Betterware From Heaven

Mrs Williams lives opposite me in bungaville on the cliffs high above the Underbelly. Her routine is largely that you would expect of someone who is 75 years old. She wakes up about six-thirty every morning with the wood pigeons and washes up last night’s dinner things. She has a dishwasher but she’s always been scared that it will fade her best dinner plates. The kettle goes on at quarter to seven and the tea is made, the toast pops gleefully and she spreads lashings of home made apricot jam over the thin layer of butter. She closes her eyes as she sinks her falsies in, smiles and stuffs the remaining pieces of toast right in. When it comes to toast and comfort food in general, she can’t get enough. Geoff would never let her be so wasteful or greedy. Some mornings, although she’d never admit it, she will gorge herself on half a loaf. Before she knows it, it is midday and she’s still eating breakfast.

Her husband, Geoff is dead; stomach cancer, the curse of the Williams’. In the end, Geoff did right by Glenys. Pensions and life insurances, alarms and instructions on how to reset the central heating when the clocks went back. The Williams’ house was functional if not comfortable. Glenys’ obsession with toasted bread products came from having to deal with Geoff’s slow and painful demise through the eating of toast. She never made the mental leap between stomach cancer and her own appetite and I’ve never felt like mentioning it. She is 75 after all.

The doorbell. Zac predictably goes crazy. The postman. A man trusted by the Queen to deliver our valuables, a man known to the me on an altogether different basis.
“Wotcha.” Mike looks like he’s taking a sabbatical from the cutthroat world of smoking dope on your sofa.
“Hey Mike.” He hands me a parcel. “For me?”
“Nah, Mrs Williams again. She on some sort of spree?” I shrug my shoulders. “That’s five this week. I don’t deliver that many after I’ve cropped.”
“I’ll investigate. I doubt it’s anything of note.”

Mrs Williams answered the door and invited me in. She could see I had her parcel in her hand and she was visibly excited.
“Good, good. You can help me open it. The packaging is so difficult these days.”
“Ordered something nice?” I ventured.
“Don’t know luvvie, it’s always a surprise.”
It took ten minutes to break into the cardboard prison that encased it with a bread knife. I stood back and looked quizzically at the object. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“What is it?” Mrs Williams reached for the paperwork inside the remains of the box.
“It’s a…toothpaste squeezer.”
“Did you not order it?”
“No, not exactly.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know my dear but I have an idea.”
“How much stuff have you been getting?”
“Well there was the winter proof outside tap jacket, the slip resistant shower shoes, the knee pillow, the bath safety handle. I could go on.”
“So who do you think could be sending all these things?”
“You saw the ambulance outside my house last month?”
“Yes, you fell over didn’t you?”
“In the shower and on my return there were the slip resistant shower shoes. I have arthritis and at night my knees are unbelievably painful.”
“And next morning, the knee pillow turned up?”
“Yes.”
“So who?”
“I think it could be Geoff.”