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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