Subscriber-only competition winner
MARSHMALLOW TRUTH
by Tanya Aydon
Changes competition winner
Winner
If your parents are rubbish enough to give you a crap name like Deirdre you can be sure as hell there’s no hope for you and not much for them either but it’s never been the least use telling them that since Mum only listens to what dead poets tell her and Dad only listens to what Mum tells him and so you’re stuck with it because Mum used to have a thing about this Irish poet called WB. Yeats who wrote about someone called Deirdre which only goes to show what a twat he must have been.
Mum’s moved on since then and now she wishes you were Beatrice as she’s got like some random crush on Dante since Dad took her on a coach trip to Italy even though she’s always tutt-tutting about that old lecher Silvio Bareyourbosom (whatever) who most likely can’t get it up anyway so what’s all the fuss about a pathetic geezer pretending he still can and now she’s always going off to her class at the adult education centre to learn the Italian for The Divine Comedy which isn’t like funny at all, but about hell so much like life in our house I’d say shit it turned out that Dante wrote in some weird medieval version which is enough to do her head in good and proper mind you Mum never lets it go it’s like there’s a never-ending supply of poets writing about their numpty mistresses so it’s a dead cert you’ll get called a whole pisspot of names in her head before you can get away from home for good and that’s got to be soon please God.
Because you’ve landed the kind of parents who can’t clock you need to find things out for yourself rather than have them shoved at you time and time again by first Mum and then Dad and that you want to try being a different person for a change and having a tongue stud and tattoos doesn’t mean you’re going off the planet you play about in your head calling yourself Dee and wearing the kind of up for it clothes that anyone called Dee would wear like her second skin but instead of hot Dee who has all the cool boys and the uncool ones as well only they don’t count in the school hanging out for her and who gets away with blue murder though you are not sure what blue murder is you are doomed to being Diddy and looking like a terrapin seeing as you haven’t the sort of chin that sticks out properly from your neck but just goes straight up from it, sounds gross and it bloody well is as your grandmother keeps saying you take after her it’s like there isn’t much hope for you in life because just look where her jawline got her all Gran ever had was Mum after Gramps buggered off to get himself a new life and most likely a new woman in Wolverhampton and now she’s got Alzheimer’s so Mum has to even wipe her bum for her when she isn’t doing stuff for all these other people who can’t get their act together and just sit around on their arse all day thinking they can get a free ride, so what with that and wading through crap poetry which nobody in their senses would read nowadays you know quite well your mum hasn’t got a life.