Chapter 12

Ah, 11o'clock; the perfect time to wake up. Only an hour to wait until lunch. ExceptDail noticed that this 11 o'clock had happened on a Wednesday. Wednesday... Itwas ringing a bell for some reason. However, it was entirely possible that thisbell was just a decoy; set up by another part of Dail's Brain to distract himwhilst it thought about something that it wasn't really meant to be thinkingabout. Like the custard in the fridge. What it should have been focusing allit's attention on was this book. Not even a book; a short story would do. Ashtory. No, that would just be a normal story read by Sean Connery. Get out ofbed. It is being silly.

Breakfast…whatto have, what to have. The toaster had been somewhat grumpy as of late, and,"anyway, you've given up bread because you think you might be allergic toyeast." Maybe an egg. “Yes, an egg." But what kind?"Fried". Has to be, that's the only kind of egg you can eat whenmeeting Gigi at 12 o'clock that's why Wednesday rang a bell crap crap crap crap.

Forty-twouneventful minutes later (unless you count putting your jeans on backwards aseventful, which, unfortunately, Dail did), he was sat in a coffee shop, beingsubjected to some god-awful song, the chorus of which was along the lines of"You can do it, put yo' back into it/You can do it, put yo' ass intoit". Dail could only deduce that this must be a motivational song forpeople who experienced great difficulty in getting dressed, and was just aboutto briefly outline this theorem to the lady at the table next to him, when Gigistrolled in; late as per custom.

"Andwhat time do you call this?"

"Quarter-pastwhen we were meeting?"

"Andtoday's excuse is..."

"Iwas arrested by a policeman on my way over here for being too on time."

After amoments hesitation, Dail murmured something about that actually being prettygood and 'well done.'

"Ifyou ever have kids-"

"Punctualityisn't genetic, Dail."

“Yes,well…you have cheese on your elbow.”

She did.

“Where doyou want to go?” probed Gigi, as they sauntered down the casually populatedstreet.

“Whereverit is, it will probably require money. Of which I have none. At the moment. Noton me, anyway. So, to summarise, I need to find a cash-point.”

When themood took him, these harmless money dispensers had an unerring ability to worryDail; as did many other entirely inanimate objects. For example, when theyinevitably asked if he would like to check his balance, Dail frequently bracedhimself for the two mechanical arms that would, one day, slowly but surely edgeout of the machine and attempt to push him over, before giving him a score outof ten. Every time this didn’t happen (which was every time), Dail felt that hehad won another battle in some silent war against banks everywhere. Andgravity. When they chose to strike, he’d damn well be ready for them. 

Gigi'ssomewhat impulsive nature had led them to a bakery, where she was spending theamount of time usually reserved for intense philosophical debate on picking acake.

"Gigi,I feel like we've been in here for a year. No-one should spend a year in abakery unless they're being held prisoner by Mr Kipling. Just pick acake."

"Thereare two that I can't make my mind up between."

"Whichones?". Dail felt that if he could help her pick one and get out of here,life would start looking good again. As long as it was a cake that he liked, ofcourse.

"Wellthere's that pie over there-"

"Pie'saren't cakes."

"...There'sthat pie over there, or this chocolate thing that has so much sugar in it thatI'll most probably go into a coma."

"Sowhy would you get the chocolate thing? You'll just get half way through it,start feeling sick and then wish you had the pie. Just get the pie." Dailliked pie, and therefore liked it when Gigi had pie.

"Nono" Gigi countered. "I want to do this right."

"Fantastic.Well I'm leaving." This was because Dail was getting that feeling in thepit of his stomach that meant anger was stirring. It hadn't opened its eyes yetbecause they were still welded shut with sleep dust, but it was becoming dimlyaware of its surroundings; the chirping of the birds outside, people usingtheir cars or feet to go about their daily business, the noisy house-mateupstairs stomping around because they, for some inexplicable reason, chose to wear their stupid red boots indoors...

It was onlywhen Dail got home that he realised he should have just bought a pie forhimself, and wondered if Gigi was still there. Probably. That mad woman.

Chapter 8

 Several months had passed, during which many, many interesting things had happened. The kind of things that Dail felt someone might consider interesting and worthy of mention should they be writing a book about him. But this, of course, was preposterous. Outrageously absurd. Nobody was documenting the everyday happenings of Dail’s life; the ins and outs. Hopefully not the ins as they were too boring and personal. And the outs were only exciting when juxtaposed by the ins. Many people probably went to South America to do some travelling; trying to recreate the fun of a long past journey. Most people learnt how to just about juggle, spent days painting, bought a hamster, lost a hamster, learnt that hamsters aren’t the kind of animals that you should take for walks in the park (the tiny wheel was evidently in the cage for a reason). Any thoughts about the book had taken a temporary hiatus, but they would be back soon; ready to pounce unexpectedly, like a child hiding in a cupboard.

