Yes Another Word Game (story)

[Fishy]

And lost a boxing match to Norman off Coronation Street.

[ManxTrialSpaz]

And then to add insult to injury, Fedor broke his arm off and then proceeded to

[Danny Kearns]

Masturbated with his eyes closed until sudenly...

Edited May 28, 2007 by Danny Kearns

[ben_travis]

The young librarian laughed. ‘It doesn’t mean it’s pervy.

There’s just not enough room for everything on the shelves.’

She consulted a little card taped to the desk. ‘If I call now, it

should be here on Wednesday. ’

Donald frowned and adjusted his cap; he pulled on a pair

of red and yellow knitted gloves. ‘No, don’t bother. I’ll go

down there now and ask for it myself. Thank you.’

Donald was a short, dumpy man whose coat was much too

big for him. It had belonged to his father. Both his parents had

died in the early Thatcher years and he had drifted down to

London from Luton with not much more than a bag of old

clothes. He had no other family. His father used to talk of an

uncle of his who also had come to Britain from Ceylon, like

Donald and his parents, but that had been long before the

Second World War; he had never kept in touch. As Donald

grew older, he became more and more obsessed with information

about anyone who could be regarded as a predecessor

from the island of his forebears.

Recently he had been on the trail of a poet. He had first

caught sight of him in a book about Leonard Woolf; a passing

reference to a young Ceylonese poet who had visited the Woolfs

in Bloomsbury after the Hogarth Press had reissued The Village

in the Jungle, the novel Leonard had written after his experience

of Ceylon. Donald had first assumed the visitor was

Tambimuttu, poet and progressive publisher who was the one

of the first to celebrate the new diversity of English poetry. But

then he’d discovered that Tambimuttu had arrived in London

only in 1938, six years after the reported meeting. Donald had

scoured through all the accounts of the 1920s and 1930s he

could find, but there was only one other mention of the man.

He had been noticed at a bohemian gathering, a glass of cider

in his hand, mocking Mr Eliot. ‘Tcha, bad move,’ Donald had

clucked and turned the page. The next sentence simply stated

that this fine young poet had gone on to produce one pamphlet

— four leaves, seven poems — before disappearing from the

scene. Nothing more. No name, no title for the pamphlet, no

clue to what had happened. Only that this promising voice had

faded away. After that just one minor footnote: there had been

a poem apparently dedicated to this Ceylonese writer by a

Hornsey poet briefly in the limelight two decades later.

Donald himself was not a poet, although he had flirted with

the idea as a young man. To recollect in tranquillity was something

he had been prepared to do when he first moved to

London. After a few false starts, he had ended up better

employed in the downstairs registry of a welfare organisation

ordering files from H to P. He had two colleagues dealing with

the rest of the alphabet and a boss who drank vodka out of a

mug. Donald proved to be a wizard at finding any scrap of

paper he filed, but promotion eluded him. Management, he

was told after ten years in the department, required more than

a prodigious memory and a penchant for paper.

After the initial disappointment of this news, back in 1993,

Donald had accepted his limitations and devoted all of his

spare time to the preservation of his personal heritage. A man

has to find his own place in the scheme of things, he told

himself, and began to hoard facts and artefacts from Ceylon,

now Sri Lanka, good and bad. His tiny flat on the Archway

Road slowly turned into a museum crammed with wooden

curios, brassware, files of cuttings and piles of second-hand

books of colonial history retrieved from charity shops and

bric-a-brac stalls all over London.

On this Saturday morning, it was a little gusty outside the

small branch library on Shepherd’s Hill. The wind hadn’t quite

begun to howl as it was doing from Yeovil to Basingstoke,

denuding fat oaks and toppling chimney pots, but Donald

noticed how it lifted the lids off the bins down the road. He

looped his scarf over his cap to keep it in place and made a

knot around his neck. He liked his cap – £3.50 from Marker’s

in Holloway – and he didn’t want to lose it.

At the gate, he looked cautiously both ways before stepping

out on to the pavement. The last time he had left the library he

had been too engrossed in Keynesian economic theory and had

blundered into the path of a speeding four-year-old from the

nearby community centre. There had been no serious damage

but the nap of his suede shoes had not recovered. This time

there were no vehicles. Only Janice Conway who was having

trouble folding her baby’s buggy. The hood billowed like a sail

as the wind caught it. Her car door banged shut. ‘Oh, bugger, ’

she swore before she saw Donald.

‘Too windy?’

‘It’s a bloody hurricane.’ She put a foot on the buggy’s

wheel and punched the plastic hood down.

‘Can I hold it for you?’ Donald asked. He knew her from a

neighbourhood residents’ meeting, several years earlier, where

she had spoken passionately against road-widening. He had

seconded her motion and since then they’d exchanged pleasantries

on the rare occasions they met.

She was a tall strapping woman and looked down at him

from a great height trying to work out which would fly first,

the bundle that was Donald, or the rickety buggy. ‘If you could

hang on to it, I’ll strap Tommy in before he leaps out of the

other end and creates Armageddon.’

