Linger Awhile

30 Dr Wilbur Flood

31 January 2004. I was coming through Cecil Court early in the morning on my way to the lab when I heard a woman singing with a down-home accent:

Tweedle-O-Twill, puffin’ on corn silk,

Tweedle-O-Twill, whittlin’ wood,

Settin’ there wishin’ he could go fishin’

Over the hill, Tweedle-O-Twill.

That’s a Gene Autry song, and the last time I heard it was back in Tennessee about thirty years ago. My daddy used to sing it when he was working on his old Ford pickup.

She was sitting in a doorway with a man slumped against her. I noticed that she was wearing cowboy boots. She didn’t look homeless and neither did the man. I stopped in front of them and she said, ‘Howdy.’

‘Howdy,’ I said. ‘Been having a late night?’

‘I been saving the last dance for you,’ she said.‘Whyn’t you come a little closer, honey.’

It’s hard to say no to a good-looking woman even if she seems a little the worse for wear. ‘Won’t your friend mind?’ I said.

‘It don’t make no never-mind to him,’ she said. ‘He’s dead to the world.’ She reached up and pulled me down to her and gave me a big wet slobbery kiss with her tongue half-way down my throat. She tasted like my high-school friend Barbara-Ann Hopper only ten times worse. Oh my God, I thought — a toad-sucker in London! Then she was trying to bite my neck but I got loose and backed away as fast as I could. Everything was going round and round with the ground sometimes tilting up and sometimes down while out of the corner of my eye I saw some great big hopping thing coming after me. I sprinted down Cecil Court, dodged through the traffic in St Martin’s Lane with the thing close behind, made a sharp right towards the Coliseum, then left and left again and so on trying to lose it but when I reached the lab it was still hot on my heels. Once I got inside I phoned the police while the hopping thing did its best to come through the wall. Scared? I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind so I just kind of closed one eye and farted and hoped for better times. It took about an hour and a whole lot of black coffee before the thing left off thumping and squelching and went back to wherever it lives.

When PC Plod got to Cecil Court Miss Tweedle-O-Twill was long gone but her friend was still there. He was dead to the world all right, stone dead with all the blood sucked out of him.