Sticks & Stones by Gerry Webber

Few people ever referred to him by his given name.

His classmates saw him in the showers one day, and were suitably impressed. He was a well-developed young lad, and was happy (at the time) to be known as “Jimmy Saveloy”.

Then one day, they caught him in the toilets, pleasuring himself. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been about to ejaculate into an empty milk bottle. God alone knows why. After that, they called him “The Milky Bar Kid”.

He was glad when he left school, but his work colleagues were no kinder. He drank too much on his twenty-first birthday, and was sick on his own shoes. They decided to call him “Dash”. It was short for pebbledash.

He didn’t mind too much. To the uninitiated, it suggested that he might be dynamic.

Later, however, his wife began referring to him in public as “Disk”, and the new name stuck. Apparently, it was an abbreviation, or so she told her friends one night. Sadly, it then became common knowledge that the missing word was “Floppy”.

After he divorced, his mates called him “Eagle”, which at least sounded positive – unless you knew that it was a corruption of “egalitarian” because, they reckoned, he no longer discriminated.

When finally he moved into sheltered housing, he thought that the name-calling would stop, but pensioners can be cruel. He started dating a woman twenty years younger, and his neighbours labelled him “The O.A.Paedophile”.

It was intended as a joke, of course.

Unfortunately, the police believe that this was the reason he was beaten to death.

© Gerry Webber 2013