The Homeless Millionaire

Hangovers are always a bummer, and the hangover I woke up with the next day was intense. It was way out of proportion to the amount I'd drunk. When I was going through the morning bathroom routine, I realized I had caught a cold. On top of that, I discovered the wounds in my foot had become infected . Each puncture looked like a tiny volcano preparing to erupt, and some had already started: there was some sort of sticky liquid oozing from them.

There was a medical cabinet in the bathroom, its door doubling as a mirror. I opened it, and found the cabinet decidedly understocked. It contained an ancient bottle of aspirin half full of crumbly tablets, a roll of adhesive bandage, cotton wool, scissors, and a plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I soaked a piece of cotton wool with peroxide and did a lot of hissing while cleaning the wounds. It was clear there would be no trip to the house across the lake that day. The weather was shitty too, it looked like it might start raining at any moment.

Before leaving the bathroom, I also took a couple of those ancient aspirins. The bathroom humidity had got to them and they crumbled on my tongue; they were unbelievably sour. I drank several handfuls of tap water and went to the kitchen to make myself one of those bring-back-from-the-dead coffees. I wasn't hungry, but I knew I should eat something, if only to get rid of the taste in my mouth. There was still plenty of meat in the fridge, a couple of steaks and half a dozen hamburgers, all on the verge of going bad. I ate some bread with my coffee and got going on the meat. I couldn't cook it on the barbecue grill: it had started raining. as advertised earlier. I had to use the kitchen stove, and that meant I had to f.u.c.k around with pans and cooking oil and stuff. I was so busy with all that shit that I didn't hear the car coming until it was practically in front of the house.

I thought it was Roch, of course. There were windows on both sides of the front door and when I got there I saw it wasn't Roch who had arrived. The car that was parked in the driveway was a red Ford Mustang. The driver's door was hidden from view. I heard it open and took a step back; sometimes it's a wise move to pretend there's nobody home.

A woman got out of the car, pulling the hood of her shiny red raincoat over her head. I instantly knew it was HER, the girl from the house across the water. She really seemed to be into red. I seriously contemplated hiding in the house until she went away. I was still wearing the T-shirt I'd slept in, looked and felt like shit, and was generally unprepared for facing the girl I'd been thinking about those last few days. I told myself to relax. I told myself she'd probably have a face that would stop a clock. In my experience, that often was the deal with women that have great bodies. You'd look at them from the rear, and get all hot. Then they would turn around, and you wanted to scream and run.

I couldn't see her face as she walked up to the door: her head was bent, she was intent on avoiding the puddles of water scattered around the driveway. She was wearing black jeans and clogs with black tops. A strand of blond hair had escaped from under the hood. I thought f.u.c.k it, and opened the door when she was still a few steps away.

"Good morning," I said, noting with alarm that I sounded scared.

"Hi," she answered, raising her head, and I was struck speechless. She was beautiful. She had big dark eyes and a generous mouth that was made for kissing. I stood aside, opening the door wider.

She didn't come in. She stopped right outside the door, in a spot that was protected from the rain. She looked at me and said:

"You are the one that was swimming in the bay yesterday? Yes you are. I was watching you. I saw you threshing around in the water but I had to go and turn the kettle off. When I looked again, you were gone. It bothered me. I was wondering whether I should drive to town and tell the police."

"I'm all right," I said, and was very glad to find out that my voice had returned to normal. "I got hit by cramp in the middle of the bay. That's probably what you saw. But I made it to the shore, no problem."

"I can see that," she said. We looked at each other for a while and I knew that was the right moment to say something brilliant. I couldn't; my mind was blank. Eventually, she said:

"I was really bothered. I thought that maybe I should have done something, I don't know. I had to come and find out if, uh, you were still alive. I'm glad you're okay."

She sounded as if she were preparing to leave, so I said quickly:

"Thank you. That's nice of you. I mean, really nice that you, that you took the trouble to drive out here and check. Yeah. Really nice." I found myself nodding like one of those dog mascots people sometimes place on the top of the dashboard or on the back shelf inside a car. I probably looked just as stupid. I said:

"Would you like some coffee? I've got a really wicked coffee machine in here. It makes coffee that will propel you to the moon and back."

