I Love Absurdity. Don't you?

Chapter 1

It may be you've seen this before, it's been a stand alone story in my portfolio for a few weeks now. Chances are though that you haven't. In which case welcome to the start of the story, in case you skipped past it i'll just ask that you go back and read the note at the start of the story as there are some things there that need saying before you start reading. Anyway, I'll quit yammering now and get on with it.

I love absurdity, don’t you?

By Richard Paul

Fifty year old terraced housing, one featureless mound of bricks after another stretching down to the end of the road, beyond which another two identical streets could be seen. Houses like these were unusual things in that they looked more appealing in the daytime rather then under the glow of the moon. Now, at half three in the morning in the middle of winter and in the dark they were little more then frosty husks.

“Oi!” Came yet another shout from behind me. That must have been the fiftieth time I’d heard it. He was a persistent little whelp I’ll give him that. With that thought in mind I looked around myself and noticed that lights were on in two of the houses, I think I could hear Stand and Deliver playing through a closed window. Shame, but there you have it. I can’t expect the local insomniacs to accommodate me and my new noisy friend can I?

“You little cunt!” He’d said that about fifty times as well. He insisted on calling me ‘little’ despite the fact I was twice his size. The kid, who was about thirteen if he was a day, had been stumbling behind me for what must have been two miles now. No doubt his incessant rancour had woken no end of slumbering locals. His vocabulary seemed to consist solely of those two grunted lines you just heard and also a third one which was what came next in his unwavering sequence.

“What’re you looking at?!” Well, no, I think I give his vocal chords too much credit, what he actually said was more like ‘Wot yuu lookin ahht?!” The fact that I wasn’t actually looking in his direction didn’t seem to matter too much to him.

If you’ve never met a chav, perceptive young reader, then I doubt you’ll believe or truly appreciate just how big an evolutionary step backwards they are. An interesting example of insect mentality, they fashion a hive of likeminded idiots and as such the individual chav mind and soul is largely overlooked. Together they combine the power of their pathetic brains to form a facade of a strong, streetwise attitude. Alone however they become little more then a frightened child in a large patch of irate cacti. On second thought let me form an analogy that makes sense. They are like those yappy rat-shaped dogs that yip at your heels, only to scamper away when you turn round and yell at them. My casual sauntering hadn’t changed at all since I’d run into him and if he’d wanted to catch up to me then he could have easily done so.

“Oi”

Sigh.

One thing I like about these terraced houses however is that every so often you find this narrow alleyway which is too narrow for cars and not much use for anything except putting out your wheelie bin on Monday mornings. These things are normally blocked off by largish fences. I turned into one such alleyway as I approached the end of the street. There were a few houses with lights still on, but they were a fair way away. I stopped, and waited.

“You little cunt!” I know it sounds incongruous but that really was all he said, one line after another. I listened to the squeaky voice echoing around the corner and counted the pincy footsteps on the pavement. This routine was getting annoying, it was time I dealt with this pestiferous pillock.

“What are…?” He abruptly stopped shouting when I drove the butcher’s knife into his gut. Normally people have a moment of shock before the pain takes their attention and if you’re quick then you can take advantage of this temporary paralysis, and that is what I did. I take hold of his arm and drag him down to the floor where we’re a little better hidden by the shadows. One hand over his quivering mouth to stop him from howling. I take the knife, cut his throat and waste no time in pulling the collapsible bag from my left coat pocket and the hacksaw from the inside pocket where the handle had been whacking me in the ribs for hours.

He’s starting to notice it now, the fact that ‘the little cunt’ he’s been pestering for the better part of the early morning hours was now going to be the cause of his death. Maybe he was beginning to wonder whether why he hadn’t listened to his slightly wiser friends who’d told him again and again to sit down when he started trying to prove himself, and ultimately abandoned him when he showed no sign of obeying them. Maybe he was wondering whether he’d have had a longer and more fulfilling life if he hadn’t been so stupid as to pick a fight with a passing stranger in the first place. Or maybe he was just blinded with testosterone fuelled outrage at the idea of being gutted and sliced by the… Do I really have to say it again? Fine, by ‘the little cunt’. Maybe he was preoccupied by the presumably considerable pain or the sudden difficulty which breathing now entailed.

