My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen Page B

with chicken fat, and exposing herself to the dogs of the neighbourhood who lick her clean with their slobbering tongues amid much giggling on the part of the townsfolk, and much revulsion on mine. There are times when I praise God we are not related! Anyway on the issue of bathing Fru S & I were so united & adamant that Professor Krak sighingly agreed that we might simply wash & change for now, & showed us to what he called the bathroom, so white & luminous that it looked like a porcelain Heaven, with hot water – he demonstrated – that gushed from neat little taps, & liquid soap that foamed most prettily, & lights so bright that in the mirror you saw your face in more detail than you had ever done before, & had occasion to feel mighty pleased with your appearance, despite the misery of your situation. Professor Krak indicated on a chair two unadorned white nightdresses of soft cotton, one a normal size & the other gigantic, & then pointed out the water-closet, & showed how one must press a button to make the water whirlpool through its system after one had sat on it & done one’s private business & dabbed at one’s tissekone with the very soft white paper that hung in an interminably long roll next to it. With many grunts, Fru Schleswig proceeded to show great interest in the throne, so different from our own bucketed facilities, or the porcelain receptacle at Fru Krak’s, & investigated in detail, & by the time we had succeeded in freeing her thick arm from the pipe Professor Krak called ‘the U-bend’, the sleeping potion had begun to take sudden & dramatic effect, & I felt the urgent need to get into my nightdress & horizontalize.
    At which juncture it is possible that I parted with consciousness, for I have no memory of changing, walking back to the bedroom,
& lying on the softest bed I ever felt beneath my bones, or falling into a deep & dreamless slumber, such as a baby might
enjoy in its cot in the very earliest days of its entry to the world.
    And I was such a baby, of course, dear reader, in terms of innocence. But I was not to remain in that happy state for long.
The next morning I awoke to find myself still in the future: it seemed that whatever dream my sleep had conjured was proving
most tenacious. And I might have carried on believing in it still, were it not for those small things that made me know that,
as a part of me had suspected & feared, what I saw & felt was indeed a waking reality. The snoring of Fru Schleswig was real.
I pinched myself & the pain of it was real. I looked in the mirror (the mirror being so often my solace, dear one, & my means
of cheering myself – I need not explain further, as being beautiful too, I am sure you have the same experience!) & knew that
my face was real, & when my heart groaned (not at my appearance – on the contrary – but at my situation), that, too, was real.
    Returning to the bedroom where Fru Schleswig was just beginning to utter the first expletives of wakefulness, I saw that across
a chair next to her Herr Krak had now spread a huge plain shirt, & a giant skirt, & some monstrously big white undergarments
in a stretchy fabric I had never encountered before. On my own bed lay a pair of men’s trousers & a shapeless man’s shirt,
alongside a pair of hideous bulging shoes of a soft texture, a woollen long-sleeved shift & a pair of socks. There was underwear,
too: a pair of white knickers with very little lace, & a gusseted contraption, also lacking in adornment, that I presumed,
from its dual concaves, that one strapped to one’s bazookas. My clients would have laughed their heads off if they had seen
me attempting to get into it, & I would not have blamed them, but the result was comfortable & flattered the cleavage, though
it could never, to my mind, compete with the aesthetics of a corset
    â€˜I hope I furnished you with the correct, er, size,’ said Professor Krak who knocked & opened the