Filthy DaveFilthy Dave was the sick kid in our class at school.
You could only describe Filthy Dave one way: filthy. Filthy of mind and filthy of body. His school jumper was full of holes, and his ears dripped with enough wax to keep the Catholic Church in candles until the Second Coming. And his mind - we prided ourselves on being a pretty cosmopolitan, depraved bunch, but Filthy Dave was a breed apart.
When somebody suggested what a laugh it would be just to spy on the girl's changing room during PE, Filthy Dave was the one who marched in and had a good look round while high-pitched screams shattered the windows. The only words we got out of him for the next two weeks were "Tracey... Tracey..." and a glazed, faraway look which could only be erased by a well-aimed punch to the scrotum.
When Miss Shagwell was sensitively discussing the subject of female genitals during a sex education class, Filthy Dave was the one who asked for a practical, hands on demonstration. And knowing Miss Shagwell's reputation, he probably got one too.
Filthy Dave's idea of a good laugh was to open a box of fishing maggots in the dining hall during lunch - and eat a handful; while one of the ingredients he brought in for a home economics class was an unidentifiable road-kill picked up and stuffed into a Sainsbury's carrier bag on the way to school.
He was always doing the disgusting stuff your mother warned you against. Filthy Dave started the school craze for crapping through letterboxes, and leaving a well-placed turd exactly where you least expected to find one. For example, on the rear pew of the local church during the school carol concert. Filthy Dave was a filthy, filthy boy, and gained a cult following not just for his filth, but for the fact that as far as I know, he never, ever got into trouble for anything he ever did.
Filthy Dave once shaved his head during Maths. "It's the lice, miss," he explained and not a word was spoken on the subject.
One day, he found that by drinking enough blue ink (either from ink cartridges or straight from the bottle, the filthy Quink addict), he could do a blue poo, and laying a log on a piece of yellow paper nicked from the art class, he discovered, with a bit of prodding that he could make a passable example of the school badge in faeces. The school motto was an entirely different matter, but it's amazing what you can achieve with ear wax, snot and Lord knows what else extracted from bodily orifices. We thought it best not to ask how he achieved the red lettering.
So, over a period of several weeks (I could be wrong with this detail - subsequent police reconstructions suggest that it may have taken him "ten, maybe fifteen" minutes), while the rest of the class were out playing football and fighting over pornographic literature, Filthy Dave beavered away at home over his meisterwerk, crouching over a piece of paper, pants round his ankles, eyes bulging with the strain. He sculpted it, varnished it, and handed the result in as part of a project in "three dimensional texture modelling" for his CSE in Art.
Mr Law - the mad bastard's mad bastard - was so impressed he showed it to the Head, who, in turn, was so impressed that he had it hung in the school entrance hall, where I gather it remains to this day. I always knew our school was crap. Luckily for all involved, the photographer from the Maidenhead Advertiser was covering a rare fully-clothed Women's' Institute meeting, and failed to keep his appointment.
I still see Filthy Dave every now and then. He is no longer filthy, just plain Dave. It's sad how age mellows people. But God, you should see his kids.
More of this lunacy over here.
