Introducing the Brotherhood of the Innuendo

Lunchtime, Gym

         I am sitting in the gym, half on the browny orange floorboards and half on the green tarp that’s supposed to separate us from them. Skunk and Lisbeth, who have been wrestling for the best part of the last ten minutes spring up, having been told by a dinner lady in a red jacket, rather irritatedly, that they were in danger of knocking down one of the many stacks of green plastic chairs which line the back wall of the gymnasium. For a moment I imagine them toppling over, sending the next tower falling, and the next and the next... Like some strange furniture domino line. But they stay standing. Another dinner lady begins wheeling them out, soon joined by more Ladies in Red.

         I am hit in her left shoulder by a stray ball of tinfoil that has been being thrown around the small knot of people in the corner since about the same time as the wrestling started. This seems to happen a lot. A conversation has started up,our combined dirty minds and expressive eyebrows supply endless filthy jokes and innuendos. There is a small lull in the conversation.

“Well, we’re a cheery bunch.” observes Lisbeth. Buttons says something I don’t quite catch and they laugh again. Lisbeth moves next to Skunk and proceeds to put the shoes which she has been carrying in her hands back on her feet. She is still holding the piece of paper I ripped from this notebook a few weeks ago and gave to her mere minutes previously.

          And then we’re in the canteen, and Lisbeth is ripping off tiny flakes of the sheet and eating them. Buttons comes back from the queue, sitting down on my left before changing her mind and placing her tray (on which there is a plate of pasta among other, non-paper, edible things) on my right side, opposite Lisbeth, who is still slowly making her way through the paper. When I show them the pages I have written, Lisbeth says, with a hint of awe in her voice, “Your life seems so much funnier when you read it back”

“S’why I do it” I smile.