The weather got in bed with us and would not respect our boundaries. Weekdays we all worked beyond our thresholds in breezes bought from Wilkinsons that made an office-wide soup of our deodorants. Widened margins of error let photocopied rectangles land on previously unthinkable desks. Chiming phones were gripped in sweaty trepidation. Remarks were made. The customers were hungry for rain.
In the unwaged hours we groaned in parks showing our feet to each other and suffering leisure. A frisbee is a machine that takes away from the people in its immediate vicinity the ability to fully relax and replaces it with the faint but persistent worry that at any moment some jovial wrist will launch a silent disc at your favourite nostril irrevocably.
A memory wails: before a P.E. lesson in the gym this tall guy was spinning round under a basketball hoop with a rounders bat in his left hand. Others were gathering in a bored and fragrant murmur in the middle of the court and under the far hoop this older tall guy was stretching and doing smiling older tall guy stuff. The first tall guy increased the speed of his spins until he felt queasy and then stopped spinning and also stopped gripping the rounders bat, which was then launched across the basketball court in a dead straight untumbling line towards the back of the other tall guy's head, past and through and inbetween everyone else's white-clad adolescent necks and foreheads and oozings and worries, and as the other tall guy tuned into the collective clench of expected horror he turned to receive the fat end of the bat with his mouth half-open at first and then shut just before it bulleted into his face. Half the audience looked at the other half for an indication of how to react appropriately.
He staggered into the changing rooms and leaned on the sink and spat out a tongue of blood and shattered tooth. The bat thrower stood just inside the doorway, unsure of the etiquette, crying. The teacher picked the tooth fragments out of the sink and took the boy and his mouth away. The rest of us played games with no projectiles.
