Daft Wee Stories Read online

  CONTENTS

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  THE BITE

  THE FAT WORKIE

  THE FEMINIST

  CLAUSTROPHOBIA

  HAZY DAYS OF SUMMER

  LUXURY APARTMENT

  YOUR SHITE IS MY SHITE

  THE BALL

  HATE BEGETS HATE

  FATHER OF THE BRIDE

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY

  THE RADIATOR

  UPSIDE DOWN

  DANCING

  DESERT ISLAND

  JINXED

  STEVIE

  THE FAKE

  VEGETARIANS

  NOTHING HAPPENS

  DIRTY WEE SECRET

  AN IDEA

  THE BILL

  THE JACKET

  I HAVE SOME PICTURES

  WHY I DON’T COME HERE

  THE BREAK-IN

  BEHIND THE TOILET WALL

  THE WEREWOLF

  ARNOLD’S ARSE

  THE CONCERT

  ARNOLD’S ARSE EYE

  PUMP

  CHEAT

  THE BEAR COSTUME

  FACEBOOK PAST

  THE INFINITE TEA BAG

  NAIL VARNISH

  JANICE’S FACE

  SEXUAL HEALTH CLINIC

  WELCOME TO THE SHOW

  WORKING IN A SUPERMARKET

  THE TIP

  MR NORMAL

  THE GOAT

  THE COUCH

  I’LL LET YOU GO

  ROOM WITHOUT A ROOF

  THE MAGNET

  THE TIGHT LACES

  THE SIZE OF SALLY

  A SIMPLE MISTAKE

  BUTTERFLY

  STREET LIGHTS

  THE TEACUP

  A VALUED MEMBER OF THE TEAM

  THE CHIMNEY

  THE BOWLING CLUB

  THE GLOBE

  ONE MAN HUNT

  THE GAMBLER

  SENSITIVE PETE

  TOMATO SOUP

  CRAP FILMS

  THE WALLET

  THE BLANK BUTTON

  SMALL PRINT

  ME AGAIN

  THE PIGEON DANCE

  LAPTOP

  RENNIE

  COPYRIGHT

  About the Book

  Daft Wee Stories is Limmy’s first book.

  It is a collection of stories.

  There are short stories.

  There are longer stories.

  There are stupid stories.

  There are thoughtful stories.

  There are upside-down stories.

  There are normal-way-up stories.

  There are weird stories.

  There are less weird stories.

  There are really weird stories.

  There is nothing else like it.

  Have a read.

  About the Author

  Brian Limond is an actor, writer and comedian, known for Limmy’s Show! (2009), Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe (2013) and The IT Crowd (2006).

  For everybody that can’t be arsed with a real book.

  INTRODUCTION

  Hello and welcome to my Daft Wee Stories. There are short ones, longer ones, thoughtful ones and stupid ones. Feel free to read them in order or just jump about to whatever ones take your fancy. It’s your book, after all. And I hope you like it!

  Limmy

  THE BITE

  ‘Fucking do it,’ whispered Gary. ‘C’mon. What are you waiting for? Do it!’

  Things had been leading up to this for the past week. In a way, things had been leading up to this moment for years. A moment that would change his life for ever.

  Last Thursday, Gary had shown his mates the picture he saw online. He found it after one of his usual late-night sessions of lying in bed with his phone, drifting from one site to the next, with no particular aim other than waiting to fall asleep. When he saw it, he sat up, and couldn’t get his head down for hours. He couldn’t remember what led him to it exactly. Fate, perhaps.

  ‘And what?’ asked one of his mates when Gary showed them what he’d found. It was an old 1800s sepia photo of a young man in his twenties, maybe his late teens, standing in front of a wagon. It was unremarkable by itself, but then Gary held up a finger to say ‘Wait’, then opened up Facebook. He typed in a name, which brought him to the page of Vincent, a nineteen-year-old he had working under him in the call centre. A pale sort of guy, skinny, with black hair; quite anti-social, and shite at his job. Gary clicked on Vincent’s profile picture, then put it side by side with the photo of the guy from the past.

  His mates burst out laughing. Because Vincent and this sepia guy were fucking identical.

  ‘It’s him!’ shouted one of them. ‘It’s actually fucking him! Hahaha!’

  ‘D’you think so?’ asked Gary, completely serious. But nobody heard. They were too busy shouting out requests of what to search for on YouTube. A moment later, they were howling at a compilation video of dogs chasing their tails. All except Gary.

  He stared through the video and thought more about Vincent and the guy in the picture. ‘It’s him,’ his mate had said. ‘It’s actually fucking him!’ Gary felt daft for asking his mate if he really thought so, not because it was a daft idea, but because it was daft to expect his mates to be open-minded enough to consider it. As open-minded as they were about everyday things like equality and who should be allowed to marry who, their minds were closed to certain other possibilities. Unlike himself.

