Chapter 16

It was that time again. Not the kind that you view with suspicion; like when you haven’t checked your digital clock for ages and yet every evening when you do it somehow manages to be 22:22 and you point and shout “Look at the time! It’s doing it again!”, whilst everyone else rolls their eyes and dreams of a quieter time. A time of greater simplicity. A time when twenty-two minutes past ten was completely inauspicious. Just a seemingly random allocation of big and small hands that held little or no meaning at all beyond ‘It’s not quite twenty-five past yet’. No, it wasn’t one of those times. It was more like one of those times where you’re part of two, separate friendship trio’s that merges for a merry day of relaxing mirth. In this happy instance, it was the case that Dail and Robin (a man friend of Dail’s) sometimes hung out with Kara (a lady friend of Dail and Robin’s). At other times, they also hung out with Caroll (another lady friend of Dail and Robin’s). But on this day of days (a Saturday to be quite obsessive about it), they were all together, watching a movie at Kara’s house.

The movie wasn’t even out in cinemas yet, but Kara was doing some baby-sitting for some neighbours who happened to be directors and may have had some Bafta nomination DVD’s that they weren’t beyond lending out. Delirious amounts of tea had been sipped, many choice words had been uttered as tongues were burnt, movies had come and gone and eventually chatting had re-emerged from its movie-length snooze and started prancing around the room like a particularly theatrical deer.

As usual, questions of why Dail’s book still hadn’t stumbled out of its bedsit, yawning and blinking in the cold, harsh daylight, were trained at the would be author.

“I’ll have you know,” Dail proclaimed “that I have in fact written something.”

“Sweet monkey Christ!” announced Robin. “S’about time, isn’t it?”

“That it is. It’s a poem and it is titled ‘One Man And His Log’.”

Worried glances passed between Kara and Caroll, who sensed that some fairly childish verse was hyperactively bounding towards them; outstretched hands sticky from sweets whilst its mud covered face drooled like a frog-spawn on the edge of a chair.

“I actually wrote it on the way over here…” Dail admitted whilst pulling a weather beaten notebook out of his bag. After a fairly disgusting clearing of the throat, he began to read. Out loud of course, or the phlegm relocation scheme would have been entirely uncalled for:

A man did drive down the motorway

He had been gone 3 years and a day

When a sudden ache did grow inside

His mouth did drop, his eyes grew wide

He pulled over to the side of the road

Into a forest, he quickly stowed

In his bowels, anarchy

Soon to be, misery

Sprayed all over the nearby trees

A shaky feeling controlled his knees

Exhausted from this dramatic feat

The man did ponder, “What did I EAT?!”

He looked around for something with which to wipe

But in the confusion, in the hype

He grabbed the nearest thing to him

Onwards and upwards, and the finger therein

Suddenly, a burning sensation did grip his arse

And the thought then came to him at last

Shock, horror, disbelief…

He’d wiped with poison ivy leaf

Trousers round ankles through the woods he ran

A horrific sight, for he was a man

Reddened now, was his rump

With trousers round ankles, he could not jump

Over the tree root that lay in his path

He was feeling the poison ivy’s wrath

Down a hill, half naked he fell

All the time his buttocks did swell

He landed in a babbling brook

And opened his eyes just in time to look

At the many small children lined up on the bank

On a school trip they were, wrecked, to be frank

A lift back home, he caught on their bus

The boils on his arse started spouting puss

Homeward bound, did swiftly go

To a tube of cream, and some hot coco

The cream supplied a soothing sensation

Whilst on TV he watched a demonstration

On the steps to take if stung by ivy

Is anyone else here sensing the irony?

“Are you proud of that?” asked Caroll eventually, a look on her face like she’d just opened a fridge with something highly questionable at the back of it.

“Not particularly. Just needed to kill some time on the tube.”

“Well I think you’ve managed to kill it fairly successfully. I’m informing the police of it immediately. ”

“What happened to his car?”, this from Kara, with her degree in English.

“Kara, you have a degree in English. Surely there is more in that poem to offend you than a minor wormhole in the plot?” Dail knew that the poem he had written was rubbish; immature even. But he maintained that letting that side of you out in writing was much more harmless than, say, going into a crowded playground and forcing yourself onto the roundabout before realizing that you get severely bad motion sickness and ruining the seesaw for everyone.  

“I know but…did he, like, go back and pick it up afterwards?” Kara asked hopefully.

“Yes. He did. They all lived happily ever after. Apart from some arthritis when he got older. But hey, that’s life. You get older, things start falling to bits…you know how it is.”

“Sarcasm. Nice!” expulated (again, not a word but should be) Robin. What followed was the kind of high-five that can only ever occur between two fully-grown males that spend far too much time together. Once they’d returned from the kitchen with ice to numb the pain in their hands and more tea for everyone, they found Caroll deep in conversation with Kara about the intricacies of the poem that had essentially just poked them in the ears with a toy dinosaur whilst they themselves poked the weather beaten book at the heart of the debate. So, giving the empty sofa something to do, regaled past glories and tried to conjure up a means to create some new ones in the near future.

 “I still have a mark there, you know.” Dail said in a hushed, ashamed tone.

“Well you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Hardly. It was nothing but bravery. We won, didn’t we?”

They had gone paintballing some months previously, before anyone’s imagination starts working too hard.