The Boy Next Door

by Emlyn Rees

  Looking into Mickey’s eyes, I almost believed her. She was right about most things she said. Still, the thought of sitting in a strange new class, surrounded by strange new faces, filled me with fear. It didn’t have to be this way and it wouldn’t be if it weren’t for Miles.

  I’d been with Miles the day before, walking with him through Chinatown in Soho, London. The day had been hot, the streets crowded, and the exotic smells of roasting meat and simmering sauces had clogged the air. Chicken and duck carcasses had hung in the windows of the restaurants like alien babies, and Miles had been late for something or other and had been in a stinking mood.

  The cause of all this had had something to do with his business partner, Carl, who’d gone abroad a couple of months before and had failed to return. ‘Nervous breakdown,’ I’d overheard Miles telling Mum. ‘Probably in a rehab clinic somewhere trying to remember his own name.’

  There’d been some trouble following Carl’s vanishing act, involving lawyers and the club’s ownership, which I hadn’t understood, but which had cost Miles a lot of money to get fixed in his favour. It had been this, according to Mum, that had been making him so grumpy.

  Once we’d reached Clan, Miles had left me downstairs for eight hours with a cheese sandwich and a bottle of lemonade for company. I’d sat there, bored, cursing him for every minute that had passed.

  Looking away from Mickey, I grimaced, wishing I could stay up here on Dave’s roof for ever. Home was a real problem by now. An atmosphere of permanent tension had gathered there. It felt as if a thunderstorm were about to break in the living room and send forks of lightning crackling out through the kitchen and bedrooms. It had been that way since Christmas, when Mum and Miles had argued late into the night about a photograph of Miles that had appeared in a magazine.

  I’d seen the photo myself, over at Dave’s house. It had shown a grinning Miles with another man, both of them with their arms round two women, much younger and, even to my eyes then, even prettier than my mother. The byline beneath the picture had read: ‘I’m In With the In Crowd: nightclub owner, Miles Roper, shows the girls a good time with East End boxing promoter Richie Smith’. The photo hadn’t conveyed any sense of celebrity on to my shoulders. I’d been embarrassed, because Mum had been embarrassed and because Miles was my father.

  In the wake of this scandal, Mum had started to spend her nights in the spare room. This development in their marriage had come as no surprise to me. Miles and she had never been close in my eyes. They’d always inhabited such different worlds. She’d always been stoical and sensible, and had involved herself in the church and the local community. And Miles, well, he’d never set foot in a church in his life, and had a continual look of amusement whenever the friends she’d made in Rushton through her interests and activities had visited.

  I couldn’t understand how it was that they hadn’t already got a divorce. ‘Because having us in his life makes him feel a better man and maybe he has a point,’ Mum had told Grandma one Christmas when Miles had failed to show up until Boxing Day. ‘Because they must still love each other,’ Mickey had said, ‘in some weird way that we can’t understand.’ ‘And because Mum thinks divorce is sinful,’ I’d countered, remembering a conversation I’d heard her having once with Steven Kent’s mother, after his father had run off with his secretary.

  Whatever their reasons for staying together, though, what remained of their relationship now seemed to operate around the principle of politeness. They talked about practicalities, but never anything to do with their emotions. I was their link. It was impossible to avoid. When I wasn’t in the room with them, I wondered if they even talked at all.

  ‘I still hate him,’ I said to Pippa, ignoring her rolling eyes and staring her out until she stopped.

  ‘OK,’ said Pippa, ‘why do you hate him? He’s probably only doing what he thinks best. My mum said she’d send me to a private school if she had the money. She went to a grammar school and that’s the same sort of thing, and she reckons they’re much better than comps.’

  I didn’t know what a grammar school was then, just like I didn’t then know that Miles had in fact dropped out of one eighteen years before without a single academic qualification to his name. Miles thought Bowley Comp was rubbish and that was all there was to it. I was going to get the best education money could buy – whether I liked it or not. And nothing – not even my mother, who thought Bowley perfectly adequate – was going to mess with his reasoning.

