After receiving a somewhat strange phone call at three in the morning, I finally gave in and decided to meet Lawrence at the bar we used to spend so many evenings.
He turned up in an old tweed jacket that had clearly seen better days, he had a big old beer gut going on, not that my dress sense was up to much, nor was my body honed like a panther, more like an old nag made out of second hand lego. He looked at me and said “hey Dennis, you’re looking great! hoo hoo hoo the clams are never blue, seranade them, lose your glue”. I felt myself blushing as I recalled making that stupid thing up once when I was drunk.
“Hi Lawrence, how’s it going?”. I was really having to make an effort here, it took me all my time to even agree to meeting him in the first place, let alone actually turn up. My Aunt Milly, with whom I share a house, no not in the biblical sense, she just wanted to have a man around, and I needed a place to stay after my messy divorce from Glenda”Glenny” Roebuck-Trent. She was a horse whistler, that’s my Aunt Milly not Glenny. I often wondered if I was really over her as I still thought of her as Glenny and not Miss Roebuck-Trent. She’d gone back to her original name after we divorced. My surname is Sump-Cleese, so it’s no wonder she reverted, and probably why she set out to humiliate me and ultimately ruin our marriage by having that affair with that garden shed. I once caught her creosoting it whilst she was dressed in a black negligee, a cigarette in a long holder in her hand, and a campari and soda sitting in the broken birdbath. My Aunt Milly, well she would cure horses of distemper by whistling old TV theme tunes to them. She had a 100% record to date, it was amazing, she’d been on the telly so many times. She did have one mishap once, on a children’s tv show, they thought it would be good to try and cure an elephant of distemper but it just crapped on her shoes.
“Oh dear”, my mind had clearly wandered, at Lawrence’s droning voice, “do you remember the time we tried to make a rocket out of old coat hangers and plaster of paris, and remember, remember we had bought all that paraffin and made booster rockets that we gaffa taped to it, and we, and we had that fuse that we lit from behind the rock wall in your garden?”. ”Yea that was fun wasn’t it, looking back it was ambitious, and Mrs Timkins pet monkey was so distressed by the flames licking up the outside of the windows he was looking through, that he squirted washing up liquid down the back of her old black and white television, and it exploded!”. ”oh yea, I forgot that bit, the flash of the blast had dazzled me and I walked into the shed door!, I had 10 stitches in my nose, I’ve still got the scar, look!”. ”Oh yes, that’s a pearler”.
“So how’ve you been then Larry?”. ”No please don’t call me Larry anymore, I finally came to terms with my proper name the day I came to terms with my sexual desires, I so wanted to be a sex god, making ‘b-movies’ with those actresses gone bad, but it turned out I was impotent. I had so much therapy and finally I got cured, I wasn’t impotent after all. I just needed to make love to a policewomen standing up in an alleyway, whilst round the corner a man in overalls and a pair of welding goggles welding a broken wrought iron gate. My psyche said it was perfectly normal, funny she wrote me that on a postcard from the Caribbean”.
“Ok so how have you been then Lawrence?”. ”oh well pretty good since I married Chief Inspecter Carolette Brannigan, and funnily enough her brother is a welder, which was a bit wierd at first, but it wasn’t the sight of him dressed like that, it was the noise of the welding equipment, and of course he was around the corner after all, so it wasn’t like I was looking at him. Obviously neither of our families know the truth, but I know I can trust you Dennis, and I heard you flunked out of that journalism degree you started. I knew that as I bumped into Miriam Tunsgten-Dart. So what are you doing now then?”
“Well actually I work for the Flinton Gazette, I write the gossip column and stand in for Dr Lotar, the ‘agony aunt’ columnist when he takes his month long holidays back to Bremen every August, he has a sick Mother there, and some sisters I think”.
I didn’t really want to indulge Larry, sorry Lawrence anymore, but I suddenly blurted out, “hey do you remember the time we smoked all those banana skins and drunk all that tea and then felt so wierd we called the Samaritans and said we wanted to end our lives by drowning ourselves in a vat of lentil dahl. She must have been used to time wasters because all she said was that she’d prefer we call back after they’d been soaked overnight”. ”Yea I remember that, I laughed so hard I thought I was going to gve birth to my younger brother. My mother was still carrying him at the time and that would’ve ruined her chances of getting into the Guinness book of records by being the first woman to have the county’s first water birth.
“Oh dear”, I thought, I was actually enjoying Larry’s company, in spite of myself. ”Hey!, now this is probably the all time classic tale of yore, do you remember the time we asked the man in the garden centre if he’d like to try our hash cakes, not that he knew what they were of course!” ”oh yea”, I enthused, and started to laugh, again in spite of myself. ”That’s right he loved model trains and we went in there at his tea break and he always sat out the back drinking his coffee that looked like sump oil, and smoked those old woodbines!”. ”Yea, we got him talking about the new pullman carriage he was going to buy with his next paycheck. After about half an hour, he started stomping around that little patio like he had lead boots on and then he starting dancing like a pixie. He rolled his trousers up to his knees and tied his tie around his head, and started whooping like a red indian. But then he started to cry, fell to his knees and said he wanted to make love to the rose bush over the other side of the garden centre. We followed him through the gate and off he skipped. When he got next to it he started pretending he was Romeo and he serenaded the rose bush, but his ardour got the better of him, and the next thing we know he pulled his trousers down and jumped on the bush, saying passionately, “oh let me ravish you, you proper diamond of a woman, I love you, arrrrrrrggghhhhh”. ”Yes I almost died that day, especially since we’d eaten at least as much cake as he had, all we could do was laugh and laugh”. ”Yes a night in the cells and a bloody lecture the following morning from the chief constable certainly brought me down. Hey maybe that was where my police uniform fantasy started to manifest”. ”I doubt it, he was called Reg, had a thick accent and had warts on his neck, if it did you’re in a lot more trouble than I thought!”.
We had another pint, still laughing our heads off. After a while I did remember something that might top the garden centre episode, “hey Lawrence, do you remember the time we joined the French Foreign Legion, and failed the language test, as all we knew how to say in French was hello madamoiselle, would you like to sleep with me tonight?and the recruiting officers kicked 7 bells out of us?”
Lawrence looked at me quizzicially, the wheels clearly going round in his head desperately trying to remember the incident, but after a while, he said “no I don’t actually”…
