You don't understand. It was heat like nothing on earth. It was literally like we were on Venus or something.
I mopped my brow and tried on a dog-creeping-closer-for-treats face for the Good Lady who was standing sternly before me with her arms folded tight across her chest.
Check for yourself!?
I threw my arms out at the raging inferno that lay beyond the opened kitchen door.
It's hell out there. At one point, when it hit 28 degrees I had to kill a man so I could cut his eyes open and drink the grotty fluid from the insides?!
I paced back and forth.
Baby, this is Scotland. Its September?! Its 28 degrees outside? No one can survive that. No one Scottish that is. I mean, for fuck sake, there were dogs running about on fire?!
The Good Lady opened her mouth to speak but I shushed her with an upraised hand.
No. No, wait. Put yourself in my shoes. I am working in the attic. Parched. The sun beating down. It's lunchtime. I decide to go for a walk but as soon as I get outside the heat hits me. I stagger back, my skin red and burning and stagger to the sink.
The Good Lady is staring at me now, her eyes burning into me harder than the sun did mere hours before.
I squirmed like a rat in a bag.
I drink water, sweet cold water... As much as I possibly could. I drank and drank and drank.
Then I headed back out, in the sun and I lay in a chair in the garden. Even though I was working, I cracked open a sweet cold beer.
I stuck out my bottom lip and looked sad.
It was lunch you know? Then I finished my beer and drank more lovely cold water cos it was fucking boiling.
I hung my head in shame.
Go on...
The Good Lady was all but tapping her foot with impatience.
Well, did I say how boiling it was, like everything was fucking melting??!
Yes.
Oh, ok. So it was fucking boiling and I am sitting in the garden drinking beer, my belly aching with all the beer and the water and the sun and the good times...
I looked heavenward as if hoping for some kind of intervention.
Alas, there was none.
again this proves without a shadow of a doubt that there is no GOD.
Then my phone starts going and I take it out and it's El-Jefe, you know, the Boss man?
I rubbed the back of my neck and blew heavily through my parched lips.
So I answer and El-Jefe is like, BoomDawg?! Why aren't you on this call, for fuck sake. The head of the department is on the warpath?!
I mime a panicking face and flapped my arms about as if I was being set upon by a tawny owl in the shower.
So I run back upstairs and I have to join this call and it goes on and on and people are shouting and arguing and it seems like the call will never end and my bladder starts throbbing. I am desperate to pee but I am on the call and answering questions and explaining simple things to idiots and my bladder feels like it is going to burst... I am so desperate it starts to hurt and I feel like I am on a train to UTI central...
The Good Lady breathed in and then let it out really slowly shaking her head at me.
And?
She said in a dangerously quiet voice.
I closed my eyes, gave inward thanks to having lived a long and relatively happy life and prayed that my ending would be quick when I uttered my next words.
And so, that's why I peed in the cup...
