by T. S. Easton
Contents
Title Page
ALSO BY T.S. EASTON
Dedication
Part One: The Contender
The Dishwasher
Ian Beale
Pip
Oh Fleur
Blossom Pankhurst
Prince George
Boudicca
Ricky
We Happy Few
Sunday Lunch
The Bluebell Road Film Club
Eye of the Kitten
Sweat Angels
The Return
Fewer
Forbidden
The Meninists
A Feminist Issue
On the Buzzer
Torn
Date Night
Girls Can’t Hit
Part Two: On the Ropes
Routine
Battle
Fleur ‘Broken’ Waters
Girls’ Day Out
134–Nil 1!
Structural Meninism
Appraisal
Splintered Parmesan
Fairy Godbrother
Here Come the Girls
Jar Jar Binks
Home Run
Fish and Bicycles
Norman Wisdom
Punchdrunk
Boxing Clever
They Say It’s Your Birthday
Showdown
One of the Boys
Surprise!
The Ton
Part Three: Down for the Count
Float Like a Butterfly. Sting Like a Butterfly.
Sunday Punch
Hold the Front Page
School (and Biltong)
Give Me Angry
Punch Up
Destiny Calls
Tarik
Careful, Now
1066 and All That
Down for the Count
Outliers
Start Spreading the News
Need for Speed
This Is a Disaster!
Show Me the Biltong
Busted
The Big Fight
The Count
Weigh-in
Round One
Round Two
Round Three
Eleven Beers. One Coke, Full Fat
Traffic Lights
Battle
T. S. Easton
Copyright
ALSO BY T.S. EASTON
Boys Don’t Knit
An English Boy in New York
And for younger readers
Our House
Our House: Time to Shine
For my daughters. Who can.
With special thanks to Alice and Rikke and everyone at Farnham Boxing Club – Where Champions are Made!
The Dishwasher
I groaned inwardly. It was a cold Tuesday morning in May and my parents were arguing about the dishwasher again.
‘Honestly, Liz,’ Dad said, ‘you don’t need to rinse the plates before putting them in. That’s the whole point of a dishwasher.’
‘If you rinse the plates,’ Mum said patiently, ‘then the dishwasher is more effective. Otherwise, you get potato starch streaking the glasses.’
‘Look,’ Dad said, ‘why don’t you go and sit down and let me do this?’
‘Oh no,’ Mum said. ‘I’m not falling for that. You’ll start putting wooden spoons in.’
‘You CAN put wooden spoons in,’ Dad said. ‘That’s why we bought the German one.’
‘If you two don’t stop arguing about the dishwasher,’ I butted in, ‘I will throw it into a quarry.’
‘We’re not arguing, darling,’ Mum said brightly. ‘We’re just discussing.’
Other unimportant things my parents argue about just discuss include:
• Whether to butter both pieces of bread in a sandwich, or leave one side for condiments only.
• Whether to put your coat on a few minutes before leaving in order to ‘build up a fug’ or just as you leave so you ‘feel the benefit’.
• Whether jam or cream goes first on a scone.
• Whether Jaffa Cakes are biscuits or cakes. (‘There’s a clue in the name, Liz!’)
• Whether you’re allowed to fold the corners of books over to keep your place.
None of these issues will ever be resolved. Ever.
I love my parents dearly, but they drive me crazy sometimes. Aside from her dishwasher obsession, my mother is possibly the most terrified person on the planet. She panics over the tiniest things and she won’t let me do anything that she considers even remotely dangerous. She made me wear a hi-vis bib on my walk to school right up to Year 8 before I rebelled and threw it into a duck pond. Even now she insists I wear a blinking light on my backpack. Last month I asked her if I could go to London with my friend Blossom to attend a Knitters Against War protest march and she immediately had palpitations and got a migraine.
‘A march? There might be terrorists!’
‘Mum, they’re knitters.’
‘There’ll be an extremist wing. Don’t you know how dangerous London is? A man knocked me over on a tube platform once.’
‘By accident,’ I reminded her. I’d heard the story before.
‘I could have fallen in front of a TRAIN,’ she said dramatically. ‘My life would have been snuffed out in a moment.’
‘Dad would have found someone else,’ I said. ‘He’s resilient.’
My father drives me mad too. He’s one of life’s fence-sitters. To Dad, there are always two ways of looking at things. ‘Faults on both sides,’ he says about the conflict in Israel and Palestine. ‘Both candidates make good points,’ he says whenever two lunatic politicians argue with each other on the radio. ‘There are two schools of thought,’ he explains when I ask him what he thinks about the death penalty. Apparently there are two schools of thought about the death penalty, but only one about rinsing plates before loading the dishwasher.
I watched the two of them edging around each other in the narrow kitchen. One would put something in the machine, only for the other to reposition it, or take it out altogether.
‘You CERTAINLY can’t put that knife in,’ Mum said.
‘Why not?’ Dad asked.
