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Apeth Badly-spelt high-jinks with a purple gorilla from outer space!

Captain Carnivore Gary Shepherd is hunted down by a deadly flying meteor

Apeth

(from Ota Sbees)

Monday April 14th, 1980

It’s the first day of my third term in Fairburn and my first English assignment looks like it must have been a free choice. And when given that choice, I took the opportunity to double down on some of the stuff I established about myself in the previous term, resurrecting the weird purple gorilla Apeth in a bid to: a) have fun; and b) confirm to the world that my stupid sense of humour wasn’t going away. Like the first time we met him, Apeth’s story is written in the first person and full of spelling mistakes. Partly because I enjoyed showing how clever I was at spelling, but mainly because it seemed like the best way to convey what i thought his voice might sound like. Slow and stupid, and very carefully enunciated without being pronounced very well. Like a well-meaning gorilla who’s taken a long, long time to learn how to speak English. Naturally, the misspellings are more extreme than before, some words escalating by duplicating letters to fill entire lines of text. Unfortunately, the story’s not quite as engaging as last time, just some dull stuff about a fly landing on his nose and his wife throwing him out of his house. This last point being quite a continuity error, given how the previous story firmly established that his wife was very, very dead and never, ever going to be resurrected ever again. But I suppose you can make that work if you really want to. If you want to be kind about it, there’s a strong sense of Apeth’s emotional life here. The episode with the fly really does seem to cause him some concern - “I wuz soo glad!” he says, expressing serious relief at the end of such a stressful business. He’s pretty hangdog about his troubles with his wife as well. Until he just goes off into some self-referential, fourth wall-breaking stuff about how bad he is at spelling, which bursts the bubble completely. The picture’s marginally interesting too, conveying the same sense of hapless anxiety suggested in the text. It’s definitely a step up from the first time I drew Apeth, but curiously, it also appears to be an improvement on the drawing of him I did on Grobschnitt’s Page in Topic 2, suggesting that maybe I wrote that page before the end of my second term. In the end though, it’s Mr Geraghty’s comment - “Plenty of spelllig misstucks!” - that steals the show. Not just because it cements that this is basically just a conversation between me the pupil and him the teacher (until now, he’s the only other person that’s ever read it), but also because it proves that he was actively encouraging my silly experiments in writing. He obviously wanted me to test out these bizarre voices in my head and see where it might take me. And for the rest of the term, that’s exactly what I did. Probably to his utter regret.

A Translation (if indeed I understand it myself) APETH (from Outer Space) One day I was walking along when a fly landed on my nose. I looked at the fly and the fly looked at me. I sneezed! “Atchoo!” I said. The fly flew away! I was so glad! I went on walking. I soon came to a house. It was my house. I went in and my wife chucked me out! I was very unhappy. Then I forgot to write all my full stops and capital letters, also commas. I couldn’t do anything right! That’s why I what should I do next [???] Then I remembered to do it all! The end. [I think…]

One final note: having read it again, I’m starting to warm to it. It’s quite a sad story really. Not only is he scared of flies but his wife throws him out for reasons he doesn’t quite understand, which apparently leads to a complete breakdown of his ability to communicate properly, almost like aphasia. It’s not very well written, but it wouldn’t be if he can’t communicate properly, would it? And on the subject of being thrown out of your own home - that’s surprisingly adult subject matter. I wonder if it’s anything to do with…? No. I’m not ready to talk about that just yet.

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