Today should have been my first
meeting of the term with my new tutor but I shamelessly camped up the
‘ankle in plaster’ thing and got out of it. Instead I spent the day
with my nose in a book…no, you’re right, I didn’t. I spent 25 minutes
with my nose in a book and 3 hours dozing with my mouth open. When I
finally shook myself properly awake, I had a headache and the bedroom
was stuffy. I flung the sash window up and found a bat, not hidden,
just clinging to the brick under the windowsill, tiny and furry and
fluttering as it breathed in and out.
As I leaned out of the
window watching it, a neighbour from next door but one came out, looked
at me and asked, “Are you alright?”
“Yes. There’s a bat.”
He
went back into his house for a moment then walked into my front garden.
I was still watching the bat and I assumed he’d come for a closer look
too. I didn’t realise until it was too late that he’d brought a brush
with him, which he used to sweep the bat off the bricks. It flapped for
a second, still holding on by one claw, then he swept at it again and
it dropped to the ground. I screamed, suddenly convinced he was going
to stamp on it, but the bat flew off erratically, quickly invisible
against grey clouds.
I stared at the man with hate hissing out
of my ears like steam. He chuckled indulgently. “There you are love, no
need to get yourself upset, it wasn’t going to get caught in your hair.”
At
moments like this I’d like there to be a god, to come along with her
celestial brush and stamp on this foul man. The best I could manage was
a rather prissy, “You shouldn’t do that, you know, they’re a protected
species.”
I was still upset when D came home and I greeted him
with a snivelling, wobbly account of events while he blinked at me in
bewilderment. “…and then I thought he was going to stamp on it so I
screamed and…” It slowly filtered into my head that D was wearing a
suit and has had a haircut and shave. “Oh, how did the interview go?”
The
interview has gone well and he’s now on Medecins Sans Frontieres’
shortlist. He won’t know where they want him to go until closer to
January but they discussed Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso and
he has a list of vaccinations to get now based on travel to West Africa.
He’s very excited and not really bothered about my bat.
