MUD HUT MAN - Chapter 2 - part 1

Outside there’s a real downpour going on, beating down on the roof like hailstones, it is. But when I stick my head out, the rain isn’t frozen, and I get a right gobful of fat, yellow drops. Stinks, it does and doesn’t taste too good either. Bit like Rab Cask’s hut-brewed Devil Water, finest dung liquor in all the huts. The lords must have drunk a riverful last night.

I pull my head back in, grab some straw and dry my face. I brush a crust of ice from my leggings, step outside and run to the foot of the Castle wall. Old Tess hobbles up behind me determined to join in. The overhang of a turret keeps the lords chamber pot rain off us. As I relieve myself against the wall, I burn with hatred for hut life. My need to get inside the Castle has resurfaced with a vengeance. There’s no way I’m going to settle for life in the huts. I’ve only been kidding myself to think I could. I lean my head back, heedlessly splashing my foot, and peer upwards. Atop the pitted cliff of craggy granite the battlements are shrouded with mist. The rain thunders around me. Good, everything needs a bit of a clean, myself included.

Lately I’ve taken to secretly cleaning myself. It’s something I’ll have to do if I’m to pass unnoticed once I get back inside the Castle. Every now and then, at dawn, I sneak off to a grassy dell just inside the woods. There I strip off my clothes and lie down in the dew-sodden grass. I only have to roll around for a couple of minutes and I’m soaking. It had gotten to where I’ve even starting to enjoy feeling unnaturally clean.

I finish pissing and shake the last few drops from my pizzle. I don’t know why it is that no matter how much you shake your pizzle, the last few drops always run down the inside of your tunic. As I walked back to the hut I have a good old scratch and find the swelling in my armpit has gone down. Praise be to St. Pustule! I think I must have just stabbed myself in the uxster with a bit of the roof when I fell on old Dad.

For a couple of days there had been some talk about folk getting together to help fix the mysteriously collapsed roof of widow Milligan’s hut. Dad made some excuse about having to work late at the dung heap. Shit shoveling in the dark? Right.

Uncle Jack is really starting to get on my wick though. Just sits there in the corner all day, doing his dung heap impression. He might have been dead a week and we wouldn’t be able to tell. Doesn’t even fiddle with himself any more. If you ask me that’s a bad sign. Mean you’re well on your way out when you don’t even fiddle with yourself. Much less anyone else. Uncle Jack is a waste of fucking space and food, plain and simple. Even the scraps he manages to get would help me out. I’m a growing lad, I need my scoff. The more I think about it, the more I think something needs to be done about the old fucker. It just isn’t right. Life is too fucking hard as it is.

But Herne take my sodding family, I need to concentrate on getting back into the Castle. Every night, I lie awake remembering things I’d seen. I invariably end these reveries by cursing the dwarf Shankshave whose treachery led me away from my dream and back to these filthy huts. I swear one day I will find him and have my revenge.