Contents

1 Carnival Queen

Marnie Sleightholme was well chuffed when she got the chance to be carnival queen, and she couldn’t give a shit if it was true what folk were saying about her only getting picked because she’d had her right arm ripped off.

2 Gypos

Uncle Cyrus had had a beef with the gypos ever since he’d come up short at dinging the strongman hammer bell a couple of carnivals past. He’d slapped down the mallet and it had only gone up half-way. Soon as that dinger starting falling, I knew sure as hell there was going to be trouble all right.

3 Eleutherophobia

Everybody knew Shandor Marley’s mother liked to spend more time flirting with serial killers than she did taking care of things at home. So when her son went round with an air rifle popping his neighbours like they were allotment pigeons, they figured all the boy really needed was a bit of attention.

4 The Parish News

The Ladies’ Group held a tasting of ten different puddings in the village hall. They were:

5 Sweet Tooth

Trisha dreamed of being a Playboy Bunny since the days she still had buck-teeth and fried egg boobs. She blu-tacked page threes above her bed-head and had me snap topless Polaroids till they littered the floor. She told me to imagine she had 36DDs and peroxide blonde hair. I used to wish like hell that she wasn’t my cousin.

6 To Boldly Go

Jason Munt said him and Carly Furnish got beamed up by a bunch of aliens just after he’d boldly gone with her in the car park woods. It was the boldly going bit people thought was bullshit.

7 Nine Lives

Lorna Feargal kept sixteen cats and slept with schoolboys, one for each cat, give or take.

8 Shiny And New

When Debbie first got pregnant we had her going that the bairn would most probably pop out looking like that pervy old codhead off the fishfingers packets. It was our way of taunting her for getting herself knocked up while the fleet was in.

9 Hannah & Alec

Hannah walked in on Alec while he was taking a shower. Alec shouted, ‘what the hell?’ He grabbed out for a towel and lost his footing. He splayed nude on the tiles. Hannah tugged down her tights and plonked on the toilet seat. She looked down on him and teased her eyebrows high. She started to pee. She said, ‘when a girl’s gotta go, a girl’s gotta go.’

10 Seventeen Days

I turned on the news and I thought, this can’t be right. There must be some mistake. These sorts of things just don’t happen round here.

11 Odd Kirk

I don’t reckon the sun’s ever come up quite the same since the day it happened. I’ve been watching it for years now and to me it still don’t look right somehow. Maybe it’s just me thinking it, sending myself doolally after what I’ve done. But I swear every morning it creeps up and it’s looking at me, all knowing like. And when you reckon the sun’s acting like that over you there isn’t a right lot you can do about it, beyond burying yourself away like a mole in the soil.

12 Revelations

Debbie Bullock’s mum was as horny as hell till the day she saw a vision of the Virgin Mary scouting up at her from the bottom of a fish and chip tray. Call it divine intervention, whatever. That was the day the shit really started to hit the fan.

13 Jimbob

Jimbob Blakey wasn’t so much given birth to as clambered right out of his mother himself. He weighed in at almost thirteen pounds, came ready-fitted with a shock of fat black hair and a couple of razor teeth.

14 Good Oil

Johnny got a tattoo of his girlfriend’s name inside an arrowed heart on his upper left bicep. He said it was to show Carol how much he loved her. Carol took one look and decided she loved the estate agent a whole lot more. So Johnny changed the tattoo himself, using biro ink and a sewing needle, so it said ‘Castrol’, as in the oil. Then he added ‘GTX’. The ‘T’ and the ‘X’ strayed outside the arrowed heart, and even in his own opinion made the thing look messy. Johnny spent a week in hospital with blood poisoning. He said what the hell, it’s good oil.

15 White Power

As forty-something neo-Nazis went, no-one was denying she was hot as shit. She had short-hacked hair that shone white as a Klan hood, and a perma-tan so deep she was in danger of having to start to hate herself.

16 Loonies

Our topic is loonies. We got the idea for our topic from all the loonies who live in our village. Loony means lunatic, which means someone foolish or eccentric. Calum’s dad says our village is going down the pan.

17 Cow-tipping

The sight of all those schoolgirls’ legs unfolding off the buses at just past four o’clock every afternoon is almost enough to shut anybody up, except for Roscoe Williams when he’s got another one of them stupid ideas of his rattling around in his thick old head.

18 Chat Room

hi all!!! has it really been ten years?! time flies when your having fun!!! (not!!!) thanks for popping by, there’s a few peeps (?) i couldn’t track down, anyone know what happened to ged blowes, marnie sleightholme, jake birdsall??!!