Sorry about the tense switching, it’s easy to get caught up in the memory of such an exciting moment in one’s life. Anyhoo, decapitating someone with the right kind of saw is surprisingly easy, with practice anyway. I didn’t know if anyone had witnessed the scene or was just looking to see if they could catch a glimpse of the drama that the shouts of earlier may have hinted at, but it made sense to work quickly. And that my friend, can I call you friend? Anyway, that is what I did. I severed his head, pushed his foul smelling baseball cap into yet another coat pocket, pushed his dripping head into the (waterproof and blood-proof) bag, made a hasty call to the emergency services informing them that a boy had been stabbed, told them where it had happened and hung up when they started asking me about his condition, feigning a lack of battery power on my mobile.
The one thing I really didn’t want was for some innocent and undeserving person to walk out their back door later on and discover a headless corpse four feet from their house. If the police or ambulance crew find it that’s slightly better.

With all that said and done, I stood up and made my way out of the alley, sparing a glance around me for any faces and finding none. I wanted to write something like ‘don’t worry’ on the floor near the body but that would be stupid. The ambulance or whatever would be here in minutes and the public probably wouldn’t feel any less scared or disgusted. I felt bad for them, I really did. I’m too nice a fellow, that’s my problem.

I take it you can guess what I did next, with one half of the freshly cut, two-piece troglodyte that I’d butchered in my right hand, I started home.

One slight problem, where the devil was I?

______________________________________________________

It took me about two hours to get home in the end, fortunately with the country in the grip of winter it would be dark for another hour or so. No one, save for the misfortunate people on early shifts, were stirring. Everyone else had the good sense to stay under the warm covers of their beds.

Mike was already up. When one of us was out all night then the other one knew what it could mean. He was in the living room watching the antics of Basil Brush on replay. He turned his head as I came in, saw the bag in my hand and you could his eyes change. The bog-standard monotonous Tuesday he’d been expecting was no longer going to happen, and for now that was a good thing.
“Who’s this?” He asked, standing up to draw the curtains.
“A gift from the fates,” I replied, landing the bag on the table, “It has to have been. It was too easy Môn amis, this stray was lured from his herd by his testosterone fuelled stupidity and followed me straight into the shadows.”

He nodded, we were both trying for a detached professionalism but hell, this was exciting stuff.
“Where’s the rest of him?”
“In a drawer at a police station I expect.” That got his attention, “I killed him two miles away, give or take, I doubt be a thinking anyone saw me.” (You heard me.)
“As per usual.” He said, it was true you could never be certain that you hadn’t been seen or that a noisy police van wasn’t charging towards your front door.
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense, let’s see it.”

I set the bag down on the table, gently prised the top open with two fingers and let the fabric collapse over the severed head like a magician’s curtain. The kid looked little better in death then he had in life. In fact he looked a damn site worse. The face showed an expression of pained outrage. I think he was angry at me for killing him. Not entirely unreasonable I guess but still, I’d hoped for some flicker of regret or shame.
“Gormless git isn’t he?” Mike said leaning his head in for a closer look, “What is he? Twelve? The kid’s already got two fillings that I can see, hang on.” He tilted the head backwards and held the mouth up to face the lamp on the mantelpiece.
“Disgraceful,” He continued, “Didn’t his parents teach him the basics of dental hygiene?”

I shrugged and made a last check of my coat. Hacksaw, knife, phone, wallet, keys, latex gloves and a lighter. Everything was where it should be.
“Any ideas?” Mike asked, returning the head to the table.
“One or two,” I felt something unfamiliar in one of my pockets and found that it was the hat I’d taken along with the head. I tossed it to Mike, he made a brief attempt to press out some of the creases before jamming it atop the table’s new centrepiece.
“Well first things first,” He said, “Let’s get the tools sorted. Anything still wet?”
“Doubt it.” The knife was probably a lost cause, twas both red and crusty and we had about forty of them stashed away. The hacksaw was saveable, we just needed to run some sandpaper over it.

I won’t bore you with the largely uninteresting details of the cleanup process. That’s the nice bit about tales of adventure, you can skip past the boring bits. That’s the plan anyway.

______________________________________________________

We made the news.

-A body has been found in the early hours of the morning by police and ambulance crews in a residential area of Plymouth only half a mile from the city centre after an unknown person called the emergency services and reported a stabbing. This person later fled the scene before either the police or an ambulance could arrive. Although an official statement has not yet been released, comments made on the scene by police and ambulance crews aside describe the murder as ‘utterly disgusting’.{/i>}
The newscaster carried on with his report, going on to list a similar murder two months ago. In a small park in Exeter, a Mr. Harold Brown. His eyes were missing and his tongue had been nailed to his chin. Kind of crude but it was all we could come up with at the time. (Don’t ask me why we had a hammer and nails with us.) We were also drunk, which didn’t much help.