  Gary put that down to his insomnia. As he lay in bed each night, meandering online, he’d find himself gravitating towards sites that dealt with the strange and mysterious, the supernatural, the things that go bump in the night. They were the sorts of things that held no power over the imagination during the daytime, where they’d be laughed off or drowned out by noise. But there was something about the wee small hours that let unlikely ideas get their foot in the door. It was a time of night where you’d think ‘What if?’ And lying in the darkness, in silence, with no distractions, no urgent business, no conversations to move you away from that question, you were left facing it until it was answered. ‘What if?’ What if you lose your job and can’t get another and you lose the house? Or what if you get that pain checked out and they tell you you’ve got six months to live?

  Or what if the things that you don’t believe in turn out to be real? What if there’s a reason why certain things, certain beings, certain seemingly unbelievable beings, have cropped up in the stories of various cultures, thousands of miles and years apart? What if it’s because they existed at one point? Or what if they still do exist, right in front of our noses, but we refuse to believe our eyes?

  Gary thought about Vincent and the sepia guy. And when his mates were gone, he looked at the pictures and thought some more.

  He spent the rest of the week thinking. Thinking about Vincent. Gary would watch him out the corner of his eye at work, looking for a sign that would snap him out of it, something that would slap him across the face and bring him to his senses, but it never came. His nights in the house were much the same, looking at the pictures of Vincent, past and present (he gave up thinking of them as two separate men). And he’d read stories, folklore and mythology, the myriad accounts down the ages that not only backed up his belief, but sickened him with envy. What must it be like?

  And now he was alone with Vincent. Gary had asked to speak with him for a moment in the wee room where they kept the photocopier. They walked in, Vincent first, and Gary shut the door behind them.

  ‘Fucking do it,’ Gary whispered, pulling down the collar of his shirt, before turning his neck towards Vincent. For a second or two, Vincent did nothing, and a feeling of horror began to rise in Gary’s chest. Would Vincent den
y it? Would he call Gary mental and leave the office, before vanishing mysteriously without a trace? Or would he take Gary with him on a journey that would last a millennium?

  ‘C’mon. What are you waiting for? Do it!’ Gary felt like he was about to cry, until Vincent stepped towards him. Gary stepped back instinctively and bumped against the door behind him. He was aware that the door opened inwards, which would leave no room for it to open without him stepping towards Vincent. In other words, if Gary changed his mind and wanted out of there, he was fucked. But it was well past that point now.

  Vincent clamped his mouth around Gary’s neck, and began to suck.

  Gary closed his eyes and felt like crying again, with joy. He thought of his mates, and how things would change. He wondered if he’d ever visit them, and show them what he’d become. He thought of his future, long after they were gone, and the many more mates that would come and go. The girlfriends, the wives. There would be sadness and loss, like in any form of lifetime, but he would experience love and friendship with his kind, his new kind, that would span centuries. He would travel far and wide, learn every language of every time. He would …

  Gary realised that Vincent had stopped. He opened his eyes slowly, and looked upon Vincent’s smiling face. It was done. No pain at all.

  Gary looked around the room, to see the world for the first time through the eyes of the immortal. But there was no change. He looked out the window to the city below, bathed in the summer sunshine.

  The sunshine! Oh my God, the sun! The sun!

  But he hadn’t burst into flames or turned into dust. Maybe that won’t happen until tomorrow, he thought. Maybe it takes a day to kick in; Vincent would explain everything. He looked to Vincent, who was standing in a shaft of sunlight without so much as a blister. This didn’t make sense.

  Gary touched his neck and looked at his fingers. No blood. Maybe … no, this didn’t make sense. He took out his phone and stuck on the front-facing camera to get a closer look at his neck.

  A love bite. A big fucking purple bruise of a love bite about the size of a crisp.

  They didn’t speak much after that. Gary wore a scarf indoors for a couple of weeks. As for Vincent, he got a promotion, even though he was shite.

  THE FAT WORKIE

  There once was a fat workie. You’ve seen him before. High-vis jacket, helmet, steel-toe capped boots. And a belly like a space hopper.

  He grafted all day, every day. You might find him lifting scaffolding poles out the back of a van, before carrying them halfway across the site, two at a time, to wherever they were to go. Or you might see him walking around with a wheelbarrow of building bricks, stacked high like a pyramid, as he shifted them from here to there. Or he might be taking an industrial-sized drill up to Mick on the third floor. Or pulling a thousand litres of water out of a hole, one bucket at a time. Or shovelling concrete for four hours straight.

  Yet there he was with a belly like a space hopper.

  He’d see the office workers, the men and women in suits, with their slim, toned bodies. He’d see them from the site, from a high point. He could see right in their windows, as they sat at their computers. They’d barely move a muscle, other than their fingers, to type. They’d sometimes move one of their hands to their mouse, to click a button, then move it back to the keyboard again. Sometimes they’d turn their neck a bit to look at somebody else, then move their mouth to speak. And that would be them, all day, every day, until it was time to leave. He’d see them walk to their motors and trains and buses, where they’d sit down again until it was time to get out, then walk a short distance to their houses, where they’d sit down in front of the telly for the rest of the night before lying flat in their beds for eight hours until it was time to get up and go to work and not move a muscle once again.

  Yet there they were with their slim, toned bodies.

  And there he was with a belly like a space hopper.

