Daft Wee Stories (9 page)

Just then, a laser beam the width of the sun blasted through planet Earth and destroyed everything before Johnny had time to complete his thought.

Some aliens at the other side of the galaxy were testing out their new weapon: the Doom Ray.

It worked!

He was having a wank. That's what he was doing, that's why he locked the door, that's what he was up to in there. She wasn't daft.

He denied it, of course, he always did. She'd go to bed and he'd head to his wee home office, saying that he had one or two things to work on. And she believed him. Believed him until that time she caught him. She got up for a glass of water one night, and thought that while she was at it she'd pop her head in and ask him if he fancied a cup of coffee. You know, to help him get through his late shift, the poor wee soul that he was.

But the second her foot hit that squeaky floorboard outside the office door, she knew she'd been taken for a mug. The sound of him scrambling about, rattling the keyboard. Then her opening the door and seeing him in front of a switched-off monitor, his face beetroot. He said he'd finished for the night, and his face was red because he'd been doing press-ups. She was having none of it, and asked him why the fuck he was up wanking when he had a woman in the next room lying in bed. But he'd just deny it. Deny, deny, deny. She was taken for a fucking mug.

And after that, he put a lock on the door. He said it was because he sometimes wore headphones when working and if she walked in on him at night when he had them on then he'd get the fright of his life. Bullshit, he was having a wank. But again, he'd just deny it, deny, deny, deny. Denied it so much that she sometimes wondered, well, maybe he was telling the truth. But he wasn't. Was he fuck.

And tonight, she'd prove it.

He said he needed to get on with some extra work, surprise surprise, but she didn't cause a fuss. She just headed to bed, where she'd normally just fanny about on her phone for a while before nodding off. But not tonight. Because tonight she just happened to have left her phone next door in the office. How silly of her. She just happened to have left it sitting in the corner of the room, with the camera pointed at his computer, while running an app that enabled her to stream the live video to her tablet in the bedroom. Oopsadaisy.

She opened the bedside drawer and pulled out the tablet. She switched it on, tapped on the app and waited for it to load. She felt a bit grubby. She reminded herself of her mum, that time her mum read her diary when she was fourteen, and the argument that followed of who committed the greater crime: a fourteen-year-old smoking hash, or her mum for being a nosey fucking cow.

She decided to switch it off, to switch it off and give her boyfriend some privacy and respect, because this was out of order. She was just about to hit the power button when in kicked the video stream. And when she saw that, when she saw that grainy live feed of her boyfriend sitting down at his computer, well, all that human rights shite went right out the window.

It was like watching
Big Brother
. It was interesting watching somebody do nothing. And that's what he was doing: nothing. He really did seem like he was just working away, typing up some document. But after half an hour of that, things started to get a bit boring. There was the odd exciting moment when he'd open up a browser window, making her sit up in expectation of a wanking session. But no, just Wikipedia or some news article, all work-related. He didn't even waste some time on Twitter, she couldn't even nail him on that.

It was when she felt herself nodding off that she thought she'd better call it a night. Fuck waking up with him nudging her shoulder, pointing to the tablet by her side, still streaming the video from next door. Fuck trying to justify that. So once again, she put her finger on the power button of the tablet to switch it off. But once again, she had reason not to.

Her boyfriend had stood up and walked over to the office door to double-check the lock. This was interesting. He sat back down, looked over his shoulder, got up and checked the lock one more time.

This was it.

He sat back down, put on his headphones and undid his belt. So that's why you got the lock, you fucking liar. Not because you don't like to be disturbed while listening to music. You don't like to be disturbed while listening to shagging.

He looked over his shoulder one more time at the lock on the door, then faced his monitor. Then he pulled down his trousers and pants. It was going to happen. It was about to happen, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to see this after all. This was evidence enough. She should just switch off now. That was it, she really was going to switch off now. But once again, something stopped her. Something intriguing.

There was a mic on his headphones. She'd never seen him use it, but here he was, giving it a few adjustments so that it hovered just in front of his mouth – and that baffled her. If he was only going to watch a porno, what the fuck did he need a mic for? What sort of kinky shite had he got himself into?

She had to watch now. It was almost no longer about spying on her boyfriend, but a general case of human interest. Like when you watch a programme about men who like getting their balls trodden on by women in high heels. You have to watch, you just have to.

A video began playing on his monitor, but it didn't look like a porno. It looked like a game show, sort of. There was a presenter, and behind him scrolled hundreds of tiny screens, maybe thousands, each displaying a video of a man. Some of them were old, some young, some fat, some thin, all of them looking into the camera and all of them with their cocks out.

Honestly, what the fuck was this?

The presenter pointed at some screens behind him, half a dozen or so, making them whoosh to the foreground, all big. The presenter said something, and the men waved, happy to have been called out. She thought she recognised one of them, a guy she used to work with, but then they whooshed away.

Then another half a dozen were selected. One of them looked like Phillip Schofield. The absolute double of him. But it couldn't be, obviously, because this guy had his dick out and Phillip Schofield wouldn't do that. And then they too waved and whooshed away.

Just as she was about to take a moment to try and work out what she was seeing here, she saw something that made her heart skip a beat. Another half a dozen men flew out from the background to fill up the screen, and in amongst the range of men was her own. Her boyfriend.

‘What the fuck?' she whispered.

Her boyfriend began to wave, the actual one in the home office, followed by the one on the screen. He was on a fucking webcam.

‘Hello, everybody,' he said. Then he whooshed off.

‘What the fuck?' she whispered again.

