Once upon a time, a mysterious time that exists through a window in your mind, a time that seemed, to those present, exactly like now does to us, except their teeth weren’t so clean and more things were wooden, there was a town called Hamelin.
The people of Hamelin were a pompous bunch who loved themselves and their town so much that if it were possible they would have spent all day zipped up in a space suit smelling their own farts. But space suits hadn’t been invented in their dimension so they couldn’t.
Instead they held endless puffed-up competitions and parades to see who grew the best vegetables or had the nicest garden, or whose pig had the prettiest teats, but the most prestigious of the contests was the annual pageant for The Most Gorgeous Child in Hamelin.
The pageants were a good way of checking that things were nice and neat and normal. The Hamelinians liked things nice and neat and normal. They liked Hamelin the way it was: tidy and trim and controlled. They didn’t like anyone or anything coming in to Hamelin and upsetting its perfect borders and lines. Not ideas, not strangers, not animals. If they needed new people, the Hamelinians thought, they’d make them themselves: Hamelinian children, perfectly fashioned in Hamelin.
Now if you ask me, the children of Hamelin were a wretched posse of pink-cheeked snot-sacks;
guzzling chocolate and gurgling lemonade,
belching up grog with
pockets full of mulch
and bottoms
full of stink.
There wasn’t a kid in Hamelin I’d go near with a ‘gorgeousness’ trophy unless it was to
bosh ’em over
the noggin.
Alright, okay, I’ll be honest,
as honesty is meant to be
SO important, of all the town’s
children there was one
I wouldn’t love to slug in the
guts with a wooden hammer.
His name was Sam and he had
a gammy leg, that is to say it
was all withered and thin like
a sparrow’s leg. Lame you’d
call him in Hamelinian.
Sam had just turned up on
planet Earth with a deficient
limb, he popped out his
mum and the Hamelinian doctors
informed her sniffily that
Sam was odd.
“I shall love him just as much or maybe more,” she chirped. The doctors, unprofessionally, it should be said, rolled their eyes.
“There’s a place for kids like him on the outskirts of town; for naused-up nippers with bulging eyes, with skin too yellow or blue or not pink enough, with thin legs or too much fingers. We can fling him in the cart and he’d be there by tea time,” said the top doctor, checking his giant, fancy watch that could do things he never needed it to do.
Sam’s Mum, even though she’d lived in Hamelin for ages and knew people could be right divs, was pretty appalled.
“No way! I love this lad! He’s stopping with me. His name is Sam,” she pulled Sam in all tight like a jacket potato.
“Maybe he’d be happier in a bizarre depository for unfinished kids on the outskirts of town,” said Sam’s Dad, who was tugging on a fag out the window, just below the ‘No Smoking’ sign.
Sam’s Dad was a man who found it hard to love people because his parents were a bit aloof and self-involved. We should be empathetic, that means try to understand and not judge him, but I feel so bad for little newborn Sam that I think I’m just going to cut the swine right out of the story.
There. We’ll never see him again.
Luckily Sam had his mum and she more than made up for having one leg a bit thinner than other people’s legs and even thinner than his own other leg.
“Sam, you are perfect as you are, a perfect expression of the love I feel for you. I wouldn’t change any aspect of you because I wouldn’t want to tinker with perfection.” Which was a nice thing to say and gave Sam a lot of comfort and peace inside, which he needed because whenever he went outdoors all the other kids in Hamelin were total jerks to him.
When he was small and learning to walk he’d hobble along on crutches trying his best to join in with the turd-kicking puke-buckets of the town, but they’d always holler the vilest abuse at the lad.
“Bog off Sam, you twig-legged oddball!”
“Yeah! Go limp off into a ditch.”
“You are a nobody and you’ll never amount to nothing!”
Whilst this hurt Sam in his little tummy he’d never show it. He’d fib and say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” That actually encouraged some kids, who took stuff too literally, to throw stones at him. I’ll have to think of a better comeback, thought Sam, rubbing the bump on his head.
By far and away the worst of the booger-scoffing, stone-throwing Hamelin tot-rotters was Fat Bob. He was a rotund sphere of chocolate-coated self-regard. Probably because he had won the most Gorgeous Child pageants, not to mention a series of less important but still prestigious contests – loudest burp, for three years running, wettest fart, district finalist, and the Hamelin beige rosette for slickest poop.
This last gave him such pride that he wore it emblazoned on his chest most mornings and once, on half term, when emotions ran high for Fat Bob, he was so eager to get the thing on he’d pierced his own rubbery nipple with the pin.
He usually wore a sailor suit, like Donald Duck’s one but with underpants on, he had one gold tooth, very scabby knees and his cheekaboos were so rosy and plump that if I thought I could get away with it I would prick ’em with a fork. Fat Bob, like a lot of bully-boys, ran with a gang. That way he didn’t have to face up to his own feelings or the quiet sobbing in the corner of his mind, he could live in the colourful din of the day creating a racket with his crew, scorching the