Love: A Messy Business (10 page)

“Mr. Fukui has instructed to save the remaining eggs until later.  He will decide what to do with them then.”  The relief that this statement brought Kate was pretty short-lived as Colin had already brought back the next course back from the table.   He was holding two plastic bottles, one in each hand.  Each had the same label on, but Kate could not make out what the label said from the picture on the screen.   Colin flipped up the lid of each bottle, checked to make sure that the foil had been removed from each lid and then flipped them over, positioning them over Kate’s head.   A slow drip of a viscous, creamy liquid started to emerge from each one, in parallel.  Slowly, the drip increased into a stream and Colin grimaced with concentration in trying to ensure that the flow was even between the two bottles.  It was not overly important, but Colin was all about the little details.  To him, it was important to have the symmetry and the emptying of each bottle at the same time.  He had judged it to perfection – a steady stream had flowed on each side of Kate’s head like a river, onto her shoulders and upper arms.  A small quantity was also finding its way down her top to hobnob with the residue of the eggs.

Kate could not help but smell what was being poured over her and she recognized it from summer picnics when she was on her holidays as a child – it was salad cream.  She looked at herself on the screen.  She had aged by a couple of decades, her hair turning white at the sides but still dark in the middle, which was so far unscathed.  Colin had deposited the empty bottles in a very large rubbish bin, along with the empty egg box.  No wonder he needed half a dozen bins every week if this was what he got up to, thought Kate.

There was no mistaking the next item, given the shape of the bottle and the branding – it was tomato sauce.  There was only one bottle this time, but it was a large bottle, so large that Colin needed both hands to control it properly.   A small technical error crept in this time – in his haste, Colin had forgotten to shake the bottle before using it and a small amount of runny red liquid dribbled out over Kate’s head as he turned it up.  There was a delay in the rest of it coming out due to an air bubble.  Colin shook the bottle a bit more vigorously and that seemed to do the trick.  A huge dollop came out with some speed and went straight down Kate’s forehead, right down the end of the nose, off it and onto her lap.  Colin maintained that line and kept on squeezing.  The river of sauce increased in width until it was dripping of one of Kate’s eyebrows and she squinted, fearing that she might get some in her eye.  What she couldn’t avoid though was the pungent, vinegary smell and it almost made her gag.  Kate had managed to keep her hands clean up to this point, but she could not stand it any longer and wiped some of the red tide off her face.  Colin was too busy trying to get the last bit of the sauce out of the bottle with a combination of shaking and squeezing.  Anyway, the major thing that Kate achieved by her actions was diverting even more sauce down her top than was arriving there by natural causes.  Colin could enjoy a wonderful bird’s eye view of this from above.  

“You look like you’ve been shot!” laughed Colin.  Kate looked at herself on the screen.  He was right – she looked a bloody mess, in more ways than one.  For some reason, the words of a Bon Jovi song came to her mind.  Perhaps it was the effect of the copious amount of alcohol she had recently imbibed, but she began to sing as though she was holding the microphone at the karaoke session down at the pub: “Shot through the heart and you’re to blame, You give Love a bad name.”

“Nice one!  I’m pretty impressed by that, very quick off the mark, that was.”

Kate was beginning to realize she had got to the point where there was not much to be gained by worrying about getting messy – it was far too late for that – she was wearing eggs, salad cream and tomato sauce already and goodness knows what was coming next.  All she could do was grin and bear it and keep remembering that this was earning her a cool two thousand quid.   Kate’s thinking showed that she was new to this particular game.  She might have thought that she was messy enough already, but Colin and Mr Fukui had barely got started.

Colin had paused, frozen like a statue, listening with rapt attention to the next batch of instructions from the Land of the Rising Sun. “Err, sorry, they were out of stock so I don’t actually have that.  Will vegetable do instead?  Yes, don’t worry - it’s very lumpy.  OK, good!”

