Daft Wee Stories (23 page)

When he got home that night, he walked straight to the living room, his jacket still on, turned on the telly and flipped to the news. Nothing. He got out his phone to check out the news online, in case he missed the headline on the telly. Nothing. Nothing about India anyway. What was he expecting? He smiled and went to the kitchen and made himself some dinner. Business as usual.

Until five weeks later.

He was having dinner. Watching the news. And he saw something that stopped him mid munch. There had been a flood. In India! Well, it was Sri Lanka, to be exact, but that was close enough. He had touched that fucking globe just after coming in from the rain. It was five weeks ago, but he remembered it clearly: it was raining, and he touched India (pretty much) with what was probably a wet finger, and now they've got a flood. Are you going to call that a coincidence? No, that was that as far as he was concerned. That was fucking that. What time was it, what time did that bookshop shut?

An hour later he returned from the bookshop with the globe in a bag. The display model. They wouldn't let him have it, to begin with, because it would mean one of the staff would have to replace it by removing a new one from its box and blowing it up. But he insisted, offering to blow it up for them; he just wanted that display one. He needed it. So they gave him it. They told him he didn't have to blow up a new one, though, the shop was shutting and they just wanted to go home. So now it was his.

He looked at it as it sat on the kitchen worktop. He looked at it without moving an inch. Fear and awe, that's what he was feeling. What was this thing? Who made it, and how could it hold so much power? He turned his head to hear a woman outside in the street, telling her son to hurry up and stop eating from the bags, it'll ruin his dinner. The normality gave him a shake, and when he looked back to the kitchen worktop, all he saw was an inflatable globe. Probably cost no more than twenty pence to make. He burst out laughing. Dear fucking God, man, what the fuck? Had he lost it? What the fuck had he done? Haha. A globe with magical powers, is that really what he thought? He felt like taking a knife to it to prove a point, but he quite liked the thing. He put it in the cupboard and gave his mates a phone. Fuck me, if there was a guy that needed to get out the house, it was him. It'd been too long.

It lasted three minutes. One of his mates in the pub said something about global warming. He remembered the globe was in the cupboard next to the tumble dryer. The dryer wasn't on, no, but the significance was there. He stood up and ran out without saying a word. When he got home, he took the globe out the cupboard – very, very fucking gently – and placed it next to the draught at his bedroom window.

Six weeks later there was a hurricane somewhere. How's about that then?

He moved the globe back to the kitchen, this time just keeping it on the worktop. All was well, until he saw a fly land somewhere in Africa.

Two months later there was something on the telly about malaria. Fancy that.

He moved it to the living room and placed it on the couch, where it wasn't too hot, it wasn't too cold, where he could pull up a seat and sit nearby and keep his eyes on it and make sure no flies or spiders or anything else could get near it without him seeing it first. He could sit there all day, all night, with the news on by his side to keep him updated on world affairs. All week long.

The lads texted to try and get him out, they were concerned, but he was busy. His work got in touch to ask him where he was, and then they got in touch to let him go, but he was busy. The bank and the council and folk like that sent him letters with red ink and capital letters to tell him that he had to do this and that urgently or else. But sorry, he was busy.

A year later there was a conference, one of these big conferences where the world's leaders get together to discuss how to save the planet. As they stood outside for their group photo, protesters waved banners and shouted things to say that the leaders weren't doing enough. Peaceful protesters, of course, staying well behind the barrier. All except one.

He leapt over the barrier and made a run for the leaders. He looked wild. You could barely see his face for hair. It was difficult to tell where the hair on his head stopped and the beard began. Completely fucking wild. And completely naked.

Because he was naked, the marksmen decided he wasn't a threat, and let the police on the ground take care of it. Until they saw the bomb. At least, it looked like a bomb. Not the type of bomb you strap to yourself to blow you and everybody else up, but like a cartoon bomb. A big round thing you carry in your hands. It was the size of a football and … they didn't know, but you can't hesitate with that kind of thing, not for a moment.

