Shame

So anyway, my stepsister’s twenty-somethingth birthday party was on a hot August Sunday afternoon. I was nineteen or twenty, and my super-straight boyfriend and I drove over to her house to join in the celebrations. As I wasn’t driving home, I drank a lot of beer. There were also a couple of spliffs going round, and as the boyfriend was dead set against that sort of thing I had a few sneaky tokes while he wasn’t looking. Except it was super-strong grass and by the time we were ready to leave I was completely and utterly wasted. On the way home, we drove through the village I grew up in. It was about three years after I’d left home, and while approaching my childhood home I noticed that the bungalow next door that my godmother lived in had gone, and that a detached house now stood in its place. Being off my face, I decided that the best thing to do would be to go and knock on the door of my old house and see if they knew what had happened to poor old Auntie Win.

The nice lady who opened the front door was most sympathetic as she explained that poor old Auntie Win had died the year before and that the new house had only been up for a couple of months. I explained that I used to live in the nice lady’s house, and at this point I can only assume that her judgement was as impaired as mine, as, despite the fact that it was 6pm on a Sunday afternoon and I was dishevelled, wobbly and reeking of beer with my eyes rolling around in my head like balls in a bingo machine, she invited me to come and have a look round the house to “see what they’d done with it”. Naturally I enthusiastically accepted, and regrettably I have almost total recall of what came next.

The following twenty minutes or so saw me stumbling round my childhood home (trailed by a panicky boyfriend), loudly exclaiming at how much SMALLER it all seemed than when I was little (funny, that), and variously hiccupping and bouncing lightly off the walls. On seeing my childhood bedroom I was, like, astonished to see that the nice lady’s small son’s bed was exactly where mine had been and went on for ages about how totally, like, weird that was, convinced that some sort of universal synchronicity was at work. By now the nice lady’s face was sort of frozen in a rictus of fear, and the boyfriend was almost in tears as he cheerfully suggested that perhaps we ought to be off now.

I don’t even think the nice lady noticed me falling down the stairs on the way out, so relieved was she that we were leaving.

The horror.

Carry on.