Free Kiss My Name by Calvin Wade Page A

slapper’ stickers, on the back window. Nobody had stolen it. She had just parked it in a different place the previous morning and completely forgotten.
    “Oh, I’m a dozy bitch, aren’t I?” Zara commented with a nervous laugh.
    “Zara, I keyed in ‘dozy bitch’ on Google images and there was a picture of you!”
                  Zara ignored me. She ran over to the Corsa in her bottom wiggling way and attempted to give it a hug.
    “Oh Charlie, I’ve been so worried that you were with some nasty men. Thank God you’re OK!”
                  I watched her play out this scene and smiled. It was only just past half past eight in the morning and I actually smiled, surely that must be a first. I wanted to be furious with the girl, but it was impossible. Without even trying, Zara was the funniest person that I had ever met and I wondered how she was going to trump this one. Not surprisingly, she did though. My life wouldn’t be worth living without that girl, it seriously wouldn’t.

FLO – May 2011
                  I was in the queue in Greggs, a daily lunchtime routine. When you are a little on the large side, it goes without saying that you will have an unfeasibly large belly. This chubby belly is only amiable when it is cared for. When it is not, you prepare yourself for vicious e-mail complaints being sent from belly to brain. A fat belly abhors loneliness. It is the dance floor of your body. It needs to be full.
                  One day, I hope to have a body that allows me to see my pubic hair whilst I am standing straight, but I have no real desire for that to be any time soon. For now, I answer the e-mail complaints from my stomach with an apology, followed by two cheese and onion pasties and a steak and onion slice. I am not hefty because I am big boned, like some people are, I am fat because I eat a lot. Notice I say ‘a lot’ rather than ‘too much’, because it is not ‘too much’. Right now, eating stodgy, fatty foods makes me happy.
                  Sorry, I was distracted by trying to explain how my stomach works and the demands it puts out to my brain. The point is, I was in the queue at Greggs at ten past one in the afternoon. That day, like many other days, I had rolled out of bed, like a ‘Weebles Wobble’, at twenty past eight and left home by half past. No food passed my lips at breakfast that morning. By ten past one, I was starving. Not really, truly starving, but an over indulged, first world, ‘starving’. I was ready to pig out. I knew the cheese and onion pasties and steak and onion slice were heading my way, but I was deciding between a vanilla slice and a jam doughnut when my phone rang. It was buried so deep inside my coat pocket that my initial reaction was to wonder which prick in the queue was now going to start shouting down their phone like Dom Joly. Once it registered that the offending ring tone was Take That’s ‘Rule The World’, I encouraged Gary and the boys out of their warm, dark hole and the phone’s display revealed to me that Zara was in need of a conversation.
    “Hello, Zara.”
    “Flo, is that you?”
    She had just phoned my phone, it was pretty obvious it was me.
    “Zara, what do you want? I’m in the queue in the pie shop.”
    “Guess where I am?” Zara bizarrely asked.
    “Penny Pinchers.”
    I had not suddenly become possessed with the powers of Uri Geller, I was on one o’clock lunch, Zara had been on twelve, I had seen her come back in at ten to one, when I was on the counter.
    “Yes, obviously, but where in Penny Pinchers?”
    “On the counter? Surely it’s not empty at ten past one.”
    “No, not on the counter. Guess again!”
    I wasn’t in the mood for guessing games. I was in the mood for food.
    “Zara, just tell me! I’m second in the queue now.”
    “I’m standing outside Mr.Brazier’s office, Flo.”
    “Why? Hang on a minute......can I have two cheese and onion pasties,