Alan Marshall

It’s good to make people laugh. There’s a hell of a lot of other things making them

when Mrs Carruthers handed Mary the present, did Mary touch her

I wished I was dead, seeing in death not a frightening absence of life, but a sleeping without pain

my right leg dragging in the dirt like a broken wing

My right leg, the one I called my ‘bad’ leg, was completely paralysed and swung uselessly from the hip, a thing of skin and bone, scarred and deformed. I called my left leg my ‘good’ leg. It was only partially paralysed and could bear my weight

They angered me, though sometimes they seemed to live a sad life of their own apart from me and I felt sorry for them

leaving the hospital I would lose the security I had acquired there

The word ‘lame’ was associated in my mind with limping horses and suggested complete uselessness

You can have a lend of me shanghai any time you want it, Alan.’

She could stay with any flying doe and’d bail up an old man ’roo in a hundred yards.