Linger Awhile

28 Grace Kowalski

31 January 2004. Maybe three toads in the soup were one too many. When J Two snogged Artie he started hallucinating so badly that he almost had Irv and me convinced that a huge hopping thing was coming through the wall. She’s some piece of work, that girl. And strong. After putting the frighteners on the three of us she grabbed her wet clothes, got dressed, and headed for the door. Irv and I tried to stop her but she scattered us like tenpins and hopped it. Now I know how Frankenstein felt. And at least his creation had a bolt through the neck so that anybody could see that he wasn’t the usual thing. J Two was pretty, for God’s sake.

Obviously the thing to do would have been to go after her and bring her back before she did any harm. Right, but Irv wasn’t up to that kind of thing, Artie was hiding under the bed, and I was no match for her. I couldn’t very well ring up the police and tell them to be on the lookout for a sexy woman in wet clothes with a hallucinogenic tongue. Would she be out for blood already? If not, she soon would be.

What had I intended when I brought her out of the soup? I wanted to teach Istvan a lesson. How? What kind of lesson? I don’t know, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. And, as Artie has said, once you see that a thing is possible you want to make it happen. I ought to have learnt by now that I tend to act without considering the consequences. Now the consequences were loose in Soho, out there in the dark. I wondered how soon we’d read about J Two in the papers.