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"Curing the Chameleon"
A story set sometime in the 1960's
One eye closed.
He sniffed and shrewdly lowered the weapon muttering expletives. No longer armed to his decaying teeth.
Out of breath and with a final tug to get her shoe back on Chloe jiggled in her Hillman Imp she had left parked awkwardly in a soggy side road. Letting the dog jump through the rear window. Once both inside the hound shook its fur fecklessly and spattered her with the fallout. She laughed and checking her hair in the mirror cranked an engine that reluctantly gasped to start. She bumped along a drove with the tiny car wheels spinning erratically as she tuned the radio while lighting a cigarette at the same time. It crackled on the speaker about the civil rights street battles in America and something about a six day war in Israel. Finally 'Help me Rhonda' from the Beachboys blasted from the dashboard distortedly and Chloe sang along in between drags on a Consulate.
The little yellow car bumped down the road without a care in the world. Chloe was unaffected by her brush with death and the baseless altercation with the farmer only seconds before. She had been remonstrating with the cantankerous not so gentleman for months.
Chloe was a spitfire by nature. She was the epitome of an enchanted Princess perched on an electric chair daring anyone to throw the switch. Life was too short sucking up to morons. She regretted her fiery outburst from a professional perspective. But she did not brow beat herself. This Neanderthal had the sensitivity of a bludgeon towards his meek mannered wife and she was not going to be intimidated either. Her feminist views would do more damage to pond-life like him, than any well-oiled shotgun could. She was like that. As far as she could understand Mr Shitface deserved the attention of a fruit fly and the compassion of Great white.
"Nasty bugger him, eh, Rosie?" Driving single handed she tugged the ear of the dog affectionately looking for support for her actions.
"Poor Mrs Mazzeppa, I hope she comes to see me tomorrow, moochy." The dog accepted the attention but was oblivious of any issues. It sat in the car seat licking its genitals gleefully.
She drove hastily. Chloe was late for class. She had to get to college for a lecture. She was studying botany for which she needed a diploma to practice her therapy. Conventional medicine would not do for unconventional ambition. She would take the train from Ely but first she needed to change out of her muddy dress and collect her assignments. She lived above a flowershop by Ely cathedral and woke up to the 'Ship 'O' the fens at her window each morning. The grey smouldering relic looked over her patiently as she examined the weather. The twisted spires plucking at the low clouds of early rising mist and the lead roofs steaming with spring dew as the sun spread across its heaving mass.
She lumped the car into a curb stopping abruptly with an effective stall, and Rosie scratched excitedly at the side window. She diligently danced across the road swinging her handbag wildly as if part of some choreographic sequence with the dog jumping alongside to bite it as some tugtoy for a new game. She pranced like a pixie in paradise trying to avoid oncoming vehicles and jaywalking with dangerous expertise. She stopped suddenly at the shop front and looked across the array standing guard at the door. There she embraced the heady hues and with her hair tossed back, she sniffed the scents of the pageantry to greet her. She looked down at her colourful reception with wonder. Anenomes bouncing in their pots like they were gossiping in the breeze. Bedding plants arranged in lines of colour laughing at the last frost. Cornflowers, stirring with pride alongside a fleet of sword lilies. A tribe of narcissus and jonquils twiddled in buckets tightly budded and in close uniformity.
She picked a crimson primrose and with a twinkle of mischief placed it in her hair.
She swept into the shop bumping into the proprietor.
"Hi Mrs Howard, I have your rent." Chloe jammed her hand into her bag that looked as if it could only hold £3 17 shillings and sixpence in loose change before the coins would find escape. A threepenny bit fell to the floor finding its bid for freedom as it cartwheeled towards the roadside drain. A man carrying a pair of steps saw the absconding coin and flattened it with his boot.
"Thanks Charlie." Chloe retrieved it bending down far too inelegantly making the man grin with delight as he witnessed the tops of a sunkissed thigh hiding inside some frilly white undies. A sight worth 'thruppence' any day.
A slightly perspiring woman in a bib and brace smiled at her clutching various dismembered foliage.
"Thanks Dear, that will come in handy. I have to order wreaths for Sir Alfred Thomas who passed away on Friday? You know, the desert rat with thrombosis and full pension? I knew that bloody pipe would kill him."
Dorothy Howard had been busying herself with funeral arrangements. Lucrative for business but very hard work. It was the surviving relatives that made her life difficult. Squabbling over whether it should be white lilies or carnations, daisies or roses.
