What’s the Points? | Tom Docherty

Hello (8 points minimum),

My name derives from my letter allocation and the number of points I carry.

As you are no doubt aware, many of the tile letters are duplicated, the vowels for instance, so, in these cases, we indulge in private pet names. I am a member, along with 99 siblings of a 100-tile family, a centruplet (14 points minimum) if you will. We are a unique group: we originated as a coherent 100 letter family, in an English Scrabble (13 points minimum) set, and owe our simultaneous beginning, I like to think of it as our birth, to a 2-phase injection moulding machine with multiple heads which produces 5 rows of twenty different letter tiles in just one step. A stream of plastic pellets (10 points minimum) is heated and moulded, quite forcefully, to make the tile shape in a similar manner to a computer key cover. A gentler pressure provides the letter and number value. This process produces 1 million letters per day or, as I prefer to describe it, 10,000 letter families.

We have been together, so far, for a total of 11 years with various owners. My knowledge and education (11 points minimum) are basic since it really depends on the amount of time the game is in play and the number and type of players involved. By far, the majority of my life is spent huddled with my comrades in a small drawstring bag in a cardboard box, on a shelf in a dark cupboard. My first, real memory is of a Christmas Day and the MacDonald family, as part of a gift for a teenager. My first ever game involved all 6 of the family, two individual mid-teens, a mum and youngest child team, and a dad and second youngest child pairing. The game lasted just under an hour and ended abruptly as one of the teens stormed out in high dudgeon when his use of a swear word was denied. During this phase there were spells of use by the two young children which just amounted to playing with the letters and trying to spell out words. Occasional games with only the teens never lasted long, and usually ended in argument and dispute. The best experiences involved the two adults, which also provided much needed enlightenment. In time, regardless of who (9 points minimum) owned the set or played the game, my knowledge-gathering only consisted of matters relating to sport, tv, films, work, or family as well as all manner of gossip, related or otherwise. Politics, if mentioned at all, was always quickly closed down.

I was keen to find out more about my existence prior to injection-moulding but on discovering that it involved crude oil and boring industrial processes, I lost interest although I later discovered that the plankton-like beings that became the oil did provide a pleasing sentient (8 points minimum) link.

The next phase of my life found me rescued from a short Marie Curie charity shop residency and in university student halls thanks to a young, social studies student, Jenny. This was an interesting phase of my life. Game time was more frequent. Conversation was more lively, most likely due to the large quantities of alcohol and drugs involved, usually but not always marijuana. This idyll lasted for three short happy years, after which I found myself, yet again, on a charity shop shelf, Chest, Heart and Stroke this time. This sojourn (14 points minimum) lasted for quite a long time until I was picked up, along with every other board game in the shop, by a social worker, Bridget, and taken to a Women’s Shelter. I had a fair degree of exposure there as well as becoming aware of domestic abuse. Who would have thought that a football team losing a game apparently caused abuse ona partner and even her children sometimes.

While on the sadder aspects of life, I can report on the loss of some members of our centruplet. At least two I know of, an E1 and an I1, ended up down the back of a sofa (7 points minimum) and are quite probably still there. Another one was deliberately stolen, disappearing into a pocket. The sofa situation is just bad luck or carelessness but the theft is annoying. Was the P3 stolen because it was a name initial or perhaps to cheat somehow in the game? The truth of the matter is that nobody ever notices the odd missing tile. I have never seen anyone systematically check that all the tiles (5 points minimum) were present. To be honest, it doesn’t appear to affect the playing of the game much, certainly not at domestic or amateur level. Local government cuts inevitably led to the closure of the shelter and the next phase of my life soon became apparent. This closure marked a serious downturn in things for me and my siblings. We, and all the other board games, ended up in a large, smelly (11 points minimum) skip along with everything else that could be removed from the shelter building in preparation for its transformation into yet another nail salon/suntan studio. We quickly found ourselves in a landfill site, an experience which managed to outdo that of the skip. At least the skip had been short term. Another very traumatic experience was the end of our raison d’etre (possible 5 points but challengeable as a foreign language word). While we letters all managed to stay together, thanks to the tightly-closed bag, our box, board, and letter trays quickly disappeared, presumably scattered across the site or, in the case of the box and board most likely disintegrated by the rigours of the weather. We seemed to be there in the bag, in the landfill (12 points minimum) for a very long time. On reflection, it was just as dark and gloomy as the cupboard situation which we were well used to. But we had a constant feeling of dread which, linked to a lack of purpose and the scurrying, burrowing rats, made for a very trying existence.

