Move Back to Brighton 5

I have sinusitis and a bit of wheeziness. Before my cacao in matcha latte oat milk I tilt myself forward and backward and then roll from the waist to dislodge phlegm. 

As a toddler, when I was recovering from the fatal strain of croup, Doctor Halfpenny...I don’t know what he would be called these days factoring in inflation: Doctor Twenty-Six Pounds Seventy-five, maybe? Anyway, to shift phlegm he recommended Eirwen and Terry play the Fishy in the Water game.* One or other of them would sit me facing them on their lap, then tilt me backwards so my head was just off the floor and sing, ‘Fishy in the Water/Fishy in the Sea/Who Do You Like Best/The fishes or me?’ 

And to be lifted upright again I’d have to reply, ‘You’.

I gave them such a complex...

‘Fishes.’ 

‘Fishes.’ 

‘Fishes.’ 

By the time we went back for my check up with Doctor Twenty-Six Pounds Seventy-five again I’d effectively renamed his game, ‘Don't ask the question if you can't handle the answer, bitches.'

Eirwen (ego) would forego playing and instead rope in others. The Avon, lady, insurance rep, rag and bone man. He smelled of Brasso. 

Mrs Lingwood was too scrawny, Tom Delaney just that tad too known for sure about paedophile – but anyone else was fair game. 

I’d seen Eirwen and Terry at their fore-fore-play. She would sit knitting. He would lie on the sofa leering across at her. Once he commented he could see something winking at him from beneath her housecoat. She went over and sat on his lap, squirming while his head bobbed like a turkey's as he stared goggle-eyed down her front.

That looked fun. 

Terry had a roadie called Big Al. I got him to play 'Fishy in the Water' with me and held him off tilting me downward - I asked child questions, natch - while I squirmed in his lap like I had worms. 

His muscles, you see. He was big and strong and capable. He could rescue me. Like the catcher in the Flying Zippos trapeze act in the circus I saw in Battersea Park when I was seven. He was hairily topless in lycra with lurex wellies. 

He could still rescue me any time he felt like swinging by. 

I'm not into any of the Marvel heroes. Their use of lycra is far too performative. 

I’m more a spit and sawdust cosplay queen.

Sometimes – kinky bitch mode activated - I forego the rescue element factor and just watch gimp-masked Stevie from Gravesend on PornHub coming hands free braced on the crossbar of his Pon Holdings Roadmaster.

I won't tell Flixy I have a congested chest. She'll no doubt have been Emily Bronte dying from consumption on the parsonage sofa refusing to see a doctor till it was too late.  

* I always called my parents Eirwen and Terry; mum and dad sounding too affectionate.

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