The Landlady has a rude awakening

Me and my big mouth… A few weeks back, I was extolling the virtues of my current flock of students, crowing smugly about how quiet and respectful they are. I was forced, rather too abruptly for my liking, to change my opinion at precisely a quarter to one in the morning last Monday. Having bedded down at my usual time of around 10.30pm, I was awoken at the aforementioned hour by what seemed to be a herd of screeching club-footed banshees galloping up the stairs past my bedroom.

“I was awoken by what seemed to be a herd of screeching club-footed banshees”

I groped around in the dark for my dressing gown and shot out into the hallway, completely dishevelled, just in time to see a couple of balding, middle-aged men disappearing up my stairs. It’s been an awfully long time since any balding middle-aged men have legally been resident in my house, so I shouted up after them, “Oi, who’s that?” being just about all the eloquence I could muster, given the lateness of the hour and the rudeness of my awakening…

“It’s Valerie,” shouted back one of the men in a high voice, using the name one of my lodgers.
“No it’s not, come down now!”, I shouted back, with even less eloquence than before.
One of my students appeared in her coat, looking sheepish, her well-oiled segue appearing to have been parked for the evening. “So sorry,” she whispered. “It’s just my friends.”

‘Well, they have to leave right now because I have to get up in six hours,” I less than whispered back, possibly with a few ill-chosen expletives.

Then, a girl I’ve never seen before (and actually, never want to see again), staggered drunkenly down the stairs, knocking all my pictures off the wall as she went. She leant over the bannister and peered at me, barely able to focus and said: “Don’t worry love, we won’t be long,” as if it were her house and I were the imposter.

‘Love’, is not a form of address to which I take kindly even at the best of times, so being called ‘love’ by someone who’d just decimated my picture display, having first woken me up to witness the spectacle, did not elicit the kindest of responses from me.

Having spent my formative years ejecting unsavoury characters from my nightclub, it was not long before all five imposters were outside the front door where they belonged. I lay in bed seething and pulsing with adrenalin, listening to them shouting at each-other, possibly waking-up the neighbours as well as me.

The following day when I caught up with one of my students in the kitchen, she was so remorseful and beseeching that her forehead was almost on the floor. “I wish I’d never invited them,” she said, showing a perfect use of the imperfect conditional. “Me and my big mouth.”