The Puffball Horror

I walked into the room, sat heavily on the couch.

“What’s the matter?” said Ma. I hid my face with my hand, unable to speak for a moment.

“God, what did you do?” asked d, feigning suspicion.

“Too…too horrible…” I muttered.

“What? Tell us?” demanded d.

Regular readers will know I’m taking medically-prescribed Zenical as an aid d’weightloss. Zenical, for Americans or the new and innocent among you, is what Alli would be if it went on an intensive, Green Beret-style boot camp designed to turn it from a lily-livered pissant digestive tract fluming agent into something more akin to Agent Orange, that can almost literally kick the crap out of you at a previously unprecedented range of knots. It makes every stomach-gurgle a sound of impending doom, and it shoots a foetid orange oil out of your ass like a kind of no-waiting sprinkler attachment.

Often – and indeed in my case, famously - relatively unannounced.

We’d decided that Dad was calm enough and stable enough to allow me to make my Monday morning London trip, which meant that one way or another, I had to shower before we stumbled, bleary, to our beds.

I turned on the water, waited for it to heat up, and stepped underneath the stream. Picked up the washing puff, soaped up, farted a small, insignificant puff of a fart, and began to scrub myself clean. Worked down my legs, round my ass, up my body…

I looked at the puff.

There are some moments in life that are truly, stunningly, horror-movie horrible. This, I’m here to tell you, was one of them. It was like the moment in Carrie where she gets her period in public and has no idea what it is or what to do about it. It was like some Hammer movie moment where a guy gets in a cab and is chatting amiably to the driver, only to see the driver turn round and reveal he’s just a rotted, animated corpse. It was that level of body-horror that I encountered now.

The puff was orange. Really, really orange.

“Ohhhhhh godddd….”

I poured shower gel into the puffball like it was going out of fashion, and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed it against itself, willing the orange out. There was no other way of getting clean, so I scrubbed that thing like it hadn’t been scrubbed in years, got out of the shower…ahem…wiped…got back in and used it again to get myself at least theoretically clean. Then I got out, threw the puffball in the recycling bin, wrapped myself in a robe and came through to the living room, sitting heavily on the couch.

“Orange…” I muttered. “So…so orange…”

d, in that way that women have carte blanche to do, but which would get men into allll sorts of trouble, laughed her head off. Ma, who’s relatively new to the intimacies of Zenical, raised her eyebrows.

“Ahem…” she coughed.

“That’s OK,” she said, searching….realllly searching for a positive in the story. “I’ve got plenty of puffballs. Been meaning to throw that one away for a while anyway…

Today was pretty much grim on every conceivable level, but warmed more than somewhat by the kind words of friends in the Real World and the e-world, for which, to all those who sent them, I’m grateful.  But today, frankly, is something I’ll tell you about tomorrow. It’s fally-downy time again. Yay…