  Miles was already talking about revamping the club, so cash wasn’t a problem. Nor was politics. From being a rebel in his youth, he’d moved on, working hard and growing rich. Now he aimed to stay that way. He’d even voted Tory for the first time in his life in the general election the year before, handing his entrepreneurial allegiance to the offspring of another grocer, one Margaret Thatcher, in return for a promised drop in taxes.

  Aged ten, I knew not and cared less what Miles’s reasoning was. Margaret Thatcher reminded me of my grandma when she’d been at the sherry and my only experiences of mismanaged socialism had been the power cuts and the stink of rubbish on the streets during strikes. All I cared about was that Miles had unilaterally decided to split me up from my friends. And all I knew was that I didn’t want to go.

  ‘Well?’ Pippa asked.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Why do you hate Miles?’

  A bee buzzed by and I waved it away with my hand, using its appearance as an excuse for cutting off my conversation with Pippa as I followed its progress through the air. Turning my head, I stared at the dark-red brickwork on the side of the house next door. The dusty grey cement between the individual bricks was like a maze and my eyes followed its path while my mind followed another equally complicated route.

  Why did I hate Miles? It was a question that – despite what Pippa might think to the contrary – I had already addressed. The loathsomeness of Miles was, in fact, a subject that had occupied my mind repeatedly over the last few weeks as the end of the summer holiday (and all that had signified to me) had approached.

  On the surface there were some simple enough answers. I hated him because he made my mother sad and sometimes angry. I hated him because he was hardly ever at home during the daylight hours and he spent most of his weekends in London. And I hated him because, in my mind’s eye, he was no different from my teachers: on the rare occasions that his path did cross mine, all he did was ask me questions about my life without telling me anything of his. Above all of these reasons, though, I hated Miles because I loved him and I didn’t think he loved me back.

  ‘You could refuse to go,’ Mickey said. ‘If you do that, then he can’t stop you, can he? It’s like with my dad and him telling me not to get my ears pierced.’ She pinched the very tip of her earlobe between her forefinger and thumb, and waggled it at me demonstrably. A tiny silver star sparkled. ‘It didn’t stop me. I did it anyway.’

  ‘It’s different,’ I said, wishing it really were that easy. ‘You can take your earrings out when your dad’s around.’

  ‘You could always run away,’ she said.

  We both laughed. Running away was Mickey’s ultimate solution to everything and I hadn’t yet seen her do it once.

  ‘Or get expelled,’ she continued. ‘That could be fun and he couldn’t send you back if they wouldn’t have you.’

  ‘It’s no good,’ I moaned. ‘He’d only send me somewhere else.’

  ‘Shut up, you two,’ Dave suddenly hissed. ‘They’re back.’

  Our group reaction to Dave’s words was both frantic and immediate. Mickey’s sunglasses were off in a flash and the three of us were huddling around Dave, jockeying for position, elbows at the ready to claim the right to have the binoculars next. Like Red Indian scouts, we then froze and stared across the ground between ourselves and Sam Johnson’s back garden. Two people in swimming costumes were now visible in the corner by the towels, and Dave hadn’t been lying when he’d rung us an hour before: one of them, wearing a blac
k and white polka-dot bikini, was without doubt Miss McKilroy, the plump, blonde-haired teacher who’d joined the staff at Rushton Primary the previous September.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Pippa asked. I glanced quickly at her. She was rubbing furiously at her glasses before putting them back on and squinting across the divide in frustration. ‘Is it her?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mickey, Dave and I said simultaneously.

  I looked back across the road. Sam Johnson and Miss McKilroy were now sitting down on the towels.

  ‘And Sam Johnson?’ Pippa enquired, starting to snigger.

  ‘Yes,’ we all replied.

  Sam Johnson worked as a building contractor in and around Bowley, and did the Sunday evening hospital radio slot at the Whispering Glades old people’s home. He was as old as my parents and was in charge of the Rushton Players, the local amateur dramatics group that put on plays twice yearly at the Memorial Hall. I’d seen him in The Importance of Being Earnest the month before, which my mum, as part of the Church Sewing Circle, had helped to make the costumes for. At the end of the play he’d kissed Miss McKilroy on stage and every boy and girl from Rushton Primary in the audience had gasped and looked at each other with wide eyes and open mouths. Mickey’s elder brother, Scott, who up until this point had been sitting next to me in the dark, trying (and failing) to grope his new girlfriend, Alison Rawling, had grumbled loudly in Alison’s ear, ‘At least someone around here’s getting some action.’

