Four Out Of Five Housewives Say The Other One Is Lying

In some ways I was happy but also annoyed that I had left Zac back in bungaville earlier that morning. There was a slate pile of letters waiting for me when I finally opened the front door. I stepped over them and stripped completely, burnt my clothes in the garden and dug the ashes into the dirt beneath the geraniums. Zac watched me gush sweat with increasing bafflement. I reminded him that dogs get sweaty too sometimes. To his relief, I then washed and shaved myself until I felt raw like a raw red rabbit ready for the pot.

The comfort of my dated country kitchen and my toweling dressing grown were perfect accompaniment to the cheap bottle of Merlot I found at the back of the cupboard next to a spunky bottle of Advocaat and an unopened litre of Pernod. Things would never get that bad surely? Halfway through the bottle I looked up at the clock; barely eleven in the morning. I really had lost track. I put the cork back in and let out a fiery deep breath. I focused on the mail and returned to the kitchen table having disposed of the bills and the usual tranch of begging letters. There were two letters that intrigued me above all the others. One was addressed to me in simple crooked typeface, obviously composed on a typewriter rather than a modern printer. The other was handwritten. The writing on the envelope looked at first glance to be a child’s, but to a practiced eye, it was distinctly the writing of an old man. I smelt its edge and felt its weight and resolved to save this one to savour. I moved speedily back to the first. They say that sending letters is a forgotten art in today’s electronic world, but I also say that receiving letters has its finer points. Whenever you receive a letter, the first thing any recipient should do, is apply the nostrils. After a smallest of sniffs, my first instinct was to put the letter back down on the table and call someone with access to a Hazmat suit, but I persisted. It was indeterminable whether the nasal gay was in fact dog or cat food. There was always the chance that Mike had been snacking on his post round but I soon discounted this. I retrieved the letters that had been at the top and bottom of the pile; they clearly smelt of pear drops, Mike’s staple suck. Since I neither have a cat nor will bend to Zac’s whining and pining for horse-meat, I was between the two, cat-food or dog-food. I sliced the letter open around all four sides of the envelope and laid bare the autopsy for clues. The letter itself was flimsy enough to be a greeting card bought from any one of the eight charity shops in the high street. On the letter in the same crooked type was the word BOB. I delicately lifted the letter and peered underneath like I was sheltering under it from the rain. Nothing. I looked back down to the exposed envelope and there almost unnoticeable was a single bright red hair.