by Terry Ronald
Maxie was quiet for so long that I wasn’t altogether sure if he was still there. Then he mumbled, ‘I think it’s best … don’t you?’
‘What?’ I snapped. ‘What do you think is best?’
‘Us not seeing each other,’ he virtually whispered.
‘But …’
‘I think that when I come back to school I reckon we should just cool it: stay away from one another. My mum is all stressed and broken up with it, so is my dad, and they don’t even know the half of it. I don’t want them digging any deeper – finding out what happened … you know … at Moira’s place.’
Jesus Christ! What did he mean – finding out what happened? What did he mean – it’s for the best? What had happened to my brave, bold Maxie, the boy who threatened to flatten Jason Lancaster and single-handedly take on the National Front? Who was this muttering, gibbering article on the other end of the line?
‘But you told Frances that you cared about me,’ I said urgently. ‘She told me what you said to her.’
‘I do care about you, David,’ Maxie said, ‘but maybe just not in the way you want me to. I told you, mate, it’s too much for me, I …’
Mate? Had he actually called me mate? There was silence again for a few unbearably long seconds. Then Maxie said, ‘Maybe we can be friends again one day, when this shit has all blown over.’
‘Great!’ I laughed caustically. ‘That sounds absolutely fucking … great!’
More silence.
‘I’d best go now, David,’ he eventually muttered. ‘I can see me mum coming up the front path with another tapestry footstool. It’s the second this week. I’ll see ya.’
And then he was gone. He was actually fucking gone.
As I rolled the final Watney’s Bitter keg into its allotted space in the club’s cavernous, ill-lit cellar, I was on the brink of tears, and trying to hide it from Marty who was busy whistling ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. I felt completely unable to grasp or make any sense of Maxie’s abrupt and violent turn away from me. I was an idiot, a sucker, an idealistic, romantic loser who should have spotted this cantering towards me a mile off. How on earth could I have been such a ludicrous love-fool?
‘I’m done,’ I yelled over at Marty, who was stacking some crates in the other corner. ‘Can I go now?’
‘Hang on,’ he shouted back, so I plonked myself down on a barrel and seethed quietly while Marty finished what he was doing.
OK then! OK! Fuck you, Maxie, I told myself. Fuck you and your cheeky grin, and your football, and your freakishly big penis. I don’t need your ‘perhaps we can be mates one day’ bollocks. You’re a gutless tosser and there are plenty of other blokes out there who’ll fancy me – other men who will fill my dance card and fall in love with me, gallantly and fearlessly. You wait and see! Then you’ll know; then you’ll realize and you’ll regret what you’ve done, and you’ll want me back again – well, you can just PISS OFF!
Marty, who was by this time sitting on a barrel opposite me, eyed me across the dark cellar.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
I collected myself as best I could, wiping my face with the sleeve of my shirt.
‘Fuck all!’ I shouted, and then I began to cry and laugh at the same time. Marty said nothing until I’d hauled myself back together.
‘Are you really, truly queer, Davey boy?’ he asked finally.
‘Bent as a nine-bob note,’ I sniffed.
‘Huh! Funny. I always thought you were. I know I take the piss sometimes, Davey, but there’s nothing wrong with it, you know.’
‘Isn’t there?’ I said. ‘You could have fooled me!’
He leaned forward and stared at me in the half-light, and he looked quite sexy in an uncouth sort of a fashion. I actually had thought about Marty in that way on a number of occasions but, to be honest, his personality was so god-awful most of the time that it completely obliterated any appealing qualities he might otherwise have had.
‘You’re a nice kid,’ he said.
‘Am I?’
‘Well, my Denise loves ya, and you’re a sexy little thing as well, ain’t ya? Sort of … girlish.’
He stood up and sauntered nonchalantly two steps towards me, grinning foolishly.
‘Like … if you were a bird …’ he said.
‘A parrot?’ I quipped, endeavouring to flirt, as I suspected that was where Marty was headed.
‘A woman,’ he said. ‘If you were a woman …’
‘You’d what?’ I whispered, standing up straight to meet his murky stare. ‘And what difference would it make to you anyway whether I was a woman or not? A blow job’s a blow job isn’t it, Marty? That’s what you always say.’