  ‘Give us a go,’ I said to Dave, tugging at the binocular strap.

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Pippa asked again.

  ‘They’re just lying there,’ Mickey said.

  ‘Very close,’ I added.

  ‘Very, very close,’ Dave confirmed.

  I watched as Sam Johnson stood up and disappeared from view for a few seconds, before returning and proceeding to sit astride the prostrate Miss McKilroy. By now, the atmosphere on the top of Dave’s garage was electric. Mickey giggled nervously.

  ‘Suntan lotion,’ Dave relayed. ‘He’s rubbing it all over her back.’

  ‘Minute’s up,’ I said, tapping Dave on the shoulder.

  Reluctantly, he surrendered the binoculars.

  ‘Me next,’ Mickey chimed, squeezing up close to me.

  I raised the binoculars to my eyes and slowly panned across the top of the brick wall and down, until the lenses were filled with flesh. I adjusted the dial that controlled the focus until I could see both Sam Johnson and Miss McKilroy clearly, right down to her puffy cheeks and sharp nose. She rolled over so that she was lying on her back and … and … and I could hardly believe my eyes: her bikini top was no longer there. ‘I can see her tits!’ I squeaked.

  ‘What?’ Dave gasped.

  ‘I can!’ I gasped back, focusing in on them. ‘I can see Miss McKilroy’s tits!’

  ‘Give me the binoculars,’ Dave said.

  ‘No,’ Mickey interrupted, ‘it’s me next.’

  I didn’t care whose turn it was next. All I cared about in the world right then was the sight before me: Miss McKilroy’s blotchy, blubbery boobs. Their nipples were like great blobs of chewed-up strawberry bubble gum and each separate, sweaty tit must have weighed in at over a ton. ‘They’re horrible!’ I gasped in delight.

  ‘My turn,’ Mickey said and, before I could do anything to stop her, she’d snatched the binoculars away from me and was staring through them herself.

  I raised my hand to my eyes to shield them from the sun. Without the aid of the binoculars, though, it was no good: Miss McKilroy’s body had reverted to being nothing more than a pink blur.

  ‘The dirty old sod,’ Mickey said a couple of seconds later. ‘He’s rubbing sun cream into them.’

  ‘Into what?’ Dave demanded.

  ‘Her tits, of course.’

  ‘Let me see,’ Pippa begged, tugging at the binoculars.

  ‘No, they’re mine,’ Dave snapped.

  Mickey held firm, shaking them both off. ‘They’re snogging,’ she told us. ‘He’s lying on top of her and they’re snogging.’

  ‘Please, Mickey,’ Pippa implored.

  Mickey carried on looking for a couple more seconds, then handed the binoculars to Pippa.

  Dave scowled. ‘I wish we had a camera,’ he said. ‘You know, one of those big ones that can zoom in. We could stick photos up at the bus stop.’ He shook his head. ‘Imagine what everyone’s parents would say.’

  Pippa shrieked, ‘Yeuch! Tongues!’

  The moment we heard Pippa’s voice, we knew she’d blown it. With or without binoculars, the flurry of motion in Sam Johnson’s garden meant only one thing: we’d been rumbled. Within seconds, Sam Johnson was on his feet, looking around, while below him, Miss McKilroy scrambled around frantically for her bikini top.

  ‘Leg it!’ Dave said and was gone, swinging over the side of the garage roof and down the drainpipe in one easy, fluid motion.

  Pippa, frozen to the spot, stared on in dismay as Mickey and I followed suit. We slithered down after Dave, collapsing in a heap of limbs at the bottom, breathless with exertion and exhilaration.

  ‘Pippa Carrier!’ a voice – unmistakably that of Miss McKilroy – called out. ‘Pippa Carrier! You stay exactly where you are.’

  Mickey, Dave and I exchanged looks. ‘What are we going to do?’ Mickey asked. ‘She’s going to have our guts for garters.’

