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Chapter 13

last update Last Updated: 2021-07-12 11:07:48
 

 

Teddy lay on the hospital bed with the poison coursing through his veins. It is how a person dies. A withering poison turning their insides to stone. Lala sat beside him as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was heavily drugged. She thought about him and their life together, the long years of chaos and sometimes harmony, and never imagined, not even for a moment, that she would see him lying there like this.

A nurse entered the private room on the fifth floor of the Institut Bergoniè, closing the door almost silently behind her, leaving just a little click hanging in the air. She offered a sympathetic smile, which, once she decided she liked the look of her, Lala returned. Even the monitors were on low in the room, which was full of clutter: flowers, fruit, coats, bags. A traveller’s court. The nurse checked the absepto case connections, and the dial on the pump which controlled the flow of drugs. Teddy grimaced, though still asleep, when she gently wrapped t
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    The recent past: the Brexit ravings, the murder of Jeremy Baden-Flogg MP, Teddy’s sad, mundane death, were now subsumed by a dull ache, a persistent paranoia, a reckoning with sad, individual failures, unhappiness’s, woeful longings, dreams never likely to be achieved. What matter were they, when one moment a person is happily chatting to others in a bar or a shop or peaceful social gathering, or sharing memories of themselves as little children or wonderful drunken nights on social media pages, when the next, those snapshots, are all that will ever be left of them as their bodies succumb to the evil magic of fate? What did they matter, the old girl and boyfriends they were delighted to find still thought kindly of them, a small flame perhaps still burning? Those loves for cigars, wine, music, art, dance, food, sex, violence, solidarity? ‘My glass is empty.’ Lala sat in Teddy’s chair which was now her permanent throne. Sèdonoudè brought her vodka and red bull. The habit

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