Brian Patten - The Story Giant

ONE PERFECTLY CLEAR NIGHT A YOUNG GLOW-WORM crawled from a crevice in the vineyard wall and saw the stars for the first time. Naturally, it mistook them for glow-worms like itself.

‘I never knew there were so many of us!’ it thought. It sat staring at the stars the whole night long and when dawn came and the stars vanished it thought itself the sole survivor.

Then the sun rose, and the glow-worm retreated back into its crevice and peered out in even greater astonishment, for it believed that the sun was an even bigger glow-worm. It concluded that of all living things, glow-worms were supreme.

A man who had been studying the glow-worm smiled to himself, thinking how deluded the little insect was. ‘But then, how can something so insignificant know that it is Man who is the supreme life-force on the planet?’ he thought.

He reached into the crevice to pick out the glow-worm and as he did so, he pricked his finger on a thorn. A fatal microbe entered the tiny wound and as it multiplied and went rushing towards his heart, it thought, ‘How deluded the man is, to think himself as powerful as a microbe!’

A MAN HEARD A RUMOUR THAT DEATH WAS COMING TO THE town in which he lived to search for a man called John. He was terrified that it might be him Death was after, for his name was John. Of course there were lots of men called John in the town, but he decided to take no chances. Within an hour of hearing the rumour he packed his bags and set off for a distant town, where he took up lodgings above a café in a small out-of-the-way street and changed his name to Paul.

The moment he’d settled in, he went down to the café and ordered food. He was hardly seated before Death came and sat at a table beside him.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be in a different town tonight?’ the man asked.

‘Yes,’ said Death, ‘but I’ve one more call to make here first.’

‘And who might you be looking for?’ asked the man.

‘For someone called Paul,’ said Death. ‘I believe he has just arrived here from another town.’

The children found the Giant’s last three stories impossibly sad. Instinctively, they understood the relevance of the stories to him, for they were all, in one way or other, about dying.

As the night progressed so the Giant’s preoccupation with the consequences of not finding the missing story grew. He tried his best to hide his fear from the children, not wanting to upset them. But it was not possible to conceal entirely the enormity of his plight. Resting on the arms of his chair, his great hands trembled slightly, the veins twitching as he tried to accommodate the pain that came and went, flashing on and off like the beacon of a lighthouse on the edge of a dark, unforgiving ocean.

Rani and Hasan had been sitting apart from Betts and Liam, whispering and occasionally looking over at the Giant, obviously discussing him. It was not the missing story that preoccupied them, but something else. Eventually, they came and stood beside his chair where, egged on by Hasan, Rani asked, ‘Are you a real giant?’

The Story Giant screwed up his face in a show of mock concentration and said, ‘Well now, Rani, let me think about it. I am over three feet taller than the tallest human being who has ever lived – does that make me a real giant?’

‘But in fairy-tales …’

‘In fairy-tales we are nasty pieces of work, aren’t we?’

‘You are much taller in fairy tales, though. At least as tall as a house.’

‘Or even taller,’ said Hasan. ‘I’ve seen pictures of giants as tall as office-blocks.’

‘The mistake about our size came about because people once took us for something else,’ said the Giant. ‘Many centuries ago, before people knew about dinosaurs they were puzzled by the huge bones they were constantly digging up. Because they knew countless legends and myths about giants they decided that the bones must be ours. And why not? At least they had heard about us. The bones were proof that we were indeed monstrously tall. Does that answer your question?’

‘You mean people actually thought dinosaur bones were giants’ bones?’ asked Hasan in disbelief.

The Giant nodded.

Rani was satisfied with the explanation of the Giant’s less than fairy-tale size, but Hasan wasn’t. He went off to search the library shelves for books on dinosaurs.

What he found was something quite different, but equally fascinating.

It was a rather strange ghost story …

ANDREW COFFREY WAS AN INSENSITIVE BORE. HE WOULD tell the same story over and over again, and whatever he said would always somehow or other end up being about himself. There was hardly a sentence he spoke without an ‘I’ in it, or a ‘me’ or a ‘mine’. He was totally – but totally – insensitive to other people’s feelings. If someone said to him, ‘I’ve just suffered a tragic loss,’ he would reply, ‘Oh yes, but can you guess what happened to me today?’ Then off he would go.

One evening he was riding home on his horse when to his surprise he found himself lost. This baffled him, for he took the same path day after day, and even if he had been asleep his horse would have known the way. The darker it grew the more hopeless his situation became, and he was relieved when he saw a small cottage outlined on the horizon just ahead of him.

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