She Fell Asleep On The Beano

It started with a belly button ring, which was a miracle to start with a miracle fit for a

group of poor French kids in a field that they should call the Miracle of Bernadette of The

Beano – You’ll find out why later. I mean finding that bellybutton can’t have been easy,

she hadn’t seen her feet since the the Queens Silver Jubilee, so her belly button was back

there in the memory with the spangles and adverts for Brentford nylons. I say started

with, with a heart heavier that the eyeliner and mascara she now spends shoveling on. It’d

be easier if she bought two tarantulas and trained them to get up every morning snack

lightly on a live cricket then off to work up across her fizzog before nestling around each

eye. After the belly button ring came the nasal stud, it looks like a posh blackhead, the

sort Council Spice would gob off about in one of the Sunday magazines in an article

crammed between the Elvis plate and the Kraftmatic beds that allow you to sleep like a

fat astronaut. It makes her snore the nasal stud; the thing about Wendy is she’s a creature

of habit. Most of them disgusting and a couple of them deserving a reality TV show of

their own. Every night at eleven she has a piece of cod. I know it’s weird but she does,

steamed in a little milk and she slides it down her neck in one, like a retired performing

seal gone bad. And now she’s taken to snoring because of the stud in her hooter, and

when she does her mouth opens and her jaw drops open like a pink trawler door with a

force nine codded gale gusting out ever other breath. Still could be worse, but I can’t

think how, just yet. I’m glad she’s out of her Tai Chi phase, it was quite distressing for

me to see her in her pyjamas, never mind all the early commuters getting an eyeful as she

stood on the front lawn pretending to hold that big imaginary golden orb, slowly rotating

it around in a make believe orbit. Black silk pyjamas will turn most sow’s ears into

something half decent, but not Wendy, oh no she just looked like a bin bag with a head. I

think if she hadn’t got bored with it the council would have put a restraining order on her,

I hid the first three letters from the council, but I’ve kept the letter from the woman bus

passenger whose nausea was heightened by Wendy and her ‘magnificent under arm sweat

circles’ after her nausea level being heightened she describes how two days later it

reached critical mass and how she vomited her part digested Weetabix onto her lap at the

sight of what she described as ‘a map of Africa snaking from the area above the crack

of Wendy’s arise.’ An arse which she unhelpfully described as being so large that it

should have it’s own M.P.. Which is cruel and untrue, although I have to admit

suggesting one morning as she tried to put on a belt that a boomerang might be useful.

The Tai Chi has been replaced with car mechanics, that’s right mechanics; I can no

longer access the kitchen table for the parts of the Vectra she has piled up on it. Sitting

elbow to elbow with a Stromberg carburetor and a laycock clutch and bearing assembly

isn’t my idea of fun. Wendy however, down at the college where she trundles in her

Halfords ‘Sunday mechanics’ overalls every Wednesday night is a bit of a star. She

delighted the whole class of blokes (there was another girl but she only came the once

and was frightened off when in week three she read in the prospectus that they’d be

greasing nipples) when lay flat on her back under a Nissan that looked it had been painted

with a woolly hat proclaimed her diagnosis with one word. Fortunately for Wendy’s

popularity that word was ‘fuck’ used in every form possible. “Now Wendy, smirked Pete

the ex AA man with the teeth like bins (one every yard) what’s your diagnosis with the

Nissan?” Wendy rolled herself out from under the car and exclaimed ‘Fuck, the fuckin

fuckers fucking fucked. The round of applause lasted 'til the end of the lesson, which was

all she needed, praise for bad behavior encourages more. I won’t go into what else she’s

taken to saying, you might not have eaten yet but it ain’t pretty. I hope the mechanic

phase ends soon as she’s started hanging calendars that picture well-hung young men

holding tyres all over the house. Her estimation skills have deteriorated, as you would

expect from a mechanic. When she says she reckons the weekly shop will cost fifty quid,

she really means two hundred and she’ll have to send of for some of it to a main dealer.

We’ve taken to ordering polony sausage from a main polony dealer, Wendy insists it’s a

genuine part I still prefer Asdas own mostly because it cost nine quid less. I wished she’d

stuck with the posh blackhead and the bellybutton ring that lay hidden in the pink ripples

of her marvelous belly. The first tattoo was O.K. a fairy waving a wand at the top of her

bum where the crack peters out and the black hairs start. ‘It should have been holding its

nose instead of waving a wand’ I thought in a sulk over the arrival from Parma, enough

ham to carpet the house. Once she’d had some ‘ink done’ as she called it, they started to

appear everywhere a butterfly on her arm, a smiley face on her ankle. Most of them went

unnoticed because they were covered, but that all changed one horrible afternoon. She

came into the bedroom turned side on and put her thumb up.

She’d had a Celtic design tattooed to both sides of her neck circling up onto her cheeks.

She looked like she’d fallen asleep on the Beano….

“What? Sorry Vicar I drifted off’

“Do you take Wendy to be your lawful wedded Wife?”

I do I do I do – she’s gorgeous.

The End