The Fabulous Destiny of Marked Accordingly

“We’ll o’er the water, we’ll o’er the sea,
We’ll o’er the water to Charlie.” -James Hogg, O’er the Water to Charlie

I don’t doubt that I’ve mentioned this many a time before, but the coach of my old football team was a distinctly odd man. He was a short, bald, stout little man whose cheeks and forehead were constantly on fire with rage and indignation at our complete inability to convert his match-winning tactics into results. What the fuck was so fucking hard about it that we couldn’t understand, he’d demand, his little white moustache positively bristling with the frustration of incommunicado genius. Just what was it that was so far beyond our fucking grasp!? For fuck’s sake! How hard is it?! A fucking five-year old could have come up with these tactics! And so it went on, and there was never any point in voicing dissent because Charlie (as he was known) was of the firm conviction that all difficulties, from moral qualms to physical impossibility, were things that we’d just made up on the spot for reasons quite inscrutable to him, but which he was quite sure were in no small way related to his concurrent, a priori observation that our fucking attitudes stunk. After a cheerful interlude in which Charlie yet again reprised his celebrated “When ah wis your age, ah was crawlin’ through the jungles wae a knife between ma teeth…” soliloquy, encored by his lesser known “Ah’m sixty-fuckin’-two an’ ah’m still up at 6 o’clock in the morning liftin’ concrete slabs..” set-piece, we would be promptly sent off to run the circumference of Strathclyde Park, following a path neatly delineated for us by the broken Buckfast bottles on one side and the bee-loud bog on the other, and wondering between gasps what business a postman had lifting concrete slabs at 6 o’clock in the morning- and we knew he was a postman, because he knocked on all our doors every morning to make sure we were eating our porridge like he’d told us to. Porridge, of course, being the universal cure of all sores, with the apparent exception of stinking attitudes, which we found we were still all burdened with by the time we got back; most especially whichever player it was this time who’d been repeatedly stung by a swarm of wasps and had had to be carried back through the trees like Burt Reynolds in Deliverance. Ya big fuckin’ jessie! Greetin’ aboot a wee bee-sting! Man, when Charlie wis your age, he wis crawlin’ through the wasps wae a knife between his teeth!

One fine day, it suddenly occured to Charlie that every time he sent us out on a run we all emerged from the woods at the final stretch and sprinted for the finish line within a mere few seconds of each other. It subsequently crossed his mind that not all of the team’s players were as fast or as fit as each other, and even over short distances certain members of the team would leave the others trailing far, far behind. He’d seen that with his own eyes. Yes, with his own eyes.

I cannot say how far subsequent to these ruminations came Charlie’s startling revelation that we only ran until we turned off into the trees and out of his sight, jogging in a leisurely fashion around the rest of the course until we burst back from the trees to the finish line with an admirably lung-busting sprinty-type run. I daresay the gradual reddening of his face would have served as an admirable barometer of his tempestuous cogitations to the interested by-stander, had there been any such available. All I can say is that, on correctly identifying the olfactory offensive nature of his charges’ attitudes, he was not slow in confiding to us this discovery.

“Attitude STINKS! Attitude STINKS! Attitude STINKS! Attitude STINKS!” he exploded, directing this crushing evaluation three times to three separate players before considering the point well made and masterfully encompassing the entirety of us with the fourth, “Yeez’ve hid yer last chance! Ah’m no’ wastin’ ma time oan trainin’ sessions nae cunt will bother his arse aboot! Yeez aw think yeez dinnae need tae train cos yeez are aw in the team anywey! Well, that’s aw gonnae change! Ah’ve hid it wi’ yeez! There’s gonnae be new players comin’ in, players that’ll work hard an’ train hard to keep youse jokers oot the team! There’ll be nae mair rippin’ the pish ooty aul’ Charlie at trainin’! Aye, jist wait till yeez aw turn up nixt week! Ah’m gonnae be bringin’ in some new faces!”

(Beat. A small voice.)

“Will we still get tae keep our auld ones?”