‘That’s a paring knife. It’s vital that it remains sharp. The water will blunt it.’
‘So how would you suggest I wash it?’
‘In the sink!’
‘Using what? Sand?’
They drove my sister Verity batty too, which is why she moved to New Zealand a year ago, along with Rafe, my two-year-old nephew. I missed Verity and Rafe dreadfully, but I didn’t miss the arguments. Mum and Verity fought like stoats in a sock.
‘Fleur? Fleur?’ I realised my father was trying to get my attention.
‘Yes?’
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I think you are both insane,’ I replied.
‘Yes, but what do you think about putting paring knives in the dishwasher?’
‘I think,’ I said, getting up from the table and grabbing my school bag, ‘that there are two schools of thought on the issue.’
Ian Beale
Ian Beale intercepted me as I reached the door. ‘Don’t let him out!’ Mum yelled. ‘He’s on antibiotics.’ Ian Beale is our elderly dog. We got him when the last dog died, maybe ten years ago. The last dog’s name was Patch, which I thought quite dull. I was so upset when he died that Mum made the mistake of letting me choose the new dog’s name. I was a big EastEnders fan back then. Even now one of my favourite things is when Mum calls him in for tea. ‘Ian Beale! Ian Beale!’
Not a lot happens in our village.
Ian Beale suffers from any number of chronic ailments and I believe may be Britain’s most medicated dog. He has to take so many potions and remedies that he sometimes can’t
manage his dinner. I feel very sorry for him and wonder sometimes if he wouldn’t be better off being allowed to run wild, even if it means he goes to the big kennel in the sky a little sooner. But that sort of thinking isn’t allowed in our house. I dropped to one knee and gave him a big hug, holding my breath as I did so. Ian Beale is rather whiffy. As I opened the door narrowly and squeezed through, he watched me go, a slight look of betrayal in his bloodshot eyes.
It was early to be leaving but I needed to escape. After all, better to arrive early at school than to be sent to prison for stabbing your parents with a paring knife. We live in a village about two miles outside the town of Bosford, sort of between Hastings and Brighton, about an hour and a half from London.
School is in Bosford, and I usually walk with my friend Blossom, who also lives in the village. Sometimes we get a lift with another friend, Pip, who has a car but shouldn’t be allowed to have a tricycle in my opinion. He is a terrible driver. He doesn’t go fast and I suspect he’s never even broken the speed limit. But unfortunately driving slowly doesn’t stop you from hitting things, or crossing the white line into oncoming traffic. When he parks he creeps incredibly slowly into the space, showing brilliant clutch control, then invariably, at the speed of an exhausted snail, he’ll hit the wall with a soft crunch.
I ran into Blossom by the church. I’ve known Blossom forever and she is the best person in the world. She has mad curly hair and twinkling green eyes. She’s a bit taller than me but most people are.
‘All right, Fleur?’ she asked.
‘All right, Blossom?’ I replied. She fell into step beside me and we strolled down the Bosford Road.
‘So are you going to Battle on Saturday?’ I asked. Going to Battle was a thing we did. Battle is a small town near Hastings and the place where the actual battle was fought in 1066. When I was a child I used to think that battles were called battles because the first one had been fought in Battle.
But of course Battle is called Battle because it was named after the battle. There wasn’t anything there before the battle except some cows in a field and, I guess, a really rubbish gift shop. English Heritage is always looking for people to work there and we take the bus down on a Saturday morning to earn money dressing as Saxon peasants and relating the details of the battle to jet-lagged American tourists. We know a LOT about the Battle of Hastings, although we may have made some of it up. Like once I told some lovely people from Iowa that William of Normandy had married his own horse. Also I have to admit our accents are a bit hit and miss. I do a sort of West Country pirate accent, Pip does Scouser because that’s the only one he can do. Blossom usually ends up doing a sort of Mary Poppins cheeky chirpy cockney thing.
I love going to Battle but the only problem is you have to dress up in period costume and you get funny looks on the bus when you’re wearing a wimple. Since Pip got his car he usually drives us down, which is a lot easier because it means he doesn’t have to argue with the bus driver about whether he can put his halberd in the luggage rack. Blossom and I mostly do craft with the kids, and sometimes she helps out with the ghost walk through the Abbey. Pip is a guard. He wears leather armour and tries to scare the children but they just laugh at him. We’re very much Team Harold when it comes to the battle; Saxon blood courses through our veins. In my opinion there are two types of people in the world: Normans and Saxons. And there are two types of Saxons: the noble Thanes and the peasant Churls. I’m definitely a Saxon Churl. A defender. Minding my own business. Keeping myself to myself, not sailing about the world conquering people and marrying horses.
Pip
As we walked down the narrow lane, fat bees lurching drunkenly from poppy to cowslip, Blossom was moaning about her boyfriend. He comes from Glasgow, calls himself Magnet and works in a tattoo shop as an assistant piercer. I quite like him but Blossom finds him irritating. Also he’s never around. He’s a total hippy and wants to live off-grid, but all that means is he sometimes turns off his iPhone.
