The bottle of whisky that Scottish Brian gave me a few weeks ago was polished off last night. Surprisingly, I do not have a hangover at all. I do, however, have a bad case of indigestion – whisky always does that to me, especially Jack Daniels. As I was walking Audrey this morning, I was repeatedly burping oak-matured alcoholic fumes into the frosty early-morning air. To tell you the truth, I think I was still a little drunk from the evening before: the birds were swaying and the trees were singing and – unusual for me – I was more than happy to stand and chat with a few fellow dog-walkers.
The blended malt was all I had to offer Hamilton at 10pm last night when he surprised me by turning up at the house completely unexpectedly. He was carrying an old leather suitcase and was looking very dishevelled and forlorn. ‘I’ve been evicted from my lodgings in Nottingham, dear boy. Could I crash with you?’ he asked softly.
‘Just for the night, Ham,’ I told him. ‘I simply don’t have the room.’ I felt awful.
He went on to tell me a sorry tale of unpaid rent and threats with violence and of nights spent wandering the city and sleeping rough.
‘What about your sisters?’ I asked him.
‘They want nothing to do with me,’ he snorted, full of rancour. ‘I’m such a disappointment to them.’ (Oh God, here we go, I thought.) ‘The bailiffs came and took all my belongings – I don’t have a bean.’
‘You must feel awful,’ I said.
‘It hit me like an atom bomb, old boy.’ Hamilton is always going on about atom bombs; it’s his favourite subject. At school, he was known as Atom Bomb Hamilton.
‘I don’t want to be a Scrooge, Ham,’ I told him, ‘but you’ll have to find somewhere else. Nelson will be here in a few days to work on his album and he’ll be on the sofa-bed in the studio.’
‘I’ll sleep in the bath,’ he growled.
‘Shower,’ I corrected him.
‘Don’t worry, Atom Bomb,’ I said eventually, ‘we’ll sort something out for you. We’ll ring that good-for-nothing, hook-nosed publicist of yours in the morning.’ I poured him another tumbler of Scotch and patted him on the shoulder.
I’m seriously worried, though – not for him: he’s been in this kind of situation before and always lands on his feet – but of what the cerebrally-challenged elements of the community will think. I fear there will be a public stoning when they find out that there is a songwriter, a glamorous transvestite and the bloke from the Mr Sheen advertisements living together in a terraced cottage in the middle of the village.
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