Madame Tea

A Cold Call and Death by Fridge

Ok, so I missed the pride festival in Bristol yesterday because of sleeping in. I blame this partly on a white witch from western Warsaw, who conjured significant amounts of the alcoholic undead at her housewarming last night, though I could only really identify the two Flaming Zombies, a Bloody Mary, and a Ruddy Vampire, who went around giving everyone free shots by biting them on the neck, an affectation that resulted in a lovely taste of peppermint vodka in the inner ear. A lot of this could have been hallucinations due to a Hotchpotch Scotch, known by everyone at that point as a Wishkey, of dubious origins (it said so on the bottle "Product of Dubi OUS") that everyone was drinking out of glasses and licking off the lenses, all of which suggests a certain level of inebriation beforehand.

The other part of the reason for my slow start that morning is that, earlier in the week, I was kept up all night by a snoring fridge. This unusual object was left for Madame Tea at a t-shirt, tea, and shorts emporium called the Short Sharp Shower of Shirt Shop. I received a mysterious phone call at one o'clock in the morning telling me to pick it up and bring it to a desserted warehouse at the harbourside in a few days. It was less mysterious when I checked the caller ID on the phone.

So for a couple of nights I had this small fridge in my room, and when plugged in it would snore like an asthmatic narwhal, though when I tried to turn it off, it spent the next hour farting like an inflatable hippo, with a steady change in pitch that was just enough to continuously annoy. Thankfully I only had it for two nights, and on the third evening I wheeled it along by its lead to the warehouse full of chilled puddings and cakes, happy to be getting rid of it, though less happy about the looks I got when the fridge randomly backfired at people in the street.

Madame Tea herself only appeared after I had chanted her name backwards three-times, hopped round the magic circle twice, and tripped over massive black forest gâteaux at least 4 times, simply through boredom. It was worth the wait though: she appeared in an explosion of tiles, carried elegantly from underneath the earth in the rapidly growing tendrils of some plant, probably another variety of tea. It was obvious though that the transport was far from glamorous or even comfortable: the instantaneous blooms that had appeared on the branch tips the moment they hit sunlight, spraying the air with thick white pollen, didn't manage to obscure the fact that being dragged through the mud had not only left her clothes mucky but a bit thinly veil. Bits and Bob's were certainly visible, and I felt a bit sorry for Bob, as Madame performed a quick change, wrapping herself up in her mysterious layers of silks that made her look like her, and probably like her mama too.

I got scolded for seeing, but it was my own fault for not watching while I was filling the teapot: it had a habit of moving, wandering off to unknown places, and occasionally fighting back. This time I'm sure there was a giggle of steam from the spout.

It turned out the fridge was supposed to work with a tea that had evolved in East Carolina, which produced a strange combination of mild paranoia, reasonable sociopathy, and hypersensitive hearing. The noise of the fridge every night was supposed to drive an individual insane with noise, so they killed everyone else in the building. She didn't like such a buck-shot method, but it was good for anonymising motives, and was also amusing at parties. This fridge was heading for a very posh student hall of residence, which somewhat tempered my objections to her job. 

There wasn't much chatting time: the tea we had been drinking made it impossible to speak normally. But as she left, fridge in one hand, tea chest in the other, she did promise to tell me more about some of the jobs she had done in the past. 

I have to say, I'm really looking forward to them.