This Flash "The Fucking Point-Two" won a short-story competition. (I think it was Lichfield Prize but it might have been Southport.) It appeared in my collection, Ballistics (SALT Publishing.)


Again it was a Boot Camp daily flash, written quickly from prompts to a time-limit. I think we aimed for 45 minutes but had a cut-off of 70 minutes.

What was different about this one was that I included ALL the prompts.


I remember that one of the first prompts was "My brother's habit is annoying." I instantly thought of a MONK's habit and in a second I had written two guys running a marathon for charity, dressed in fancy dress. If you're astute you might see me feeling around for a voice and a purpose. I SENSED it but it didn't happen for me until I wrote the second sentence in paragraph 4.

Having troubles with the formatting

The Fucking Point-Two

My brother's habit is bloody annoying. He’s Friar Tuck and I’m running as Maid Marion and we are only four miles into the London Marathon and the swish-swish-swish-bloody-swish is driving me crazy.

         “Fer Christ’s sake, Colin, I told you, go as the Sheriff of Nottingham, we’ll never catch Robin Hood and Little John now – and that’s me and you down fifty quid each.”

         “Ah sod off, brother,” Colin says (he always says it like that, brother heavy on the emphasis). Then he reminds me the London is his seventeenth marathon and Robin and Little John have gone off far too fast.

Don’t ask me why we do it, raise this money. Don’t ask me, because I know and telling people breaks my heart, but why do we dress like idiots every time? My forty-seven inch D-Cups make Jordan look anorexic, but bloody hell do they bounce, swish-fucking-swish, bounce-bounce-bounce. AND WE HAVE TWENTY-TWO MILES TO GO.

         “Twenty-Two-Point-Two,” Colin reminds me, swish-swish, bounce-bounce. “Never forget the point-two. The number of people who think ‘26’ and end up on their arse, 392 yards to go….”

I need to get into the zone, settle into the rhythm. Running a marathon is as much in the head as in the heart and lungs. You have to settle down, not get too excited (twenty-six-point-two miles is a long way) run within yourself and if you’ve trained properly just remember you run twenty miles and then you have to run another six-point-two. Never forget the point-two.

The rebels had an odd badge, a blue apple. After they had cleansed a village, they would paint their damn blue apples everywhere. White squares, blue apples, and so much blood.

         They liked to finish people with machetes.

         I’m thirty-two. Thirty-two, fit. I run marathons. Colin and I still climb, we white-water raft, we fly hang-gliders, we surf off Newquay. We do lots of things, things that are easy with two legs. Legs with feet on the end. We are young men, but sometimes, especially last thing at night, or passing a glossy display of red-green apples in the supermarket, I feel old, old, old.

         And empty.

I was in the mob, a sprog, a foot-soldier, a para almost before I was shaving, then I came under fire, the real thing and forgive me but I loved it. I loved the way the world came down to just you, your mates, staying alive. I loved it so much I trained twice as hard, even tried for the sas. It’s not Hollywood, not ever, but even losing buddies you get used to. That’s why when I came out I straight away signed up to go to Africa. I hadn’t had enough.

We are passing the ten mile marker. Colin’s saying something. Apparently one of my tits has shifted position. I shove it down. The crowd laughs and someone starts a chant, “Get-yerr tits out for the boys!!”

We’d stopped singing three months into that dirty war. We’d stopped most things. I kept a diary back then – we all had visions of being Andy McNab –

and reading it what strikes me still is how we avoided our feelings. We saw the world as them, the fucking rebels. The rebels did this, fucking disgusting, the rebels did that, fucking evil, we walked in on this, fucking unbelievable.

Thirty, gonna live for fucking ever. What we didn’t do was think. What you don’t ever do is think. Thinking can slow you down and there’s sometimes a split-second difference between killing and killed. We just did our job.

         Thirteen miles. No, it’s not half-way. Don’t forget the point-two. Colin is like a metronome now. I would be if it wasn’t for these tits. We go along easily, eight minute miling. We’ve run together like this with packs on, carrying weapons, and we both ran sub-three hour marathons before we started raising money for the charity and had to dress up.

         “Oi, Marion, fancy a shag?”

         “Oi, Tuck! Ooo ate all the pies?”

         We wave back, grin. Suddenly for no reason at all I imagine blowing the two blokes away, the women nearby going down too, collateral damage. Instead I shove my tits up and wave.

I know when I decided enough was enough. We were clearing a town about ten miles from the capital. The Blue Apples had been there, swept in, swept out. We knew there’d be bodies, but even hard bastards like us weren’t ready for what we found that day. Carnage.

         We went in before sunrise, laid under cover and obbed the place for movements. Nothing. Me, Colin, half a dozen others, Robin Hood and Little John, got up and walked in. The other half of the squad watched our back.

         Seventeen miles. About four hundred yards ahead I think I can make out Robin and John from the way they are running.

