Issi nodded. ‘Roy brought it. Sip?’
‘Yes please.’ She took hold of the offered glass and tasted the strong Australian wine. Delicious but potentially lethal. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m going in.’
Frantook a breath, drummed up a smile and opened the door of the sitting room.
The smell hit her. Alcohol was coming in waves from the two men who were half sitting, half lying, taking a sofa each.
‘Hi, guys!’ Fran said brightly, far more warmly than she would usually be with Roy. ‘What have you been up to?’ It was blindingly obvious what they’d been doing but it felt polite to ask.
‘Gin,’ said Roy. ‘We went on a tour.’
His friend, who might have been slightly less drunk than Roy, struggled upright. ‘Hi, I’m Barry.’
‘Hi, Barry. So you went on a tour that involved gin?’
Barry and Roy both nodded. ‘Lots of gin.’
Barry cleared his throat, obviously making an effort. ‘It was a distillery.’ The word didn’t come out perfectly, but well enough. ‘They had tours. Lots of samples, different sorts of gin.’
‘I see. So how did you get here?’
‘Left the car there,’ said Roy, much to Fran’s relief. Otherwise she’d have been scanning the news obsessively, waiting to hear of a hit-and-run accident. ‘Walked here.’
‘Oh my goodness! Where did you have to walk from?’
Barry waved an arm. ‘Was quite local. Bloody taxi wouldn’t take us. We weren’t even drunk then.’
Franthought about this. ‘So when did that happen?’
‘On the way home,’ said Roy. ‘We drank the bottle we’d bought. But it was all herbal, it said. I didn’t expect it to have alcohol in it.’
‘Really? Don’t they have gin in Australia?’ Fran asked, incredulous.
Roy nodded. ‘Yeah, they do, but they went on and on about the botanicals, flowers and such, that was in the stuff, I thought maybe it was like Auntie Amy’s cowslip wine. In fact,’ he went on, ‘we found a bottle of that and added the gin.’
‘I thought you drank the gin on the way home from the distillery,’ said Fran, no longer pretending to be nice about all this.
‘Not all of it!’ Barry was indignant. ‘We bought several bottles.’
Fran’s barmaid experience took her only so far. In a pub she could have ordered them (shoved them, with help from some hefty male bar staff) off the premises and there her responsibility would have ended. But these drunks were in her home and there were no hefty bar staff.
‘OK, well, I think maybe your next drink should be black coffee. And then we’ll eat. Issi’s made a chilli. I’ll just set the table.’
‘Oh, we’re eating in here, are we?’ said Roy. ‘Because we’ve got guests.’
Frandecided to tell them what Issi had said. ‘No, it’s so that if you pass out, we don’t have to move you. Now I’ll make the coffee. Roy? Have you shown Barry where the downstairs loo is?’
‘Loo?’
‘The dunny,’ she explained, grateful for all the Australians she’d worked with in the past.
‘Well,’ she reported back to Issi who was cooking rice and grating cheese. ‘They are dreadfully drunk, but, so far, not too unpleasant.’
‘But you won’t go to bed and leave me with them?’ Issi said. ‘I haven’t had your experience working in bars. I don’t really know how to handle drunks.’
‘I certainly won’t leave you with them. I am pretty tired, but I think they’ll pass out fairly soon. Let’s feed them and hope that sends them off.’
‘Do you think we should put them to bed after supper?’
