So I’d just been eulogising her fingers or something—eulogising them—and in the right mood I could probably be more eloquent than I am now, in a totally free-association sort of way. So I’m eulogising her fingers, giving it some of the old bended knee, and I-may-be-a-king-and-wild-and-proud-but-before-such-beauty-I-am-slain, sort of thing. We climb up the hill a bit further and there’s a gate to a field, and the tunnel of trees breaks to let in the sun, and there’s a bench, and we pause quite naturally in our game and go and sit down.
We’re looking out over rolling fields and occasionally the wind flicks her hair. That’s when it strikes me. I’d call it temptation, but that would suggest I could resist. How do I explain? I suppose I looked at her knee and the inside of her pale leg just before it disappeared into shadow. I don’t know if you had this in your school, but in ours there was something called the ‘nervous test’. What would happen, some sporting girl would agree to the test and you’d start with your hand below her knee. Slowly you’d creep upwards till the girl said she was nervous. The leap over the elastic was the most difficult part and I never made it. Children are not sexually innocent. Not exactly. We were all creeping towards the subject of sex in intense curiosity, and the subject reared up in my mind at that moment, perhaps the most significant rearing-up it has ever done in my life.
What can I say? Some things are easier done than said, and this is clearly one of them. I wanted to tell you my story, and some indignant part of me says I shouldn’t be ashamed of telling the truth. I mean—this is my life! Okay—so this thing, this curiosity, became a white flame that was one with the flesh of my skinny little body. I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but why does a dog lick his balls? Exactly! And that’s why I started two-timing on Nicola, with Nicola. I was going out with her behind her back—because I could. She was not going to tell me she was nervous.
That little incident kind of opened the floodgates. I made the right manipulations, and sure enough, like the tumblers in a safe clicking into place, time stopped. My method was obviously consistent and I was hugely encouraged by this. Nicola was caught with her hair in mid-wind-blown-flick, and I started my self-education on her. After that the world was suddenly one vast temptation, and an irresistible one at that. All my circumspection was washed away before the tide. Well, not all. If I wanted to do something, I would, but I’d be careful not to leave any evidence. I’d always put things back the way they were if at all possible. Especially living things. People, for instance.
Now, you may be thinking, pervy benefits aside, there’s nothing so great about being able to stop time. What is time-stopping useful for, anyway? Well, I’m telling you, you would not believe it! I could not even begin to list the different uses I’ve put it to. Even taking into account the fact I had to put things back as they were as much as possible, I found I had been given a head start on the world in just about everything. Say I was late for something, I just had to stop time and I could be there effectively in an instant. Or if I was tired or bored and didn’t feel like getting up in the morning, just stop time and I could have the biggest lie-in ever. Or if I wanted something from a shop, well, if I thought it wouldn’t be traced I could just take it. Otherwise I could borrow it without asking. Then there was just the novelty of being able to pause scenes and stuff. Also, when you’ve seen people naked it’s difficult to take them seriously again. ’Specially if you gratuitously degrade them while you’re at it. Really, it’s a practical joker’s paradise. It also helped me to solve many philosophical questions, such as the old chestnut, if you knew no one would ever find out about it would you commit such and such a crime? Well, I haven’t actually killed anyone as yet, but I have made pretty free with their bodies. You think of it and I’ve probably done it. So in that case the answer is definitely yes. I realise that might tend to vitiate any moral I wanted to inject into my little tale, you know, searing indictment of an unjust society and all that, but fuck it, I’m not canvassing for votes. Anyway, I genuinely believe that what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Or do I just genuinely believe what they don’t know won’t hurt me?
