I was woken by a tiny trollish man this morning, regailing me with stories of how his ‘cubby hole’ was flooded by something emerging from my flat. I stood there dressed in nothing but a towel on with my head all clumpy and slow while he insisted that I must have just had a bath. I should be grateful really – he woke me from one of the most unpleasant dreams I’ve ever had.
I was in a place that resembled a huge, brightly lit locker room. It was as if they’d removed the gym from the building and made it all into a locker room. Some of the walls had mirrors on them. I was there for a shower of some kind. A huge institutional-looking man led me to my locker, which was a strange shape – deep and wide, but only about three inches high – and in it was were two packages that looked like they contained the towels you get at Chinese restaurants to freshen up with after eating. I didn’t know what to do with them initially, but under the steady, relentless gaze of the institutional man, I gradually I came to understand that one of these towels was saturated with some kind of soapy chemical substance, and the other removed it. You were expected to strip naked, rub yourself down with it and then use the other one to ‘rinse’ yourself. The institutional man said that sometimes the first part of the body that you touched with the towel sometimes reacted badly with the chemicals and would swell up – and he recommended using it on my chest as that would be less noticeable or dangerous. He did this bluntly – aggressively – like I didn’t really have much in the way of choice. I stripped off, took the towel and started wiping myself with it, but immediately started to feel strange and dizzy. Walking to a mirror I saw that some parts of my skin had ruptured under the pressure of the chemical towel – particularly on the side of my body – and that I was slowly become covered with substantial bleeding holes. And that’s when I woke up, with a weird troll-like man lurking outside my door, obsessed with flooding. What a way to start the day…
In unrelated news, Alan Storm has informed me that being bitten by a purple fly can turn Smurf’s purple. Note – this is very definitely not the same process as normal bruising.