And then I laughed, rather too loudly and rather too laboriously.
‘I told you I would … one day,’ Marty smiled with a forged cockiness. Then he took another small but explicit step closer to me.
‘Fuck off!’ I said quietly, incredulous. ‘Told me you’d do what?’
He wouldn’t dare. He wouldn’t …
Marty chanced another move forward, and I felt the backs of my legs come to rest against a Kronenberg barrel. There was a weird, hypnotic lust in his eyes, and it was at this juncture that moderate amusement on my part suddenly morphed into a considerably more potent cocktail of panic and arousal. I was stiffer downstairs than I could ever remember, and I felt ever so slightly like I was going to throw up.
Marty semi-lunged suddenly, kissing me on the mouth and shoving his hand under my shirt. My stomach felt slippery with sweat and Marty’s hand glided across it, finding first my chest, then nipples, navel and groin.
‘I thought you weren’t going to,’ I gulped, my mouth against his. ‘What was it you said the other week, you’d fuck me but you’d never kiss me – didn’t you say that?’
Marty, however, was heedless of any chit-chat; he was well and truly occupied grappling to liberate his dick from his pants with his one free hand, and he appeared to be doing a reasonably good job. In what seemed like no time at all my shirt was open, and pulled around and off my shoulders, then tossed over the salt-and-vinegar-crisp boxes. Marty’s jogging pants and underwear were pushed below his knees, and this sudden nakedness and vulnerability made me feel dirty and somewhat appalled.
I giggled slightly and tried to straighten up, but Marty seemed to be guiding me to the ground and, sure enough, in due course I felt the grey chill of the cellar floor against me. Marty was on top of me now – raging hard – and I felt one shoe slip from my foot as his sturdy legs pinned me down. He swallowed nervously and looked down at me, as if he were making quite certain that this was something approaching what I’d wanted. Foolishly I smiled diffidently up at him, perhaps reassuring him that it actually was. I did want it, didn’t I? If I couldn’t have Maxie then I wanted a man – not a boy like myself, or the other inept fools at school. I tensed against the fingers that were on me, determined to chase away the image of my dad and Marty a few nights before, drinking Jameson’s whiskey together at the lock-in at the club, but the picture was going nowhere fast.
‘Go on – touch me, Davey,’ Marty said, breathing hard into my neck, but his hands were coming at me more roughly and I was abruptly out of my depth.
‘That’s enough now, isn’t it Mart?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I really …’
Marty was groaning in a slow rhythm now, gripping my wrist so tightly it burned, pulling my hand to him, to where he wanted it.
‘Marty, you’re hurting me a bit … I don’t want to …’
‘Shh!’ Marty whispered. ‘It’s all right! Just touch me, mate … go on, do it for me, Davey.’
And so I did.
It was the sound of his wife, Denise, singing along to ‘Secret Love’ and cleaning the ashtrays in the bar upstairs that sent Marty Duncombe over the falls, his semen firing untidily all over my thigh, apart from one solitary athletic spurt that reached my shoulder. I didn’t come.
‘You dirty little sod,’ Marty sniggered consp
iratorially, as he got up. ‘What would your old man say?’
‘What would Denise say?’ I answered dourly, dragging myself up from the cellar floor and looking around for my missing shoe.
Marty sniffed and shrugged, yanking up his pants.
‘Are you down in that cellar, Marty?’ Denise’s braying shriek echoed from above us. ‘There’s a leak in the ladies’ lavvy cistern.’
Marty tossed a damp bar towel at me and then rubbed his head vigorously with both hands. He suddenly seemed uncomfortable, couldn’t look at me.
‘Yeah … I’m down ’ere, love,’ he shouted up through the hatch that led to the bar – he sounded like a little boy. ‘I’m just coming.’
‘You’ve just come,’ I said.
But I didn’t smile, and Marty stared at me for a moment as I picked up my shirt from behind the crisp boxes. Then he said, ‘Come on, fly-boy, clean yourself up. You’d better get yourself off to school.’
Twenty-one
Parfait!