The portly women with a swathe of long hair hitched up into a beehive revealed some grey through the henna. She was once quite beautiful. She over did her lipstick in that way that fashion dictated. Her full mouth and slight jowl quivered as she spoke.
"I don't know, they're dropping like flies. Last week young Samuel Crompton.. you know that poor lad with polio? Eight years old and gets TB. I mean these days would you credit it? Three hundred mourners at St Mary's for that one. The Reverend Martin did a lovely sermon for the little mite."
Chloe listened with a change of expression. Her head bowed forlornly. She kicked a loose fern towards a pile swept in the corner.
"The trouble is," The woman stopped bustling, and dropped her shoulders despairingly.
"It doesn't seem five minutes ago I was fixing tulips for the baptism."
A solemn pause elapsed as they stood in some sort of brief armistice day silence, that was finally broken by a very shrill phone ring. It was challenged by a bad reception instead. The partially deaf Mrs Howard would hate to answer her phone for this reason. The phone bell was hooked up to a rickety public address system to summon her from any nook in the labrinyth-like shop. To answer it would make it almost impossible to hear the caller making conversation. Customers and Mrs Howard would end up frustrated with this primitive form of communication soon wishing for the return of smoke signals or morse code. However, it always guaranteed the call would end with a plea from the florist to invite the enquirer into to the shop as the 'reception' would be far better.
It was a canny marketing ploy on the part of the industrious shopkeeper. "Flower Power" was the busiest purveyor of blooms all year round for miles around. As well as growing flowers she was already outgrowing her shop. She had thought of opening a garden centre. This was a new phenomenon. Apparently, they had one in London and it was very popular.
She piped optimistically with a few words of her own potted wisdom.
"Well, I always say, flowers are forever. They welcome you to life and see you off in death, but in the end, we all just end up pushing up the daisies, eh, love….errr would you get that for me? I hate the damn thing?"
"Sure, Mrs H," Chloe stumbled over a watering can that lay in wait and snatched the large black receiver with its cloth plaited cord.
A soft voice slipped along a buzzing, almost inaudible connection, but the sound was instantly recognised by Chloe. It was Mrs Mazzeppa. She was either having trouble with her phone too or in a flood of tears.
"Hello, hello, is that you Cookie? Whassup? I can't hear you properly."
Chloe frowned and twisted the braided wire in between her fingers into fist, wearing it like a hasty form of knuckle duster and put one finger in her other ear. She turned and stood in the corner facing a wall. A chrome carousel festooned with seed packets turned with her as she brushed against it. She struggled to listen to the muted message and her mouth moved silently like she was trying to lip-read long distance.
Chloe felt her senses bristle. She already knew the woman she was talking to, was in some sort of physical and emotional pain. Burning with anger she listened intently to horrific tidings. From the garbled and desperate voice, she had fallen victim to a tirade of abuse from her husband.
"Look, Cookie, calm down, I'll meet you in fifteen minutes at the Cutter Inn. Can you do that?"
Chloe slammed the receiver down and it slid off its cradle. She gave Mrs Howard a knowing look who replaced the hand phone for her. Without a word they seemed to be on the same wavelength even if the phone was not. Chloe nodded and smiled appreciatively at the women who with a pair of shiny clippers snipped at the bunch of gladioli in her hand like she was castrating a stud bullock. Her peach coloured lips set in a line. Intuitively, as women do, she had already read between the dodgy phonelines. An art shared by the more deadly of the species when they seem to know what the other is thinking telepathically.
Clambering up the narrow stairs at the rear of the shop Chloe slipped on a stray LP at the top that was strategically left on the floor to disable her she and went down on her backside.
"Shit". She bit her lip determinedly and jumped right up.
She disrobed in seconds stuffing her muddy miniskirt into the AliBaba linen basket. She walked through the apartment as she tugged at the knotted midriff cheesecloth blouse, and it fell at her feet.
Her body was statuesque. Gracefully, gangling, all at the same time. A slight frame with a neat black triangle matching her dark nipples. The haircut colour was from inside a bottle at Boots. She looked great in Boots. She had nineteen pairs. All kinds. Her favourite were Venezuelan suede. She placed a housefly sized pair of black sunglasses on her short platinum French cut. Minesweeping her belongings looking for something very important.
She called her dog.
"Rosie?"
She called again.
