Tim had probably drunk a little too much but he was acting in a way that a drunken man doesn’t usually act. The sausage eating competition at the Bruntingthorpe Village fete was as usual a triumph and won by Porky Cunto, the name stuck and so did he, didn’t move out of Little End all his life, his folks were there and cooked him his tea until he died in an asphyxiation accident several years later but before his 60th, never had a car, preferred his blue bike which he’d had for as long as I can remember, I’m sure we hung it up in a tree once, a long time ago, while the straw bales burnt in the Nissan hut and the farmer came to shout at us.

Tim was Cunto’s neighbour, had never got on, was too much of the town, but desperately wanted to be his friend, his equal at least, but as the sausages went down, and Katie Perry blared out her vacuous tripe from the speaker, brown sauce, tomato sauce and chilli sauce dribbled down onto Tim’s M&S check shirt. Mary, not proud and embarrassed as Tim’s wife, the fete was her time to meet the village people. Not THE Village People, but folk form the neighbourhood, she spent most of her time sitting inside, not venturing into the garden while Tim spent his time talking to his neighbours while he bastardised the garden, filling in the cow hoof print divots with garden centre compost, from when they escape. They always escaped. As Tim’s fifth sausage went down, the one laced with laxative by Keg, he wiped his mouth, sweeping the sauce to the side and then his hand onto his shirt before rubbing his hair and reaching for his snakebite and black with the wooden bastard depth charge and launching into a confused tirade of expletives against Janis, queen of the cake stall and provider of tea and also as an aside the person who had been seen shagging in the churchyard last midsummer. Tim’s ramblings became more and more random and steadily more foul mouthed as Mary tried to shush him up, Mary the quiet lamb of a woman, who was just about to realise her biggest fantasy as it became apparent that Tim was turning a shade of blue and Roger the doctor declared that he was hypoxic before falling off his chair into the side of the BBQ where the sausages were being cooked. Roger looked up just as a sausage and some boiling fat landed in his left eye burning through the cornea, spilling the aqueous humour from the anterior chamber onto his cheek which mixed with the boiling fat, as his lens melted.

Tim was now on the floor gasping for breath, as was Roger the doctor, and Cunto held up his eighth  sausage in triumph, looking at Tim and really not giving a shit that his neighbour was dying, it would save him a job he thought. He fancied a crack at Mary too, but then he fancied a crack at anyone who lived next door to him, past results didn’t perturb him. He was a serial psycho, and she was best leaving him alone. The trophy was his, and he would live to fight next year. 

He walked off, leaving the carnage behind him, someone would clear it all up, and they knew where he would be to present the prize; these things blew over. They usually did.