The weird old gypsies next door
to the house where I grew up as a kid (the bloke was actually called Gordon Bennett, hahaha) had a granddaughter who used to visit on school holidays, called Emma. We were about 6, and we used to always sneak off and hold hands in the rhubarb patch at the end of our garden, with a little bowl of sugar each that our mums had given us to dip the stalks in. We'd sit there for hours, just lying in each others' laps and talking about the shapes in the clouds or where we'd run away to if we could go as far as we liked. Then one day she threw her sugar in my eyes and started thrashing me really savagely with this massive piece of rhubarb - at one point she smashed me in the nose with it and blood was just pumping out, all over my favourite Winne The Pooh t-shirt. I was blubbering like some kind of, er, big rubbish duck (?) by the time I got back to my kitchen, whereupon my mum understandably went nuts and stormed straight around to see the grandparents.

Turns out this girl was a complete fucking mentalist, and "occasionally just did stuff like this". Apparently, "completely random things seemed to trigger her off". She'd thrown her rabbit out of the window the year before because it "wouldn't answer her or look in the right direction".

Funnily enough, it's been a variation on that theme with with nearly all the girls I've been close to since - so she actually prepared me quite well for dealing with the myriad hidden horrors of subsequent adult relationships.
Thanks Emma!
Mad bitch.
( grey kid is breakdancing to save a community centre, Thu 20 Oct 2005, 12:58, Reply)