Hot weather and work made me feel filthy today: this brought with it a desire to shower and this the recollection of how I always brought Grandma Jean soap for Christmas - not because she was smelly you understand but simply because, based on her first heartfelt thank you, I thought she liked the stuff. But did she? Years later I stayed at her home during my university summer holiday and, being innately inquisitive (nosey), unlocked the small wardrobe in the bedroom I was sleeping in. And what did I find? I found an immaculately constructed wall of soap bars that would have graced any Tetris championship. She had not used a single bloody block! Even the small fruit shaped hand soaps were cobbling a corner. 'Why why why?' I hollered, then more calmly, 'Yes why?' Well being a innately compelled to nasally intrude upon that which did not concern me (they were her soaps after all, who was I to stipulate how she used them? Indeed was it not at this time I was using the flailing limbs of drowning cat to help me achieve thoroughly bubbly baths [taps alone just do not get the job done]). Anyway I unbricked that potentially slippery wall and what did I find? Yes, that's right, a corpse... I'll not go into details (obviously she was using the soap tomb to cover the stench of the decay): the story, you might remember, was in the news and started the short lived crime fiction genre 'clean macabre,' which appealed to house proud women with a taste for the gruesome, and led to a rewrite of Macbeth featuring the line: 'Out damn spot! Ah yes it's gone now.' The subsequent Christmas, for a change, I gave Grandma Jean a toothbrush holder in celebration of her lovely teeth. She thanked me and revealed her teeth were false. Smile, gratitude: it seems the only true thing about Grandma Jean is my story.
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