded like another excuse to me as I said it.

“Really?” said David in that tone reminiscent of Tallulah Bankhead, that he saves up for the special occasions when he feels that he is being lied to.

When I declined his offer to meet, he said he wanted to drop in to get the rug he left in the top room all those years ago, and, of course, the mail.

There turns out to be 2 rugs in the top room, one of which David had forgotten all about. He was in full house maker mode, as he strode into the bathroom, saying, “There is a painting of mine here too.” He flicked on the light. “Two. Oh yes, that one, oh good.”

David and I went to Arcadia for lunch, we both had stuffed chicken. David had just got the key to his new house. Or should I say, the two pages of keys. “Jesus!”

“I know,” he practically squealed.

“How do you know what keys to give back when you moved out?”

“I know,” he said contemplatively. He looked down at the two pages covered in keys cello taped to the pages. As if mockingly, there seemed to be a key of every colour and every style.

I pissed around on my computer for a while, after David disappeared in a waft of cohabitation.

“Mike said to call him when I was leaving.” He scruntched his nose and shrugged his shoulders and smiled broadly.

I got up on the roof and continued cleaning out the gutters and trimming the creeper. The back gutters were like a garden of their own – soli, shrubs, it was so bad. I was embarrassed when the builder took a look a few weeks ago, at what could possibly be the problem with the gutters to make the veranda rot. The creeper has to be cut back once a year, it grows like a weed and suddenly I am grown in again.

The sun was shining, the sky was blue. It is good for the soul, to get out in the fresh air and the sunny day.

Then Sam was home.