The train’s just pulling out of Haywards Heath now, and some other unfortunates have boarded: a disconcerting man, who’s sitting opposite me and who keeps twitching and laughing out loud at nothing in particular, plus two ceaselessly gossiping middle-aged women in pleated skirts and A-line rain macs who got on at Redhill and haven’t come up for air since.
‘I got up eight times during the night last night,’ the much skinnier of the two women was saying as we passed Three Bridges. ‘Had fourteen cups of tea.’
‘Ooh!’ the other, frizzy-grey-haired one, said. ‘All that tannin!’
I must have drifted off after that, but as the train lurches to yet another halt between stations, I’ve woken with a start and they’re still going at it hammer and tongs.
‘I said to him,’ the skinny and clearly more talkative one is cackling, ‘I know what you’re gonna say to me, Bob … pork chop!’
I glance wearily over at the man opposite me, who twitches three times in succession – and well he might, I think, having to listen to these two idiots. I’m not sure that they’re ever going to let up. I decide then and there that I must blot their voices out of my sore, bruised head or go completely insane – one of the two – so I take a crack at gazing out of the window at the leaden skies and let my thoughts drift back to the grisly events of the day again. I would dearly love to say that it had improved after the incident in the cellar with Marty, but that wasn’t the case. As I’d stumbled up the steps of the cellar and into the day-lit yard – I couldn’t possibly have gone out through the bar and waved cheerily to Denise with her old man’s muck all over me as she emptied out the slops trays – I felt giddy, as if I were drunk.
I began to weave slightly along Lordship Lane, like the time Frances Bassey and I had drunk my nan’s Southern Comfort from the sideboard and then set off to get saveloy and chips from Elvis’s Chip Shop: Frances had, that evening, nearly come a cropper in front of a 185 bus headed for Catford Garage, but I’d grabbed her culottes and yanked her back on the pavement in the nick of time.
As I crossed the road, I feared I might be staring death in the eye myself as traffic whizzed and buzzed around me. I felt entirely unable to navigate my way across: the swish of every passing vehicle became a jet engine, causing me to flinch and start until eventually I just stood solid, like some kind of human traffic island.
‘Get out the fuckin’ way, you prat,’ someone yelled at me from a Mini, and I snapped out of it for a moment and finished crossing, shakily. When I reached the other side of the road I was outside the bistro and I stopped again, only this time in an attempt to pull myself together. I closed my eyes and squeezed my left hand shut, tight, as if I was holding on to my grandad’s hand.
‘Right! What are we havin’ for lunch today?’ he’d say. ‘Some of that nice cold meat pie with a bit of piccalilli while me and your nan watch the racing? That sounds good, eh, Melksham? And when we’ve got that, we’ll go up the betting shop and you can pick me out a pony in the four forty-five. There’s one called Kathy’s Clown – named after your mum. P’raps we should put two bob each way on that one, eh?’
Yes, Grandad, let’s do that. Please, let’s do that.
When I got a bit closer to school I felt no better, as the drunken, woozy sensation was fast replaced by a waterfall of repugnance poured upon me from somewhere above. As I passed the small bit of green that housed the big advertising hoarding, I caught the smell of Marty on me, and I stopped and vomited with as much poise as one might on a busy main road at nine thirty in the morning. There was only a cup of tea and half a sugared Weetabix to behold, but it was abundant and grim nonetheless. I was disgusted, and disgusting. What the fuck had I done? Looking up at the Marlboro man, I took several deep breaths and turned back towards the school, only to discover Frances tearing towards me in some sort of semi-hysterical flap.
‘David! Where the bugger have you been? I’ve got something to tell you; you’re not gonna believe it.’
Oh, Christ, not now, Frances, I thought, please! And I lurched on in the direction of the school gates, barely acknowledging my friend and her overexcited blether.
‘You’ll never guess in three million yonks what’s happened – you won’t! Mr McClarnon has given Maxie’s part in the play to none other than Jason Lancaster! Jason is playing Bill Sikes – Mr McClarnon says he’s got less than a week to learn the part properly, and he has to be on his absolute best behaviour. Can you fucking believe it?’
