Friday, 15 March 2019
Reading time 02 minutes 19 seconds
Strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet……..or murderers – TGI Friday’s
The Guillotine must be solid gold, it looked very heavy and very expensive as it swung from the chain around his scary neck. What made the neck so frightening wasn’t the cool looking tattoo covering at least 75% of it but the huge head that sat upon it. More specifically the face. It had menace and screamed stay away. I noticed none of that until I spoke to him. Curiosity killed the Mat.
Why have you that pendant sir?
My high pitched nasal tones must have startled him as before that point in time I did not exist. To him I was an apparition hence his surprised look. He didn’t take long to recover.
Huh?
That was his reply, it wasn’t said in a friendly tone like my simple innocent curious question, it was barked in annoyance. The bass in his voice reverberated around my entire body. If I hadn’t just been, some wee would have leaked out.
Why was I always so nosey? Why not just leave it be? Or why not start with a leading question? Where did you get that amazing Gold Guillotine Pendant? Once I’d won him over with flattery I could then counter with why.
So many questions but the horse had already bolted and the words had left my stupid mouth and had landed into the cereal bowl like ears on the biggest head I think I’d ever witnessed.
It was at that point, when he looked at me with menace and anger that I started to think what the charm around the scary tattooed neck could mean.
Was it a cigar cutter? No it wasn’t big enough. What else could it be?
Why would a man who I didn’t notice apart from his gold jewellery have a Guillotine, the best ever invention for removing human heads hung around his tattooed neck? Was it a boast that even that couldn’t remove his noggin from its mount?
My brain reached the conclusion that he’d have to be a murderer for a minor drugs cartel and this was the device of choice used to cut up body parts. He had a Guillotine in every port and had disposed of more bodies than the Co-op. It was now so obvious to me and I was very annoyingly interrupting his dinner.
I then started to question myself. If that was the case and he was a cartels cleaner then why was he sitting next to me in a 3 star all-inclusive hotel in the Canary Islands? Netflix Boxsets had taught me that Narcotics was a good business. It paid well. So why was he here?
My girlfriend glared at me in anger. She had told me to leave it which made me want to know even more. At times proving a loved one wrong has a certain sort of pleasure. This was not one of those times. This was the time where if I survived, for the first ten times of hearing the “I Told You So” comment from her, I would not be annoyed.
Was he on the run? Would I be caught in a crossfire shootout and die abroad? Did I tick the correct insurance box and pay for my dead body to be shipped home? I’d heard it was expensive to transfer a dead body in a plane. Why was that? Is it because it takes up more room than a live one? Can’t you stack more in if they are laying down and don’t need to be woken up and told about the amazing offers available today with their exclusive scratch cards?
OK imagination. Hold on your running away with yourself.
He was with a woman and a child so he couldn’t be all bad. They looked friendly. The kid didn’t have a mobile phone or tablet at the hotel dining table so he must be a fairly good parent as every other child there was engrossed in little LCD screens. I longed to be a child who could sit at the table with the world wide web at my fingertips rather than the silence of my family.
He looked at me. I looked at him. He carried on looking at me and I bottled it. The words Sorry to interrupt left my cowards mouth and I backed away to my table. He spoke to his wife, I could still feel the heavy bass of his voice touching one of my souls which was twitching.
I never saw him again and I still don’t know why would you wear a guillotine necklace. I do know that I should just keep my mouth shut and mind my own business because my girlfriend told me so.
Picture: My friends children dress me up in their fancy dress. They think they are torturing me but I just like clothes that fit.