She Fell Asleep On The Beano

It started with a belly button ring, which was a miracle, one fit for a group of poor French kids in a field, a miracle that the mumbling Catholics on their clapped out coaches would call the Miracle of Bernadette of The Beano – You’ll find out why later. A miracle because Bernadette hasn’t seen her feet since the The Queen’s Silver Jubilee, her belly button was back in her memory depositing it’s fluff on the Spangles and Ben and his adverts for Birds Eye beef burgers. I say it started with a belly button ring, with a heart heavier that the eyeliner and mascara she now spends the misty hour after dawn shoveling on. It’d be quicker and just as effective if she bought two tarantulas and nailed them to her fat fizzog. After the belly button ring came the nasal stud, it looks like a posh blackhead, the sort Council Spice would gob off about in one of the Sunday magazines in an article crammed between the Elvis plate and the Kraftmatic adjustable beds that allow you to sleep like a fat astronaut. It makes her snore, the nasal stud; the thing about Bernadette is that she’s a creature of habit. Most of them disgusting and a couple of them deserving a reality TV show of their very own. Every night at eleven she has a piece of cod. I know it’s weird but she does, steamed in a little milk and she slides it down her neck in one, like a retired performing seal gone bad. And now she’s taken to snoring because of the stud in her hooter, and when she does her mouth opens and her jaw drops open like a pink trawler door with a force nine codded gale gusting out on every out breath. Still could be worse, but I can’t think how, just yet. I’m glad she’s out of her Tai Chi phase, it was quite distressing for me to see her in her pyjamas, never mind all the early commuters getting an eyeful as she stood on the front lawn pretending to hold that big imaginary golden orb, slowly rotating it around in a make believe orbit. Black silk pyjamas will turn most sow’s ears into something half decent, but not Bernadette, oh no she just looked like a bin bag with a head. I think if she hadn’t got bored with it the council would have put a restraining order on her, I hid the first three warning letters from the council, but I’ve kept the letter from the woman bus passenger whose nausea was heightened by Bernadette and her ‘magnificent under arm sweat circles’ after her nausea level being heightened she describes how two days later it
reached critical mass and how she vomited her part digested Weetabix onto her lap at the sight of what she described as ‘a map of Africa snaking from the area above the crack of Bernadettes arse.’ An arse which she unhelpfully described as being so large that it should have it’s own M.P.. Which is cruel and untrue, although I have to admit suggesting one morning as she tried to put on a belt that a boomerang might be useful.
The Tai Chi has been replaced with car mechanics. A martial art with black hands she calls it; I can no longer access the kitchen table for the parts of the Vauxhall Vectra Monte Carlo she has piled up on it. Sitting elbow to elbow with a Stromberg carburetor and a laycock clutch and bearing assembly is now part of my routine, I’m now condemned for a while at least to live in a house with car parts as breafast guests,lunch time buddies and dinner companions, at least for dinner she dresses them with a tea towel,not quite black ties but she makes an effort, dinner by candlelight is out . Second nights dinner a candle tipped and the teaspoon of petrol from the resevior inside the carbeurettor threw a flame up eight foot high and scorched a hole big as a plate the polystyrene ceiling tile.
I think this phase is longer lasting than some of the others on account of Bernadette, who down at the college where she trundles in her Halfords ‘Sunday mechanics’ overalls on Wednesday nights is a bit of a star. She delighted the whole class of blokes (there was another girl but she only came the once and was frightened off when in week three she read in the prospectus that they’d be greasing nipples – she presumed they’d be hers and was off in a Barnsley heartbeat ) when lay flat on her back under a Nissan that looked it had been painted with a woolly hat proclaimed her diagnosis with one word. Fortunately for Wendy’s popularity that word was ‘fuck’ used in every form possible. “Now Wendy, smirked Pete the ex AA man with the teeth like bins (one every yard) what’s your diagnosis with the Nissan?” Wendy rolled herself out from under the car and exclaimed ‘Fuck, the fuckin’ fuckers fucking fucked. The round of applause lasted 'til the end of the lesson, which was all she needed, praise for bad behavior encourages more. I won’t go into what else she’s taken to saying, you might not have eaten yet, but it isn’t pretty, big or clever. I do hope the mechanic phase ends soon as she’s started hanging calendars that picture well-hung young men holding tyres all over the house. Her estimation skills have deteriorated, as you would expect from a mechanic. When she says she reckons the weekly shop will cost fifty quid, she really means two hundred and she’ll have to send of for some of it to a main dealer in Manchester. We’ve taken to ordering Polony sausage from a main Polony dealer, Wendy insists it’s a genuine part I still prefer the Asda variety mostly because it costs nine pound fifty less. On the body mutilation front I wished she’d stuck with the posh blackhead and the bellybutton ring that lay hidden in the pink ripples of her marvelous belly. The first tattoo was O.K. a fairy waving a wand at the top of her bum where the crack peters out and the black hairs start. ‘It should have been holding its nose instead of waving a wand’ I thought in a sulk over the arrival from Parma, enough ham to carpet the house. Once she’d had some ‘ink done’ as she called it, they started to appear everywhere a butterfly on her arm, a smiley face on her ankle. Most of them went unnoticed because they were covered, but that all changed one horrible afternoon. She came into the bedroom turned side on and put her thumb up.She’d had a Celtic design tattooed to both sides of her neck circling up onto her cheeks. She looked like she’d fallen asleep on the Beano….

“What? Sorry Vicar I drifted off’

“Do you take Bernadette to be your lawful wedded Wife?”

‘I do I do I do – she’s gorgeous.’

The End