Abducted

How thin: the veneer of civilization. As thin as the veneer on my front tooth, which once came off, suddenly, as I was biting into a pork pie. I trundled off to the dentist with it wrapped in a piece of cling-film (the veneer, not the pie). My regular dentist had gone to Australia, and I was ‘seen to’ by a lovely lady dentist. She was dressed all in black, and I gazed into her soft brown eyes above the mask, as I gladly allowed her to invade my personal space.
Oh, having just read over that, I wondered if I made it sound like she was a Muslim? She wasn’t. Her ‘black’ was a dental uniform: unusual, but very effective – not to say sexy - and when she came to fetch me from the waiting room she was minus mask: very pretty. I felt immediately reassured, and had no qualms about her exploring my cavities, which she did with latex-gloved fingers, imbued with skill and sensitivity. (Did not Jane Austin write a novel called ‘Sense and Sensibility’? Well, if she had had my dentist she might have thought of a better title!)
She made an excellent job of gluing the veneer back in place – I am sure an extraction by this lady would be pure pleasure.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
‘Get in, you silly sod – you’re not safe to be let out on your own!’
I climbed into the sidecar (or ‘chair’ as Myra calls it) to the accompaniment of honking horns: we were holding up traffic on a busy thoroughfare. I had barely settled myself before she accelerated away. I gripped the chrome of the curved windscreen support and resigned myself to my fate.

The ‘Downs’. Only the English could call a hill the ‘Downs’. Cold sunlight. Beautiful winter landscape. No snow, but beautiful.
‘How did you know where I was?’
‘Call it the long hairy arm of coincidence, squire.’ Responds my abductress. I wish she wouldn’t keep calling me ‘squire’ – that expression dates back to the sixties. Still, there is so much of Myra that dates back to the sixties – me as well, come to think of it.
‘You’ve pinched that “long hairy arm of coincidence” from “Lolita”, haven’ you!'
‘How do you know old Nabokov didn’t nick it from me?’ she retorts with a grin. She is sitting, sidesaddle, on the bike, filling her pipe.
‘I’m sorry I did a runner.’ I apologise, ‘but that night was just too much for me.’
‘Oh you’d get used to that sort of thing if you stayed in our house. Actually he was in the gazebo with your Carole. I saw the light on, from my bedroom window. Perhaps I jumped to conclusions, but he takes all his floozies there; calls it his ‘studio’, he does. Fancies himself as a bit of a photographer “I paint with light” he says.’
‘Is he any good… my brother… with the camera?’
‘Nah – rubbish. He got this idea of doing a calendar, for our Church. You know, on the lines of that famous one, where those old biddies posed in the nude (essential parts tastefully obscured) for a Women’s’ Institute calendar – one for each month. They made the story into a film called “Calendar Girls’. Well, he wanted to do the same for us. He had a title: The 12 Deadly Sinners – I was to be January. It wasn’t that I was opposed to the idea, in principle, but apart from his spectacular lack of artistic talent we’ve only got nine members so far – and that includes me. He wanted to rope in two of his barmaid friends from the Vole and Ferret but I said that wouldn’t be right – unless they joined the church.
‘But you would still only have eleven,’ I quickly calculate.’
‘Ah, that was where your Carole was going to come in: he reckoned he was trying to persuade her to be the twelfth – Deadly Sinner, that is.’
‘She’s got a stunning figure.’
‘Well, you would know, I suppose.’ she retorts from behind a cloud of smoke.
I wait until the smoke disperses a bit. ‘Why do you persist in smoking? Do you want to die an unpleasant death?’
‘Are there any pleasant deaths?’ She grins. ‘Anyway, I believe you are a bit of a dab-hand with the old camera – how about photographing this calendar for us?’
‘Oh I don’t know about that. Besides, I haven’t go my equipment with me.’
‘You can use Hector’s stuff.’
‘But won’t he mind?’ I object.
‘He’s not here.’
‘Not here?’ I echo, confused. ‘But where is he?’
‘No idea, squire. I haven’t seen my dear husband since the police carted him off that night.’
‘But he could come back at any time… couldn’t he? I enquire rather nervously.
She reassures me. ‘I’ve had the locks changed.’
‘But what about Carole?’
‘Oh she’s still at the house. She’s a good kid – she’s agreed to be December. Now if that doesn’t tempt you, I don’t know what will.’ She winks.
This is all becoming a bit too much for me, and I say so. ‘This is all becoming a bit too much for me.’
Myra swings her leg over the tank and dismounts from the bike. ‘Come on. Let’s go for a walk – and a talk. Walking frees the thought processes.’
And so we start to walk, up the hill.