confidence.
‘Shoes off, please,’ said Heather.
Stella squared up with Joe at one end of the mat. Delphine and Simon faced them, each foot on a different coloured spot. Simon looked with loathing at Joe, architect of his earlier misery, who had apparently forgotten his meanness and was now grinning affably at his two opponents, his conscience clearly untroubled.
‘Right, everyone,’ said Heather. ‘Ready?’
Four heads nodded.
‘OK.’ Heather spun the needle. ‘Left foot blue,’ she announced.
There was a flurry of activity on the plastic sheet. Stella, Joe and Delphine all swivelled so that their left feet were standing on a blue spot. Baffled by the rapid movement, Simon looked down slowly at his feet. His left foot was already on a blue spot. The dim light of understanding glimmered faintly somewhere near the back of his brain. Delphine had spun around almost one hundred and eighty degrees, and her leg brushed gently against his. Simon could smell her intoxicating scent. She grinned at him. He began to worry about getting an erection while his limbs were splayed all too obviously across the plastic sheet.
‘Everyone ready?’ said Heather as she spun the needle again. ‘OK, right hand red.’
The players went into a crouch. Delphine by now had contorted herself somewhat and was having to stretch to put her hand on a red spot. Simon tried not to stare down her cleavage which had appeared enticingly about eight inches in front of his eyes. Seriously worried now about the impending tumescence in his trousers, he shut his eyes briefly, but opened them again when he found himself losing his balance. Delphine had begun to breathe a little harder, which didn’t exactly help. Simon tried to concentrate on staying upright.
After a few minutes, and much to his own surprise, Simon had not fallen over. He was beginning to enjoy himself. A few spins earlier Delphine had finally collapsed on to the floor. She accepted defeat cheerfully, and had gone back to her chair to watch the game continue. This distraction gone, Simon was able to concentrate. He would pursue Delphine properly once the game was over. In the meantime, he had the opportunity to impress her with his prowess at Twister. Win the game, he told himself drunkenly, and you win the girl. Easy as that. By this stage Stella had also fallen over, and only Simon and Joe remained on the sheet. Simon eyed Joe defiantly. This would be a battle to the death, an opportunity to avenge Joe’s story about bloody Timmy and his bloody magic coin. Revenge would be sweet. No prisoners would be taken. He braced himself for the next move.
Heather spun the needle again. ‘Left foot green.’
Simon groaned. He needed to move his left foot from one side of the sheet to the other. By the time he had completed the manoeuvre, he was turned upwards with his back facing the floor. His arms were braced beneath him, twisted horribly, and his legs were bent, supporting most of his weight.
Immediately next to Simon’s face hovered Joe’s denimclad bottom. Simon tried to shift away from it, but he was unable to move. He waited for Heather’s next spin.
The bottom moved nearer as Joe tried to get into a more comfortable position. And then, without warning, there issued from it an unmistakable phhhhhttt.
Joe had farted, right in Simon’s face.
This was no ordinary fart, either. This was a fart born from the enthusiastic consumption of Fergus’s chilli. It was a sulphurous, cataclysmic bomb of a fart. It was a bleak fart, a fart without hope.
‘Oops,’ said Joe over his shoulder. ‘Sorry.’
Simon gasped in horror at the untold beastliness of what was happening to him. Then he collapsed, landing heavily on his wrist.
‘Ow,’ said Simon, just before he fainted.
Simon woke up, and immediately tried to fall asleep again. His head was filled with a searing, shrill whining sound, not unlike that of twenty or so chain saws going at full throttle. He cautiously opened one eye. The noise got louder. He shut his eye again. It occurred to Simon that he was not, in all probability, surrounded by a posse of lumberjacks. Blinding white light flashed across his beleaguered brain. Simon groaned. While he had been asleep his tongue had been removed and replaced with a large slab of medium-grain sandpaper. The chain saws had by now been joined by a chorus of crashing anvils.
Simon lay back and, against his better instincts, thought. Trying not to move, he mentally did a rapid check of his body. There was a painful throbbing in his right hand, and an even worse one in his left foot, but apart from that, and his monstrous headache, everything seemed to be all right. Tentatively he moved his left hand over to feel his right, and found that it was trussed up in bandages. Frowning, Simon opened his eyes again, and waited for the mist to clear.
He was in a hospital ward. On either side of him motionless figures were humped beneath sheets and blankets. Simon struggled up on to his left elbow, trying to ignore the demonic pounding in his head.
What was he doing here? he wondered. He cast his mind back to the previous evening. The last thing he could remember was being inelegantly spread-eagled on the Twister sheet, waiting for Heather to spin the needle. Suddenly the unpleasant memory of Joe’s appalling fart popped into Simon’s brain, and he recalled collapsing on to his hand. Simon looked down at his body. He was wearing a pair of pyjamas that he did not recognize, and which bore the unmistakable smell of an industrial cleaning process. Someone had undressed him. Slowly he began to assimilate the possibility that, as humiliations went, he had quite possibly just eclipsed all his previous efforts.
Simon’s hangover began to reassert itself as waves of nausea flooded over him. He slumped back on to his pillows and sighed. His left foot throbbed. He stared at the ceiling. This was all very peculiar, and very unpleasant. With Wagnerian hangovers such as this one, there was only one place to be: at home, in bed, within running distance of the nearest toilet. He glanced up and down the ward again. There were no nurses to be seen. He would have to wait to be rescued.
Eventually Simon drifted off into an uneasy sleep. When he woke again, a nurse in a dark blue uniform was standing next to the bed.
‘Good morning, Mr Teller,’ she said as soon as he opened his eyes.
Simon’s brain was still eddying around the fringes of unconsciousness. ‘Er, hello,’ he replied.
‘How are we today?’ asked the nurse briskly.
‘Not too great, actually,’ admitted Simon. ‘My hand and foot hurt, and I’ve got a bit of a headache.’
‘Yes, well, I can’t say I’m surprised,’ said the nurse, ‘after all of last night’s excitements.’
Simon said nothing, hoping for more information.
‘What did you think you were doing?’ continued the nurse.
Simon stared back at her blankly. ‘I really have no idea,’ he answered truthfully. ‘I was quite drunk, I think.’
The nurse snorted. ‘I think that much was obvious,’ she said, extracting a thermometer from her pocket and inserting it in Simon’s mouth without further pleasantries. She glanced at her watch. ‘I gather the board of the hospital
