From All Angus (Angus Writers' Circle Anthology 2015)

by Angus Writers

hall. He saw Stu sitting in the back seats. Eye contact was made between the boys. A nod of the head each said more than words. Friends again.

  The first line of Tears was the trigger for my interest in writing poems. It appeared one day and stayed. The poem was entered into a Circle Competition with positive feedback.

  TEARS

  Tears of pain

  When you hurt your toe.

  Farewell to friends,

  It’s time to go.

  Final goodbyes,

  to a loving pet.

  Tantrums from toddlers

  when they don’t get.

  Watching sad films,

  the real tough guys

  slyly wipe away dampness

  from corners of eyes.

  Heartfelt emotion,

  tears of joy.

  The birth of a child,

  A girl or a boy.

  I joined Angus Writers’ Circle after hearing their work at the Brechin Arts Festival. Over the years I have served as Vice-President and President of the Circle and as Social Convener. Some of my poems have been published in Showcase magazine, by Gosnells Writers Circle in Australia. www.gosnellswriterscircle.web.com.

  LIZ STRACHAN: This article won first prize in the Amusing Short Article category at the Scottish Association of Writers Conference in 2008.

  PLASTERED

  “This is a ruptured medial ligament,” boomed the God of Orthopaedics to his students. “It is almost always the result of a skiing accident when the boot doesn’t come out of the binding.”

  He turned his attention from the two pounds of raw mince that was my knee and asked me, “Going too fast down these black runs, eh?”

  “Something like that,” I lied. In fact, I was doing a slow but elegant descent of a green run when a three-year-old pocket rocket dressed in full ski wear and sucking a large purple dummy, knocked me over. The mother of this miniature Fritz Strobl whizzed past me without stopping.

  “Total immobilisation for six weeks,” he ordered and swept out with his entourage.

  I was wheeled to the plaster room wearing my temporary attire, voluminous NHS shorts which would have been loose on an overweight hippopotamus.

  “What colour would you like?” asked the cheery technician and handed me a shade card offering every colour in Joseph’s dream coat. He looked truly disappointed when I turned down his suggestion to go for lilac to match the shorts. Call me boring and sartorially unadventurous but I chose to be encased from hip to toe in chalk white to match my pain-ridden face.

  I discovered over the next few days that, in plaster, most mundane tasks are impossible. Making tea whilst balanced on crutches is suicidal, putting on knickers requires the arm extension of a chimpanzee and, to mention the unmentionable, going to the loo is more of a miss than a hit, as you and the plaster slip off the seat. To have any chance of success, the manoeuvre has to be initiated a full hour and a half before urgency sets in.

  I wasn’t the only vulnerable one. My husband fled to the spare bedroom when my ton weight appendage flung itself on to a delicate part as I turned in my sleep. Poor darling, he was singing soprano castrato for a month.

  Until the third week, my daily wash consisted of dabs with a sponge on all reachable non-plastered areas. I suspected, therefore, that I was not the sweetest smelling girl on the block.

  My husband, ever resourceful, planned the logistics of giving me a bath. The problem of getting me in and out of the tub and what to do with the leg required advanced engineering skills. I was lowered into the bath and my leg, wrapped in black bin liners, was to be supported above the water on an upturned plastic laundry basket.

  Unfortunately we had forgotten about the Principle of Archimedes. (He was the old Greek mathematician who ran stark naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka, Eureka!” He had discovered that the bigger the body in the bath, the more the rose scented suds will spill over the edge and flood the bathroom floor.) Meanwhile I had submerged. To his credit, my husband plucked me up from the depths with such a speed that I nearly died of the bends. This exercise was never repeated. Friends and family merely took care to be upwind of me at all times.

  As I was becoming a world authority on TV soaps, my darling partner suggested jaunts in the car. But there is no room in a Toyota Yaris for a plastered leg unless it is propped up on four cushions and hung out the rear left side window − with a red rag tied to my big toe.

  His next idea was to borrow a wheelchair from the Red Cross. On our first outing I discovered that wheelchairs have no suspension and roads are usually eight teeth-dislodging inches lower than the pavement.

  In a wheelchair, you are a non-person. Passers-by chatted to the pusher: they always ignored the pushee. “Was she run over by a bus? Will she ever walk again? Will they need to amputate it?” they asked. Then they would relate their own medical problems. It seems that everyone in town has had a ‘leg’ at some time – broken ones, cracked ones, twisted ones and missing ones.