I looked at her fleetingly, and shrugged. I could believe just about anything.
‘Did you hear me, David? Don’t you fucking care?’ Frances screeched. ‘Jason Lancaster! Nazi boy is playing Bill … your Bill. He’s got to kill you in the second act. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did it for real. David!’
I stopped suddenly, whipping my head around.
‘What the fuck do I care about the poxy school play now? I don’t give a shit: my whole world’s falling apart – crumbling around my fucking ears!’
Frances did the West Indian whoop that I’d heard her mother do.
‘Lisun to yaself, bwoy!’ she mocked. ‘Such a feisty likkle drama queen!’
Then, in her regular voice – but fuming and hurt – she said, ‘Don’t you ever speak like that to me, David Starr. I’ve been the one that’s been your friend, I’ve been the one that’s—’
‘Yeah, Frances, whatever you say, lovey,’ I snarled back. ‘Now, why don’t you run along and be someone else’s friend, eh?’
Frances grabbed my arm, pinching it hard through my blazer.
‘Well, maybe I should,’ she yelled through tears and teeth. ‘You obviously don’t give a shit that your sister is back with that NF Squirrel freak after what he did to me. All chummy-chummy with him now, are you? Some fucking friend!’
I yanked myself free of her and headed across the playground, saying nothing. When I reached the centre of the playground I suddenly felt dreadful, and I turned to look behind me. Frances had gone.
What actually proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say, came at the end of second period as I hurried along the corridor on the top floor towards the drama room, in the fraught hope of locating Hamish McClarnon. I had struggled valiantly through my first lesson, but I now felt as though I could not possibly go on for another minute without talking to him. He alone would understand and offer me safe harbour – help me make sense of this morbid twist of events: he’d help me turn it around, help me to find myself again … help me find a way to get Maxie back. But just a few short yards from my destination, and sanctuary, Jason Lancaster stepped out in front of me, emerging from the boys’ washroom like one of Doctor Who’s arch-enemies in the final scene of the penultimate episode.
‘Hello, my little darlin’,’ he beamed. ‘Have you been avoiding me? I’ve not seen you around much since you and your little mate got rumbled at parents’ evening – what a fucking palaver.’
And then he howled like a dog. I tried to pass him but he stepp
ed efficiently to one side, blocking my path.
‘’Ang on, ’ang on,’ he said. ‘’Aven’t you ’eard the good news? We’re gonna be sweethearts; you’ve been promised to me, darlin’!’
He shook gently with a cocky and nauseating chuckle, and I wanted to grab hold of the ludicrously fat knot in his tie and pull it tight until he turned blue and stopped breathing.
‘I might just have to use a real club in the scene where I beat the shit out of you and kill you, though,’ he went on, not smiling any more. ‘I want it to look realistic. I’m a bit of a method actor, me.’
‘Oh, get lost, Lancaster,’ I snapped.
And I shoved past him, forging purposefully on towards the door at the end of the hallway; but then, quite suddenly – and I have no idea why the hell I did it – I shouted back at him over my shoulder.
‘You’ll like that, anyway, won’t you?’ I called out spitefully and, as it turned out, injudiciously. ‘Playing my boyfriend. It’ll probably stir some old memories for you: make your cock hard for the first time in a year, eh, Jason?’
The unwelcome note Sellotaped to the small glass window in the locked drama-room door sent my stomach into freefall.
Mr McClarnon is away till Monday to catch up on some marking. Miss Jibbs will be taking his classes in Room 3g.
Oh Jesus fucking H. Christ!
As I turned and lumbered, slow and zombie-like, back along the corridor, Jason was upon me again, but this time there was no escape. This time he was seething, his face a furious burgundy.
‘Don’t you ever fucking say shit like that to me again, Starr,’ he hollered, punching me full and fast in the face. ‘You fucking bent cunt – don’t you EVER!’ A blow to my belly, felling me like a dry tree, my knees hitting wood with a thud, Jason’s finger prodding at my throat.
‘You better watch yourself from now on, Starr. One of these days you’re gonna turn down the wrong street on the wrong night and get your queer arse raped. I know people. I seen it done.’
