My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

looked like ancient animal dung, that baffled me: a shiny rectangle of metal, like a flat box,
with numbers on its face, a little like a tiny sun-dial. Playing with it idly, I found that a little door at its back slid
open and two oddly heavy cylinders fell out from a case containing small springs. Eventually I managed to stuff them back
and slide the little door to, but the object (which I hid in a chamber pot) continued to be a source of puzzlement, & it was
not until much later, when my life had undergone the most grotesque & unexpected of unheavals, that its identity became apparent.
    But in the meantime, flummoxed, we continued work. Now you may be wondering, cherished companion, just how this miracle of
domestic industry came about, knowing a little of old Fru S’s habits & nature as you by now do. Well, I have not had the ball
& chain that is Fru S attached to my ankle all these years without having devised ways & means of manipulating her simple
mind, to enable our working relationship to function smoothly, so the deal – a classic carrot-&-stick arrangement – was that
Fru Schleswig would strive to make herself presentable, arrive punctually, put in all the elbow grease she had, & at all times
keep her trap shut in the company of Fru Krak. If she complied with these rules, she would be entitled to certain rewards,
in addition to a generous quarter-share of the pay we jointly received, viz as much schnapps as she wanted as soon as we reached
home, & permission to occupy the tattered & burst chaise-longue, stirring only to gorge on whatever victuals I had managed
to forage in the shops that night. If she failed to comply, I would kick her out of our lodgings forthwith.
    Simple, but effective – or so you would have thought, but Fru S grumbled mightily, with much railing & thunderous banging of her hammy fists, despite the fact that in the end she had no choice, for she had, as I pointed out, sponged off my goodwill for too long, for the entire twenty-five years of my life in fact, & it was time to call a halt or be out on her ear. She grumbled further, & (to infuriate me) called on her claim of kinship to me, for ‘how dare I treet my owne mutha thus’ & ‘bludde is thicka than worter’, & we descended into the usual squalid battle of words, for I have perhaps mentioned that the preposterous notion of a blood tie between us is very much an idée fixe of hers, which I can do nothing to dislodge in her poor deluded mind. In the end, I turned a deaf ear to her menaces, & flounced out to see Else, who insisted we go dancing, & it was a good idea for it lifted my mood, as dancing always does, & I brought a gentleman home with me by the name of Hans-Erik, & O, the rollicking fun we had on my mattress, by candle-light. There are times, dear reader, when I was happy indeed to be paid to have fun, because the fact is that for every foul-smelling old geezer there is a good-looking charmer who knows one end of a girl from the other, & that night I had such a gift in my arms, & nothing can be sweeter, & if the truth be told, I’d have performed the act for free if he’d asked me. But he did not, & so I scored on both counts.
    It was the following day, as I was tidying up the pile of foolish women’s journals to which Fru Krak was addicted, that something caught my notice which instantly gave me a valuable glimpse into the psyche of our employer. I had already remarked that after
she had been flicking through such publications, & in particular the Fine Lady, Fru Krak would become even more agitated & pernickety than usual. I had assumed that this was because these insipid journals
have a tendency to inspire insecurity & envy in women whose beauty will never match that of the fashion models depicted inside them – which
was clearly the plight of the physically charmless Fru Krak. Yet on that day, I discovered there was something more, which
confirmed my increasing