THE SILVER SCREW.

It is my painful, sad, sorrowful, woeful, but nonetheless hopefully profitable and certainly patriotic duty to relate, unfold and reveal to you through you yours the diabolical and doubly devilish story of the dreadful misfortunes which befell a young Scottish boy.
For starters he was born right outside Glasgow.
But dear reader, spare your tears for even greater sorrow than being born outside the cradle of civilisation for believe you me or believe you me not there was even worse to follow.
His birth was a relatively peaceful and calm affair and the moment he was delivered his loving and adoring mother, who was a poor widow who had been for years, heaved a sigh of relief, lit a Woodbine and said, ‘Thank heavens for that,’ proceeding to puff peacefully at the fag.
This peace however was not to last long and was rudely broken by a cry of anguish from the attending doctor whose thin-lipped mouth involuntarily opened as he examined closely the child he had just helped bring into the world.
‘Aaaaach!’ he cried, stepping back from the infant.
‘What’s… the … matter?’ said the widow, taking a puff of her Woodbine after each word.
‘This wean hasnae got a belly button,’ said the horror-stricken physician, picking up from the well-linoed floor the spectacles which had fallen from his long, thin, and at this moment, whitened face.
‘What will I do, what will I do?’ said the woman twice because she was anxious, and besided she had a stammer. ‘In my professional opinion you had better have the child put down immediately,’ said the medicine man who was a well known Partick Thistle supporter, ‘Jags Jags Jags all the way.’ ‘No no no no,’ insisted the widow because she had originally come from Glasgow, a city which is universally recognised as a place where they don’t like having their children put down on a Tuesday which is the Half Day closing day. ‘no no no,’ she said and had another puff of her cigarette adamantly.
‘You cannae have a wean going through the world without a belly button. Think of the neighbours. What will they not say?’ muttered the doctor, compassionately.
‘No. I’ll protect him. I’ll hide the shame of it,’ retorted the widow and so saying she stubbed out the cigarette end she had latterly been smoking with the aid of a pin, flung herself from the bed, pushed the doctor from the room and closed the door behind him and the bag which she had thrown after him.
Having so done she picked up the baby and proceeded to wrap him in the finest linen which only two days before she had been busily and feverishly shoplifting.
‘I’ll protect you son.’ She almost sang ‘I’ll…’ Suddenly her mouth too was stuck open as she noticed that on the peak of the boy’s pink belly where his umbilical cord should have been there was, glinting in the filtering sunlight, a tiny silver screw.
‘Oh my God,’ she said on recovering her composure. ‘I’d better go to Edinburgh.’
From newspaper reports, history books and from the stories which had strained their way through to the West she knew that the Capital city was one in which strange things occur. ‘There must be millions of people running around Edinburgh with silver screws in place of belly buttons,’ she said aloud to the child who had little understanding of the fuss that was being made over him and could offer no resistance as his mother rushed him through the streets, on the train and up the steps of Waverley Station to make discreet inquires in the middle of Princes Street, where she could find no satisfactory reply to her questioning of would-be passers by.
‘Excuse me,’ she asked, stopping one after another of the lieges, ‘Do you happen to have a silver screw instead of a belly button?’
Her knowledge of the Edinburgh folk was limited or she would have known that whether they had silver screws or belly buttons they would never have let on.
However, in Edinburgh she stayed to raise the unfortunate child, talking great care to conceal his affliction.
On sending him to school she always endearingly affixed a piece of sticking plaster over the offending screw so that if he were being given physical jerks or swimming lessons the other children would say, ‘He’s cut his belly again,’ and assume that the boy’s belly was accident prone, like a lot of the women in Edinburgh and for that matter in Glasgow.
Thus with great love and affection she brought him up to be a decent well- mannered youth whom everybody thought quite normal.
In fact it was not unusual for small knots of people to gather in Morningside and point him out with such remarks as ‘Now doesn’t he look quite normal.’
In this way he might well have gone through life with no one else knowing his deformity had not the biological urge taken the most dreadful grip of him at the age of eighteen.
This powerful biological urge caused him to eat and drink and even worse take a fancy to a girl whom he eventually married.
On his wedding night he was lying in bed naked waiting for his bride when she entered and spotted the silver screw and immediately began to giggle.
Three times she giggled, giggle, giggle, giggle, and then she died which was not a nice thing to do on such a night. She could have waited for a more opportune moment.
However, as a result of this calamity he developed the most awful complex about his belly and went to see doctors and ministers and priests and rabbis and eventually the polis, who phoned up Interpolis who sent a bunch of flowers but who could do little else to assist him in his plight.
‘Help me help me,’ he was calling over and again as he left the polis office at the door of which he was approached by a Gypsy woman who had heard his pleas.
‘Cross my palm with half a quid,’ she said and he gladly did.
From somewhere in the folds of her brightly and variously coloured skirt she brought forth a miniature crystal ball into which she gazed for two minutes before calling out to him, ‘Go ye forth into the forest of Kirkcudbright on the night of the first full moon. Take off your clothes, lie down on the ground and look up at the moon.’
It being the month of November, the thought of lying naked in the middle of the night in Kirkcudbright he did not particularly enjoy.
But in his predicament he had little alternative but to rush down to the appointed forest, it being the night of the first full moon.
Naked, he lay down in a clearing, and looked up to discover there was no moon, it being very cloudy.
For four hours the unfortunate young man lay wriggling and writhing until he was just about to give up hope.
But suddenly there developed a hole in the clouds and through this came a moonbeam which directed itself on to his silver screw.
He became very excited as all the forest lit up and even more ecstatic when dancing down the moonbeam came a tiny silver screw driver which inserted itself into the screw and turned the latter round eighteen and a half times.
Then the screw and screwdriver went gaily dancing up the moonbeam in behind the clouds and out of sight.
The young man’s mind was a symphony of joy. He gave a shout for joy, called out, ‘God bless the Gypsy woman,’ stood up and his bum fell off.