Creative Writing - Sample Stories

The Hero

    I’d never been one to get up in the night for a piss. I could usually hold on til morning, no matter how many beers I’d had the night before.
    The old man could never hold on. But he wouldn’t go out to the shithouse. Too cold for him he reckoned, even in summer. So he’d get out of bed and stand up and piss into an ice-cream container. Then he’d stick it back under the bed. I remember Mum emptying it into the shithouse in the morning before I went to school.
    I could always hang on. But then it happens: I turn fifty and suddenly I’m getting up for a piss in the night.
    When I first started I crept round tryin to make sure I didn’t wake up Mum. Look’s like there was no use worrying about that. She was probably lyin awake in her room anyway.
    It must have been the last op that had me up and about. When they dug around in me guts they must have buggered up the waterworks somehow. It wasn’t like I was gettin on the grog more. Christ, they’d been in and out of me guts that many times it’s a wonder piss didn’t fall through holes and into me muscles. What’s left of them.
    I’d go out of me bedroom, make a left-hand turn and head off along the corridor. I kept me head down so I didn’t whack into that bloody stupid cuckoo clock thing hangin on the passage wall for Christ knows what reason. It ticks, but the bird never comes out of it.
    Then I’d walk through the kitchen in me bare feet, cross the cold lino and head out to the dunny in the lean-to, with a door you can’t pull shut cos there’s lino sticking up and I’m buggered if I could ever fix it.
    I bumbled round in the dark. Me eyes are ratshit and the Doc reckoned it was the smokes that did that. He said, Pete, how can you smoke so much when your father died of emphysema? I said somethin like It’s pretty bloody easy, mate: you grab one out of the pack, like this, and then you . . .
    The Doc shook his head and wrote a script out for me.
   
   
    The old boy carked it a few years back. While I could still drive I’d get Mum in the car every week (it was every day for a while) and we’d head up to the cemetery. She’d stick petunias on his plaque and I’d watch her and wonder how much those blokes at the front gates were makin, doubling up and sellin flowers they nicked off the graves.
    Mum always came out with the same bullshit while we were there.
    Your father was a hero . . . There were a lot of fellows who didn’t go, you know. And he went when he was 16 . . .
    I was born after he got back from the War. All I remember was a pisspot bastard who gave me a beltin til I left home not long after the age he went off to fight.
    We’d walk back to the car and she’d crap on about songs, parades and the empty town when the boys were away. I’d be thinkin, Christ, how does a bloke go from beltin his wife and kids to bein a hero? He was a bloke who did the normal tour of duty but you’d reckon he’d won the Vic Cross. When Mum pulls out the little black jewel case every Anzac Day I don’t see much more than a service medal in there.

(continues) 

*This story was highly commended in the 2006 Ada Cambridge Short Story prize