  Mickey was right. Within weeks of her arrival at Rushton Primary, Miss McKilroy had established herself a reputation for strictness and discipline which none of us had witnessed before. Everyone had dreaded the days when she was on playground duty, as they would invariably result in extra homework or detention for one of us. Even though we’d now all left her school, we didn’t believe for an instant that her influence over us and, more particularly, over our parents, had vanished.

  ‘You two go,’ Dave said. ‘I’ll stay here with Pippa.’

  ‘We’ll all stay,’ Mickey said.

  ‘No.’ Dave was adamant. ‘There’s no point. She’ll get me because it’s my house and she’ll get Pippa because she’s seen her.’

  ‘What do you think she’ll do?’ I asked.

  Dave shrugged uncertainly. ‘So long as we hide the binoculars, there’s not a lot she can do, is there?’

  ‘Suppose not,’ I said.

  Mickey smirked. ‘She’s hardly going to tell anyone else anyway, is she? Not after what we saw Sam Johnson doing to her …’

  The sound of the doorbell buzzing reached us from inside Dave’s house.

  Mickey grimaced. ‘Then again …’

  ‘Go on,’ Dave told us, glancing up at Pippa who was now standing at the top of the drainpipe with the binoculars hanging limply round her neck. ‘Scram.’

  Mickey and I had learnt a long time ago that the telephone lines linking our parents’ homes were more than capable of outrunning any Rushton child. It was because of this that, about half an hour after we’d vaulted Dave Kirby’s garden fence and sneaked away from the scene of the crime, we found ourselves sitting on the chipped marble step of Alexander Woolfstone’s tomb at the back of the cemetery on the other side of the River Elo. Mickey had hardly spoken since we’d crossed the bridge and was now staring moodily at the numbers 1765 engraved in the door of the tomb behind us as she traced them with a finger. I turned back to the tiny ant hole in the loose, dry earth by my feet and waggled the twig that I’d stuck down it, watching the ants rise up angrily.

  ‘Do you think Miss McKilroy’s told our mums?’ I asked.

  Mickey didn’t look round. ‘Dunno.’

  ‘What do you think they’ll do if she has?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  I broke the twig off in the hole and kicked earth over it, sealing it off. The ants circled round the new terrain in confusion, before stopping as if scenting the air like dogs for a clue as to what to do next.

  ‘My mum knows Miss McKilroy from doing the costumes for the play.’ I turned round to see that Mickey was now fac
ing me. Her hair lay flat against her brow. ‘Your mum doesn’t know her, does she?’

  ‘Only from school. She told Mum that I talked too much.’

  ‘She says that about everyone,’ I started. ‘She told –’

  ‘You’ve never kissed anyone, have you, Fred?’ Mickey interrupted.

  ‘Well,’ I said, after a moment’s thought, ‘my mum and my grandma kiss me all the time, and –’

  ‘They don’t count.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They just don’t.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘no, I haven’t.’ I looked down at my shoes. The ants had started clearing out the hole. ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  ‘I kissed Simon Cory once. In the playground,’ she added. ‘For a bet.’ I was about to ask her what it was like when she added, ‘But it wasn’t a proper kiss.’

  I swivelled round on the marble to face her. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘With tongues.’

  I remembered what Pippa had said up on Dave’s roof and repeated it now: ‘Yeuch.’

  Mickey bowed her head so that her fringe hid her eyes. ‘I wouldn’t listen to Pippa,’ she mumbled. ‘She’s never kissed anyone either.’ She flicked her hair back. ‘It might not be yeuchy at all.’

  I studied Mickey’s lips. They were dry from the sun, but I liked their curvy shape. I wondered if she might be right and Pippa wrong. I’d watched Mickey’s lips smile a thousand times and I’d watched her blow spit bubbles on the end of her tongue, but I’d never once thought of either parts of her body in kissing terms. I wondered what it would feel like. My eyes met Mickey’s for a second and I felt myself blush.

  ‘It looks pukey on the television,’ I said quickly. ‘Especially when it goes on and on, and they play soppy music.’

  Mickey’s eyes flashed suddenly and she snorted at me, ‘Fine, then. Don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t kiss me.’ She scrambled to her feet and looked across the valley.

  I jumped up, so that my eyes drew level with hers. She sucked her lower lip angrily into her mouth.