She watched the presenter continue to highlight group after group of men for another minute or so, until he seemed to bring that section to an end, and that it was now time to move on to what we all came here for. The camera cut to a close-up of the presenter as he said something serious, before turning to another camera and smiling again. When the camera cut back to the full-length shot of the presenter, she winced. The zip on the presenter's blue suit trousers was down, with his baldy cock and balls jutting out, his cock pointing high to the sky like a missile. It was huge.

The presenter held on to his cock and said a few words, prompting her boyfriend and all the other men on the screens to hold their cocks in unison. The presenter then raised his other hand in the air, paused for a moment, and then pointed at the camera. He shouted something, she couldn't hear, but she didn't need to. It was obvious from his mouth that he shouted ‘Go!'

And they did. They went for it. Her boyfriend, the presenter and all these men. Shuffling.

Every now and then, a selection of men would whoosh into the foreground again, apparently at random, giving her a closer look at the participants of this online group wank. Some looked angry, like they'd been looking forward to this all week. Some looked chilled out like they were having a wank on a yacht.

A few of them started poking their arse. Then her boyfriend stood up and, without missing a beat, started poking his arse as well. The cable on his headphones wasn't long enough to enable him to stand all the way up, so he had to hunch over like a cyclist doing the Tour de France. A cyclist poking his arse. It put her mind in a spin.

Then she saw Chuck Norris. Or maybe it was Steven Seagal, she wasn't sure, but it was the guy from one of her boyfriend's action films. A famous guy. And it wasn't a guy that just looked like him. It was him. Poking his arse.

She saw an old guy she recognised from the park, jiggling his ballsack with one hand, and poking his arse with the other. She saw what looked like an Eskimo with his feet up in stirrups, poking his arse. She saw men from all over the world, and in various ways they were poking their arse.

When she saw the cream begin to seep out, she switched off. Cream she had never seen or heard of before, seeping out their arses. She looked to her boyfriend and hoped he wasn't the same. He picked up the pace, and before long, there it was. Cream, seeping out his arse, some of it down the back of his thighs, some of it dripping onto the floor. She imagined that it probably smelled pretty bad.

She switched off. She switched off the tablet.

She lay in bed, pretending to be asleep, until he came through to the bedroom an hour later. He put his arm around her, the same arm that was attached to the same hand that was poking his arse silly not long ago. She froze.

On the bus to work the next day, she saw men from the night before. Reading papers. Looking at phones. Being normal, like they don't poke their arse till it creams.

And during a meeting, she was introduced to a potential client who had come up from London. She couldn't shake his hand. She hadn't seen him doing that thing, but she knew he had. She got a bollocking and was asked to give an explanation. She said she just didn't feel very well.

And she didn't. She knew what they did, what they all did, every last one of them. An ancient ritual? A new craze? She didn't know, but she knew they decided to keep it hidden in case it put the women off. And they were right. It was fucking horrible.

She knew she could never go back. Never go back home, never go back to before all this. It was too late. It changed everything and it ruined her life.

And that concludes the story.

And it is just a story. But I wonder. I wonder what message we could learn from her choices. Especially if you're a woman with a man in your life.

Like my girlfriend, for example.

Maybe the message is something like this:

If you do get up one night and hear me in the living room watching something on the telly with the sound down low with the light off and you're thinking of walking in, or maybe if I'm in our home office after saying I'm working late but you can't hear me typing anything so you're thinking of walking in, or maybe if I'm in the toilet for a really long time and you're thinking of putting me on the spot and asking me why I'm in there for so long, well …

Maybe it's best to just leave it.

I've got an idea. This idea for something. A really good idea, in my opinion. It's the sort of idea I want to tell everybody about, but it's also the sort I want to keep close to my chest. The sort of idea that can be knocked. Stolen, by some scumbag. And then they'd get the credit, they'd get the pat on the back and everything else that comes with it. I don't think they'd get any money from it or anything, it's not like an invention, but, you know, if you were to come up with an idea for something, however big or small, and some scumbag comes along and swipes it and gets all the credit, that sort of thing can gnaw away at you for the rest of your life. So you can understand my reluctance. But I reckoned, well, if I put the idea in this book, if I just type it up and stick it in the book, it'll serve as a written record of who came up with the idea first and when. If somebody comes along later and says it was their idea, I can just pull out this book, show them the year it was written and that'll be them clamped.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not on some kind of ego trip here. I'm not expecting everybody to fall at my feet and call me a brainbox, I'm not expecting a statue. It would be a nice wee perk if that happened, I'm not going to lie, but that's not it, that's not what it's about. I just want people to know the idea was mine. Christ, that does sound like an ego trip, but honestly, it's not like that. It's complicated. I don't even think it's about who gets the pat on the back, now that I think about it. It's something else. It's hard to explain where the feeling comes from. Basically, the reason why it's so important to me that everybody knows it was my idea, and I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but it's because I'm Scottish.

You see, I grew up thinking that we Scots invented the world and everything in it. I was taught that that was our thing. Aside from kilts and bagpipes, that was our thing: inventing stuff. Every now and then, somebody would say, ‘D'you know we invented that?' and you'd say, ‘Really?' then you'd get this strange feeling of pride and accomplishment. It was strange because you yourself didn't invent it, but still, the feeling was there, because ‘we' invented it. You'd be told that there would be no telly without John Logie Baird, and there you'd get that warm wee tickle in your heart. He was Scottish, you're Scottish, it's a Scottish invention, so, in a way, it's your invention – something like that. You'd be told that billions would have died without Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin. It'd make you feel like you had personally saved the lives of each and every one of them, that the world wanted to come up to you in the street and give you a big cuddle to thank you for the gift your people have given. You'd be told that they said the Forth Rail Bridge couldn't be built, yet it was. I don't really care about the Forth Rail Bridge, actually.