Precious

Precious

When the very uppermost limit of the summit of your hair is just 15,240 millimeters from the ground including the gelled to a stiff statue the carefully cut and shaped brown question mark cum mullet at the front, the rest of the otherwise gargantuan commuters encountered on her way to work gripping their leather hold-all’s as weapons as they stalked the capitols streets, will ignore such low trifles and treat defenseless little mites like her as dehydrated dogshit. She quickly learned that with size six plus shoes and six-foot plus length comes bustling irascibility, razor sharp elbows and total ignorance for those below their eyeline. And, although she was taught the metric system of measurement at school, she preferred the old-style feet and inches - simply because five-foot one-inch sounds taller than all those metric mini-hairbreadths and ruler-full lines when you’re a twenty-eight-year-old church mouse striving for space among aggressive ratpacks such as the movable and uncaring hefties that stalk the streets of commuter London. As a little person with attitude among all these strapping lumps, you need all the help you can get because a raw, pugnacious and persevering attitude wasn’t enough.

You need to think your careful way through the trampling beanpole forest of this vertical swarm of vacuous rudeness and bruising elbows.

Sometimes she imagined the eyes of the human lamp posts coming towards her as having the bright yellow and orange preying eyes on high of fire dragons casting around for little people to incinerate. Evasion and guile had become her chief defense, dodge left, dart right, stop, ease through a momentary gap in the movable trees, scurry across the road at a break in the nose-to-tail traffic, shelter behind a parking meter or curb side waste bin, stay tight behind a shuffling slow mover for cover, take to the gutter if necessary and carefully watch the uncaring swaggering sods, especially their sharp elbows, carried leather weapons, pumping knees and huge feet.

Then there’s the bloody joggers, a movable shitstorm of puffing and agonized mouth-holes who think the pavement is a running track just for them. A couple of weeks ago she eased to the right of a particularly aggressive looking pair of suited business titans coming towards her when WHAM, a pink dayglo-topped jogger with his body control strapped to his arm hit her right shoulder from behind and dumped her on her ass on the payment. Shocked at the impact she sat just there as the jogger stopped, looked down at her as if she didn’t exist and kept jogging on the spot. The venal pig was more interested in keeping up his bloody step count than offering a hand to this very surprised and diminutive women sprawled at his feet. With a rasped ‘watch it’ he left her struggling to get upright again with a sore shoulder and bruised bum that lasted for a week.

Shit for brains dayglo trotjock.

We will need to take the trotjock’s uncaring attitude into account, Precious.

Precious, her beloved lifeline to a better world.

Then there was the other shitbit about her height, the bullshit bit, the first half of her extra ‘one inch’ being a complete and non-measurable lie that was important to her in order to keep her above what she considered the midget cut-off point of five feet. That heavily gelled inch also included another extra four eighths carefully gained through the thickness of the memory foam soles of her favourite trainers without making her too bottom-end clumpy. Clumpy doesn’t work when you have to be nimble to avoid getting smashed aside in the merciless commuter street wars of getting to her place of work. And since there is nothing worse than a diminutive, plain and completely titless young women tottering unsteadily on killer heels to maintain height and a forward motion for balance like a figure in a Lowry painting, in order to prove that she is a captivating temptress on the way to crippling herself, she gave those pointed and crippling stiletto bunion-breeders a big miss.

Because of the well-being, flexibility and quickness of her feet, her diminutive size fours were an important asset in the constant war with the continuous swathes of commuter attacks as the six foot plus, lamp-post sized eight-pint blood sacs came at her in the undisciplined and serried ranks of an uncaring and voracious enemy. Unseen and quick thinking on her small feet she continued to dodge, work and plot her way sideways and forward against the tide of the all-conquering storm; a nondescript, diminutive and unseen specimen creature of the London sisterhood who worked in an online clothing warehouse thirty-five hours a week packing orders and getting them out the door.

When, that was, she could get there unscathed and settled enough to actually carry out her duties, such as the day she was proceeding along untouched in a morning drizzle with her Paisley patterned brolly up and a full and hot cardboard cup of cappuccino clutched in her non-brolly holding hand. She saw him in plenty of time and moved smartly to her left. He was wearing a leather jacket and carrying a motorcycle helmet and seemed oblivious to the drizzle. As she moved left, he moved to the right and then they started the age-old dance of aping each other’s movements; she back to the right, him left and then back again until he lost patience with looking down at this annoying little person constantly in his way in front of him hidden under a Paisley patterned rain shield and barged past her with an exasperated grunt and gave her a bang on the top of her brolly with the helmet…

Which promptly collapsed around her head tipping the hot cappuccino down the front of her jacket. As she struggled to get the collapsed brolly from around her head and keep the hot fluid from seeping through to her skin, she received a couple of thumps from other lighthouses in too much of a rush to avoid her blind pavement struggles.

