Umberclout Digsby: Part Number Four in an Occasional Series

As promised, here's more Umberclout Digsby. As for the whole imagining Celine Dion's brutal demise thing; well, everyone harbours the odd irrational hatred, don't they? At least my one's rational.

It was with great regret that Umberclout Digsby, on his 18th birthday, gave up on his childhood dream of being liked. He had passed into adulthood and not one person had professed to like him. Neither had anyone professed to dislike him, but to Umberclout their silence was heavy. As heavy and damning as that of an adulterer confronted by his wife. Or that of a fat judge. Sure, the other children had been happy for him to join in with their playground games: Who else by squatting legs wide apart could be both the goal and the keeper? Who else could simply step over the school fence to retrieve a wayward football? And who but Umberclout Digsby could boast a treehouse for them all to play in just above his left knee (all of them bar Umberclout, of course, who could do no more than bend over and try to peer in at their happy smiles and wonder at their laughter)? But, Umberclout would have given anything to hear that he was liked.

Many a time he couldn’t control his grief and wept. It was on these occasions that the children would be sat in the knee-house watching what they assumed to be rain, waiting for it to pass before returning home. And it was on these occasions that they would pass the time by telling their favourite Umberclout Digsby stories. There was the time he’d rescued Billy’s cat from the tree; the time the girls’ jump rope had broken and without hesitation he’d offered a leg to twirl and skip over so that they could continue their games; and the time he’d grabbed that plane out of the sky just so they could all look around the cockpit. Isn’t he great, they would ask eachother, you can’t help but like him. Sadly, Umberclout never heard a word.

It was also unfortunate that the children were frequently grounded for coming home late with feeble stories about torrential rain. Why, wondered the parents, were their children continually telling them such ridiculous, bare-faced lies? Why, wondered the children, were their parents so unwilling to trust them, and why were they so frequently banned from being friends with someone so fundamentally good-natured as Umberclout Digsby? Over time a profound distrust grew between parents and children, each party equally hurt and bewildered by the other’s unreasonable behaviour. By the teenage years the distrust had become a rift, an unbridgeable, aching chasm. An entire generation of this small town’s youth went off the rails almost as one. It was no longer a happy place in which to live; indeed the closing of the local mines (one of the few things in this world that Umberclout Digsby has had nothing to do with) made it positively bleak. Umberclout’s knee-house fast became a den for young junkies and alcoholics, and after one overdose too many was eventually boarded-up by the police. Umberclout, now eighteen, could see that it was time to move on. So, with a heavy heart, he dismantled the knee-house and left. He has not returned, nor is he likely to: he just cannot comprehend the senselessness.

P.S. For those wondering about Umberclout’s parents, that is another story.