All tangled up a in changing room tango
16th July, 2006
|
There is that moment when the chilled hand of fear grips your heart as you realise your girlfriend is missing. The girlfriend in this instance might have been 20 but she was still my little shnookums. One moment she'd been in a dress shop looking at frocks.
"I'm going outside to make a phone call," I said.
I was gone for five minutes and when I returned, she'd disappeared. I asked the shop assistants if they had seen her and was met with the thousand-metre stare at which some of that tribe excel. I called her name but there was no answer. I went back out onto the footpath and checked the next shop and the next one and the one after that. She'd gone. I paced up and down the footpath, walking in and out of shops and trying to repress the tide of panic rising within me. Logic insisted that she was still in the shop in which I had left her as I'd stood directly outside it when I made my phone call. She couldn't have left it without seeing me. Unless the store was part of an international sex slave ring that abducted 20-year-old customers when their boyfriends abandoned them to make phone calls, she was still in the shop. Her father had once told me that when she'd been small, it had been her habit and delight to hide among the dress racks in stores, forcing him to crawl around the floor until he saw her legs. I didn't think that dropping to all fours was going to help much now, but I went back into the shop and called her name again, ignoring the looks that women give apparently unhinged males who run frantically around frock shops yelling out female names. I had decided that I would wait for another 15 minutes and then call the police. A minute later, the door to one of the changing rooms swung open and out strode my fiancée, as serene as ever she had been. My relief boiled into anger in a moment.
"Where have you been?" I snarled. "I've been calling your name for 20 minutes. I thought you'd been kidnapped."
Smiling sweetly, she took me by the arm and propelled me out of the store, explaining as he did that all had gone well until a few seconds after I left the store when she stumbled on a dress that appealed to her. She'd taken it to a changing room and tried it on but it failed to flatter and she was taking it off when it got stuck. Her arms were in the air and the dress was over her head. Feeling claustrophobia threaten, she tried desperately to pull it off, struggling and wriggling within the confines of the change room, managing to somehow lodge it under her armpit and across her mouth. "I could hear you calling but all I could say was 'ummmph, ummmph, ummmph'," she said. "I thought I was going to fall out of the changing room and land on the floor in my underwear with the dress wrapped around my head." "How did you get out of it?" I asked, for I have encountered similar problems in changing rooms, once splitting the seat of a pair of pants and on another occasion, jamming a fly zipper. It took three shop assistants to get me out of the pants. Then there was the time I zipped up a particularly tight pair of pants and caught a highly sensitive part of my person in the zip. My screams were heard throughout the store.
"So you didn't hear that ripping sound a few moments ago?" she asked.
|
