Madame Tea

Absolomnom

Had yet another delightful if delusional encounter with the wonderful Madam Tea, who this time vouched-safe that her third middle name was Eunice, but with an Indo-Malayan spelling. She arrived on a couple of kippers with a side order of gyoza, supposedly because her equipment wouldn't work with the main dish, but I suspect that it was simply because she was allergic to local Poodles. 

She told me she needed my help as she needed a man with no sense of taste. I said I could taste just fine. She said that fortunately my sense of humour would not be missed. She was tracking a G smuggler in Bristol's famous floating harbour (G was like E, but it got you higher - which would explain why the harbour was currently floating). She made it sounds like a terrible drug: it made you happy and shop quickwitted, but ended with what was known as the G flat, a comedown so hard that when you hit rock bottom you would go geothermal. Otherwise, you just had to find the lowest surface possible to lay down on, usually a sub-basement or maybe even a demi-crypt, while the credit card lawyers took you through the bill.

It was a processed perversion of the Patagonian Partisan Projecting Peony, which was known to amplify the noise of any creature currently sat in the right part of the plant. This was considered to be an evolutionary advantage that allowed the pollinating insects to project their calls over a larger area, calling to prospective mates in the next country, beginning an informal trend in faunal long-distance relationships, and in turn, spreading the seeds for the plants much further. There was something about the stringy enzymes in the stems that hung off the supporting canopy, which when condensed produce a compound to make people's brains go ping, from which the G was refined.

She wanted my help, and my dessert, but not necessarily in that order, so standing as far apart as it was possible to do so, we ate a doughnut cake sandwich each, while heading to the harbourside, shouting to each other across the traffic.

A narrow lane forced us to come together, the dry stone wall collapsing on me from behind just as Madam Tea was admiring some sort of hybrid tea rose in a raised garden. She smelled like a dog: 2000 times as many nasal sensors as the average human being and a tendency to root in the bushes when out for a walk. 

In order to approach the target, we were to pretend to be a young couple, which was perhaps stretching it a little: Even 'middle-age mates' was going to be hard to pull off, as every time I stood within a few meters of her, a little tea vine automatically came out of her cuff and tried to percolate me. I made the mistake of trying to stamp on it the first time, whereupon she took my hand. Admittedly she did give it back, along with the entire arm that had been removed at the socket, but the tension that ensued suggested we were more convincing as the late-stage married couple now.

We finally tracked down the smuggler sat in a flour bed, sputtering and sneezing violently. Eunice had already told me he was dangerous: two police cautions for malignant coughing and one outright comedy for wheezing with intent. Sitting in the grass nearby, she eavesdropped on the pale figure on the phone, while I had to listen in to sound of happy couples arguing in the summer air. One of the guys was complaining that whenever he was out with his girlfriend birds seemed to suddenly appear everywhere and that she must give up this obsession with avian origami.

The evening ended suddenly when the target smuggler exploded in a fireball of dust, with a strong smell of instant coffee granules heavy in the immediate vicinity. Madam Tea said that this was because lighting fires were about all that freeze-dried evil was good for. She then disappeared on her knitted pagoda, drawn in charcoal by a couple of rope butterflies, though having breathed in some of the smuggler dust, I suspect that there was some residual G wafting about to make me see these things.

I do hope I will see her again: Life's abslomnomblo more prodoloimiously interesting when she's around.