Pest Control- 13

Read part 12 - here

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It was a phone call she dreaded. 

He had been something of a friend but not really because one generally tends to remember a friends name and this man, well, this acquaintance was a person of great resources whose name she never asked and he never said and so she’d stored his number as ‘D’.

D for drugs. 

Uma at times could be rather unimaginative. 

She hadn’t spoken to him in years or months. It was about six months back that he’d arranged a certain packet of gods greens and she’d not asked him for anymore after that mostly because it was a recreational habit which she indulged in recreationally, rarely and though he’d hinted on more than a few occasions about his elaborate cache of other, more fun substances Uma had remained uninterested and it was today that she wanted to speak to him regarding the availability of a certain hallucinogen.

She fumbled with the phone, toyed with the idea of what she was going to ask and seeing how silly she sounded to herself Uma dialled his number, spoke to him and arranged to meet D the next day.

‘Were you cooking something last night?’ Manu asked that morning.

‘No’

‘It sounded like you were crushing something, like when you crush peanuts or make garlic paste.’

‘Oh that. I was just..uh.. crushing some medicine with the pestle.’ Uma fumbled with her answer.

‘ah, was it that? I thought you were cooking something.’ Manu said planting an aimless kiss on her forehead and left.

‘What medicine?’ Uma’s mother in law had overheard their conversation, not that she was eavesdropping.

‘Uh..Just..uh the medicine for the uh pest control tomorrow.’ Uma spoke quickly not believing her own lies.

‘Oh!’ the elderly woman exclaimed as a way of understanding.

The family had been packing to leave the house for the next few days until the fumes from pest control died.

This was going to be a busy Friday.

The half empty rum bottle was fast on its way to exhaustion but the bastard decanting the dark liquid in a stained teacup was exuberant with animation.

He’d just hit send after forming a tediously thoughtful message that was both persuasive and meaningful.

It had been a week and he wanted, needed to see and talk to Uma. 

‘Let’s meet tomorrow for coffee or I will come over to your house’ the message read followed by a prompt reply saying ‘ok’ and this had elevated his somewhat distressed mood which the bastard carried on into the night after the small incident in the afternoon.

A speeding car had almost run him over and in his attempt to get even with the imprudent driver of the car he’d caused a bit of commotion on the street, an exact outcome of seeking justice and getting rewarded with harassment from dyspeptic idiots with a license.

He’d been in a fight that afternoon after he refused to get off the road and his totally rational annoyance had peaked to a deranged metaphor when a man had physically tried to push him off the road.

He was in a mad mood having been punched in the face after he attacked the driver of the mindlessly honking car with a knee in his stomach. 

The bastard was enraged, never the one to play fair, he’d bit and pulled at his opponent's hair; the fight ended badly for the bastard and it didn’t help that an elderly couple whom he’d followed to the park passed by the commotion looking at him like he were a common thug. 

Their reprehensible glare making him feel like a miserable worm had added to his foaming lunacy and perhaps it was his need to hate something until his heart spilled or love he sometimes found himself unable to tell the difference that he messaged Uma, ordering her to meet him because this couldn’t go on any longer.

It’d been a week since he’d contacted her and now it was time, she’d have to meet him.

The bottle of rum now nearing its demise was artlessly gulped to its last breath and the bastard made a plan for how he’d want to spend the day with Uma.

Start with coffee and end with..he looked at the empty bottle and smirked.

Uma had meticulously planned for the big day. The day she’d known that the bastard would die.

It was unwillingness on her part to make any contact with him that kept her from sending the bastard a message to meet her but stars aligned when he did it himself in his usual threatening little small ways, the spineless coward she mumbled to herself while picking her pace through the narrow market alley which seemed to be busier than last afternoon when it was but all deserted.

Her eyes glued to the ground, she drew no attention in keeping with the prevailing fashion of the few shoppers with a tatty cloth bag that contained a change of clothes, a container full of ground sleeping pills and two cubes of sugar laced with what D called magic.

“it will take immediate effect but try to take it sooner in the day because the chemicals begin deteriorating and it loses potency.” he clarified and Uma had sealed those sweet gems in a vacuum bottle.

This was to be her plan B to slip them in his coffee if she met him and watch him drive into a glorious accident, but she didn’t want to meet him and so it was plan A that needed her to sneak into a little hellhole..momentarily while the bastard sat waiting in a coffee shop.

Uma had thought this through in a way that this plot lacked loopholes from her point of view and she had hypothesized how the bastard would probably think but that was just an assumption because he was erratic, imbalanced and unstable and every time that she played the upcoming scenarios in her head, Uma’s imagination took a despairing route and came to a dead end.

Waiting was the keyword, that he would be waiting for her. He knew nothing of patience and so Uma would have to be quick.

She plucked the withered plant to retrieve his house key and found it empty. 

This she had not anticipated.