Fast Fiction: Beaten Up
"They had beaten me with sticks and kicked me when I was down...'' Richard Mallinson's story present a bleak account of a life lived in carboard boxes.
Lying there in the dark I couldn’t stop shaking with pain and cold. They had beaten me with sticks and kicked me when I was down. Then they’d gone away jeering and one of them had come back and kicked me again.
Now the rain had started. Perhaps it would wash away some of the blood from my face and head. I groaned and cried out. I hoped no bones were broken. I didn’t want to end up in a hospital death trap.
A woman arrived and helped me to her flat not far away. She said she really ought to ring for a doctor but I asked her not to and she saw how sincere I was.
She cleaned me up as best she could and dabbed iodine on my cuts but I made no sound.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked and I tried to explain.
Soon I was asleep and hours later when I woke up she was sitting by me, smiling sadly.
She said that I didn’t look at all like her late husband and I said, ‘Well, perhaps it’s for the best.’
‘He was a painter, you know,’ she went on, ‘river scenes and the like, a bit Whistlerish, if you know. . .that’s one of them over there on the wall.’
She gave me clothes, food, brandy, cigarettes and (when I was shining clean) the freedom of her sturdy body.
After three weeks I went back to my patch under the bridge.
Another man was in it, using my cardboard boxes.
‘That’s my place,’ I said.
‘You bugger off,’ the man yelled.
He was a violet-eyed drunk.
I dragged him out and he plopped into the canal, taking one of my boxes with him - a big loss to me.
There was a lot of coughing and retching along the line but soon most of it faded and we all began to settle down for the night.
