Ripping yarns

Mutley has been listening to too much Radio 4. His passion for the National Short Story competition has resulted in this little demented parody. Please feel free to add to his/my efforts - I don't think he has copyrighted it - yet!


“Its was the falling of the petals from the first cherry blossoms of spring I always remember – like heavy snow down the track that lead to the farm and falling into drifts on the porch. Old Murgatgh was still living back then – and in the early spring sun he would sit like a polar bear on a berg wrapped in a fur on the old porch hand carving heart valve replacements from old pork bones. Them Bones! My old daddy was not one to let anything go to waste, he’d sell his pigs to the slaughter house and then late at night take his big old yellow pick up round the skips of garbage – in a fly blown courtyard round the back and he would get them old bones back!. Ma would boil them up for soup, or set them into a soup or serve with cherries and pistachios for delicious desserts. Oh how Mam loved those desserts – and old Murgatgh loved them too. Slurping down great piles using a spoon made from an ear, stitched to a twig. Like I said nothing was wasted in the Belrooville Cottage. At the end we would all sit a-lickin at them plates like a canoe full of Tasmanian Devils in a raspberry jam factory. Other nights a piece of meat dipped in dung to resemble chocolate would be devoured in communal silence and sometimes toads which brother Rodney caught behind the wood shed where he went for a wank. At the end of the road where Picking Petes Cottage stood obscuring the view with its seventeen stories of ramshackle building , the road forked and lead one way down into Scratsboro Village and the other up the hill, between already scorching fields full of pigs and lambs towards the main road.Of an evening when I was home from school that spring and Old Murgatgh was carving surgical accessories I would screech on my bike down past Petes do it yourself skyscraper and stare for hours up the hill with the dingy roofs of Scratsboro firmly at my back. If I knew then what I know now I would have just turned and bolted home to the pig infested farm, its bizarre guests and disgusting puddings, and the porcine embrace of my old Ma’s arms. Then I was just full of yearning. To get away, to travel that busy road and to see the big city. Sometimes Rodney would join me for a while, his jaw slack and his eyes puzzled as he fiddled with his todger. But he never understood my passion, nor me his, and he never did get away or alter his devotion to onanism.
Johannes Belrooville that’s my name sitting by the side of the road 15 years old and yearning for adventure, Rodney is already trailing back down the road hand busy in his dungarees and Old Murgatgh is playing the harp calling in the family and the workers from the pig fields for evening Robustimo Feast . To me the planchett tones of the harp recall the later works of Debussy, or maybe a Lynyrd Skynyrd Ballad . – He had no musical training Old Murgatgh but he could work a harp tune as well as any other Red Indian I had ever met. I haven’t told you about Pa Belrooville yet – but Robustimo Feast is a good place to start….and about how that fateful night set me – that shy sensitive 15 year old - off on my journey to Rwanda, Palestine, Tooting Bec and the depths of human suffering…”

Minx adds.....

The Robustimo Feast, ah yes. Its delights would linger in my mind, and haunt my nether regions for years to come.
It was a moonlit night, I recall, the beautiful, honeyed silence broken only by Mam's not-quite-dead rabbit stew and Rodney's endless, rythmic pumping from behind the wood shed.
I saw her first standing at the edge of the woods, her lithesome figure swathed in mechanics overalls, oiled and seductive. Under the pale light of the moon I could just make out the 'come hither' sweat stains that played across the grey vest that she always wore underneath.
It was best not to look at Lois Slagheap's face. Old Murgatgh had once declared, steeped in the after effects of Carnage (a local brew), that Lois had a face that that defied a single bag.
'You need two' he slurred, through lips swollen by the petrol additives in the latest batch of Carnage.
My youth had asked the question, a question that I should surely have kept inside until I was old enough to wear long trousers and old enough to know that Lois Slagheap's knees did not age at the same rate as her face.
'Two bags over her head' Murgatgh cackled, now dribbling uncontrollably from one side of his mouth 'in case one should break.'
Murgatgh had a pig bone sculpture of Lois on his mantelpiece. It had taken me years to realise the perspective he had taken, but here under the gibbous orb all became as clear as Mam's water soup. I knew that my time had come. I stepped forward, eager in my innocence, to greet my destiny, only vaguely aware that a second set of footsteps were following my own........

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