Well, moving on—over the next few years my life just seemed to swell with changes. I say ‘swell’ because that’s exactly what it was like. You can take that metaphor in a number of directions. You could imagine a river after a flood, for instance, or the sails of a ship. Then again, you could think of a werewolf wracked by metamorphosis, bubbles of flesh pulsating on his hands and neck. Yeah, I like that. There’s drama in that. It was definitely drama I felt, too. The drama and profundity of life. It wasn’t all bad. I was embarking on an incredible, soaring journey. I was the first to hit puberty in my year. I remember, in the cloakroom, when we were changing. I can practically smell it. Old dried mud caking bootlaces, and new mud and grass on football studs, and sweat and dust. The boys would muck about, fight and jump on each other’s backs. I remember my friend Nicky went through a phase of kissing other boys right smack on the lips, all wet and cheeky, like Bugs Bunny or something, and I thought that was pretty cool. But this one time we were all comparing our cocks. One or two of the boys had the first faint beginnings of pubic hair. Weird little white crinkly pubes. I was the only one to have something a bit darker and more luxurious. The other boys were genuinely impressed and obviously of the opinion I had a cock worthy of honour and respect. I remember my lip curling in a smile as I nodded to myself knowingly. This was an augury of things to come.
It wasn’t just that, either. My chest and shoulders were becoming broader, and I could feel a real, solid power in my body. It seemed to me that this power had arisen directly as a result of my use of my little talent. It had awoken dormant potential in me, of the kind that school is specifically designed to smother. Use it or lose it, they say. Now because I was using it, it was bringing a whole train of secondary powers in its wake. It wasn’t just stimulating my growth physically. I also felt an almost supernatural confidence. I became a legend in the classroom simply because I refused to play the counter-point subservient role that all the teachers’ talking-down demanded. Since I practically only had to snap my fingers to make everyone freeze, I really felt like I had power over them and I didn’t care about much at all. I came and went as I pleased in school, like a stray cat, and if I felt like swearing in front of some hypocrite invested with authority over us, or talking back to them, then I would. I could have had my own playground gang if I’d wanted, but it wasn’t really my scene. Fuck, I could probably have ruled the world by now if I’d really made proper use of my gift, but I s’pose I’ve always been too much of a dosser.
I’m surprised I didn’t get put in a unit or something really. Some of the teachers must have noticed that I wasn’t thick, though, and also that I was chronically bored, because one day Mr Chives took me aside and asked if I wanted the opportunity to stretch myself. I was offered a place on something called an ‘extraction group’, which would go to the comprehensive school once a week for special lessons. We’d discuss philosophical syllogisms and shit there and it was okay, but I’m kind of digressing. Mr Chives’ diagnosis had been correct. Boredom!
I suppose a child is most comfortable feeling that the heads of the adults towering above him form a canopy to protect him from the emptiness of the upper atmosphere, though he might not employ such phraseology. I, on the other hand, felt like I was looking down at everyone from a very great height. Ant people on a tiny, tennis ball world. I’d sit at the back of the classroom and the desks would yawn out before me in acres and acres of aching tedium, like creaking ice floes, and at the front the teacher, our figurehead, some balding spiritual illiterate with a blind spot so big you could lose a whole fleet of insights in it. And he was the one leading us, a fresh complement of press-ganged life, on to new frontiers of human knowledge. Or perhaps just over the edge into terminal mediocrity. Oh, the tragedy! Oh, the waste! Oh, the farce of it! Oh, the frigging boredom! Should I just slit my wrists now with the blade of my pencil sharpener? Or, on t
he other hand, I could just stop time for a minute, get the teacher’s cock out and slap it about with a ruler, play with my classmates like dolls, make them move and talk—‘Take that! And that! And that!’ Stare one-eyed into a few orifices as if they were telescopes—‘I see no ships, only hardships!’ That sort of thing. And that’s how it was!