Kate did not think that lumpy sounded very good.  She guessed, having seen the food on the table already, that she was going to become acquainted with a large quantity of soup at some point in the very near future.   There was probably going to be enough vegetables for her five-a-day at least.   Colin was not going to make the same mistake he had made with the tomato sauce; he knew that vegetable soup was usually a mixture of liquid and solid, so it was important to mix the two elements up for it work properly.   He decided to empty the seven or eight small cans into one big bowl and mix up before depositing the whole thing on Kate.  The strategy worked beautifully, he noted with professional satisfaction, although the finer points of his approach seemed to be lost on Kate.  She was too busy gasping for breath as the whole lot deluged her, little cubes of carrots, peas, beans, turnips, cabbage and who know what else seemed to be on a madcap race down her cleavage with the help of the liquid, but spending only a little time there before many arrived at, and into, the winning circle of her knickers.  Unpleasant didn’t even begin to describe it.

But the unpleasantness was quickly outdone by the next “ingredient” - a dry one this time, and one with a very distinctive smell. 

“Only a small jar for this one, as it’s relatively expensive stuff,” explained Colin.  “But it does go a long way.”

Kate instantly recognized that it was instant coffee.  Colin decided to take a slow, sprinkling approach to this one and Kate looked at the developing scene on the screen – either she was now part of a snow globe or was experiencing very bad, very dark, dandruff.    The worst thing was that the granules did not slip off her as they would have done at the start, but they stuck everywhere, and mingled with the food that she always had on her.  Of course, this was the whole point.

“Now, I’ve been very kind on this one.  I heated it up before hand, so this should actually feel quite nice.”

Kate remained to be convinced as Colin knelt down and picked up a saucepan from underneath the table – from the way he carried it, it looked quite heavy.

“What on earth is in there?” asked Kate, not totally sure if she really wanted to know the answer.  “You’ll soon see”, said Colin with a smirk.   Colin was quite wrong because, a few seconds later, Kate could not see – she could not see a thing as she felt a very warm and very heavy substance pour over her head.  It felt like her head was completely enveloped and she could hardly keep her head up with the weight of it.    Carefully, she wiped away as much of the gunk as she could and looked at her hands.  They were covered in a sticky, brownish mixture.  It was, of course, porridge.  Kate had to admit that the warm feeling on her skin felt quite nice, like being in a nice warm bath. 

Colin had kept half in reserve as he felt that Kate’s cleavage could do with some topping up.  Carefully, he poured the remaining porridge down her top until the porridge had pooled in her cleavage and was actually overflowing out of it.  Kate squeezed her chest and pushed out another large amount of porridge onto her lap with a little flumphing sound.  She instinctively pushed the porridge off her lap, forgetting that the result would be that some of it would inevitably slip down the front of her boots.  All she could do at this point was laugh.

“Crap! I’m doing your job for you now.”

“Carry on by all means! Self-wamming is a lot of fun.  Do you want to try it?”

“Oh, what difference does it make - why not?  I just hope no-one asks me what I was doing this evening. “Oh, nothing much, same old stuff…porridge over the head, soup down my cleavage, eggs in my boots, you know what Wednesdays are like.”

“And don’t forget Mr Fukui’s next selection…”

Colin held up two tins that were so distinctive that Kate could tell immediately what they were, despite her view being obscured by random mess dripping occasionally off her hair and down her face.

“Syrup!”

“Exactly.  Want to give them a try?” Kate said nothing but lifted her hands high above her head with a grabbing motion as if to say “come on, hand them over”.  Colin put one in each of her hands and guided them so that the tins were right above her head.

“OK, all you have to do is tilt the cans slightly, and at roughly the same angle, until the syrup starts to drip.  It might take a second but it will come if you’re patient.  Just tip the tin up to get it to come out faster.”   If this had been an examination on self-wamming, then Kate would have passed Module 1 with flying colours.   It required a great amount of self-control to keep going, even when the sticky, golden liquid enveloped her nose and mouth so that she could hardly breathe, but she managed it brilliantly.  She did, however, make a common mistake for beginners and succumbed to the temptation to stick out her tongue to taste some of the syrup as it dripped past her mouth.  Inevitably, she ended up with a mixture of coffee, salad cream and syrup on her tongue which was not a winning formula, and caused her face to screw up in distaste.

