Polo - the mint with a hole

They called me Polo because my ex boyfriend shot me in the chest with an air rifle and it left quite a decent size hole.


Well, I say ‘shot’ but it was an accident I suppose. He was sat opposite me with the rifle laying across his lap, pointing away, when – for no other reason than to make some noise and break the boredom and because he knew he shouldn’t really just point the thing without taking aim – he squeezed the trigger. Only the pellet hit a metal rivet in a stone post and ricocheted straight back into my chest.


It’s lucky I wasn’t a bony child or it would have hurt like a MF. As it was it stung enough to make crying in front of the boys a reality. When the wound started dribbling blood all over my clothes, making the whole incident even harder to hide from my mother, fear dried my tears.


Mam worried about me and my sister so much it’s a wonder she got any sleep. As it was, she would lie in bed at night imagining horrific ‘what if’ scenarios where my sister and I met with a gruesome end at the hands of a deranged maniac, or under the wheels of a lorry, or trapped in a torrid house fire. She loathed to let us out of her sight (and out of the protective circle of her arms) and would have fainted or choked or threw the most almighty temper tantrum if she knew just what we DID get up to. If I came home sporting a gunshot wound, my mother would have enough reason to ban me from going outside for the rest of my adolescence.


Eventually the wound healed and the scab fell off and, through some clever dressing, my mother was none the wiser.


My mates had great fun for a few months calling me polo and, on any flat surface they could find, drawing pictures of a short, fat, round girl with a hole in her chest . I especially liked it when they used permanent marker and wrote my name next to the drawing with a big arrow pointing at the fatty.


Happy days.