What pissed Frank off was that someone kept throwing stone tablets down the well behind his council house. Them tablets were inscribed with all kind of foul curses and being as how the well was deep they ended up right near the underworld where God or the Gods might surely act upon them, at least if you believed in that kind of thing.

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Poor Frank – he was up at all hours of the day and nite trying to fish the tablets out of the well and his breakfast table was nothing but a big mess of breakfast cereal packets and stone tablets drying in electrical light.

MURDEROUS FUCK & POISON TO FRANK said the tablets.

PAX AMERICANA.

NEGATIVE STRIPAGRAM FOR ANYONE WHAT LIVES HERE.

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Frank’s neighbour was an American delegate to the recent peace talks, staying at Mrs Pottage’s bed and breakfast and dealing crack cocaine as a sideline.

Frank kept offering the bloke money to see if he would help catch the scum what was throwing curses in his well but the Yankee was a filthy reluctant coward. Each nite you could see him counting his money and watching that rubbish movie STREETS OF YESTERDAY on TV.

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Month after month the peace talks dragged on and it really seemed like Cromwell, King Arthur, Richard The Lion Hunt (sic) and the Reading Chapter of Hells Angels would never make a truce with the govt or anyone else they were fighting.

Stuck in town for no reason Jake (the bloke from the US delegation) slowly made a friend of Frank and other local persons in the local pub.

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Over many pints of local lager beer J kept saying how he wanted to go home and how he just wished the war would end. So far as he was concerned in fact, just cos there were a few kids still throwing stones at tanks in Toxteth it really didn’t constitute a war anymore. Not by his definition.

J’s room at Mrs Pottage’s was full of books of philosophy, law, war and killing – so if anyone should’ve known about wars etc it was him.

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Anyway. One nite Frank persuaded J to sit with him and watch the well and they talked, and listened to the radio a bit

Frank had purchased one of those guns which people had in movies – a gun that could fire any number of bullets you wanted until the final moment of tension when it would run out. He kept the gun inside his Adidas bag which still bore the names of teen groups he had scrawled and loved during puberty.

BABY BIRD it said. GOAT TRAILER.

POISON JAMES

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