Lobsters

by Tom Ellen

But, in reality, it was just the two of us standing over a mop bucket in Robin’s back garden. If this was the road to adulthood, I was considering turning back.

Freddie. Of course there was a Freddie. There’s always a fucking Freddie.

And this,’ – he indicated his T-shirt – ‘is basically a one-way ticket to a lady’s bedroom.’ ‘A lady who can’t read, presumably.’

I made a mental note to stop calling her Ribena Girl, though, as it made her sound like a crap superhero.

‘So, why are you cleaning then?’ ‘Because I don’t want the place to look like a pigsty when she gets here,’ she replied, scrubbing some invisible dirt off an old school photograph of me. ‘I don’t want her thinking I can’t keep my own house tidy.’ ‘The very reason you employ her suggests that you can’t keep your own house tidy. What’s she going to do when she gets here and finds that’s everything’s already clean?’

Why ‘Toilet Boy’ anyway? That makes me sound awful. Surely ‘Bathroom Boy’ works better? It has alliteration going for it and everything.