Living for Disco

Dragging my shopping bags out to the taxi rank, I was steered forcibly into a waiting car, amidst shouts of “Meme, where are you going? Take this cab, this one meme! We leave first!”

We sat for a while, waiting for the car to fill up and I started to eat a strawberry. I bought the strawberries because I was hungover, and needed to make my insides feel pampered after the battering they’d had the night before. Strawberries are scientifically proven to do this. If you can also add champagne and/or melted chocolate then you have an instant cure, but a strawberry on its own will work wonders on a bilious constitution.

Liverwurst, however, will not. I didn’t notice it until after she got in the cab, because I was too busy trying to find space in which my lungs could expand. She was vast. One of her thighs was the size of two of mine. Her flesh moved in a way that reminded me of marine tides and the gravitational pull of the moon. A pair of flimsy shoes attempted bravely to contain the chunks of meat that were her feet. Clutched in her fist, her thick fingers curling posessively around half its girth, was a liverwurst the size of a dachshund.

And, oh my god, the smell. Don’t get me wrong – I love sausage. I don’t even object to liverwurst in moderation, even though it smells of cheap dog-food. But this thing was huge, and she was taking planet sized chunks out of the side of it, they way you would a 99 flake or a cornetto. Also, I was quite hungover and not really too happy to be trapped in a corner while meaty gusts ruined the enjoyment of my strawberry, which in any case now seemed to taste only of liverwurst.

So I spent the journey with my elbows trapped against my sides, trying avoid breathing (not so tough when you’re being crushed), while the sound of open-mouthed mastication went on, and on, and on by my left ear.

The taxi ride was interminable.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Under African Skies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.