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alternative weblog |
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entry 68 - 13th March 02
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not quite so 'armless I was sitting on a bench on the promenade earlier (watching a distant pissed Mad Max scaring the shit out of four Italian tourists) when a motorised wheelchair trundled past me at about three mph. This wasn't unusual in itself, but I did notice something unusual about the chair's occupent: he didn't have any arms or legs.
Anyway, I was fascinated by the fact that he was able to control his wheelchair so well; nudging the tiny joystick to-and-fro with his right arm-stump. I watched him for a while but he disappeared behind a beach hut, so I moved to another bench to see more clearly what he was doing. Surprisingly he was fiddling with the beach hut's padlock. He was obviously trying to insert a key, but wasn't having much luck. Driven partly by altruism and partly by the desire to compare my grenade story with what had really happened to him, I decided to walk over and help him out. And so I did, but as I neared I could see he wasn't actually fiddling with the padlock as I'd thought. Instead he was writing something on the door with a big red marker pen, held between his stumps. Closer inspection revealed two words; FUCK and SLAG. He was starting on a third, but stopped in order to turn his head toward me. "Fuck off you nosey cunt," he spat. "Fuck off, fuck off."
"Shoo," she yelled. "Go away. I'll get the Beach Patrol. Shoo, shoo!" Uttering a stream of expletives, the zero-limbed man nudged his chair's joystick and trundled back onto the promenade, where he headed off in the direction of the still distant Mad Max (who had fallen over). I spoke briefly with the woman, who was surprised I'd never seen the old bloke before. She told me he was constantly vandalising the beach huts along that stretch, and that he particularly concentrated on hers. She said she remembered him from when he was in possession of all his limbs: limbs he'd been losing one by one due to excessive consumption of alcohol. She said he was only 45. She said he probably didn't have long to live... "Thankfully," she added as an afterthought, laughing. I preferred the grenade story.
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He
was about 80. This would have put him in his early 20's during the second
world war, so naturally I concocted a story for him, involving a bunker
in the Sahara Desert and a German hand grenade. The grenade had come in,
he'd scrambled to pick it up and throw it out again, but it had gone off.
The fact he hadn't been killed I put down to the random nature of blast
wounds (a bomb can go off next to two people, killing one but leaving
the other intact). I noticed his head was a bit of a funny shape, though,
so maybe he took some damage there as well.
Then
a woman dashed around the corner of the hut...