  THE FEMINIST

  There once was a guy who called a lassie ‘one ugly bastard’, right to her face. What d’you think of that then?

  His name was Paul. What had happened was that there was this wee party – it was his mate’s birthday – and there at the flat was the usual crowd, as well as the familiar faces of acquaintances that he sometimes saw at weddings. But there was the odd person he’d never met before, and he’d be introduced. On this occasion, he was introduced to the birthday boy’s cousin and her husband. The first thing he noticed was that the husband was considerably better-looking than the wife, and he couldn’t let that go without remark. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said to her, in front of everybody within earshot, ‘you’ve done pretty well for yourself, considering you’re one ugly bastard.’

  So, what d’you reckon? What d’you think of Paul? A bit cheeky, definitely, but what else would you say? Sexist? Misogynistic? He didn’t think so. Far from it. Paul thought he was brand new. A feminist, even.

  He thought, well, if it had been the other way around, if it had been the husband that was the ugly one, he’d have said the exact same thing – to the husband, of course. It was a bit rude, but it was a funny thing to say, and something that most men laughed off. He’d seen it for himself. He’d seen the same sort of thing said to many men for as long as he could remember, right in front of the woman, and more often than not they’d both smile and nod in agreement. He’d even seen it on prime-time telly, on game shows, the type where they’d have a married couple on, like Family Fortunes. The host would say to the guy, ‘Bloody ’eck, you’re punching above your weight, ain’t ya?’ then everybody in the audience would have a right good laugh, as well as the millions at home, at just how unattractive the guy was.

  So what was the difference in saying it to a woman? Why was saying it to the man all right, but saying it to the woman was bang out of order? If the host in one of these game shows said the same thing to the wife, well, it would be a career-ender, wouldn’t it? But why? Paul’s theory was thus.

  All throughout history, men have imposed their values upon women using their physical strength. Back in the cavemen days, men would get what they wanted simply through force, no need to reason or explain. As things became more civilised, the use of force started to seem a tad lowbrow, with most men preferring to use words and intellect to put women in their place. If women disagreed, convincingly, by using their own words and intellect to greater effect, it was always understood that muscle would make the final decision, one way or another.

  The power that men gained over women through brute force – or the threat of brute force – was then used to gain power over their minds, by excluding women from education, from voting, from many of the rights and expectations that men take for granted. After time, the values of heterosexual men, written by men, distributed by men, have become values for all people, both men and women alike. And with these men placing little value on a woman’s intellect or self-determination, only one other aspect of the woman remains: her body. Her beauty. If there is no beauty, there is no worth.

  And that, Paul thought, is what women have been taught to believe. After thousands of years, enduring scores of patriarchal cultures serving the base desires of heterosexual men, women have taught themselves to believe that their beauty is paramount. He knew that was wrong. He believed that men were able to laugh off criticism of their looks because deep down they knew they had so much more to offer. He felt that many women were unable to laugh off similar criticism because, deep down, whether they were aware of it or not, they had been programmed to believe that what they had to offer in compensation for any physical shortcomings was not as much as the male.

  He simply couldn’t go along with that. He felt that to crack a joke about the looks of a man, but not of the woman, was to validate and perpetuate the inequality. And that is why he called her ‘one ugly bastard’.

  Anyway, she got her husband to put the prick in hospital.

  CLAUSTROPHOBIA

  There once was this lassie, Lesley, and she was b
oarding a flight to Australia, at long last. She couldn’t believe this was happening. This was the plane she’d been dreaming about stepping onto for over five years now, ever since she first thought about emigrating. It started as a trivial remark about wanting to get away from Scotland, because of the weather. It’s cold and wet, summer lasts a week, no wonder we’re all alkies and junkies, it’s fucking miserable – all that. And like anybody thinking about getting far away, she thought about the other side of the world. She was only thinking about a holiday at first, but as time went on, she started to dream bigger; she started to think about maybe spending a whole month there, or even travelling around for a year. Then she finally decided to fuck off for good.

  She sat down and buckled up. It really was happening. As she watched the other passengers getting on, she could hear Australian accents all around. It made the dream more real, it made her feel like she was almost there already. But she’d have to wait a bit longer for the real thing itself. Just over twenty-two hours. Or just under twenty-four hours, if you want to look at it that way. Almost an entire day, sitting in one place. Christ, if she was stuck in the house for that long, she’d go off her nut.

  Here, she thought. Imagine you wanted to get off. Imagine you started feeling pure claustrophobic and wanted to get off, but you couldn’t. Imagine that.

  She smiled, nervously. She wasn’t claustrophobic, but she imagined what it would be like if she was. Wanting to get off but not being able to, like if she was in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. That would be quite scary. No, she wasn’t claustrophobic, but she was starting to feel scared of being claustrophobic. Claustrophobicphobic, haha.

  These seats didn’t give you a lot of room.

  She took a deep breath and told herself not to be scared, and that surprised her. In fact, it scared her. It scared her that she was beginning to feel scared. That was something she could really do without, especially at the start of a twenty-four-hour flight. She was scared of being scared of being scared of being trapped in a plane for twenty-four hours with no way to get off. Claustrophobicphobicphobic, haha.