Five hours he’d stood there, five. He’d moved around nonchalantly at first. Made tea for them both, albeit awkwardly. He’d successfully emptied the shopping bag after he’d decided bending down to remove the contents wasn’t going to work and he had heaved it on to the table in an ungainly fashion. He immediately wished he’d put it nearer the cupboard because his body seemed to have gained a new barely controllable momentum. The following four hours forty minutes? Well.
His wife invited him to join her on the sofa but he was having none of that. No, he wanted to make a point. So he’d stood there, made coffee on occasion and cobbled together some sort of supper. With his back to the wall or leaning against it, propped, he witnessed Celebrity Something, X Factor or was it Britain’s Got No Talent, the news and the start of Match of the Day. He couldn’t recall much of it.
His shoulders ached first. That surprised him. It began as a dull inconvenience but rapidly escalated to some bastard driving six inch nails into that lump of muscle between his shoulder blades and his spine. Then his back started. He didn’t even try to isolate the part of the lumbar region where it originated. He gave it a name and spoke to it nicely. It ignored him. He gave it a number, like on the Richter scale, but found he had all to quickly reached ten and instinctively knew eleven would not suffice. He gave up that notion.
‘Come and sit down. It’ll make it easier,’ his wife had informed him and had repeated the invitation numerous times since her first attempt. He would have sat down but the amusement in her voice was matching the escalation in his discomfort. Going up at the same rate was his annoyance with her, with the tv, with the world.
‘Not getting a bit snappy are we?’ She almost revelled in the words. ‘Come on, sit down.’
He wanted to sit down, but was not sure he’d ever get up again. Without even trying it, he had more pain in his knees and back, and his bladder screamed to be emptied at the mere thought of it. Bugger, he needed to pee. He tried performing the act in his head, but it soon became evident that such a performance was just that, a performance, impractical, futile – his arms were no longer long enough to do it standing up. He’d have to pee sitting down.
And there was a problem. Yes, he managed to wedge himself into the downstairs loo. It was a tight fit. He should have gone for the small corner hand basin. He was warned. But no, he wanted the full size job. Well this was his thanks. He was in the loo but, in his current state, could not drop his trousers. Bollocks he thought, but they’d got him in this mess. I’ll have to go upstairs.
The thought brought him to his knees, or would have done if he could ever have imagined himself getting up again.
‘Ok,’ he sobbed, ‘yes,’ he sobbed. ‘Please, please, let me take this two stone belly off. I’ll never make fun of your pregnancy again.’
