Have you ever suffered from vertigo? I don’t mean the odd dizzy spell; I mean the “Jimmy Stewart climbing up the stairs of a tower while the whole world swims around in his head” type of vertigo. I have! Just last week, in fact.
It isn’t pleasant!
Try getting out of bed when your bedroom has split into three identical bedrooms that are vying for your attention. Try standing up while each bedroom swims through the other two as your eyes try to focus on just one. Try standing up while…well just try sitting up let alone standing up.
Lie back down, Saucer, I hear you say. And I did. And I closed my eyes so that I didn’t have to watch the three bedrooms fight. But, I really needed to get up. Why? Because it was morning and I had been asleep through the night and there was business I needed to take care of. Desperately! Try taking care of said business when there are three receptacles swimming through each other.
Then I crawled back into one of the three beds and fell asleep. And I dreamed:
It was a typical “pre-loved” bookshop. I mean a bookshop of “pre-loved” books not that the bookshop was pre-loved. We used to call them second-hand bookshops until this younger lot came along. Inside this establishment mustiness waged a constant battle with dustiness among the well stacked shelves. Some of the books were obvious casualties in the war, but other, sturdier specimens stood proudly amongst the fallen.
A handful of people stared at me suspiciously when I entered but they didn’t deter me. True, the little old lady with the twitch and three eyes was a little disconcerting, but I managed to avoid her by moving to the back of the shop. The back of the shop was my destination anyway – it had a fine collection of articles that I wanted to read. (Look, it isn’t my fault that the articles are always sandwiched between pictures and it isn’t my fault that I turn the pages slowly.)
There was a solitary man perusing the articles when I got there. He glanced up at me with guilty eyes and pulled the collar of his raincoat above his face. I asked him if the weather forecast had predicted rain but he ignored me. Two could play at that game: I picked up a magazine at random and thumbed through the pages absorbing the astonishing information therein (which reminds me that I must find out how Miss October is doing in her quest for world peace.)
That was when it happened!
A tall man rushed in clutching a steering wheel, a small leather bound book and an animated picture of my boss that kept screaming “get back to work!” This man (the tall one, not the boss and not Mr Raincoat) threw the book at me crying “look after this with your life”. He actually cried while saying this; it was not a metaphor. Then he collapsed at my feet.
I looked at the book. The title was embossed in gold and said Lefty’s Diary: a Sock In search of His Twin.
Then I woke up and the room wasn’t part of a trio anymore. I was better! Much, much better! Now I’m trying to figure out what happened and why. Is it really linked to the mystery of the missing socks?