Oh don’t give me that look. I know what you’re thinking. You think that me and Mike got loaded and murdered some innocent bystander. You think we’re a brace of despicable and wretched youths who hold no value for human life and should be hung, drawn and quartered for the good of society. Am I right?

We had been out visiting a former housemate from our university days for his bachelor party. It was a good night and we didn’t especially want to see the end of it after we had left the pub and bade our farewells. Also, as I mentioned, we were both drunk and in no fit state to drive, so we wandered from here to there, trying to keep within a memorable distance of the car.

Our wanderings took us to a somewhat large forest/park that like so many areas of England was soon to be snatched up by property developers. We fell upon Mr. Brown amongst a small group of darkened trees. By his loud shouts, murderous face and the heavy looking iron pipe in his hand it soon became obvious that he was a villainous character indeed. He took a few swings at our heads, ranted about how we were ‘wrong’, and we killed him.

It turns out he had three sons. Now you can see this in one of a number of ways, one is that we went too far, killed a man and left three children without a father and possibly a wife without a husband, the news wasn’t too clear in this respect. Another way to see it is that we rid the world of a violent, mentally unstable individual who may very well have been abusive to his family and might one day have killed one or more of his children had we not intervened. This is of course nought but speculation, but make no mistake, we are very careful about who we kill. Every human life is sacred to us, what annoys us is the creatures to whom such lives aren’t held in the same respect. We hate people who’ll knife a stranger simply to get a hold of their phone. We hate drunks who cause an accident on the road that results in the death of the innocent people in the other car. We also don’t take kindly to people trying to kill us like Mr. Brown did. We make examples of these people when we can, we provide vengeance to anyone who may have been wronged by our targets, we protect those who might one day be raped, killed, beaten, or stolen from by one of the non-humans whom we’ve made it our mission to dispatch. We, dear young reader, have saved more lives then we’ve ended.

Forgive me, I may have judged you prematurely, who knows, maybe there’s a trace of envy in your reaction as you read this, maybe not. But you know what else occurs to me? For all my talk of the quest, I’ve forgotten to introduce myself. Sorry about that, my name is Sylvester ‘False Prince’ Wright. Freelancer, gentleman, adventurer, warrior and arguably a hero. My accomplice, (I’d call him my apprentice but then he’d probably whack me upside the head), is known also as Michael ‘Ranger’ Brooks.

Ah nuts, I seem to have veered clear of the story. Then again, it helps to have a little context methinks. I’ll stop dawdling now and get on with it. As I told you, we made the news. There was no mention of witnesses or any evidence to link the deed to the dashing young rouge with the victim’s head on his coffee table. These were early days however, there’s no telling whether or not a well meaning citizen might phone in with helpful information or whether the chav’s friends who staid behind might put two and two together. I doubt they got a good look at me but you can never be certain of anything in situations like these. All you could do was cover your tracks as best as you could and hope for the best.

Mike was doing just that, going through the tools, wiping away blood, taking a hammer to the phone which as I should have probably mentioned earlier wasn’t mine. We keep a small supply of the things handy for nights such as this, all taken from people who don’t particularly need them anymore.
My task, as you’ve probably guessed, was to look at the news and keep an eye out for anything unpleasant. We’d yet to fall afoul of the law for our good deeds. I think that’s partially because we don’t typically ‘off’ anyone who the vast majority of the people are likely to miss. Not sure whether that would be the case or not this time but you never know.
If you’ve no objection then I think I’ll skip ahead another few hours. There’s a lot of busy work involved in such matters as these but nothing which will hold your interest I’m sure. What next? Ah, of course, the head.

Now then, as you may remember, I earlier endeavoured to ensure that the innocent homeowners in the residential area where I’d killed my pursuer were not the ones to find the body, then I left it there in plain sight because I was in a hurry to get away. There’s a fine line between decency and hypocrisy which me and Mike have been balancing on since we started, but it pays to remember that people have a handy habit of forgetting things, it’s a fact of life. In other words they’d get over the corpse in their back alley.

Right, enough of that, enough self justification. I hate having to explain myself, it always makes it seem that I’m, I mean we’re doing something wrong. Anyway, the head was left in Mike’s care and now it was missing all it’s teeth, had a box of dental floss stuffed into the vacant mouth. The words ‘you’re welcome’ had been cut out of the top of his hat which had been sown onto the skin around the forehead. Very pretty, but where to put it? We couldn’t exactly cast it from the car window could we?

