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THE DRUNK MAN
"Hie!" The smell of liquor hung around him like
the smell of fish on a trawler. His jacket was on back to front and his flies were undone.
"Hie !" He walked into a post box and slurred a "Shorry, mate," staggering back. Then he tried to walk on the zig-zags at the side of the road. In his sweaty hands he held a broken bottle which he kept trying to drink from.
"It was on the good ship Venus, By God you
should have seen us—" he burbled between burping and hiccuping.
"Annie, the captain's daughter. Was swimming in the water—"
Suddenly he tripped and fell, bottle towards him. He pulled the bottle out and looked stupidly at the now red glass, grinning.
I left him gripping the edge of the pavement and shouting "Helpsh, helpsh I I'm going to fallsh I" Somebody helped him up and soon all I could hear was a faint "The ship's cook's name was Mabel—"
K. Isdale, 2A
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John woke up suddenly when his landlady screamed as usual from the bottom of the staircase. The room looked the same. His clothes were strewn, crumpled in every corner of the small attic room. His suit looked like it had been torn into thousands of pieces and put together in a haphazard manner. The same pungent smell greeted him as he stumbled out of bed on all fours. It smelled like a fish market and the air was so repulsive, his stomach almost leapt out of his mouth. As he was washing himself in the toilet a thought entered his mind, "Why must I stand for all this filth and disgusting way of living." He focussed his attention on the hand basin, ugly
cracks ran the whole length of it, criss-crossing every few millimeters. Filth had accumulated over the years in the crack as silt on a river bed. As he was carrying on with his shave he noticed something that he'd not noticed in the past—the mirror was broken in several places, portraying his image like the hall of mirrors in a fair ground. Looking closely at the biggest portion of the mirror his eyes began to study the rest of his face. Underneath his eyes, bags of skin hung lifeless, bluey-black in colour. His nose had its stronghold near the centre of the face, but had outposts hither afield almost to the middle of his eyes. It drooped like an elephant's trunk. Wisps of bristle protruded from his chin similar in appearance to an aerial photograph of a thinly populated forest. His hair hung down almost covering his eyes like strands of dried out leather thongs. He had made up his mind, grabbing his toilet things, rushing into his room he collected his few possessions and bolted out the front door like a scared rabbit. He climbed into the train that would take him home. He reassured himself once more that he'd made the right decision to go. Grant Doyle, V
ANGRY GIRL
I came downstairs and saw immediately that my sister was fuming. She was bright red and stamping up and down. This was only the start of something big as I soon found out. Then she really went to town, "I never said you could use my record player," she hissed through her grinding teeth. "Do you know you've scratched my best record ?" I stood silently and watched her growing anger. She started throwing punches with tightly clenched fists at imaginary people on either side of her. I could see her eyes beginning to water and could still hear her teeth grinding twenty to the dozen although her mouth was tightly closed. She picked up a book, but just as she was about to launch it at me she noticed it was her library book and laid it down. She sat down on the couch and started to kick her legs in the air in a most unladylike manner. "Go away and don't touch my record player ever again," she screamed in hate-filled fury as I left to go up to the haven which was my bedroom. K. Gibb, IIA
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