Donald gripped the handle. ‘Right. I’ve got it.’

She yanked the door open again and ducked in; Donald

averted his eyes from her stooped back and puckered jeans.

When she emerged again, another gust made him stagger.

She caught the buggy and swiftly collapsed it. ‘Thanks. Can I

give you lift somewhere?’

‘It’s ok, I am just going down to the main library.’

‘Get in. I’ll be passing that way. It’s not safe walking in this

gale . ’

Donald looked at the line of trees swaying along the road.

The tails of his coat flapped dangerously around his legs. ‘Well ,

if you really are going past it . . .’

‘Yes, I am.’ She slid behind the wheel and started the car.

‘Come on.’

In the back of the car, Tommy howled and thrashed about.

Janice fumbled in an open bag by the gear stick and found a

teething ring with brightly coloured plastic keys. She shook it

in the air and then, twisting around, passed it to the child.

‘Shush, Tommy, shush. Mummy’s driving, Tommy, driving.’

Donald noticed that she was looking more in the rear- view

mirror than at the road ahead. Perhaps it was inevitable if you

crave a family. He checked the buckle of his seat-belt and

silently thanked the Romans for their straight roads and the

ancients for their ley lines. He had only once before thought of

marriage and the idea of bringing up a family. That was when

Sharon had joined as the new receptionist at work. She had a

lovely smile and her cheerful greeting would always banish his

gloom, along with the cold and grime of the street outside. But

within three months, before he had plucked up the courage to

say anything, she had quit and emigrated to New Zealand with

the I T manager on the second floor. Donald had been quite

upset .

Tommy howled louder and chucked the teething ring at the

window.

‘Oh, dear. I’m sorry.’ Janice shifted down. Her nose

twitched. ‘I think he needs a nappy change. I have to pull over.

I can’t go all the way to Sainsbury’s with him like that.’ She

stopped by the small public garden half-way down the road.

Donald opened the door. ‘That’s fine. This will do nicely. ’

‘Why don’t you take a turn in the garden. I won’t be a

minute. Really. ’

The wind had dropped and Tommy, awed by his power to

stop the car, and his mother, had gone silent. Donald, trapped

by a combination of favour and obligation, unnerving social

protocol and unpredictable weather, grunted.

He stepped down on to the overgrown path and made his

way through the becalmed trees. Above him he heard a woody

staccato. He looked up and heard the hammering again, like a

highly sprung bouncing ball. Then he saw it: the crested head

of an angular woodpecker. He hadn’t seen one in years. Not

since he’d left Luton. He watched it go again, bobbing madly.

Then a big fat pigeon crashed through the trees and the woodpecker

flew away. Donald walked down to the empty shambolic

field below and gazed at the allotments beyond and the

hills on the other side with Alexander Palace shored up like a

wreck in the distance. The woods dotted about the hills floated

in muted autumn colours. A sense of foreboding seemed to

seep out of them, staining the air. He thought of the bird that

had vanished. He felt he was becoming invisible too, perhaps

like his anonymous poet, lost in a state of hibernation. Besides

his colleagues in the basement in Pentonville, the woman at the

Post Office, the odd librarian and grocer, and Janice, no one

knew him at all and he knew no one else in the city. After

Donald’s father died, his mother complained that her memories

were too much to bear alone. She said she needed more

than a graveyard, she needed a sense of a shared past. In Luton

they had lived very much on their own.

He made his way slowly back up the path to the car. Janice

called out to him. ‘That’s it. Master Tommy is much happier

now.’ She handed him a knotted pink polythene bag. ‘Could

you sling that in the bin for me, please.’

He held it gingerly by one of the loops and dropped it in the

black litter bin.

‘Nice spot. I sometimes take Tommy down to the field . ’

‘I saw a woodpecker,’ Donald said.

‘ Blimey. What’s it doing here?’

‘Nesting?’

Janice tapped a cassette into the car stereo and they set off.

‘Yankee Doodle’ started and Tommy began to clap his hands.

‘Oh, God. Not that.’ Janice turned it down.

‘He likes it, doesn’t he?’

‘He loves it. The only bloody thing his father, the ex, ever

did was play this. But even that was too much for the tosser. ’

Donny nodded. ‘It’s catchy, but . . .’

‘Actually I might pop in with you and pick up a new tape

from the kiddies’ section. Check out the notice board, too. I

find the Hornsey one very handy, don’t you?’

‘I am looking for a poem.’

‘Oh, really?’ She turned to look at him, neatly avoiding a

flustered masked cyclist as she did so. ‘Are you a poet?’

‘Not at all.’ Donald lowered his head sheepishly. ‘I just read

a bit.’

‘My grandfather was a poet. He wrote a lot of poems back

in the fifties. Maybe you know of him? G. F. Parker?’

Donald unwrapped his scarf and pulled off his cap. The car

had warmed up with more gleeful tunes and gurgles. ‘Parker?

That’s the one.’

‘You are looking for him?’ She laughed as she shot through

the traffic lights. ‘Grandpa?’