Wednesday Morning (Two days later)

I woke up to find one of Mike’s slumbering arms casually draped over my face. He’s an awkward man, as soon as he falls asleep he tosses and turns more then an oft flipped coin, letting his limbs fly where they will. He’s kneed me in the crotch on more then one occasion.

Before you get any ideas, I must sadly inform you that ours is not the story of two lovers united by a righteous destiny, we’re not an item, the simple and rather unexciting truth is that it feels better to have an extra body in the bed, companionship of any other sort does not come often and this just, to reiterate, feels better. Except of course when I wake up with one of his limbs someplace unwanted.

I shoved myself up, only to collapse back onto the mattress with both hands grasping my throbbing cranium. We’d gotten drunk last night, we had to, it was part of the head dumping process, a night at a club, alcohol, a typical night out. We went to Union Street, a grim place which contained two kinds of people, piss-tanks who were so far gone that they were practically flinging themselves into the roads, and police who were standing ready to arrest any of said piss-tanks should they start kicking the townsfolk or urinating on traffic lights or something ghastly.

The nice thing about Union street is that it’s a place of easily forgettable, easily unrecognisable people who the vast majority of people wouldn’t remember even if they were sober, this is handy because me and Mike were just two ordinary, plainly dressed, quiet and relatively ignorable individuals, nothing special. No one who anyone would notice dropping a cranium filled carrier bag in a wheelie bin.

Ah who am I kidding? We’re not experts on police practice, human psychology or anything like that. We were just two faceless men with a head to get rid of, and we weren’t stupid enough to dispose of a human head in full sight of the watchful law enforcement types. We were just in Union street in case worst came to the worst and we needed some kind of story for where we were that night. Mike suggested coming to this street because there’d probably be CCTV cameras or something quote-unquote. Failing that Mike bought two pints of Carlsberg with his debit card so there’s corroborating evidence in a bank statement or some such.

As for the head, we dumped it in a sport’s bag and left it in the bas station. The only person there at this time of night was a homeless person outstretched on a bench with his face to the wall. Maybe he was dead. You can never tell with sleeping homeless people sometimes.

The bag would probably be claimed by one member of the bus station’s staff or another, or possibly just an enterprising fellow looking for some new acquisitions or things to sell for drug money, it would either be opened or it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be too long before we found out which.

You know, when I say it like that there are moments when it sounds almost professional. It’s nothing of the kind though. Trust me on that, for one thing Mike never finished his pint, he’s got no stomach for beer but it’s a typical ‘lad’s’ drink and we were trying to blend in, I’ll admit that I flicked my gaze towards wandering policemen and women more often then I should have. Lots of little things really. We got our job done for better or worse, though it could have gone a lot smoother.

I pushed myself out of bed, left Mike to his snoring and moved myself to the dreaded television machine. This was not a moment I’d been looking forward to.

When I started this tale I’d hoped it would be a dramatic and riveting account of the swashbuckling adventures of myself and young Ranger. I’d hoped to avoid all this justification and explanation and just tell the kind of tale that one might tell around a campfire. That’s never how it works though is it? Something has to be explained otherwise the reader won’t understand what’s going on, another bit has to be explained so the reader won’t think the protagonist is a homicidal nutcase and so on and so forth.

A very few things in this life are exciting, or to rephrase that, if you’ll excuse the nauseating phrases, very few things in this life actually ‘mean anything’, not nearly enough experiences in a person’s life are ‘pure’ or, dare I say it, ‘real’ enough. Sad but true. Another cliché which springs to mind when considering the overall value of life and human existence relates to mountains and molehills and how one should not take the place of t’other. To conclude this sequence, my final cliché shall be, who the fuck cares?

Do, don’t, indulge, abstain, travel to Japan and find a find a tri-headed schoolgirl to ravage or sit in a darkened room and offer your blood sacrifices to the luck weasel. There’s a whole other story of observations about the all important human condition which I could spend hours drivelling on about and considering I am a life-taker, I expect I could trick myself into thinking my twisted and beastly views on life would interest you, maybe they would, maybe not. It isn’t really the point my friend, put simply it would be a betrayal of my last cliché.

So there you have it, I have wasted yet more of your time with my in-depth description of why I won’t describe anything. I’m not very good at this am I? The head, that’s what you want to know about right? The head was indeed discovered and now the full force of the Devonshire police force was committed to stopping the beastly brutes who’d done the deed before we, ‘they’, no ‘he’, made a grisly spectacle of another local ragamuffin.

