BABUSHKA: The Warrior's Angel

Chapter VII. Four Fifths of Everything

VII. FOUR FIFTHS OF EVERYTHING  

Slumped in the shower, a pile of extinguished limbs, for just a moment there was peace in the sleeping warrior’s heart. Following the weight of his head through the cracks between his jewel-encrusted fingers – his hands forming a kind of royal pin-cushion between his crooked neck and the tiled wall – the black makeup that ran from his eyes had merged into a single oily trail, leaching its way down one of his arms to the elbow embedded in his thigh, the last obstacle before the ceramic base still swirling with the unspeakable remnants of the diaper, piled and sodden at his feet.

            And then came the click of the apartment’s front door, followed by the vox <Any-one ho-ome?> sing-songing its way through his mind and sucking him, drooling, out of the plug-hole’s gravity.

           On groggy autopilot, he rinsed himself down as efficiently as he could before stepping out of the shower and selecting an old towel out of the dirty-linen basket, giving it a quick security sniff before wrapping it around his waist. Removing the jewelery, he made a gentle golden nest of it on top of the old hand towel in one of the twin sinks – her sink – still curled up like a sleeping pup, just how she’d left it.

           Opening the bathroom cabinet, its mirrored doors criss-crossed in manic strips of insulation tape – something he had absolutely no recollection of doing – he found the brown pharmacy bottle he was looking for amongst the jars of junker teeth (he knew, he knew, but he’d been very angry back then) and shook out half a dozen of the crimson and cream capsules: his ever-trusty rhubarb-and-custards, a hundred times more potent than espresso and Red Bull combined.

           Popping the rhubarbs and bending for the faucet, he noticed out the corner of his eye that there was a cachaça bottle floating in the toilet bowl. A scrolled-up message appeared to be stuffed in its neck so perhaps he’d tried to flush it to someone. Or maybe someone had flushed it to him…

           Fishing out the bottle, he extracted a long, laminated menu: spider-scrawled in what looked like eyeliner pencil the handwriting may or may not have been his but as he’d never really learned it was hard to tell.

            The only race is with yourself, is what it said.

           Well, that and the takeout prices at the local Chinese.

            Tell me something I don’t know, he thought, eying the backwash at the bottom of the bottle. Sucking out the last swig and sluicing the rocket-fuel around his teeth he swallowed hard, sending the capsules along their way, deep into his inner space. Now ready to make an appearance, he dropped the empty bottle in the linen basket and headed for the door, remembering along the way to lower the toilet-seat because that’s how she liked it.

           Sporting his fresh(ish) white(ish) towel, he then dripped his way out of the bathroom, right smack bang into the pair of what he’d once heard the Academy’s locker-room jocks describe as perfect blowjob lips. Over their owner’s flawless shoulder the early-morning light was spilling through the living room’s balcony windows and into the hallway, bathing everything in a soft focus, accentuating the feminine touch the apartment had clearly once reveled in; the decor’s color scheme tastefully tying in with the lily-pond frescoes and a scattering of oriental rugs and cushions, all carefully co-ordinated with strategically placed vases containing a variety of dried flowers. Closer scrutiny of the water-stains hooping down the interior of each vase though would have quickly revealed the arrangements to have been originally constructed with fresh flowers that had simply been left to wilt and die.