Ten Pound Pom by Niall Griffiths Read Free Book Online

just fucked your missus in the dunny.
    Shocked, Chris says: –Not bothered. So’s he, and points to me.
    –Yeh, I say. –And she told me that I was bigger and better than you.
    Shortarse mulls this over. Mutters to himself: –Bigger… better…
    I watch the ponderous thoughts porridge themselves through his echoing skull; Pom calls me small of dick and bad lover. Tall Pom is not biting. But shorter Pom has made insult. What I do? Smash Pom? Me not like be told him bigger and better than me as lover of ladies. Me not like him . Smash Pom? Smash Pom! MUST SMASH POM!
    –Come on.
    His girlfriend drags him away. Pugnacious little prick. Shortarsed fucking swaggerer, nobody’s fault that you were born to be small, deal with it. You’re not going to grow anymore. You’ll always be short. Cultivate some dignity and you’ll be a much happier man.
    Paul joins us. –Was he giving you trouble, that copper?
    –He’s a copper?
    –Aye yeh. I know him. He’s not one of the worst, either.
    Put a shorty with a hang-up about his height in a uniform and all you’re going to get is grief. Especially here, where whether you fit in or not is predicated on such narrow-mindedly tight criteria… I witness an arrest, later that night, not long after the episode with PC Shortarse; three big coppers pounce on a slight and dreadlocked young man, throw him to theground so hard that he makes a thudding yelp, sit on him, scrape his face across the concrete, cuff him. Killing an ant with a bomb, this is. I have no idea what the young man had done; had too pale a skin colour, perhaps. Or coughed too loudly. But I doubt very much that it warranted such treatment.
    I get very drunk in O’Malley’s, because I must, and stop for a pie on the way back to my swag-bag and balcony. Eat it on a bench amongst pecking white ibises, facing the sea. This should be lovely. But it’s very far from it. Surfer’s fucking Paradise. This is a shite place. I can’t wait to leave it.
THEN
    It’s a short boat ride to Coochie Mudloe island but the boy loves it. He loves travelling on water. He can’t swim, yet, and actually being in water scares him, but he feels an attraction to it, a powerful tug, that sits in him and which he likes to safely satisfy by being a passenger on boats. He thinks of the cold dark depths beneath the hull. He closes his eyes and envisions a vast blackness with a tiny boat on top of it and on that boat a tiny him. Giant sharks and squids and whales cutting across that unfathomable deep.
    The boy’s family set up a little camp on the island, in one of the wooden huts on the beach. Sandwiches and crisps and lemonade. From this base, the boy explores the beach; he clambers over the shed-sized bleached-white treetrunk that the tide has carried in, he bodysurfs the waves close to the beach on a small piece of polystyrene foam that he clutches to his chest, he and his siblings build castles of sand and dig holes at the tideline. Many different types of bird catch his attention.He bobs in the shallows on a rubber ring, spooks himself and his sister by pretending that a submerged rock with trailing weed attached is the severed head of a young woman. He searches for, and finds, crabs in the rockpools, and anemones and shrimps and small and colourful darting fish. When he’s alone in the hut, he pretends to be a shark-hunter, like the Quint character in Jaws , called to the hut by the island-folk who are trying to persuade him into killing the shark that has been eating them. It can detect our blood from two miles away , a worried villager says. Correction , says the great shark-hunter, chewing on a fishpaste sarnie, one foot up on the wooden bench: Five miles. The shark’s been terrorising the island for months; the islanders can’t swim, they can’t fish, even the supply-boat was attacked last week and overturned and all its crew eaten. So you’ve got a big problem , the great shark-hunter drawls. What’s in it for me?
    The boy loves