Читать книгу A Fucked Up Life in Books - Литагент HarperCollins USD, J. F. C. Harrison, Professor J. D. Scoffbowl - Страница 13

My Mum used to work nights. In the evenings before she left she would tuck my brother and me up in our beds in our shared bedroom and put on a storybook cassette for us to listen to before we went to sleep. The content that she supplied was sometimes questionable: where we could easily drift off to sleep listening to some old dear tell us fairy tales written by Enid Blyton, it was much more difficult when she put in the cassette of some mad bastard reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

When it was a Grimms’ night, as soon as she’d left the room my brother and I would leap out of bed and play, because we were fucking terrified of the dark stories pumping out of the little speaker on top of the chest of drawers.

One night we were particularly restless, so while we played quietly with the stories still on in the background, I decided that I would do a magic trick that would knock his fucking socks off.

Earlier in the day, Mum had given us both a shiny new ten pence piece each. We’d never seen one before, but the old ones were big and fat and dull, and these were all beautiful and sparkly and new. I told my brother that that with the new ten pence piece you could do magic far more easily, because they had loads more magic in them.

He didn’t believe me, so I had to prove it.

I popped the ten pence piece into my mouth and told him that when I opened my mouth it would have disappeared. I closed my mouth and moved my tongue to try and push the coin to the floor of my mouth to conceal it, apart from I fucked it up and accidentally swallowed the coin.

I started crying.

‘Has it gone?’ my brother asked innocently.

I ran out of the bedroom and into the living room where Dad was sat with a fag on watching Red Dwarf.

‘DADISWALLOWEDTENPEE!’ I cryscreamed at him.

He asked me why and after a lengthy discussion he realised that I was an idiot and chucked both my brother and I into the car for a trip to accident and emergency.

‘DADAMIGOINGTODIE?’ I cryscreamed at him all the way there.

He told me of course I wasn’t going to die.

We got to accident and emergency and the doctor told me off for trying to be magic and I was x-rayed and stuck in a bed to be monitored.

Now, I don’t know the technical medical term for it, but this fucking coin was hovering somewhere in my throat. The doctor was worried that it would go into my lung and if the shiny little shit didn’t move the right way (into my tummy) then there would be problems.

I stayed in hospital for fucking ages waiting for it to move.

It did move, eventually, and it moved the right way. Down into my tummy. I got sent home and my Mum was given loads of those cardboard sick/shit holders and some lollypop sticks. I had to shit in a cardboard pot for the next three days until one day my poo had a shiny bit in it and I was free.

Needless to say when I got back to school I was a fucking legend. I was the girl who shat out the new ten pence piece.