Cooking With Fernet Branca (31 page)

Poot

Poot

T. S. Eliot, casting around for onomatopoeic words to suggest what the thunder said, came up with
Datta,
Dayadhvam
and
Damyata
, three Indian Test cricketers of the early nineteen twenties. When it comes to verbal equivalents for my own personal thunder, I can only produce

Poot

and a bit later

Pheeee
… truff
-wuff

Consciousness begins to coagulate gently around the notion
I
am
. Opening my eyes is not yet an option so I assume I’m once again lying on the ground outside my own front door, helplessly venting gas after many hours’ oblivion beneath the stars. Well, well, Samper. Stocious again. When I do get an eye open I see roses. That can’t be right, but I don’t really care.

Blutter

This time I open both eyes and notice the roses are painted on some sort of pale green surface. More, I find I am not on the ground at all but lying on a bed looking up at its headboard. Curious. Slowly I roll over and find beside me a dead camel.

Strange. That beige colour …
No!
My God, that’s … that’s
Marta
lying right next to me, blinking at the ceiling. The Bedouin traffic warden herself. This is her
bed
.

‘You woke me up‚’ she says.

‘I didn’t speak‚’ I croak.

‘Quite.’

Oh my God. We
can’t
have … No, impossible. Unthinkable. No, no, no. Please God,
no
. ‘That’s the very last time I drink
galasiya‚
’ I promise, rolling away and falling painfully to the brick floor where I find an empty black bottle.

It’s all right, Samper. Don’t panic. All you need do is get yourself home, take lots of Alka-Seltzers, put on a pair of dark glasses and sit quietly under your pergola for the next few years. Then everything will get back to normal.

James Hamilton-Paterson is the author of
Gerontius
, winner of a Whitbread Prize;
Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds; Playing With Water
; and most recently, of the wild comic trilogy
Cooking With Fernet Branca, Amazing Disgrace
and
Rancid Pansies
.