I’d also learned a few things about the kid I’d sliced. His name was, and to the best of my knowledge still is Joshua Tate. 14 years of age, he was your bog-standard, cranially devoid ASBO hunter and no, before you ask, I don’t think I went too far at all. There was more flesh then soul to the boy. The world is better off without him.

Don’t believe me? Could be you do, could be you don’t. This prose format doesn’t suit my purpose as well as I’d hoped. Next time maybe I’ll make a video journal. What I really need to do is speak to you face to face. A full Q&A, that kind of thing. All answers out in the open and both of us walk away satisfied.

______________________________________________________

Mike has a bad habit of twisting his bank statements into paper aeroplanes and casting them into the sea. Whenever the large pile on his desk reaches a certain height outlined by a large red line he painted on the wall, he ventures down to the sea front and let’s the things fly. There’s a secluded spot about halfway down the quasi cliff-face which allows for a nice view of the inky black sea of night time.

I always liked this part of the city, the perilous and slippery trek over a thin, titled pathways overlooking no end of jagged rocks ensures that a very few people actually come down here. Very peaceful.

“So what brought you two out here?” Caitlyn asked as Mike let loose another aeroplane at the sea. The wind caught it and sent it crashing back into his right shoulder. He cursed and kicked it over the edge of the mini-precipice.
“We wreckers.” He said, lifting another sheet of paper from his bag, “We wait for ships to arrive then send out false lighthouse signals. They crash into the rocks and we make off with whatever loot we can carry.”
“Pays the bills,” I added, “And we’re never short on larger.”

She laughed and propped herself up onto her elbows. She had been sprawled out on the rock face long before we arrived, we almost didn’t see her at first, it was only when Mike nearly stepped on her and she pushed his foot away, almost sending him into the sea in the process, that we noticed that for once we were not along in this our, dare I say it? Secret place.

Since we’d arrived she’d done little more then lay back on the rocks with her arms behind her head, almost like she was inviting us to ravish her there and then, we would not do such a thing of course as that would be the act of a beastly and unconscionable brace of ruffians and I ask you dear reader, does that sound like us?
“No really, why do you come here?”

I looked at Mike, he shrugged and let fly another paper aeroplane.
“It’s quiet,” I said, “peaceful, nice view.”
“The steady rhythm of the waves can wash away all of life’s bullshit.” She said with a hastened confidence that told me she’d practiced that line before.
“Yeah,” Mike said, “That’s the thing.”

I pushed my head back into the soft, muddy grass patch behind me and spared a glance upwards. The stars were indeed numerous and beautiful tonight, as they were on any relatively cloudless day when you get far enough away from street lights. If I was perfectly honest though it was getting cold, I was getting hungry and were it not for the company I’d probably have made my way home by now.

“I love it out here.” Caitlyn said, “It just feels like…I don’t know. Like it belongs in the world.”
“It’s simple,” I said, “simple and elegant.”
“Yeah.”

Above us, the ever awkward whine of a police car’s siren grew steadily louder, the sound of tires in motion came and went just as quickly, and soon the siren and the faint light it cast onto the cliff began to recede. Caitlyn I noticed had pushed herself back into the cliff.
“Here we go,” She said, “The 1AM corpse hunt.”
“You what?” Mike asked.
“You know, they send one poor sod out here to see if any drunks decided to go swimming and now float face down in the water.”
“Can’t imagine they’d see much at this time of night.” Mike said.
“And with only one bloke in an area this big.”
“Well I might be wrong, but I guess they have to make some kind of effort, or be seen to.”

That seemed a little incongruous to me, but then I didn’t have any better ideas. I guess it didn’t much matter. All through the night, the one thing I found that I really wanted to tell this girl was that I, or I guess for practicality’s sake me and Mike were the ones that had killed the boy she’d probably heard about in the news. I wondered how she’d react, I wondered whether she’d understand why we’d done what we’d done. I wondered whether she’d appreciate our quest, and I doubted it. At best she’d run away as fast as her legs could carry her, hopefully without slipping and getting herself killed. At worst, she’d think we were cool and want to join us, simply to escape the apparent monotony of her everyday life.

There are a very few people who can do what me and Mike do, and we’re yet to find any of them. Don’t think that in my more romantic hours I don’t dream of raising an army and sweeping through this country, ridding the people of the cancer that plagues them, removing the government and giving birth to the people’s republic of Great Britain. (Easier said then done I imagine). Alas, it can never be. Not in my lifetime anyway.

