Sin by Shaun Allan Read Free Book Online Page B

haddock, chips,
scraps and lashings of salt and vinegar if you please. No, no mushy
peas thanks. The thing was with sand, it was sandy. It got into all
your nooks and crannies if you so much as sneezed at it in the
wrong way. When I was younger - young enough to not question wonder
and not to care about ordinary - I thought nothing of building
sandcastles, kicking footballs, rolling around and mucking in. The
sand would poor out of my trainers, my socks would shake and my
jean's backside would brush clean. So simple. I reached a point,
though, when I realised not all the sand left my trainers, and no
matter how hard I shook my socks I'd still end up with sand between
my toes. I'm not sure how old I was when that happened. I grew up,
I think. How sad is that?
    If you're ever contemplating
growing up, don't. Take my word for it. BORING! That's my word.
What difference does it make if your toes are sandy, or if you've a
speck of muck under your fingernails? It really doesn't matter a
flying fig. Not that I'm sure whether or not figs can fly. So don't
do it. Stay a kid for as long as you possibly can. You hear about
men hitting 45 years old and falling under the spell of the Wicked
Witch of the Mid-Life Crisis. They buy flash sports cars and try
and cop off with young pert-breasted blondes to recapture their
youth. Personally I never owned a flash sports car, and I preferred
redheads, so I didn't really have that youth to recapture. I always
figured that a man's mid-life crisis was just an excuse. Not for
anything in particular, just an excuse generally. A bit like PMT is
an excuse for a woman to tear a man's balls off. As women don't
have balls, a man doesn't have anything to aim at, so we're not
that fussy. I'm still a long way off of 45, and don't have the
money for a sports car, so I'll stick to trying to be a kid again.
I'll continue to attempt to ignore sand, and to try to run between
raindrops and see if I can jump in a puddle right up to my
muddle.
    But facing that beach right
then, having realised I was still breathing, I was repulsed. I
hated every single grain of sand and every tiny shell. It was
personal. The beach was to blame. The water around my ankles had
joined in for good measure. They'd clubbed together to abduct me,
taking the piss and rubbing my nose in the fact that I could still
feel the sun on my face. I could hear seagulls laughing somewhere
off in the distance and I wanted to shoot them, one by one.
    Let's see them laugh then!
    I'm not normally the sort of
person to get angry. I get down, maybe moody, pissed off and
peeved, but not really angry. I don't fall into helpless rages,
tearing through a room like a tornado, or a poltergeist who's had
one too many coffees that day. That's not me. I'm fairly chilled,
not tending to get worked up about things over which I have no
control.
    Perhaps that's hard to believe
seeing as I committed myself to a lunatic asylum and then tried to
toast my tootsies in a flame that Zippo or Clipper would have been
proud of. The thing was, I didn't see it - the disasters, the death
- as something out of my control. At first it was just a matter of
ridding myself of that damned coin. Once I realised the coin was
simply a focus and it wasn't going anywhere if it didn't want to,
I'd hoped the heady mix of drugs, padded cell and strait jacket
would do the job for me. I always thought there would be some way to stop it all. In the end, there could be only
one, as the Kurgen once informed a young Highlander.
    The Kurgen. Big, bad,
mean-mother-hubbard. If ever there was a guy, immortal or not, who
had a terminal case of PMT, Kurgeyboy was he. Anger was his middle
name, or it would be if he'd had a last one.
    So. My one chance to end it all
- the pain and suffering and death - and I'd ballsed it up.
    I was angry. Angry to be alive.
Angry at the sea and the sand and the shells and the laughing
seagulls. Angry at the fact that I could even be angry! One of the
gulls landed a short