181. Someone's at the door

Once upon a time, quite some time ago, around the time when the greasy-hair psychopath was becoming a regular visitor to the flat in the coolest part of the trendy at the top of the city West End hill the door bell went. You could not miss that bell. Our landlady was a little deaf and very stingy and very nosy so the door bell sounded a lot more like a school bell.

After a few minutes it went again. Surprisingly. I was in the shower so had the perfect excuse not to go and get the door. Anyway it was probably someone being late in getting to the door to greet one of their friends. Time keeping back then was a loose concept, highly subjective.

The door bell went again and this time I heard someone go and get the door. I was still in the shower, oblivious to the mundane tasks of getting the door when the bell went.

When suddenly my friend was banging on the bathroom door shouting to be heard over the noise of the slashing water (we did not care much about the planet then).

'It's for you.'

I thought the greasy-hair psychopath might be early in picking me up. No big deal, he would settle in the kitchen and make himself a cup of tea, this treating the flat like his own would in turn would annoy our grumpy unhappy-in-love flatmate - nothing we could not cope with. Yet i turned the water off and asked who it was. She kind of found a way of adjusting her voice level so she was whispering yet shouting at the same time. She was obviously trying to be discreet about this. Why?

'It's the police!' 

I must have swallowed about two mugfuls of soapy water. The police? Me? I rewound my life over the past weeks, zooming in on weekends and parties but could not figure out why the police were looking for me! Was this about the new boyfriend? AKA the psychopath, the one my flatmates had warned me against?

I quickly considered my options.

a) jumping (naked) out go the window (top floor) into the bushes below and running away. This was risky: our landlady was for ever keeping an eye on us depraved students and she was bound to call a second squad. I might break a leg anyway. And I was naked. And this was Scotland. Not the Bahamas.

b)just stay in the shower for ever. The way my own daughter today does. Waste water. Waste time. They'd get bored waiting and realise they had better things to do than bother a poor innocent student like me.

c) get out the shower. Say hello politely. Disappear to my room and get dressed. Choose respectable clothing. Then see if they were still there and if it was me there were after (or psychopath boyfriend).

I got dressed and peered over the bannister (my room in that flat was an attic flat). The police man was still there. Standing very still and very patient. Maybe this was a cardboard version of him?

I decided there and then that despite my long studies and quite a long time spent in an English-speaking country I could not yet master the language. And I went to greet the young not bad-looking policeman. 

'Ello!'

The guy standing there was not a cardboard cut-out. He was real. And highly professional. He declined his identity. Declined mine and asked me to confirm it. 

I just kept nodding furiously, shaking my wet hair, and frowning a  lot as if to signal a poor command of the natives'language. He was not fooled. He carried on unperturbed, not even slowing down, not even raising his voice a little louder!

I really wanted to  laugh. I was obviously a very bad comedian. And something told me that some of my flatmates' bedroom doors were a little ajar and someone might be listening in.

I kept opening my eyes wide and peering into nothingness while he was reading out the  long list of un-paid parking tickets.

'You can either come to the police station with us now or you can pay us by cheque or cash.'

My.

I peered some more (by now the guy must have thought I needed glasses rather than had language problems) and shook my hands: sign language for I am thinking.

He went back to his cardboard cut-out version and I quit the stupid woman act.

'Cash.'

And off I ran up the stairs. I did consider an escape route. I knew the rooftops well, as we regularly climbed through the skylight and took drinks and real glasses up there (nothing to do with the planet, to do with us being stingy students). (If my teenage kids did that today they'd get a two-hour lecture about how totally irresponsible that is).

I remember thinking that was a lot of money but I decided to to argue, pay the guy and send him off. I f I wanted to meet him again I could just carry on parking anywhere and everywhere and not pay. 

This must have been the Auvergnate but at the time I was doing a lot of tutoring and everyone paid me cash and I had a stash in my desk drawer. I counted the bills (so many I remember thinking!) and really felt like some kind of bandit or outlaw. I ran back downstairs, shove the wad of notes into Mr Patience and wished him goody and shut the huge heavy door on his back releasing a consort of inside doors opening and a chorus of giggles.