The Trouble With Edwina Currie

I discovered Gabby in a black mood this morning. She was sitting at the kitchen window with her air pistol, shooting at sparrows in the garden below. I made my way slowly around to the fridge, having discovered on many previous occasions that it’s dangerous to disturb a trigger-happy Romanian with a handgun.

‘So,’ I said, as I began to squeeze my morning orange, ‘are the sparrows biting today?’

Crack. The distant squawk of wildlife, though I can’t dismiss the possibility that it was the postman.

‘Edwina Currie thinks I have talent,’ said my death-dealing buttercup as simple as an accusation gets before noon.

‘And so do I,’ I replied, but inwardly steeling myself for an argument I knew I simply would have to win.

‘So why won’t you lend me money?’

‘I haven’t got a penny to spare,’ I said. ‘My financial thong is empty. And if it wasn’t, we can do better things than pay somebody to publish your poetry. Vanity publishing is just that. Vanity. When they see your genius, somebody will offer you good money to publish it.’

She frowned, fired, and a starling suffered a mortal flesh wound.

‘Edwina said…’

‘I don’t give a damn what Edwina said,’ I cried. ‘You have to still to learn some things about the British. We’re a nation who like to see people make fools of themselves.’

‘So why did she say I was good poet?’

I hadn’t the spirit to explain the rest of what the needlessly profane one-time Junior Minister for Health had to say on the matter of poetry. I merely regretted that the bad language she’d been recently displaying on my blog hadn’t been put to more use a decade ago when she should have been more vehement in explaining the dangers of under-cooked poultry. I might never have suffered the food poisoning that led to my dismal A level results, eventual rejection from university, and led me to my current low paying work as a male stripper.

These were the distracted thoughts that went through my head as I snatched the pistol from Gabby’s hand and managed to shoot myself in the foot.

‘Damn that Edwina Currie!’ I cursed, falling on the floor as blood made an early appearance over the Chipster’s slippers. Even then, I was proud of myself for not resorting to profanity, even as I felt the blood begin to seep between my toes.

‘Chippy? You okay?’ asked Gabby, rushing to my side. ‘It okay if we don’t publish poems,’ she added, cradling my head. ‘I’m not good at rhyming yet…’

‘Shot… foot,’ I gasped, feeling suddenly faint with the pain.

‘No, no, that not good rhyme,’ said Gabby, apparently oblivious to the serious nature of my injury. ‘Cut rhymes with foot. Soot rhymes with foot…’ She went silent and I believe I passed out for a few minutes. The next thing I remember was Gabby slapping my face and forcing a piece of paper into my hand.

Gabby shot a sparrow, then a thrush,
Then poor Chippy shot himself in foot.

‘Does this rhyme?’ she asked.

I was beyond caring. My foot was a congealed bloody mess the likes of which have slapped many a certificate 18 on a film. Tears ran down my cheeks and pooled on my lips. ‘Help me,’ I pleaded. ‘My foot…’

‘Pah,’ said my Romanian humanitarian looking at my yellow slippers, now completely covered with Chip Dale’s finest O positive. ‘Gabby uncle once shot foot off with shotgun. He did not stop work until he pick up every potato on field.’

‘Please…’ I begged.

‘Finish washing up,’ said Gabby, dropping my head onto the tiled floor. ‘I want to finish this poem before we go.’

An hour later, I was in Bangor’s emergency room waiting for a nurse to bandage my foot. A doctor has just pulling a lump of pellet from it, which Gabby had taken as a souvenir. ‘I think I make into earring,’ she said, holding the bloody mess up to a lobe.

‘It suits you,’ I replied over lips parched dry with suffering.

‘So, do you think Edwina Currie would read my collected poems?’ asked Gabby. Now having turned her attention to a box of scalpels she’d found in a drawer, she began to juggle three.

As I watched the razor sharp blades arc through the air, I thought of the nine hundred pages of tightly typed manuscript sitting at home, waiting to be discovered like an extra forty cantos by a Romanian Ezra Pound.

‘I’m sure she would,’ I said with a grimace or a smile. ‘I’m sure she would…’