The Derry Pigwash

He kept his things, his gyp-rock and mason’s trowel, in a box he hid underneath the pushcart, making them next to impossible to fish out, even were one to fancied oneself a prized angler. The rest of his things he kept in a stowaway trunk made from cane and pullet-wire. These things he hid between his bed and the wall next to the bed, safe from meddling hands. He kept the key to the stowaway trunk on a length of string tied around his throat, tight enough but not too tight. He sang hymns in a high vitriolic voice, his tongue lolling in the orchestra pit of his mouth. As he was a meddlesome man, he kept a ledger with all the names and birthdates of the people who stopped to look at his wares, pealing through it at night to see who had been by more than once, then rewriting the names on a separate page; these names and birthdays he reserved for further inspection, just in case he needed a place to stay when the rains rained or the cold ate at his bones like shipyard rats. He wrote Dejesus four times on the second page, underlining the j and s’ in a heavier script. Underneath Dejesus he wrote Witness, witless and ssentiW.

U. C. Eccles came by way of Swindon on a 3-oar ferry with two rudders. He met the gyp-rock man at the Derry Pigwash in nineteen-hundred and fifty-seven, both men hawking rock-salt and collectables. The following year they met in Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur in the town of Marseille, where a Hawker’s and Barker’s convention was underway, both men looking for a rock-salt man by the name of Vergas. (...this nonsense and blather; I haven’t the foggiest; I simple tap-tap-tap on the keyboard and hope for the best, it’s as simple as that, yes…). U.C. Eccles let out a borating ester, whoring in excelsior borealis’. Its never to late to earn another star for you’re grammar-chart, never! Grandmamma made the most sumptuous raspberry tarts, flouncing the edges with the tines of a fork. Derry Pigwash, a copper a dozen, six to the nickel, grandmamma storming pigs’ ears with the tines of a fork. She liked, she did, the porker’s pie with jelly-jams and peach aspic, said the sins in the plodding, a nickel to the harlotry (the slatterns washed starched and folded) crimping the edges with the behinds of hare arse, ferrying slatterns’ pie to the hobbled and bedeviled, cock’s catheter, more piss for the tootle.