Daft Wee Stories
Authors: Limmy
CONTENTS
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.
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.
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
âFucking do it,' whispered Gary. âC'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.
âAnd 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 âWait', 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.
âIt's him!' shouted one of them. âIt's actually fucking him! Hahaha!'
âD'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. âIt's him,' his mate had said. âIt'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 âWhat 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. âWhat 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.
âFucking 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 deny 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?
âC'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 â¦
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.
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.
There once was a guy who called a lassie âone ugly bastard', right to her face. What d'you think of that then?