The wild man was babbling as he raced towards the leaders, something about how he'd destroy the planet if they didn't come together to find a solution. Maybe. They couldn't be sure, he was too far away, and he didn't get much closer. One bullet tore through his shoulder and knocked him to the ground. The next bullet punctured the bomb, proving it to be not a bomb but an inflatable something or other. He just seemed like a relatively harmless fruitcake. But the marksmen put another half a dozen bullets into his head anyway, just to be on the safe side.

And that was the end of that.

Insane, you might think. An insane, naked loony lying next to a burst, inflatable globe. Is that what you think? Well, perhaps you're right. But consider this.

Not long after the globe exploded, so did our planet. No, not right away, not by our minuscule measure of time. I'm talking a billion, billion, billion years later. But it exploded nevertheless. And that kind of time, in the scale of the infinite universe, well, that's practically a moment.

Now, I don't know about you. But that seems like a mighty strange coincidence to me.

Daniel wanted to play. He was sad because he wanted to play but nobody would play with him. No, he wasn't a six-year-old boy, he was a forty-one-year-old man. But nevertheless, he wanted to play. He'd tried most of the grown-up ways to play. Shagging, drugs, going to things. Football, gambling,
FarmVille
. You name it. They were all good for a while, then they weren't. Same old, same old. It was like there was nothing left. Nothing at all. Except, there was one thing.

D'you know what he fancied? D'you know what he fancied playing? This'll sound daft. He knew it sounded daft, but the more tired he grew of all these things that were supposed to entertain him, the less daft it felt. It almost felt like the only other option. D'you know what he fancied? He fancied a game of one man hunt.

It was a game they'd play when he was a boy; he hadn't played it for fucking ages. He loved it. It was a bit like hide and seek, in that everybody would run and hide and one person would count to a hundred then go and try and find them. The difference was that instead of just spotting the person, you had to grab them and shout, ‘Two, four, six, eight, ten, caught, one man hunt!' Then that newly grabbed person would join in the hunting, then the next, then the next. You'd all be climbing over walls, hiding under motors, jumping through hedges, pissing the neighbours off to fuck. And the more people that were caught, the more mental it would get, because the people who were the best at getting away were the people that were into taking the most risks, like climbing drainpipes and running onto roofs and hanging off things by the tips of their fingers. It was insane. It was deadly. It was fucking magic.

But then everybody grew up. They lost interest. There was a time when everybody was up for it, everybody you knew was up for a game, then, one by one, they'd stop. They'd just stop, never to play again. And if you asked, they'd laugh at you, like you were a silly wee boy, like you'd asked them if they wanted to play with your My Little Pony. Usually it was an overnight thing: they were into a game yesterday, but today, no, as if a part of their childhood had died in its sleep. But for some, it would happen while the game was playing, it would happen mid-game. Everybody would hide, waiting for the guy to come hunting, but the guy wouldn't come. At some point during counting, it would occur to the guy that this wasn't his thing any more and he'd just head home. He'd just head up the road without telling anybody.

But Daniel never lost interest. He never let it go. He kept it to himself, of course, he didn't want to look like a freak. But he always wondered if anybody else felt like him. He wondered if anybody else felt like him now. So he sent out a wee tweet. He just chucked the thought out there: he tweeted, ‘Anybody up for a game of one man hunt?' He only had around forty followers, who were mates, mates of mates, and some strangers that had started following him after a few of his funnier tweets got retweeted. He didn't expect much of a reply, which was just as well. Most people said nothing. A few just said, ‘No.' One asked if the game was iOS only, because they looked it up on Android and couldn't find it.

Pish.