‘For someone who is all about peace and harmony in nature he’s often really grumpy,’ Blossom said.
‘He’s not grumpy,’ I replied. ‘He’s just Scottish.’
‘He’s got himself involved in something called The Project,’ Blossom went on. ‘It’s an experimental, self-sufficient community that he and his friends from the Socialist Action Group are trying to set up in a thistle-strewn field in Essex.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘They’re all convinced that capitalism is about to implode, and society will crumble into anarchy,’ she said. ‘They’re basically left-wing survivalists. It sounds pretty grim and apparently when you’re in the field you can’t get a phone signal.’
I shuddered.
‘He told me he wants me to move there and live with him when it’s finished.’
‘What?! What did you say to that?’
‘I told him that if the apocalypse comes,’ she said, ‘and capitalism does crumble, then I’m determined to go down with the sinking ship, clutching my lifeless iPad.’
‘Shush a minute,’ I said. ‘Can you hear something …?’
We stopped walking and held our heads at a slight angle in that way you do when you want to make it clear you’re listening really hard. I could hear a blackbird shouting madly at us, and the sound of our neighbour Mr Palmer’s tractor in a nearby field, but those weren’t the sounds that worried me. It was a clunking, roaring sound of a badly tuned engine chugging through the hedgerows.
‘Is that …?’ Blossom began just as the car came trundling slowly around the tight corner of the narrow lane. At the speed it was going there should have been ample time to stop. The driver saw us and his eyes widened in alarm but the car carried on coming, heading right for us. We squealed and leapt into the hazel hedge as it missed us by inches. I heard a scraping thump. Blossom groaned underneath me and I peered out of the hedge to see the little white Clio had crashed into the hedge on the other side of the lane. We got to our feet and I emerged from the scratchy branches. I stepped towards the car, brushing myself off, as the driver’s-side door opened and a long leg emerged. That long leg was followed by a succession of other long limbs and necks and heads and all the other bits you’d expect to see attached to an extremely tall human male. Atop all this gangliness was a grinning, pale face under a shock of bright red hair.
‘Pip!’ Blossom yelled. ‘Why didn’t you stop?’
‘My foot missed the brake,’ he said.
‘You nearly killed us!’
Pip blinked at us in surprise. ‘You were walking in the middle of the road,’ he said. ‘To be fair.’ If I was asked to describe Pip in two words, I would probably choose ‘drunk giraffe’. Watching him walk, I sometimes wondered if his joints had been put on backwards because everything seemed to bend the wrong way.
‘You need to work on your braking skill set,’ Blossom said.
‘Would you like a lift to school?’ Pip asked.
‘Yes please,’ Blossom said.
‘Magnet wouldn’t approve,’ I told her. ‘After all, when capitalism crumbles there’ll be no more cars and we’ll walk everywhere.’
‘I know,’ she agreed. ‘But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.’
‘If we come to a bridge, Pip will drive off it and we’ll drown,’ I pointed out.
‘I’ll take my chances,’ she said. ‘I have a verruca.’ She got into the back seat of Pip’s Clio.
‘Is your car OK?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, think so,’ he replied. ‘Why?’
‘It’s just that you crashed into the hedge,’ I explained.
‘I didn’t crash,’ he said. ‘I parked. Are you getting in?’
Deciding I was probably slightly safer as a passenger inside Pip’s car than a pedestrian out of it, I got in to the back with Blossom. Pip folded himself back into the driver’s seat with difficulty before puttering off down the lane blowing black smoke, me calling out directions. I always feel like the navigator for the world’s slowe
st rally driver when I’m in a car with Pip. ‘Right-hand coming up in twenty … fifteen, ten … eight … five … three … one … TURN … TURN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD … left-hand sharp … keep going … now straighten the wheel … mind that horse … red light … red light … RED LIGHT!’
I’m only sixteen and have never so much as depressed a clutch, but I’m still a better driver than Pip. I’ve broached the subject of driving lessons when I turn seventeen with Mum but just the thought brings her out in a cold sweat. She showed me a very long and unnecessarily detailed article she’d found featuring statistics that said there was a much lower mortality rate for people who waited until they were nineteen before taking their test. I didn’t push it. It’s pointless to argue with her when she’s made up her mind.
Oh Fleur
Pip dropped us at the school gates and drove off to find a parking space somewhere in the side streets. The school is quite modern. It was built about ten years ago and is starting to look tatty. It’s all wooden clapboard and brick and floor-to-ceiling windows that never get cleaned. Originally there were going to be loads of playing fields but half of them got sold off for affordable housing and now there is an entire community of people right behind the school with dozens of tiny children who spend the whole day peering through the fence calling you rude names. It’s quite disconcerting when you’re trying to eat your lunch in the sunshine and a six-year-old is calling you a cockwomble.