“Excellent work, Samantha!” said Colin, remembering to use Kate’s stage name.  “Mr Fukui is so impressed with your work that he has asked me to give you a relaxing head massage.”  Of course this was simply an excuse for Colin to ensure that the mess was fully rubbed into every strand of hair on Kate’s head and not just the top layer.  Even so, Kate quite enjoyed feeling Colin’s big strong hands working her scalp and the back of her neck, even though it meant a longer job of washing her hair at the end.   It was as near to a spa treatment as she was going to get that day, anyway.

Kate looked at the screen and saw her hair piled up on top of her head in a bizarre kind of sloppy top-bun, absolutely filthy and multi-coloured.  She sighed resignedly.  This was a far cry from the evening out at a swanky restaurant that she had been expecting. How much more was there of this?   The truth was that the session was not far off its conclusion.   But Mr Fukui and Colin were now working up to the grand finale – how would cope with the disgusting denouement?

CHAPTER TEN:  ANOTHER FINE MESS

Kate tried to think back to the items she had seen on the table before they had started.  What was still left? Would they be using all of it?  She remembered the large bowl of bright green mushy peas and hoped fervently that Mr Fukui would not.  She had always hated eating them, never mind wearing them.  But it was as if Mr Fukui could read Kate’s mind as that was exactly what he asked Colin to use next.  Kate cringed as Colin picked up the bowl.   At first, it seemed as though she would avoid the peas going over head as Colin stooped again and started to pour them down each boot.  It was surprising how much each boot could hold, and soon each boot was completely full – and heavy.  She had always loved those boots, she thought, but she would never look at them the same way again.  She bet that they would always smell of mushy peas now, no matter what she did to them.    She was thinking the same thing about her hair soon afterwards because, unfortunately for her, there were some leftover peas that Colin felt needed to be found a home – and what better place was there than over her head?  Kate came the closest to throwing up that she had done all through this endurance test.  She shivered and shook herself like a dog that has been caught out in the rain. Foul substance!

Everything that had gone before was almost entirely obliterated by the next item – a large bag of white self-raising flour.   Colin started off gently with it, a light dusting at first, gradually increasing the intensity until it became a flour cloud.  Kate began to find it a bit difficult to breathe but Colin went on regardless and relentless.   He switched from pouring over her head, which by now had a heap of flour three or four inches high and covered her from head to toe so that she appeared like a ghost.   The flour mixed in some places with the existing substances to create a vile paste.  Colin knew that, perhaps with the notable exception of Vaseline, flour and water was one of the hardest things to get out of a model’s hair.  Still, he would say, he was only following his client’s instructions.

Kate seemed frozen to the spot – the complete covering of flour had left her not wanting to move in case she dislodged more flour from her head.   However, this soon proved to be a fruitless exercise because what came next was a barrage of custard, one tin after the other.  It was like a tidal wave of yellow that engulfed her in the space of ten seconds.   Now no longer a ghost and looking more like a ripe banana, Kate cursed Liz for selling Colin such a large supply – she would get her revenge for this!  This, of course, was completely unfair as it wasn’t as though Liz had the faintest idea of what it would eventually be used for.  However, it is difficult to approach things rationally with your ears, hair and cleavage clogged with custard, flour and mushy peas.

“We’re almost done,” whispered Colin in Kate’s ear, sensing that she was beginning to flag.  “Only two things left.”

“Thank God for that!” said Kate with real feeling.

“Good point, Sir”, said Colin to Mr Fukui. “I will rectify that straightaway before the finale.”

“Samantha, Mr Fukui is enjoying the proceedings very much, but he is a little concerned that there is one part of you that has so far escaped largely unscathed.  He has just instructed that this should be rectified immediately.  I’m sure you understand.”

“Anything to get this over with,” mumbled Kate.

“That’s the spirit! Would you please stand up then?”

This was not as easy task as it might have sounded.  It was very slippery underfoot and Kate’s clothes were heavy and sodden, not to mention the destabilizing effect of two large glasses of wine.  She tottered slowly to her feet and stood there waiting further instruction.