I'm Normally Perfect (re-upload)

Chapter Ten

Next morning when I woke Clem was gone from the foot of my bed. I dressed and went downstairs to find Alex (wearing burgundy satin with gold piping pyjamas) sitting at the kitchen table, teacup in hand, Guardian in front of her. She noticed me and put down the paper, 'Look at you, all dressed. Takes me a bit longer to get going, I'm afraid.'

I sat opposite her, 'I only appear to be conscious. It's an illusion.' I spread jam on a crumpet and took a bite. 'Mmmmmm.'

Smiling, she poured a cup of tea for me, 'Do you care for Marmite?' She laughed in response to my expression, 'It's not for everyone.' She added my milk and sugar, 'I thought today we'd set you up in the study so you'll have a place to work on your stories. The ones you haven't shown to me.' She cleared her throat.

'If I let you read them you have to promise to be kind.'

'Of course. Though I won't lie.'

'Oh, well, then, I can't show you.'

She laughed, 'Whenever you'd like to let me read them is fine.'

After she dressed she returned to the kitchen and gestured to the sculpture of the nymph, 'What do you think—in the blue guest room so you'll have some art to look at when you stay over?' To my quizzical expression she asked, 'I wondered if you'd like to spend the next break with me? I thought we could go to Essex for a week, you could see the shop and the house there.'

'That'd be great.' Tears welled up in my eyes.

She hugged me, 'Darling, it's all right. I'm not offering you a vital organ. If you haven't already put in your request to stay on for the break you'll need to clear everything out of your rooms. You may keep your things here, if you'd like. I'll let Melvin know you're going to be with me.' She picked up the typewriter and started through the house to the study, I followed with the statue.

I commented facetiously, 'That should thrill him no end.'

'All the more reason to tell him then.'

I laughed, 'Have you never got on?'

'I have sympathy for him, in a way. His first wife left one day whilst he was at work, took everything and then had the locks changed so when he arrived home he couldn't get in, when he did it was to an empty house. His second wife (I quite liked her, actually) died of cancer two years after they were married and his third wife left him for a friend of his. He seems to have finally got it right with the fourth one—one'd think he'd lighten up a bit.'

'Yikes. That sucks.' As we reached the top of the stairs I said, 'I'm going to put this in the guest room.' I placed the statue on the tall chest of drawers and joined her in the doorway of the crowded office. Her desk was immediately to the left as you entered the room, with bookcases along every wall and two cases back-to-back at a perpendicular angle from the far wall, forming a kind of partition. Books and papers were piled on every available surface and on the floor. It was enough to send the obsessive-compulsive part of me into stupefied shock. Usually when faced with a mess I immediately made a mental list of where I'd begin cleaning, but this room was beyond simple organisation, unless you can call a blowlamp "simple organisation". She set the machine on her desk and surveyed the room.

'We'll clear off this desk,' she pointed to stacks of books and folders to our right, under which I assumed there resided a desk, 'and the floor over there,' she pointed to stacks of books in front of the cases in the far right corner of the room, 'and get you a chair and you'll be sorted.' She removed a stack of books and set it on the floor in front of the cases in the corner to the right as you entered the room. 'You clear that corner.'

I wandered in that direction, 'Where should I put it all?'

'Just anywhere.'

'Yeah, ok.'