Meanwhile—I’ve always wanted to say that—meanwhile—imagine a caption hanging over us in a separate box of some comic strip—I was still going out with Nicola. When I look back on my life, the time I spent with Nicola, I mean, with her conscious of it too, is the only thing I can really recall with any fondness. Perhaps she represents the only purity I have known since my very early expulsion from Eden. Thinking about it, everything else but her seems trivial and corrupt. She is the only thing that withstands my retrospective scorn and retains an air of mystery. And who was she? Just some little girl, some random crush that worked out. I fully expect her to be dowdy and matronly now, and perhaps sort of bovine. Some girls start out as ugly ducklings and grow into supermodels. But there is also that rare type who start out so pretty that you suspect they are not long for this world. Of course, in the end it’s only their beauty that flees from this terrestrial plane. They hit puberty and, even though their features are the same, somehow those same features are now only dull and repulsive. You see white, milk-like saliva wetting the ends of a white moustache grown over what used to be kissable lips, and you feel sick. Have you never? No? Perhaps I really saw Nicola once at that stage, or perhaps I’m just imagining it to put a lid on the past. I have no idea where she is now.
Our relationship was conducted largely in the shade of the lanes around our village. We were not officially going out with each other, and, apart from our make-believe, everything was left unspoken. But it seemed our bonds were all the deeper because of these things. While time was flowing between us things never progressed beyond kissing and holding hands. In fact, they never ‘progressed’ at all. I never expected them to, and I’m glad they did not. At least one side of our relationship remained uncontaminated.
We’d actually been going out for some years when, one day, I don’t know why, I really felt like going back up Shoot Lane. We hadn’t been up there for ages, you know the way habits change, and I was suddenly afflicted with a nostalgia that bordered on panic. So I dragged Nicola up there with a real sense of purpose, as if I’d found a treasure map and worked out where the X was. She didn’t know what was going on, and to be honest, I was beginning to wonder myself. Of course, she had grown in the time we’d been seeing each other, but I had grown more, and we were an odd couple to say the least. I was by now very tall and my face had grown into the long, weasely face you see today. I did look old for my years. I was about nine, I suppose, perhaps ten. I looked more like thirteen or fourteen. But I was, and am, such a weird-looking guy it was hard to tell my age anyway.
I’d like to know how we must have looked to an outside observer, two people who had obviously formed some sort of deep and unique attachment, but who would normally never be associated with one another, hurrying up the hill without looking at each other, as if to some mysterious appointment. When we came to the gate and the bench where we had sat before I stopped automatically. For some reason I felt this bench was what I was looking for. We sat down. Nicola followed my example and tucked her dress under her legs as if it were a formal occasion. I had very good reasons for remembering that bench, but what, if anything, did it mean to Nicola? She was looking out over the field with eyes narrowed. I just stared at her profile, like I was taking it in my hands and examining it.
‘Do you remember when we came here before?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
Her voice sounded distant, like it was torn away by the wind. There wasn’t any wind, though.
‘Yeah,’ I said, looking at my shoes, turning my toes in, examining the scuff marks, ‘I remember. It seems like a long time ago. It seems like so long ago we were different people, you know, when the world was in black-and-white and everything. But here we are again. It’s near and yet it’s very, very far.’
She was more than used to me talking in this half-nonsensical, fey idiom. It was my preferred mode of communication. And that stuff about the world being black-and-white was typical of our fantasies. But somehow I felt her prickle at my words, as if I had let something slip.
‘It’s not that long ago,’ she said to me in a voice I could swear was hurt.
I suddenly felt cold inside. It was as if at that moment I already knew, emotionally, everything that was about to take place. Time had flowed between us, but it seemed that more time had flowed on my side than on hers. Now there was a swollen river between us, icy and sluggish, and already she belonged to the past, even if she was near enough to kiss.
I would have kissed her then, too, despite, or because of the stinging in my heart, but she turned to me and stared with a strange expression that stunned me. Her speech had changed, too. She was having to find words to suit unfamiliar emotions, serious emotions.
‘Have you got another girlfriend?’
‘No.’ I felt like a liar.
‘Terry, I don’t understand you and I don’t want you near me any more! I don’t know what you are! Or, yes I do! You’re a two-timer! You’re a two-timer!’
