Well… to be honest, I felt like a bit of a dick. I mean, it wasn’t just the indignity of it, although, quite obviously, that was bad enough. It was more that it was such a cliché of comedy, of sit-coms and cartoons and jokes.
I mean I could – maybe – have coped with the nudity part of it. I may not be a sex god or anything like that, but for a bloke my age living in this 21st century of cheap food, idle living and excess, I’m not in too bad a shape, so, yes, I could have coped with the fact of my nudity… maybe. Perhaps by adopting some sort of dignified stance, I could have used the fact of my nudity as a source of strength rather than weakness like some ancient warrior…. Yes, I’m sure I could have made that work. On the other hand, caught cowering in her wardrobe whilst naked, I’m not sure I could make anything of that. Cowering is not a good start. However, with the amount of clothes in an average woman’s wardrobe, there is not much you can do, but cower… that is if you can squeeze in there in the first place.
I could hear him, walking about, their voices as they chatted about this and that. I could detect, even muffled by all the dresses around my head, a certain nervousness in Helen’s responses, but her husband - Steve, she called him once or twice, which I assume meant that was his name - didn’t seem to be paying that much attention to her. He was one of those blokes, the ones that only listen to what others say only so they know when the others shut up so they can go back to saying what they wanted to say, usually about what is wrong with the world and how they, and they alone, know how to fix it.
Cowering there, getting a pain in the back of my thighs, listening to Steve going on and on - and Helen’s decreasing contributions to his monologue - I understood why I’d become her alternative to him, and even why I had ended up naked in her wardrobe.
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