  As the weeks went by, the pain disappeared but a new problem developed. Every evening I waited desperately for my husband to come home from work. Before he got his jacket off I was pleading for the bottlebrush treatment to relieve the terrible itch under the plaster. As he squeezed the long prickly brush into the gap at the ankle, I yelled in ecstasy, “Ooooh, aaaah, more, more, up a bit, round a bit, yes, yes, yes!” Our neighbours thought we had discovered something truly wonderful to spice up our long marriage.

  If you are powerless in a wheelchair, you are a king on crutches. National Health sticks get you the best table in a restaurant, doors opened and library books carried. And you can take as long as you like crossing the road as motorists have a natural squeamishness about running over those already crippled.

  After six long weeks, I was looking forward to seeing my pal in the plaster room again, but he was off duty. Instead Cruella de Vil approached wielding a Black and Decker saw. I nearly fainted as I imagined a re-enactment of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with gory bits littering the plaster room floor. I demanded to see proof of her Standard Grade qualification in joinery. She informed me, rather huffily, that she had never cut off a limb... yet. The saw screamed through the plaster, and half a minute later I was blissfully scratching my skinny white leg.

  Eventually, after weeks of the torture they call physiotherapy, it was time to have a final consultation with the big man in Orthopaedics. He gave his entire attention to my knee and invited his disciples to feel the ‘interesting twang’ in the kneecap. He did not speak to me directly but I got the message. “This lady,” he announced, “would be ill-advised to ski again.”

  So, no more stylish descents on these green runs with soft powdery snow on my boots. No more gorgeous ski instructor with his mahogany tan and sexy designer ski suit so tight I could tell which coins he had in his back pocket. No more sundowners on the chalet balcony.

  It’s enough to make a poor girl get herself… well and truly… plastered!

  I like to write articles, short love stories, children’s stories and letters. I have also published two amusing books about mathematics, A Slice of Pi and Numbers are Forever, and a memoir for my family titled Snippets of a Happy Life.

  JAN STRICKLAND: The Bag Lady was entered for the Mini Story Competition at the Scottish Association of Writers annual conference in 2013, the first conference I had attended, and was Highly Commended. It is based on a true story: I saw the woman outside the tar pits when I was visiting Los Angeles.

  THE BAG LADY (CALIFORNIA STYLE)

  Her once brightly coloured cotton dress was at odds on her wizened bent body. It fell in voluminous folds, which obscured what little figure she had. Her stick-like legs jutted out from the skirt, ending in large dirty feet encased in equally dirty and worn flip-flops. The creaking, rusty shopping trolley was half full of black bin bags and an old cardboard box, perched on top of which sat a pathetic little terrier, tied on by a piece of string from his collar.

  She was rooting thr
ough the bins, her beady eyes hoping to see a half-smoked butt, a drop left in a Bourbon bottle, perhaps a tasty morsel which the flies or birds hadn’t yet discovered and devoured.

  Her claw-like fingers picked over other people’s refuse: she was adept at sorting. She had spent half her life in this humanitarian twilight zone, her former life forgotten.

  Thank goodness for the heat, the one saving grace. At least she could sleep out on her bench each night. Warm but, she knew, unloved.

  Have You Heard? is a poem I wrote just for the fun of it. The idea of constructing a poem based on a conversation appealed to me and I could picture the two characters very clearly.

  HAVE YOU HEARD?

  Do you know? Have you heard?

  I’ll tell you this, but don’t say a word!

  I don’t want this to get around

  but, in for a penny, in for a pound.

  You know young Molly down the road?

  She got knocked up or so I’m told!

  Her boyfriend’s left her, such a shame.

  Let’s grab a coffee, it’s going to rain.

  So go on, tell me all the goss.

  Well John, her fella, don’t give a toss.

  Her mum and dad are mad as hell;

  want rid of it, so I hear tell.

  What age is she? Sixteen, my god!

  She won’t cope, not on her tod.

  And all the things she’ll need to buy.

  Expensive, babies, and such a tie.

  Well, I’ve some things that were my Joe’s

  and I’ve some clothes and babygrows.

  We’ll rally round, do what we can.

  Poor kid and no help from