For a moment I had been wrenched out of myself by a sense of desperation, but when I heard her last, frustrated accusation the irony brought me back to myself again: very alone, bleakly, sickeningly alone, but in my own body and safe. My lips curled and finally I could not keep myself from laughing uproariously. I’m sure that laughter must have left a permanent scar on her young and tender little heart. It was adult laughter, like a word she didn’t understand. But she must have felt everything that the laugh meant, because my eyes closed and when they opened she was walking away. I did not move to stop her. After a while I stopped laughing and just sat alone on the bench, looking out over the field.
I couldn’t have stayed with Nicola much longer, anyway. Some sort of sickness was settling deep inside me and tugging down the corners of my mouth. I was sick of keeping up pretences. I was sick of many of my consolations, too. I couldn’t even fiddle with people supposedly my own age anymore. I don’t know; some sort of weird repulsion had set in about that kind of thing, as if I was being watched. The very fact that I knew no one could possibly know made me more paranoid, more self-conscious. And besides, it was all so absurd and undignified. These feelings got worse after Nicola chucked me. Everything was turning grey and ashen. A gap had opened between me and the world, and was widening. Even when time was passing normally I felt as if it was still and I was alone, sprawling out across a desk with my head on my arms.
I moved on to comprehensive school. I think comprehensive school is where most people start to acquire that nasty, gritty feeling in the pit of the stomach known as ‘reality’. Me too. The honeymoon was over. I was still wallowing in the hollow aftermath of the Nicola chapter in my life, and I did a lot of thinking as I hung around cloakrooms and stuff, not making any friends. I couldn’t help feeling I shouldn’t be there, in school, with all those juvenile rules, in that stupid school uniform. I don’t know why I’d been so slow to catch on. I suppose, for one thing, young kids are convinced of their own eternal youth anyway. But on top of that, I suppose I didn’t want to believe that my brilliant gift might bring with it an equally weighty curse.
It was round about then that I started having maths lessons with Mr Eliot. He was the temporary replacement for another teacher who had had to leave suddenly. I already knew him from the extraction group thing I told you about. I think the whole group might have been his idea. But he was stern as a white-hot poker, if you know what I mean. He had probably liked me before because I was ‘promising’ and still quite presentable. Now I looked like a burnt-out case. I had clearly let myself go, and he hated me more than any normal ruffian because I had been part of his pet project before. I used to loathe going to his lessons. Double maths Monday mornin
g always summed up, so to speak, my dull hatred for school, anyway, but having him, too! It was intensely uncomfortable sitting under the gaze of some humourless young probable-eugenic-freak, with him thinking we had some sort of secret handshake thing going on and wondering why I never returned it. It was like having to sit until the end of the lesson in trousers soaked with your own cooling piss.
So sometimes I would mitch off, and one time I was hanging about in the cloakroom with another reprobate called Lee. We’d only really come inside to get something from Lee’s coat, but the timing was bad, because at that moment Mr Eliot marched round the corner, all pale and threatening. I suppose he must have forgotten something too, because normally he would have been in class. We’d already got what we needed out of Lee’s pocket—a packet of fags, as it happened—and we were just standing there discussing flobbing techniques. There was a craze for flobbing going round school at the time, and some of the boys could do all sorts of intricate things with their saliva. I was a little behind in the flobbing stakes and wanted to get a few tips off Grand Master Lee. As it happened, I’d just gobbed into the corridor when Mr Eliot appeared. I looked up from where my gob had landed to see him glowering there. You might expect at such a moment for the teacher to feel at least a modicum of gloating pleasure at having caught someone in mid-delinquency, knowing another victim had been delivered straight into their merciless clutches. There wasn’t a trace of pleasure on his face, though. He was deadly serious, through and through. For a moment he was completely silent, but that silence was so utterly terrible even I was afraid. You could see the faint pulse on his temple, and it was like he was about to fall down dead in a fit of apoplexy or something.
Morbid Tales Page 18