We were saved, after an eternity, by a searching hand and quickly placed in the pocket of an old, worn waxed jacket. After a short vehicular (17 points minimum) journey, we ended up in a room and we were emptied into a box. Our trusty cloth home disappeared forever. We were surprised/confused/delighted to discover that the box already contained a lot of other scrabble tiles. At least another 2, or perhaps 3 families, I estimated. We soon discovered our fate. We would be laid out on a wooden table (7 points minimum) to make words and sentences. Sometimes long sentences, sometimes short ones. On each occasion we would be photographed. I had never experienced this before but it quickly became the norm. As a Q, I didn’t feature much in any of the sentences or photos but I was ever-present throughout it all in a hastily pushed aside pile of letters at the edge of the table before we were all shoved back into the box. It was during one of these watching briefs that I caught sight of a wall on the other side of the room. It was festooned (12 points minimum) with the front pages from lots of different newspapers, redtops, and broadsheets. Each one contained a large picture covering about half of the page. They were copies of the same photos our new owner had been taking of the assembled tile words he had placed on the table.

Eventually, it all started to make sense to me. My nameless owner, who I decided to call Dick, had been using us to write threats to a well-known female celebrity for reasons which will soon become apparent. There were all sorts of vile descriptions of what would happen to her when he got his hands on her. I didn’t know how these vile missives (13 points minimum) ended up in the media. Did he send them to the papers? Did the celebrity agree to publication? Had the police sanctioned publication? It didn’t really matter at the end of the day. Quite quickly after the newspaper wall discovery, I became aware of an adjacent wall which was covered, almost floor to ceiling, with pictures of the pretty lady in question (17 points minimum). As well as uptodate photos, there were some showing her at what I assumed to be various stages of growing up. The room where our box lived did not appear to be part of a regularly used residence by Dick (possible 11 points but inadmissible as a proper name). It seemed as if he came and went at different times of the day and night. There was no discernible pattern to his visits. But each one always involved more tile words and photos or the addition of a new picture to the newspaper or celebrity walls. Sometimes all three.

Time passed slowly until the quiet was shattered when the door to the room burst open. The first thing I saw was the reflection of a torch beam as it played across the room. Eventually our box was placed on the table and a dark, masked head loomed over us. A more organised operation later on resulted in everything in the room being photographed, bagged, tagged, and removed to a secure storage location. I stayed in that box for a very long time until eventually it was removed to reappear in a courtroom. Dick was sitting in a corner of the room with two uniformed gentlemen in close attendance (13 points minimum). Following a brief display of myself and my tile colleagues to the room, we were once more placed quietly out of the way. I could still hear what was going on though, through the cardboard and cellophane bag, thanks to many years of straining to listen from within the now much missed cloth bag. I heard the guilty verdict announced and the sentence ‘detained at his majesty’s pleasure’. I was eventually returned to the secure storage facility where I overheard that I would remain pending any appeal then kept, for a designated period, before being destroyed. Not the best of news to hear about one’s fate. I do believe in reincarnation and hope I will at least be recycled into another high value tile, perhaps a 10-point Z this time, but more likely as a plastic bottle or lid. Who knows, maybe it’s all just kismet (12 points minimum).

As a final point, and in a slightly more positive vein, I will revert to my scrabble background and leave the following information as my epitaph. The longest possible word that could be used is oxyphenbutazone (1750 points possibly). This contains 15 letters which is the maximum that could be played horizontally or vertically due to the number of squares on a board. With appropriate words crossing through it would attract a score of well over 1700 points which would include 3 triple word red boxes. Not that it really matters, but to settle any dispute the word is the name of an anti-inflammatory, analgesic drug. Ironically, the use of the drug is banned due to some nasty side effects but that does not preclude its use in scrabble. Although widely known in scrabble circles, it would appear that the chance to actually use the word in play is, statistically, highly unlikely. It is just the subject of intense research into what could be possible, and isn’t that what life’s about anyway.

Goodbye (18 points minimum),

Cueten

After early retiral several years ago from the educational sector due to a hard of hearing problem, Tom gained a Creative Writing degree and has been writing poetry, prose, and scripts ever since with poems and stories published online and in hard copy along with some competition success. When not writing he makes walking sticks and crooks and also walks the mountains of Scotland and Austria which provides inspiration for some of his work. He lives in rural Central Scotland.

theromereviewlit@gmail.com