         We walk in, careful, alert, but we just know there’s nothing alive. That’s when we see the cat. Bits of it are trailing behind it, and it’s making this sound that’d break your heart. Colin stamped on its head and the noise stopped. Then we came across a used-car lot, all the windows of the cars broken, the back seat of one of them crawling with those little brown stinging caterpillars.

         Nineteen Miles. Definitely them three hundred ahead.

         We heard a window or a door clatter. When we got up, nothing. In one house what looked like a family (except the father). I started to feel it then, and I really don’t know why. People kill. Rwanda, Sudan it doesn’t matter, people kill. Stamping on the cat, that was mercy. We’d seen death so many times. Mostly dead-people look peaceful. It’s the way the muscle-tone goes and there comes this point where they are just ‘things”. But today I felt different.

Twenty-one miles. It’s definitely them. The way they run is distinctive.

This was when we found the dairy. Incongruous or what? Right smack in the middle of it all, deep up the arse of Africa, they were making ice-cream! The Chocolate Kingfisher Company. Here’s this place, a big white building, and all along the top there are these cartoon black faces, kids enjoying ice-cream then the name “The Chocolate Kingfisher Company” and a hand-painted Kingfisher about six feet high.

Twenty-three miles. There they are clear as day, limping along, Sergeant Robin Fucking Hood and Corporal Fucking Little John. Fair dues, the bastards have done well, considering, but then it’s bleeding hot and you try running in a fucking dress or a fucking habit for twenty-six miles.

Inside the factory were these big stainless-steel vats, ice-cream we supposed. The owner was probably in England, long-gone, but we found the foreman behind one of them. This was when Robin Hood (Jack Cunningham) gets us all together.

“How many bodies we seen?”

“The family, the car-dealer, and this bloke.”

“Exactly. That’s not enough.”

What Jack was saying was, we knew that out in the villages, the people would run off into the bush, and we always knew roughly how many would catch it. Mothers with too many little kids, old men, that sort of thing. But here was a small town and we’d only found nine bodies. It didn’t make sense. Jack didn’t like it much. Summat felt really bad.

Twenty-four miles. We are a hundred yards back and could pick of Robin Hood and Little John if we wanted to, but it’s more fun to track them, save our energy.

They were out the back of the factory, between it and the dairy that must have supplied the milk. There was a big area would have been for the lorries before the civil war.

Twenty-five miles. There are people walking but not the Sarge and Corporal John Little. There they are, the fucking flowerpot men, or  Zebedee One and Zebedee Two, more like. Good foot, stump, good foot stump.

The Blue Apples, they’d herded the whole fucking town together out the back of the factory and then sent them across that open ground. No problem except the area was laced with anti-personnel mines, those tiny little fuckers designed not to kill, just to blow a foot off and tie down the enemy with too many wounded. We were a couple of days late.

We come up behind Jack and John, start taking the piss. “Hop along now you two. Hop it,” that sort of bollocks. They both ignore us, don’t even turn round. They just  make sure we see their raised fingers. Good foot, stump, good foot, stump, swish-swish-fucking-swish and bounce-bounce-bounce.

There were people alive in the middle of all that. The fucking animals knew they’d all have leg injuries, abdominal stuff. The best thing to do in that sort of killing field is walk on your hands so when you get unlucky and there’s that little phutt, it blows you head off and you hear nothing.

         They knew we were coming. They knew we couldn’t just walk away. Either we walked away, pretended we never found this, we shot the few still living, or someone had to go in and haul these poor fuckers out.

They got people who volunteer to clear these evil fucking mines. Like us. There’s a charity, that’s who we run for. That day Colin wanted to go in, grab the ones he could see waving, two kids, a woman with a dead baby in her arms.  The Sarge said no. Colin said he wanted to. Fuck it, he said, we can’t just leave.

         “How wide are your stripes?” Jack Cunningham said and when Colin said something like, “Fuck your stripes we gorra do something,” Jack told Colin he’d shoot him in the back if he so much as took a step.

         I won’t forget Jack’s face, the way he told me to get my fucking brother the fuck out of there. “Do it fucking now, Jonesey,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t going to listen to any arguments.

         We were back with the others when we heard the shots. There were five, then a gap then another one, and then a minute later, another.

         It’s that last one that fucks me every time I remember.

And now the four of us are side by side, half a mile of this miserable fucking marathon to go. Jack’s suffering more than usual, his stump is playing up, John’s OK but having one arm makes him run awkwardly and he gets blisters the size of eggs. Me, I got all my bits. I’m the lucky one, but twenty-six miles wearing tits, it takes a lot out of you. Colin lost a hand in Eritreia then another one in Rwanda but he says it’s handy, he’s balanced out and it doesn’t fuck up his running. Time to blow these two sorry fuckers away.

         So me and Colin kick on and leave Jack and John. And there’s the twenty-six mile marker just up ahead. Ha, the old buggers, good for nowt. But then we’re grinning, coming towards the finish, congratulating ourselves when the bastards come by us – good foot, stump, good foot, stump.

         I don’t fucking believe it. Robbed.

“The point-two!” Colin shouts. Never forget the fucking point-two.”

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