Donald gripped the armrest on the door. ‘Well, it’s this

poem you see. He wrote a poem and dedicated it to another

poet. That’s the one I am looking for. ’

‘ What’s his name?’

‘ That’s the problem. All I know is that G. F. Parker dedicated

a poem to him. I was going to look for his book to find

out . ’

‘Grandpa was always dedicating poems. How would you

know which one?’ She took a left turn and a balloon wafted by

the window. ‘Now, let’s hope for a parking space, Tommy. Yell

if you see one.’

Tommy squealed at the familiar sign of a party.

‘ Well done. There we are, just by the nice red postbox.’

She parked and Donald got out of the car. He fitted his cap

back on his head while Janice unstrapped the child. Tommy

looked up at him and smiled with inexplicable delight.

‘You need the . . . pushchair?’ Donald asked Janice.

‘That ’s ok. I can carry him in.’

‘You say your grandfather dedicated a lot of poems?’

‘Hundreds. He loved to make connections. All sorts of

famous people he never knew were plonked in. It made him

feel good. Part of the scene, you know. ’

‘Oh.’ Donald pondered the prospect of a vast anthology of

unclassified names. ‘I suppose I’ll be able to recognise the

name. You see, it was a chap from Ceylon. This poet. And Sri

Lankan names are quite easy to spot.’

‘You don’t mean Rohan, do you? Rohan Amaratunga?’

‘Amaratunga? ’

‘I knew him. He used to come to Grandpa’s house when I

was little.’

‘I am Amaratunga.’

‘Obviously not the only one.’

‘Rohan, right?’ He recalled the name of the uncle his father

had talked about. ‘A poet?’

‘Yes, he wrote a few poems. Later on he wrote a book

about the Crimean War. He married Gertie and became very

interested in history. ok, Tommy, ok. Stop pulling my ear.

Yes, we are going in. Hang on. Now, what was I saying?

Rohan’s book? We had a copy: a whopping big thing. I gave it,

along with a set of Grandpa’s poetry books half the size of his,

to the library here. You see, they promised to keep an archive

of local authors, whatever else they do with videos and

computers and what not. A special reserve collection in the

basement or somewhere. You should try to see it.’

‘I’d like to. Would you?’ The words slipped out before he

could stop himself.

She looked at him, startled; Tommy saw something in

Donald’s cap and wriggled towards it. ‘OK, OK,’ she said,

patting the child.

Donald waited for the clamour to subside, for Tommy and

Janice, her grandfather and Rohan, to settle in his head, for the

next step to become a little clearer.

[Dan Clark]

"Aids!", proclaimed Donald.

[Fishy]

And then...

[kid creole]

that funny looking dog showed up again

[Fishy]

and had a prostate examination.

[kid creole]

whilst eating the remains of a kebab which had been left in the gutter

[Fishy]

To his horror, he found..

[Mod Man Leo]

The dog realised it was no Donner kebab,

It was PUPPY KEBAB

[Wrayvon]

But he continued to eat it, as it was strangely arousing

[Mod Man Leo]

.

A kebab van drives past , it stops, the men behind the counter mutter something in Polish,

[Fishy]

they then quickly disembark from the van, grab the dog and throw it in the boot, while giving it the beating of its life.

After a grueling 5 hours of happy slaps and beatings the dog finally confessed to eating puppy meat. The polish then told him to...

[ilikeriding]

find new ways of arousal, involving..

Edited May 29, 2007 by afroman

[Mod Man Leo]

ultra violet lights, half eaten Cadburys fruit and nut bars and puddle water

[Danny Kearns]

Which then led on to him doing....

[Davey]

curious things with a bar of fruit and nut at the local duckpond, odly enough the strangest thing about this was...

[Danny Kearns]

The devil appeared out of nowhere and told his that "Cadburys caramel bars are the way forward", the man stood there in utter shock and said to the devil..........

[Davey]

"I've heard there's a new one with creme egg inside.... any good?". Also worth noting is that he now seems to be a person when a few lines ago he was a dog...... tis magic see! So anyway...

[Danny Kearns]

The Devil replys "Creme Egg one = Tastes like bollocks", the man replys "atleast im not the one who knows what bollocks taste's like", the devil stands there embarased and angry when suddenly the devil...

Edited May 29, 2007 by Danny Kearns

[Fishy]

Wacked out a dildo and slapped the dog/human repeatedly in the face, shouting 'Whats my name... BIATCH!'

[Davey]

To which the man-dog replied "I don't know we just met, this is highly inappropriate behaviour, please stop or I'll take a shit on your lawn and it'll be one of the runny ones that you can't get rid of with a spade". So the devil stopped, fearful of the runny turd. Then he remembered....

[Fishy]

He was the Devil and no runny dog shit was going to ruin his fun, and began to repeatedly hit the man-dog.

[Mod Man Leo]

Just as he was doing this , AGRY DADDY DUCK apeard out on the reeds.

"What the f**k is all that noise? I a trying to f**king sleep"

"BIATCHES"

The devil and dog man stop.

They both turn to look at the duck , the duck proceeds to scream

".................