Uncaring biking tosspot and his fellow commuter wankers. If she had been an assassin with a couple of loaded semi-automatic Glocks like John Wick always had in his hand in his movies, the street would have been littered with dead bodies, especially those with a crash helmet.

But, of course, she was no such thing but even the little folks can dream.

That was in the hard days before she discovered Precious.

There was another and important trait of this usually pissed-off and thoroughly put-upon pennyweight person. She continuously chafed against the slings and arrows of outrageous size preferment because, as she well knew, there was very little around to help a perfectly formed and normal person of five foot one-inch (sic) get by in this world of enormously large leviathans she was continually dodging in order to earn a living.

Her battle wasn’t only against the heaving mass of mobile giants, it was also against the lack of general facilities to enable mites like her to navigate the daily obstacle she encountered. Like steps on movable underground stairways that were too high for a normal – for her – tread, including the high leap needed to get on the entry platform of the bus, and if she wanted to go upstairs crampons were almost required to get up there, seat heights that left her feet dangling, straps on the tube she couldn’t reach, door handles that were difficult to open because they were too high. Then there were the cash-point machines or A.T.M.’s as the skyscraper-tall money dispenser is called. After struggling on tiptoe on too many occasions to reach the keyboard as others in the queue impatiently shuffled their feet behind and registered her PIN, she gave up with this method of obtaining cash because getting it was a security risk.

Not that she had much money in her account at the end of each month but she sure couldn’t afford to lose any.

Her name was Neale with an ‘e’ – a small and significant focal point when everything else about you was featureless, small, unattractive and lumpy – but not bottom-end clumpy, definitely not that with her whisper foot coverings - such that oncoming commuting folk’s eyes would slide down and over her lower presence without making any distinction between her and the dirty paving stones beneath their massive feet. In the summer the men coming towards her didn’t even lower their eyes to her tee-shirted tits because, like all the other lack of obvious female attractions, she didn’t have any being entirely flat-chested. Eyes, hips and lips? Sexless and entirely functional body parts only. Nothing about this diminutive and plain little lady fighting her way purposefully yet ignored along the busy commuting route of her war-strewn daily routine, was seemingly worth the candle of a second glance.

Seemingly…until Precious came along and her little life began to change for the better.

The mention of feet gave her another headache. Hers being a childlike size four and well below the norms any self-respecting adult trainer shop stocked, she bought them online from Kiddies Feet or Little Soles in order to save the embarrassment of having a giantess trainer sales lady tell her that their sizes began at six, although to make the sale, this little person could always big herself up by packing the toes out with newspaper.

That shiteball corn cow can continue to stroke the smelly feet and highly infective verrucae of the great unwashed until her fingers drop off.

Foot witch.

On the seven-stop tube journey to her work, she was usually buffeted about between the larger sharp-elbowed behemoths and forced to keep her eyes on the heaving, breathing mass of commuting midriffs and chests around her, all the while trying to keep from sneezing as the maelstrom of armpit deodorants, aftershave lotion and fanny perfumes swirled around her sensitive nostrils. The occasional summer female erect nipple was a threat to her eyeballs as well as the temptation to bite the protruding little bugger. As the briefcases and brown leather shoulder bags with brass rings would invade and assail her small space, she would do her best to ignore the unwanted intrusions. One fierce-looking heavily made-up lady of around her own age banged her in the ear last Thursday with a laptop case as she got off at Hammersmith, and then gave her the finger as the train left the platform and overtook the walking bitch as she gesticulated and strode along the platform like an angry lioness on the prowl at an empty waterhole in the Serengeti.

Painted freak.

But Precious would see her through the shite thrown by such arrogant bitches…and anyone else.

The subsequent walk along the busy street from the tube station to the bus stop for her nine-stop diesel-filled chug to her place of work found her frequently banged aside by muttering hurrying and running late Amazons of both sexes, and when she got to the coffeeshop counter the beanpole-thin black-clad barista with a pencil moustache and black, shiny hair, always made a point of leaning over the counter and smirking downwards to the left and right as if he couldn’t see her when he handed out the cardboard cup containing the ordered cappuccino. He hadn’t yet got to the stage of adding a chocolate dusted midget to the foam on the top but it was only a matter of time before he learned how to draw one and added that to the daily litany of insults.