As if in answer to my thoughts, Caitlyn said the following,
“You hear about that kid that got beheaded.”
“Yep.” Mike said with admirable composure, I sat up a bit, slowly of course. We weren’t exactly under suspicion here, yet.
“Creepy huh? To think there’s some weirdo who goes around beheading people right on our doorsteps.”
“Killing’s killing.” I said, “Wouldn’t make much difference if he’d, or she’d, just stabbed the guy and left him whole. We’d still have a dangerous character loose on the streets.”
“There are always dangerous characters loose on most streets.” Mike said, “It’s the way of the world.”
“I know,” Caitlyn said, sitting up, “But still, don’t you find it that much more unnerving when it happens on your own doorstep?”
“I guess so.” Mike said, “But there’s not much we can do about it.”
“Life has to go on.” I said.
“And if some crazed weirdo rids me of my cranium,” Mike paused for effect, “Well then I won’t have to worry about it for too long.”

I laughed, Caitlyn didn’t. I don’t think we were taking this seriously enough for her liking. We sat in silence for a few minutes and listened to the waves.
“Why do you think he killed him?” She asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. I waited a few seconds and then ‘Maybe just cause he was there.”
“Yeah but then wouldn’t the killer just kill him and run off if he didn’t know the kid?” (You’d think so really wouldn’t you?) “I mean the way the body was left, and that ‘you’re welcome’ thing on his head. This sounds like it was personal.”
“Or deluded.” Mike said, I could feel him grinning inside, “Maybe someone thought they were doing the right thing. A delusional psychopath with ideas of saving the world from villains.”
“Fourteen year old, largely defenceless villains at that.” I added.
“Some people are sick.” She said.
“Indeed.”

I was starting to like this girl, not entirely sure why but that doesn’t much matter. I get the feeling though that there was something that she wanted to say but didn’t. Concealing such truths is never a good idea, it may keep you safe from judgement, ridicule and generally being ‘wrong’, but letting loose your truth is like letting loose a squadron of mink in a library, the results will most likely be interesting.

Alas, that’s not what we did. I honestly couldn’t guess what would happen if we told this girl the truth but I doubted it would be positive. She knew our names and faces, she could identify us to the police, unless of course we killed her too, and she didn’t deserve that.

So we talked for a while, got up and left. She made a point of mentioning that she came down here every Sunday night and that maybe she’d run into us. She also told Mike to stop polluting, he didn’t listen.

______________________________________________________

I’ve seen where I went wrong my dear reader, I see know my pitfall. I started my story too early. I wanted to tell a tale of heroics and action, but nothing like that really happened until we left Caitlyn’s side.
“Oi!” I really don’t understand why he said that, I mean we were standing right in front of him. I’m guessing you can see where this is heading.

Mike let loose a snigger and flicked his eyes in my direction, I sighed, shrugged and held one hand under my coat.
“What do you want?” Mike said to the foremost fellow in the gang of idiots that we’d run into. One tall kid, arguably the queen bee, who stood at the front. He was flanked by two shorter kids dressed in almost identical garments and behind them were one irate looking girl and what looked like a five year old who were pointing camera phones at us. No doubt they wished to record the show for posterity.

“We want yer fuhkin fones ya fuhkin poofs.” Why do these people always associate the application of polysyllabic lexis in colloquial conversation with a foppish and weak willed character?

Oh well, I thought, might as well draw out the scene.
“Piss off kiddies,” I said with a calmness that I hoped they’d find unnerving, ‘Before you get hurt.”
“Hey uhp yuhrs yoo fuhkin cunt!” That was from the five year old, he sounded genuinely outraged and looked like he might start frothing at the mouth at any moment. It’s sad that one so young could already have fallen so far. We wouldn’t kill him, even we have our limits. Who knows, maybe we’d save him in some way.
“Yeah!” Grunted the Queen, “Wi’ll smass yuhr fuhkin faces in if yoo…”

I tapped Mike on the shoulder, signifying that we’d listened to enough of this. It was time to gain the element of surprise. I reached into my coat, drew my knife and charged.

This, my new friend, is where things really get interesting. This is a time in my life that I like to call the battle of Beaumont avenue. Kind of an uninspiring name I’ll admit but it’s accurate. What followed this was the ascension, the time of awakening. The time when Sylvester ‘False Prince’ Wright and Michael ‘Ranger’ Brooks realised a far greater destiny then any of us could have imagined. Keep an eye open my dear reader and I shall tell you this tale, a true tale of swashbuckling adventure, (occasionally on the high seas), very soon. Until then, I bid you farewell.

To be continued

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