“Check this out on YouTube” her son hopped around waving his laptop at her.
“Mummy is working; I haven’t got time for this love.” Her computer screamed white light, mocking her with the lack of words.
“I’ve two thousand words left before deadline, and only three hours to complete and edit.”
A voice blared from the laptop, “one in ten thousand bags contain pure grade cartel powdered…”
Susie snapped her son’s computer closed.
“Get ready for school. Your father is already waiting to drive you to the bus pickup.”
“But mum”.
Simon’s protestations fell on deaf ears as her thin fingers flew over the keyboard. The narrative flow whisking her mind into a flurry of facts in that satisfying way that had taken her a long time to summon at will.
“I’ll look at your YouTube thing tonight when you get back from football practice.” She smiled at her son as Ted walked into the room. Ted grabbed the laptop, stuffing it in his son's school bag.
“That’s why we don’t watch much television darling, it’s a distraction.”
Simon’s face dropped, and she felt a pang of guilt.
“Hey son, leave your mother to finish her article.”
Autumn wind battered the window, lashing it with streaks of rain. The doorbell trilled. Susie looked up, startled from her typing, as Ted walked past the office to see who'd braved the winter storm.
Susie kept typing, so close to the concluding paragraph.
As she typed the last words - the situation in the middle east has stabilized, slower than the UN hoped, but this is a sign of good things to come - her eyebrow twitched at the clumsiness of the sentence.
I can fix it in edit, she thought. Her husband knocked softly on the office door shaking a large bag of their expected medium grind.
“Fancy a brew love?” he smiled, those kind eyes that had first so attracted her crinkling many crow’s feet as he grinned. “Have you finished your article?”
Susie stood up and followed him to the kitchen. She ran her hand along the mahogany banister while walking past the hallway’s book-lined walls. Her hand was dusty. She darted through the kitchen door, trying to catch up with him before he opened the bag and that initial wonderful whiff of freshly ground coffee.
A sudden gust rattled the cottage as she entered the kitchen. Ted stared down at their usual one kilogram bag of Colombian Red Bourbon coffee, mouth agape.
“This isn’t coffee Susie.”
She walked over as he dipped his finger into the bag and licked it. Her eyes popped as she stared down at the kilogram bag of white powder sitting on the marble surface of their cottage’s kitchen.
Ted burst into fits of manic giggles.
“That’s probably the purest cocaine I’ve ever come across in my life.”
Susie’s eyebrows rose as she pursed her lips. “I thought that part of your life was over?”
“It is my love. I haven’t touched the stuff since Dave’s stag night in Preston. But you never forget the taste, or rather the lack of taste,” he giggled again as his tongue flopped out of his mouth dramatically.
“Half of my jaw is numb.”
“I propose an experiment?”
Ted winked at his wife grabbing the coffee measuring scoop and dumping half a gram of white powder out on the kitchen top. He chopped it into eight lines of crystal white with a kitchen knife from the Damascus wooden nest of blades.
“You’ve finished your article, but it still needs editing. I’ve still got a chapter of my manuscript to finish, the chickens need feeding, the boy’s room is a mess, and the hallway needs vacuuming. Also, Bess needs her usual walk.”
Susie stared from her husband to the lines of illicit ‘Colombian Red Bourbon’.
“Are you suggesting what I think?”
Ted grinned like a hyena and dipped his head to snort up a massive line of the white powder.
“Bess” he bellowed.
The Border Collie bounded into the room. It leapt up at the kitchen top, almost in a frenzy at the smell that emanated from the bag. Ted pushed the dog down and pulled him by the collar to the hook on the wall where his lead hung.
Susie shook her head, “why am I left to do the cleaning?”
She laughed as she leaned forward, stopping for a moment before looking up at her husband, “challenge accepted.”
“You focus on the editing love, I’ll do the cleaning when I get back.”
Susie’s afternoon flashed past in a frenzy of words reordered. Adverbs culled, prepositions cut, and clauses reorganized to make perfect sense.
After half an hour she returned to the kitchen for another sniff of the ‘Colombian Red Bourbon’ before reviewing her article.
It was perfect; in a fit of manic euphoria, she typed out a hasty email to the magazine’s editor, attached the final edit and pressed send.
Ted sprinted through wind whipped heather, playing with Bess among the boulders and dells of the upper moors.
As they crested the hill above their house, a hurricane force gust of wind battered his chest as he stood leaning into the invigorating maelstrom.
Bess stopped, panting next to him and he looked into his companion’s eyes, matching the dog’s heavy breathing.
How long had they been running through the purple blushed landscape of heather and gorse?
His mind reeled for a moment as his heart stammered in his chest and he realized he couldn’t remember.
Susie was polishing the mahogany banister as Ted opened the door, red-faced, with Bess heaving breaths beside him, tongue lolling.
Something tickled Susie’s mind. “What time is it?”
They looked at their watch in unison.
Five thirty nine.
Simon’s football practice had finished thirty minutes ago.
The End
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