Easy like Sunday morning

Adrian The Redeemer awoke the next morning feeling stiff.  His lilo had deflated in the night and he was in fact lying on the cold hard linoleum floor of the downstairs loo. Despite his resolve, he had not managed to keep his channels open all night and had nodded off sometime in the small hours and dreamt of rabbits.  He often did.  Reaching for his cape he wondered what Margaret would have cooked up for breakfast and hoped that it was to be was her legendary bacon butties.  He thought briefly about starting his day of retribution and slaughter before lunch, but decided on balance that he might put it off until tomorrow.

Upstairs Whitney Cox was lying in a soggy heap, sobbing.  What she had witnessed last night from her viewpoint through the letterbox of Bent End cottage had shaken her to her very core.  Since his arrival in Popwell (and let no-one forget that it was her Youtube video of the night that Aubrey Sinclair flashed his parts to all that had prompted him to fly here to punish the sinners) she had felt that Adrian was somehow her property. It was her Mum who was giving him his tea and washing his smalls.  It was her brothers who were teaching him to handle the ferrets and it was her who was lending him make-up so he didn’t just have to wear black kohl all the time. And her Nan had had a go at cutting his hair with the sheep shears.   She’d had him down as an alright lad even if he did keep on about slaughtering the unclean all the time.  But last night he had just sat there while that posh slag Lally Rowe had jiggled on his knee.  It was most rank.  And as soon as she stopped blubbing, she was going to go round there and slap her.  Because that’s what her mate Houston had told her to do and she was sound.

Downstairs in the cramped galley kitchen, Margaret was flipping pancakes.  She’d got up at six and had already made one stack which was warming in the oven.  She liked to get ahead of things on a Sunday so that she could carve out at least half an hour for a coffee and a glance at the Mail before putting her back into making lunch.

She could hear Whitney’s sobs through the floorboards and thought briefly about going up to her with a cuppa.  But she relished neither the sight nor smell of her daughter in the mornings and thought that seeing her all puffed-up and snotty might put her off in a long term way.  Not that she wasn’t sympathetic.  A broken heart was a terrible thing; she herself had had to pull back from the brink of a passionate love affair just last year.  For the sake of her children she had decided to stick with her husband Gillard.  But sometimes she still wondered whether she’d made the right choice.  He was a good chap at heart but being from Wiltshire he wasn’t much of an ideas man.

Still, maybe she would try to have a word with Adrian today, to see what his intentions were.  He was an odd lad, but quite frankly, she mused, given her dull wits and doughy face Whitney’s options were limited.