***
I came back again. This time I was in the bedroom, sitting on the padded armchair my girl had facing her bed, from which, as a teenager, she would watch how boys lounged on her bed. The uncomfortable ones, she liked them. The ones who looked as if they were expecting to ingest her DNA before they left that bed, those guys got shown the door. My girl was no slapper.
The forker the fucking forklift truck driver entered my head again. Smiling. I didn't like him smiling.
These days the chair was home to a platoon of teddy bears of varying sizes and colours. The pyramid-like arrangement was meant to signify an order of cuteness, with the cutest of all sitting proud at the top. Now, they were spread over the floor, kicked off the chair by Surfer-dude so there would be room for me. A furry green troll with lovable eyes and a tongue stitched to his cheek - to represent licking his lips, I guess - stared at me from the shadow thrown by the bed. Multi-winner of Cutest Teddy This Week, he had been cast down unloved today.
"Can't help you, dude," I told it.
"Lie back," the troll told me. My head had lolled forward, almost to my chin, but the troll used warm hands to pull me back and lay my head against the back of the armchair, propped there by a pillow so I could see the bed.
Surfer-dude stepped out in front of me. "Keep still," he said, and froze for a second, perhaps to illustrate. "You're just balanced there. It's the legs, yeah? You've fatigued them. The legs tend to shiver a lot, even if you're warm. I don't even notice these days. But it damn well saps the resources, I tell you. Look."
I looked down at his legs. Hairy, brown, muscular. "Very nice," I said.
"No, here, cock." I looked up again, half expecting him to now be pointing at his - but no, he was pointing at the bed. At my girl. It was dim in here because the only window, which was small and round and more like ship's porthole, didn't permit much light beyond a pale yellow shaft. It was a hazy room than induced tranquillity, which was what I always liked about it. Often I felt sleepy in here, seduced by the mellowing colours of posters and teddies and the stars painted on the black ceiling. Accordingly, I felt my eyelids slip over my eyes and, strangely, felt myself slipping into sleep.