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had only just clawed their way out of
the ground, which was where I guessed all this had begun. It didn’t really
matter. They were here now and they were all around me.
    It was too late to run, too late to hide. Even if I’d tried
to bolt they would’ve been onto me in a flash. All I could do was stand very
very still and hope they didn’t notice me.
    So that’s what I did. I stood very very still in the middle
of Croydon’s pedestrianised High Street and barely dared to breath.
    The dead mingled and milled, knocked into each other and
even me, although incredibly none of them afforded me as much as a glance. I
was just another obstacle to them, no more or less interesting than that tree
some fat zombie had just wandered into therefore I was invisible.
    I was just starting to think I might even get away with this
when one of the zombies stopped in her tracks and turned straight at me.
    “Are you okay, Andrew?” the zombie asked.
    I blinked a couple of times and saw Elenor looking at me
curiously.
    “Are you alright?”
    “What? Oh yes. Yeah fine. Just miles away, daydreaming,” I
shrugged, and looked back at the fat zombie to see that he’d turned into a fat
businessman. He was rubbing his head from where he’d walked into the tree and
frowning down at the slice of pizza he’d just dropped.
    “You looked lost,” Elenor pointed out.
    “I am really. Christmas shopping. I never know what to get.
I always just end up thinking about other things,” I explained, Dawn of the Dead from the night before
providing today’s inspiration.
    “Who are you buying for?”
    “Sally. My wife,” I told her.
    “What does she want?” Elenor asked.
    “That’s the point, I don’t know.”
    “What would she like?”
    “I don’t know,” I shrugged once more, as if it were going
out of fashion.
    “Well, what did you get her last year?”
    “A pen. It was a nice silver one. It was engraved with her
name and everything. It was nice.”
    “Sounds great,” she smirked sarcastically. “Did she like
it?” I thought for a moment and admitted I didn’t know that either. “Then you
should probably steer clear of pens in the future,” Elenor advised.
    “She makes it so difficult. Every year I ask her what she
wants and every year she says the same thing; ‘Don’t get me anything too
expensive, just get me something little.’ But like what? What’s little and
inexpensive and still nice that I can buy without feeling like a bleeding
tightwad? Do you know of anything?”
    Elenor said she didn’t but ventured it was the thought that
counted.
    “I know, and that’s the annoying thing. I hate shopping and
Sally knows it and she knows I haven’t got a clue what to get her and yet she
deliberately engineers a situation where I have to put a bit of thought into
what I get her.”
    “The cow!” Elenor tutted.
    “Oh you know what I mean. I’ve been wandering around these
shops half the lunch hour and I haven’t found a single thing she’d like,” I
complained. “How many more hours am I going to have to spend traipsing around
the shops just because she won’t let me throw money at the problem?”
    “Why don’t you get her some nice underwear?” Elenor winked.
    “What, some pants?”
    “No, not some pants, some nice underwear. Some sexy
underwear. Could be fun for both of you.”
    “I don’t think so,” I dismissed.
    “Why not?”
    “Sally’s not really the sexy underwear type.”
    “Why, what’s she got, udders or something?”
    “What, no. I just mean, I don’t think she’d like sexy
underwear…”
    “… as much as a pen,” Elenor finished for me.
    “No. Well yes. No. I don’t know.”
    “I think sexy underwear would be a brilliant present,”
Elenor said, and I liked the way she kept saying sexy underwear. It was sexy.
“I’d be thrilled to bits if somebody bought me a nice pair of see-through lacy
panties and a matching see-through bra,” she told me, raising an eyebrow
provocatively.