The dog sheepishly appeared from under her bed. With that look of unwarranted guilt. Why it is, dogs when asked to leave a place of warmth and comfort do so with that 'hangdog' expression as if they are asked to be walked to the gallows at gunpoint.
"S'ok, girl. Mummy will be back soon. No pissing or pooping, alright?"
Her flat was a little avant garde at the least. At most, a crazy riot of gawdy colour. With mirror tiles and chiffon tye-dye scarves hanging next to Warhol posters. Joss sticks littered the post war dresser and candle wax had already 'carpet bombed'. A factory fresh Dansette record player sat precariously on a three-legged stool next to an unmade single bed that had a Union Jack for bedclothes and a pillow hiding her stash of marijuana.
In a recess, at the back, was her 'health studio' and in the middle stood a National health hospital bed with the cot-sides down. The exploding plaster on the walls, were effectively hidden by psychedelia. A Jackson Pollock print hung from pushpins next to a signed photograph of PJ Proby. It was a stifling, windowless room, that, if not, for Chloe's neoteric touch would look like a mobile mortuary or a place where illegal abortions were carried out. A lava lamp made some jelly-like ballet in a tube, by a small sink, that had just one large fosset. In the other corner was a glass cabinet full of small corked bottles, filled with powders and potions. Scribbled labels in pencil, all askew. The sort of furniture you would reluctantly inherit from Grandma and otherwise full to the brim with memorabilia spanning two Coronations and at least one World war. A large clay mortar and pestle stood with a plain porcelain vanity basin and jug on an old trunk.
Back in her bedroom chaos mounted, unaided. She ignored the half drunk coffee cups and bulging ashtrays.
A harp stood over the dressing table like some serif at Gethsemane. Her prized possession. A tumble of make-up and accompanying tubs of rouge brushes was not far away from it. Vomiting draws left open, gave the impression a murder or robbery had already taken place. Her 'wardrobe' a large tidy-rail groaned under a quaking heap of textiles of every shape and size.
Chloe while of character was not a person of order and that is why she needed what she was now fervently looking for.
Her giant green eyes grew wider and she gave a victorious grin as she saw what she searched. She picked up her diary that was twice the normal size now. Well thumbed, and stuffed with note-lets, and it was still only May. Business was brisk. She had over eleven paying customers. Her diary was hoping to be a personal organiser one day but they had not been invented yet.
She put on a floppy hat and huge amber earrings and stepped into her torn denim shorts. She snatched up a mangle of beads and pulled them over her head as she buckled a large white plastic belt to the first notch around her skinny waist. Her tummy exposed as usual. A sort of sexy but 'un-military' 24 hour Navel display. Her belly button was the favourite part of her body and looked that shy to ever open properly, it was either, God, or a nimble-fingered midwife had already taken great care of it.
She whistled down the stairs again and shouted goodbye to the now frenzied, Mrs Howard who had wreathes over both elbows like she was about to juggle for Chipperfield's circus or become the world's oldest and scruffiest cheerleader.
"Bye love." She cried.
The little Imp car crunched into the pub car park. Builders working on the new pub sign made some complimentary grunts. Chloe sniffed loudly and gave them extra encouragement with an exaggerated wiggle as she pushed open the bar door. Carrying her trusty diary.
She panned the area and huddled in one corner under the pub clock by a bay window was a sorry figure. It was Mrs Mazzeppa. She was wearing a scarf and sunglasses. Vacantly staring at her full cold teacup.
Chloe gulped and she slid up to the waiflike wisp of a woman.
"Cookie?" She whispered.
The woman looked up and hesitantly spoke.
"He did this."
With trembling hands she unwrapped the scarf from around her head to reveal a few patchy tufts of hair and lesions all over her head. Her once, beautiful black hair had been removed by fingers, and not scissors. Her scalp was covered in fresh scabs. She quickly put her scarf back on self-consciously.
Chloe took her sunglasses off for her as she turned away with a look of hurt and shame.
Chloe gasped and felt the need to weep discreetly.
Both once exquisite eyes of Asian almond shape beauty were now disfigured. Purple and swollen. The tiny whites red with burst vessels. A slit, two inches long above her cheekbone gaped with burst tissue, where was once a brief home to a rifle butt. Her earrings had been taken from lobes by force and left them torn and shredded. Her front teeth were loose and the roots shattered making the cup of tea a waste of money.
Chloe's botany lecture would have to be put on hold.
To be continued ...
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