He wasn't being completely serious when he suggested the idea, but it was a pish response anyway. He read one more tweet. One of his followers said he'd be up for it, and suggested that Daniel could start a Facebook group to get everybody together. Daniel laughed at how pathetic that sounded, and that surprised him. It appalled him, in fact. He felt like one of the boys that would laugh at him for asking if they fancied a game, the ones that had gone off it, the ones that were in a hurry to grow up. And he did not want to be one of them. No, he'd do this. He'd do it for that wee boy inside him that wondered why the fun had stopped, the wee boy that got dragged into gambling, drugs and
FarmVille
when all he ever wanted was a game of one man hunt.

So he started a group, and called it ‘Who's Up For a Game of One Man Hunt?' He put in the time, date and location of when and where it would be, along with a description of why he wanted to do it. It took him ages to type that description, far longer than he thought, typing and deleting in the middle of the night, getting more and more emotional the later it got. What he thought would just be a fun wee paragraph had turned into a thousand-word essay on his own personal journey and the deep-and-meaningful purpose of finding like-minded individuals for this childhood game, this physical, non-digital, human game. It sounded wanky as fuck, he knew it, but he posted it anyway, and then went to sleep.

When he woke up the next day, the group had already attracted a few dozen members, with all of them saying they'd be there. By the end of the day, after word spread of this wacky but cool wee idea, the numbers had grown to a few hundred. A few hundred people saying they'd be up for a game of one man hunt. Well, he'd always wondered if anybody else felt like him, and now he knew. He was buzzing.

When the day came, Daniel cycled to the spare ground where he'd suggested they meet. He imagined that nobody would have turned up, not really. People do things like that, they click buttons saying they'll be attending something or other, but all they mean is they think it's a nice idea, that's all. But he was wrong. A crowd of around fifty people turned to welcome him with a cheer. Aye, it was a lot less than the people who said they'd be there, but it was still a fair size, and it would without a doubt be the biggest game of one man hunt he had ever played.

After the cheer, he didn't quite know what to say; he'd never done anything like this before. There was a moment when it all went quiet as people waited for him to speak, then a few people started speaking at once. One guy asked if they all fancied heading to a pub after the game; he was wearing a leather jacket, even though it was roasting, and it looked like he had come by himself. There was a fat guy in his late forties who seemed to have not accepted his hair loss, brushing the remains of it forward over his forehead whenever the wind blew it back; he told Daniel that it was good to get out the house and he hoped to make some good friends that day. There was a teenage guy who kept looking away whenever Daniel made eye contact with him.

Daniel told them all that he thought it would be a good idea to just get the game under way. Before he arrived, he'd fantasised about shouting, ‘It's time to start running!' like the presenter from
The Running Man
, but for whatever reason, he didn't. He started to count, and watched them as they made a run for it. One guy was wearing a washed-out Prince tour T-shirt from 1988. Another guy in the distance was climbing into a metal barrel, not seeming to mind that he was being covered in oil, the way a normal person would mind. And another guy was climbing a drainpipe, just like boys did when Daniel was young. Except he wasn't young, and it didn't look right, like when Michael Jackson climbed that tree.

When everybody was out of sight, Daniel stopped counting. He stopped counting halfway in.

He remembered the guy in the leather jacket suggesting they go to the pub. And the balding guy hoping to make some good friends that day. And that teenage guy that had problems with making eye contact.

And then Daniel headed up the road.

He headed up the road without telling anybody.

The pub was empty. He got a pint at the bar and walked over to the fruit machine. He stuck a few quid in, but he knew it was pointless. It never ended well, this. It never ended with a jackpot and a round of drinks for the house. It ended with nothing. It always did.

In less than a minute, three quid was gone. Just like that.

He put his hand in his pocket and dug out some change. He had maybe a fiver. A couple of pound coins, some fifties, some other change. He was going to shove the two pound coins in one after the other, but thought he'd just put one in now and see how it went.

He got nothing.

He stuck in the other pound, and got nothing.

He put his hand in his pocket to get out the other change, and banged in three fifties. Nothing.