Character Assassination

Character Assasination

She’s a brick, everybody says so. She’s hard and could obliterate your face with a single hit.

A people person, they say. A party doesn't begin until she shambles into the room. Picnics wouldn't be the same without her. Her name is on the top of everybody's invitation list— the one with a line through it and the words, ‘Not in this lifetime,’ alongside.

She’s a comic, her list of disasters drone on and on and she tells her stories as she laughs from her belly, hawking up phlegm. A drama queen by qualification, her greatest enemy is boredom. Boredom beckons her with a crooked finger and draws spite from her soul.

She stands tall at four foot eleven and a half, and laughs when the scales tip fifteen stone four. She’s proud of her 40 DD bust and when she shimmies the world shakes and all eyes turned to watch. She’s boyish with, short cropped hair and a broad frame. The mainstay of her wardrobe is jeans and a saggy jumper. She wears black Dr. Marten shoes, sturdy walking shoes for traipsing into town everyday. Her voice is loud, her voice a gravel pit and she sings Pink, badly on karaoke.

She has time for people if she likes them, and more time for them if she doesn’t, drawing them in, she lays them open and fillets them with a knife until she has slabs of weeping gossip laid on the table to pick over and share with the world. Her door is always open and you get the standard greeting, ‘Come on in love, the kettles on, excuse the mess, bloody kids. Who'd have `em?’ You'd sit at her kitchen table and drink coffee delivering tittle, future fodder for the town rabble, while she played host under the guise of friendship.

They were an average family, of average education, living in an average house on an average estate. Bobby a small man was a blue collar worker, Anne worked in a pub at the weekend and was a favorite of the punters—until they got to know her.

She died last year leaving a void in the community. Small town mentality dictates that stories still go around the houses three times, but it takes longer and they are less embellished with vitriol and expansions.

Last year, she was the subject of the talk rather than the perpetrator and in the telling there may have been more blood and more broken bones. But her brains weren’t scattered in the telling from the Brit to the Foul. She bought a motorbike and rode it too hard, too fast and into a corner that didn't yield. Her coffin bore a wreath of red and white carnations proclaiming her nickname, Gobby,

She’d have liked that.