Chapter Seven: A Trip To The Theatre

To make up for our wet wedding weekend, I decided last night to take Alfonso, the small grey beetle (or weevil, to be precise) who has made his home on my desk, to the theatre.

"Get on your best bib and tucker, Alfonso" I said breezily, adjusting my bow-tie in the mirror, "we're going to a show".

Alfonso wearily flicked over a still glossy page of his vintage "Smash Hits: Thompson Twins Special Edition", and said "I'm only going if it's Baywatch -The Opera".

"Don't be ridiculous, Alfonso. Baywatch -The Opera doesn't exist".

"We'll see about that", he said, with an alarming glint in his eye.

The play was quite long and about nothing in particular, featuring somebody I vaguely remembered from a commercial. The seats were hard and uncomfortable, although Alfonso was merrily perched on top of some solid silver eighteenth century opera glasses hung round my neck, which I had more or less stolen from my mother's bureau the night before the ballooning accident.

At the interval he suggested we leave, as a neighbouring burger restaurant chain was offering a particularly attractive meat/potato/small plastic toy combination deal, but I said that we needed to stay and find out if anything interesting was going to happen.

As it turned out, it wasn't, at least not on stage (unless you count a prop apple falling off a bowl of fruit and rolling under a sofa), but something unexpected did happen as we were leaving.

A surging crowd of theatregoers brandishing scrolled up programmes and empty water bottles seemed in a frenzy to push us out of the theatre, like a wave escaping from a dam, or perhaps just desperate to escape the paralysing nothingness of middle aged people we neither liked or cared about discussing the relative merits of 1950's beach holidays from a sitting position, when with a shriek - Alfonso tumbled off the opera glasses, bounced off a handbag the size of a tank and flew slap into the middle of the road.

He had time to gather himself and smile sadly at me for but a moment, before he disappeared under the wheels of a high-sided van; a van coloured the most hellish shade of deep red, bruised and scratched from headlight to exhaust.

Before I could protest or draw the crowd's attention to the weevil's plight, the smoked glass window wound slowly down, and the van's occupants finally made themselves known to me.

"So", I said, "I thought it would be you."

TO BE CONTINUED...