Bullet Journal: Confessions of a Modestly Prolific Hitman for Hire, Entry 2,318
Entry 2,318
Dearest Abigail,
I enjoyed the most exquisite little meal while waiting for my rendezvous with a client. I say rendezvous, but that word implies a shade more foreknowledge and mutually agreed upon participation than I can truthfully impart on this or quite frankly any of my clients (although there was that business with the octogenarian East Orthodox Patriarch with the stage four pancreatic cancer and the dizzyingly limber moral contortionist act that somehow drew the line at suicide but had no compunctions against contracting my services under an assumed alias - a bit of subterfuge against which I took the very greatest of umbrage - I may earn my bread by nudging clients off of this mortal coil, but it doesn’t do to start mixing paying customers with serviced clients - that way lies madness, to say nothing of an eightfold increase in the temptation to stiff me on the bill - I’m sorry, my dear, but I’m four dashes into a parenthetical aside and I must say I’ve rather lost the forest for the trees, or is it the branches for the twigs?)
The rather excellent meal I was enjoying while waiting for the imminent arrival of my client before their assisted-by-me final departure was what the Vinyl embossed countertop garishly proclaimed to be a “Fish’n’Chips.”
You know full well that I don’t go in for such parochial fare, but as you shall soon see, I had no other choice. I arrived, as is my wont, twenty minutes before my client and attempted to kill time, as it were, by ordering a small cup of English Breakfast and unobtrusively occupying a small table in a tidy, out of the way corner. My efforts to fade into the background until my client arrived were utterly dashed by the most impertinent Maitre D’.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself that describing any staff member of an establishment that serves “fish’n’chips” as a Maitre D’ is perhaps over-egging the pudding, but I tell you that this, this terrorista had all of the withering insouciance of a Sommelier at the Maison de la Grenouille.
Judith was her name, although it would have been more appropriate to call her Lilith, or perhaps Beelzebub. Judith informed me that not only did they not serve English Breakfast but they didn’t serve any tea at all. In fact, after my desperate cataloging of every conceivable non-alcoholic beverage I could think of (you know I’m a teetotaler during business hours), Judith informed me that they only served IRN BRU, but I could only have one of those as part of a packaged deal with the aforementioned “fish’n’chips”.
I was, of course, so discomfited by the total absence of tea, not to mention utterly cowed by the hostile and belligerent mercantilism of the young Judith that I soon found myself faced with one of the most beguiling culinary challenges of my life.
IRN BRU, it turns out, is served in a tin, and by the looks of the amber liquid trickling down the chin of a rather porcine young person quaffing his beverage with carefree abandon, the tin was rusting from the inside. I am at far too advanced an age to be taking up something so novel and potentially lethal as fizzy drinks, but I was perforce obligated to make something of an effort on the “fish’n’chips.” This, courtesy again of Ms. Judith, who kept making pointed remarks directed at the rather burly and presumably violently short-tempered cook about how I must obviously find his cookery to be substandard at best.
With no small amount of trepidation, I took the plunge. Oh Abigail, you ought to have tasted it! Words utterly fail me. Although neither the fish nor the potatoes had likely seen either the sea or the earth, respectively, since the reign of the previous monarch, and although each bite was wildly uneven in terms of seasoning, the whole thing was all wrapped up in such a gloriously crunchy and flavorful layer of fat that I am still agog to admit that I actually ordered a second plate. Although, even in my gustatory rapture I could not bring myself to venture a taste of the IRN BRU.
As you know I am quite choosy about my piscatorial intake, ever since that article you showed me about the high incidence of mercury present in certain kinds of fish. Mercury poisoning is no laughing matter, although when my client finally arrived it wasn’t any mercury in the fish that he ought to have been worried about, so much as the lead which traveled through the fish and out of the back of his tempero-mandibular joint.
If you can believe it, Judith took the whole business of my client coming to terms completely in stride. She can’t be pushing nineteen and yet already more jaded than the Forbidden Palace at the height of the Qing Dynasty.
I will of course have to do some close monitoring for any signs of gastrointestinal distress over the next three days or so but I am possessed of a rock-hard certainty that I shall, against my better judgment, be revisiting the beguiling “fish’n’chips” very soon indeed.
Yours in Eternal Affection,
Archibald Marius Thistlewaite IV