It was now June and the weather had taken a turn for the better, so Dail had been sitting in his garden, noodling around on his guitar until two bees had briefly distracted him by circling around his head; the different pitch of each buzz momentarily harmonising the other at roughly a major third. This set off a chain of thoughts that led to the pondering of how well evolution had set up the bee for suicide. Should things get far too depressing for the bee and it wished to take its own life, it could potentially sting itself with a lethal dose. But then again, bees are probably impervious to their own particular brand of venom. Snakes must bite their tongues all the time and don’t die (the ability of creatures to bite themselves was one of the things that cemented Dail’s belief that there was no god). So, should this fail to work, it has a back up plan - an ace in the hole. When a bee uses its sting, it dies. Brilliant. The animal equivalent of a cyanide capsule. Right, tangent over. Get a drink. From the…sink. I think. Dinosaurs are extinc…t. Nachos.

The niceness of the day then led Dail to cycle to Yosh’s house, whereupon they set about banishing boredom to the nether-regions of sanity, leading to the kind of discussion that would give a psychiatrist a stroke if they were to stumble drunkenly into the room in half-way through.

“We need more Babybel’s…”

“That’s your answer to everything!” 

Yosh, to an extent, is right. Recently, ‘We need more Babybel’s has indeed been my answer to the past three situations. Yes, we put one in Yosh’s microwave whilst it was still in its waxy cocoon just to see what would happen (an odd shaped, gloopy mess that looks like a fried egg gone wrong, as it turns out). Yes we then made Babybel and Nutella cakes (essentially, Nutella spread on a Babybel) with the last two and, thus, the tiny cheese purveyors of madness ran out. So the idea of a red, stop-motion Pac Man video never quite came to fruition, but how we managed to get from there to trying to throw a small bouncy ball into a glass cup on a worktop from opposite sides of the room, I’m not sure I want to know.

“So” throw…miss, “book still on hold then?”

“Yup.” New approach, bounce it off the floor. Miss.

“How come?”. Same technique. Worse miss.

“Still don’t have any ideas. Bugger!”. Almost broke the glass.

A few minutes of uninterrupted ball throwing (unless you count the Ooh’s and Aah’s and Eee’s as the ball came perilously close to either entering the cup or destroying it) and conversation had turned to other psychiatrist slaying topics.

“Dail…”

“Yes…?”

“If you tried to clone cheese…could…could you end up with…a cow?”

“Yosh?”

“Ye-e-e-es?”

“I have no idea. Your throw.”

      

 Later that day, Dail had gotten quite introspective, as quite often happened when he had consumed an odd number of Babybel’s. He had never been a religious person and saw god more as an adjective than a basis for a belief system. On paper he was Jewish, but on the ground and in planes and on chairs and everywhere else he was an atheist. True he’d had a bar-mitzvah, but in all honestly this was more because the prospect of a large injection of cash (which, he repeatedly insisted, probably made him more Jewish than anyone who might have done it for reasons aspiring to being religious) would have been tempting to any thirteen year old. But for the most part, something about religion had never quite sat well with Dail. He remembered doodling in a bible at school and subsequently being reprimanded by the teacher. But then he also remembered thinking that if god was so concerned about a doodle in a book whilst all the other evil in the world was going on, Dail wouldn’t want to spend an eternity in his ‘glorious presence’ anyway. It’s the equivalent of discovering that your house is on fire and, when the fire brigade does finally turn up, rather than putting out the fire they just berate you on why exactly you chose that colour for the walls. Bastards.

Maybe it was the way that the god that people had suggested existed appeared to be a bit of a needy and pathetic creature. Nobody likes it when someone passes something off as being theirs and then demands to be praised and thanked for all the hard work they put into it. Yes, we get it, you think you made some stuff. Now take these pills, they’ll help calm you down and then someone will show you back to your room. Tha-a-at’s it. Feeling better? Good.

Ultimately, though, it was that Dail was made to wake up every Sunday morning to attend religious classes, instead of laying in bed and dreaming of custard and sheep (not together). Dail loved his sleep, and he’d be damned if any supposed cosmic entity would come between him and an extra two hours of the stuff.