"No thanks. I have to get going." But she didn't turn away. She wrinkled her nose and said:

"Something's burning. Is that your coffee machine, or did you leave something on the stove?"

She was right. There was an unpleasant smell wafting in from the direction of the kitchen, the stink of burning fat.

"Jesus," I said. "Hang on a second." I rushed to the kitchen and sure enough, there was smoke rising from the frying pan. I tried to move the pan and burned my hand - it was one of those old-fashioned, cast iron pans with a metal handle. I grabbed a rag and put it over the handle and moved the pan.

I was turning the gas off when I heard a car door slamming shut. I rushed to the front of the house, but she was already backing out of her parking spot. I wanted to shout for her to wait and realized I didn't even know her name. So I just stood there like a fool, watching her drive away.

When the car was gone, I said f.u.c.k several times and returned to the kitchen to see whether I could salvage the burnt meat. It was blackened on the underside and raw on top. I was reminded of the cook in that restaurant I used to work at. It seemed it was all too easy to burn food while cooking.

I nearly wept as I resumed frying. She'd actually come here, talked to me - she had a soft, melodious voice, another good reason to become bewitched. I fancied she was older than me, but only by a few years - maybe mid-twenties, no more. It didn't scare me, even though a few years can count a lot when you're young. F.u.c.k that, my nineteenth birthday was coming up, and anyway almost everyone I met thought I was older than my age. I suspected this was because I scowled constantly due to assorted worries that persecuted me from dawn to dusk, day after day. People thought I was a serious-minded guy because of that. F.u.c.k! You really can't tell what's going on in another person's mind. You just can't.

I ate a couple of charcoal-coated burgers with some bread, and a side of tomato and onion salad. What remained of the lettuce had started to rot, and I had to throw it out. Then I had a beer and it was a mistake. I started to feel really bad. Physically bad, in addition to all the torment I felt when I thought how I f.u.c.k.e.d up the chance Fate had presented me on a platter. I had wanted to meet this woman (I couldn't think about her as a girl any more), she shows up on my doorstep, and then leaves without me even learning her name, for f.u.c.k's sake. The only thing I knew about her was that she liked red.

It rained all day. It fit my mood. Of course I was very tempted to take the binoculars out to the deck and have a look at her house. But I felt sure she'd notice me doing that; after all, she'd noticed me swimming across the lake. Maybe she had a pair of binoculars too. Maybe she'd been watching me just like I watched her. Roch's family's cottage did not have a TV, so maybe she didn't have one either. There isn't a whole lot to do when it's cold and raining while you're in a house in the middle of nowhere. It's natural to look out of the window in the hope of seeing something happen, even if it's only a change in the weather. She'd seen me swimming across the bay and she'd recognized me, surely that meant she had been watching me.

No, there was no way that could be true. She saw me swimming, sure, but I had to someone who was staying at the only house there, apart from hers. There was no other house for f.u.c.k.i.n.g miles. She'd taken one look at me when I opened the door and instantly decided I looked like the sort of idiot that goes swimming in the cold and the rain. Worse than that: she suspected that I'd wanted to creep up to her house and lurk in the bushes outside her bedroom window. She suspected that I was one of those peeper guys who look in through windows, hoping for a glance of flesh.

My mind went on on in f.u.c.k.i.n.g circles for the remainder of that day. I promised myself I'd definitely hike out there, to get her name if nothing else. Fortunately, my foot was getting better. The swelling around the wounds was shrinking. I took a couple more tablets of aspirin, and put on more hydrogen peroxide on my foot. I also turned out the radio in the living room and, after some searching, managed to catch a weather forecast in English. They said the weather would improve overnight. They expected it to become partially cloudy, even sunny within the next twenty four hours. It would also get warmer.

That was the kind of forecast I'd been hoping for. I was going to see her the next day, no matter what. I spent the last couple of hours before bed playing out various scenarios in my head. I knew doing this was a waste of time. I knew that whenever I imagined something happening a certain way, it was as good as a guarantee that it would never happen that way. Life always threw in a surprise or two, sometimes things would turn out exactly in reverse, and sometimes nothing happened at all. But I couldn't help it. I kept imagining stuff and then worrying about it, anyway.

That evening, I promised myself a hundred times that I'd go over and see her the very next day. But the very next day Roch showed up together with a friend of his, and everything got turned upside down.