Unfunny, sarcastic and skinny low-life asshole.

The full name of this farthing of a warrior in this daily battle against the large change of London was called Neale Prioryhouse – a SOS (Small of Stature) sufferer and Precious devotee fighting for survival in a land of ignorant behemoths.

Precious devotee who would make a big bloody difference…one day soon.

The SOS came from one of her school reports that stated in the fountain pen neatness of her gym teacher that Neale was, for someone of her small of stature, an enthusiastic joiner-in of all physical games and exercises. Full stop. Or, in other school teacher report jargon, bloody useless at just about everything physical but willing to give it a try. It was the first time she’d heard the term that was to define her and so Small of Stature - now in capitals, of course and abbreviated to the simple personal acronym SOS became her operational group mantra – it was an altogether posher way of saying she was an insignificant little person or a short arse. She just knew that Precious had suffered the same insults when he was at school, if that was, he actually went to one. When she eventually joined the bustling commuter jungle, she soon learned that willingness was no substitute for the extra inches and poundage when competing for the crowded movable space of commuter London.

Added to which she was a Prioryhouse. As if the poor little thing didn’t have a small enough burden in her nondescript and beyond mundane life with her given, albeit spelt different male Christian name, because her postman father had badly wanted a boy and ended up with three girls all named with boyish monikers just so he could mention down the pub with a suitable eye-roll that Les, Charley and Neil had kept him busy playing football over the weekend and it was only a matter of time before the Hammers came a calling with a junior first team contract. Not only was Neale the youngest but both Leslie and Charlotte, her two elder sisters, and her parents were all normal sizes and her family name took after a religious establishment and residential care home/hospice for the terminally aged.

Some burdens borne by the little people just have to be put up with… for now.

And nary a single one of the Prioryhouse girls ever kicked a bloody football nor wanted to.

But then, as far as she could ascertain neither had Precious, his sporting prowess was of an altogether different and highly trained skill set.

Little Neale soon became the family soubriquet for her which was quickly shortened to Linnet, read out to her from her own child’s animal book by her sister Charlotte as a small bird belonging to the finch family with a melodious song.

School was not her finest years to be sure and apart from a ‘C’ in the English GCSE, it taught her that the daily interaction with others was an obstacle course of special and unnoticeable moves to be carefully navigated and endured. Other than English the rest of the lessons were unintelligible Mandarin as far as she was concerned and her teachers were as surprised as her parents and sisters when she got the exam grade. So why the ‘C’ in English? It was all down to the 10p book she picked up as a toddler on a stall at the Bromley car boot-fair when trailing round with her mother looking for household bargains. The dog-eared A4 hardback was called ‘the A to Z of Animals’ and featured a picture of the animal and the spelling in large capitals underneath with a brief explanation of its habitat. As would turn out to be usual with any alphabetical tract on animals it started with AARDVARK and ended with ZEBRA. A diminutive six-year-old at the time she got it, she loved that book to distraction and still had it. Not so much for the full colour pictures but the spelling of the capital letters which she would trace and copy and blue-tack all over the Bromley council house where they lived to everyone else’s annoyance and distraction. That book became her refuge from the daily bickering’s of family life and led her on to other books and which, in turn, led her to the mighty achievement for her of the half decent GCSE ‘C’ in English.

Her solitary and only GCSE despite taking nine others.

Still, some people didn’t have any exam results, like those halfwits who buffeted her about on the war-strewn streets of commuter London.

Ill-mannered and dumb thicko’s and shite-headed lamp-posts.

Anyway, Precious had got bugger-all exams as well and look what he achieved.

And melodious she most definitely wasn’t being asked, politely and gently by the music master at her comprehensive, to leave the school choir because – as one of the smirking choirboys with a high-pitched voice had remarked later in the playground – the symmetrical head-top choir line took a sudden dip in the front row when it got to her and she had a voice like a dried turd, meaning she didn’t even hum.

She used to lie in bed at night thinking up particular and always horrendous ways in which the choirboy would die an agonizing death screaming in a terrorized high ‘C’ as he perished before his sixteenth birthday when abouts his balls would drop and he joined the lower registers like everyone else.

Shit figured early on in her stunted life and seemed to stick to her in its many attachable forms as she progressed into her twenties.

As well as helping her get the GCSE, she had, quietly and unobtrusively at home and school, developed a fascination with other letters and words from her A-Z of Animals that had led to further studies of the English language. This had taken her on a roundabout route to a few Latin words and phrases including such beauties as castrato which certainly applied to that bollockless high-pitched choir asshole.