Road to Recovery

Chapter 33

  Algernon (please call me Gerry) first realised that his mother was off on another one of her adventures when he was quietly sitting on the top deck of a London bus. He looked out of the window and there, on about ten television screens was his mother, the bus had stopped outside the Sony shop. He didn’t really pay the screens too much attention (sometimes it was a bit embarrassing having a famous mother) until a passing wave drenched her, and she laughed - now this was something new, so battling his way against the tide of embarking humanity he scrambled off the bus and ran into the shop. A large crowd had gathered around an even larger television screen, so he quickly pushed his way to the front. After quickly explaining who he was to an irate Irishman, Paddy then explained to him what his mother had been up to (as opposed to his first instinct of loosening a few of this rude young man’s teeth), and then both of them remained transfixed to the screen, along with an ever growing crowd, until the shop manager pleaded that his dinner was getting cold. Hailing a passing taxi Algernon gave the driver the address of his flat and fished his iPhone out of his ‘man bag’. With the taxi waiting outside he quickly packed a grip, rushed Jaws (his goldfish) around to his neighbour, grabbed his passport, and the driver got him to the airport with five minutes to spare, and as he sat back into his seat, on the last flight of the day to Gibraltar, he wondered what all the panic was about. His mother was forever getting herself into hotspots and he had never reacted like this before, then he remembered her sea drenched smile - and fell into a troubled sleep.

  Finding a suitable hotel in Gibraltar was not very difficult; he just took his mother’s advice. ‘Start at the best and work down’ was her maxim (she was usually on expenses) and usually it never failed, and this time was no exception. The next morning, as he tucked into his ‘full English’ with his table pride of place in front of a hastily installed television set, he waited for his mother’s first live broadcast of the day, and the black pudding was just inches from his mouth when his mother’s dishevelled face lit up the screen; and the delicacy never completed its journey. As he watched, with the two cameramen jockeying to find the best angle, his mother paused, and an enigmatic smile came onto her face. As one camera held his mother in close-up, the other one panned around and picked up an equally dishevelled Mr Michaels, and it slowly followed him as he walked to his chair - on glorious split screen of course; ‘the Director must have a really evil sense of humour’ he thought, as he groaned ‘Oh Mother’.

  Behind him he heard an equally exasperating ‘Oh Father’, and turned his head, just in time to see a rather nice ear flash in front of his eyes. After devouring his suspended black pudding Alice commented ‘As you didn’t look as though you were going to eat it, it was a shame to let it go cold’, and then continued on ‘was your comment figuratively or biologically speaking?’

  After collecting his shattered wits he indignantly retorted, ‘biologically’.

  ‘Mine too’, and then quickly sat in the empty chair across from him, latched onto his half eaten breakfast and devoured it, she was ravenous, with all the worry she hadn’t eaten a thing since leaving the Lady S. Two hours - and another two full English Breakfasts later, they were both ‘almost up to speed’ on each other’s life history, then surreptitiously she arrived at the question that she had wanted to ask at the very beginning, ‘girlfriends?’

  ‘Plenty, but none life threatening, and you?’

  ‘Oh the same,’ she casually answered then, ‘do you like dogs?’

  With that they collected Bonnie and Clyde and departed on her delayed retail therapy, although they never passed a shop with a television set in its window without pausing to catch up on the latest news.

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