Contents

Title Page

Running

My first lesson

Booky

Stains

Art

Ice cream

Deep

Francois

The Sadist

Alien life

Superheroes

Bucky

Ready or not

The Clearing

Him

Not just a boy

About the Author

Also by Jonathan Hill

Not Just a Boy

by

Jonathan Hill

Copyright © Jonathan Hill 2016

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photocopying or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

www.jhillwriter.com

Running

I have been running for only a minute, maybe two, and yet their frenzied shouts are oddly distant, as if they originate not only from another part of the wood but from another time entirely. 

Every inch of me is riddled with pain and if I stop to think how bad the pain actually is, it is enough to make me want to tear off my limbs with my own teeth. But the pain in my head - inside my head - is worse and I have only managed to run this distance at all because the agony from that physical exertion comes close to overpowering, even if only temporarily, what’s going on in my mind. 

I chance looking back and see (or think I see) movement in the trees. They are coming after me. But, no, it is just a bird freeing itself of the claustrophobic tangle of trees and flying high into the sky where the world must seem that much purer.

Oh, to be a bird.

I turn back to face the way I’m heading. A steep incline, the top of which is the road. My road out of this hell, but I am all too aware that my hell might only just be beginning.

I take stock while my breath returns. I have lost a shoe. My trousers are caked in mud, my shirt torn and bloodied, my schoolbag abandoned. 

Of course, I cannot see my face, but if I had a mirror, I would not dare look into it. 

I can taste blood.

I can smell blood. And dirt and lavender and sweat. My sweat, his sweat, their sweat...

I am panting more softly now and my lungs feel less likely to explode or implode or whatever they felt on the verge of doing while running. Running, fleeing full speed, twisting my body this way and that and ducking branches so efficiently it was as if my unconscious mind had been anticipating them before I even saw them.

The adrenaline of an escape.

It is now fading and my heart still beats strongly but with a force less likely to punch a hole in my chest.

I assess the slope, uncertain whether I have enough energy to make it to its peak. But I have no choice. It is either up here or back there. And while a part of me more than anything wants to be back there, thinks I even deserve to be back there, that part is nevertheless dying by the second. My instinct for survival is painfully intertwined with cowardice and, to my mind, they are now one and the same.

My first attempt is weak. It is as if I’m trying only half-heartedly to mount the tilt of soil and woody debris. I am trying, but... the pain... the agony and the exhaustion and the urge to lie down and sleep and wake and discover that none of this ever took place...

The second attempt is successful and, despite slipping back twice, after which I kick off the remaining shoe to grip the slope better with my toes, I make it before my legs threaten to give up altogether. As I reach the top, new tears start to trickle down my face and then they gather speed, forming rivers that roll over my cheeks to a sea that simply doesn’t exist. Never have I been so relieved and yet so afraid to have reached somewhere... something... someone...

I hear the lady before I see her, and the blurred pulsating blue just behind her informs me who she is. I wipe away the tears from one eye and look down at the muddy, bloody mess on my hand. Then it all goes out of focus again as fresh tears fall.

I feel like a small boy - five or six - an adult come to my rescue. I hope she takes pity on me and treats me that way. Like I’m too young to know better.

I don’t want to take responsibility for this. I shouldn’t have to. More tears.

She is saying things that I can’t hear, but I am not frustrated. I am just glad she is there. That is enough. And I don’t mind if I never hear another human voice again. At one point, my ears tune into what she is saying but it is impossibly brief, like when a dial touches on a radio station for a fraction of a second before moving on. It is an upward inflection. She is asking me a question. Or questions.

But still I do not hear. Or is it that I do not want to hear?

She is bending a little and looking into my face, which must be a cakey mess of mud, blood and lipstick. In comparison, her own face is a glowing pink orb of fuzziness, eyes and nose and lips each coming into focus independently of one another and for only a second at a time.

A muffled squawk penetrates my skull and I blink faster to clear my vision for long enough to make out the bird to my right.

She is still talking to me, still asking me questions, but all I can do is wonder whether it’s the same bird as before, come to reject freedom and enter the wood’s confines once more. 

Stupid bird. 

Stupid, stupid bird.

Unless it knows that back there, in the clearing, is a freedom greater than that which lies ahead. In which case I am the stupid one.

“I need to know...” she is saying.

What does she need to know?

I want to know too, whatever it is...

And then I collapse at her feet.

My first lesson

Three years earlier

That summer was generally unremarkable. I spent, as usual, much of the time that bridged school terms at the family cottage in Cornwall with my parents, who were generally unremarkable too. 

My father tinkered with anything that he could get his hands on, destroyed more than he improved, and when he did manage to inject new life into some object or other, we’d never hear the end of it for weeks, sometimes months. My mother spent her spare time, of which she had lots, watching my father tinkering with anything he could get his hands on and lived in a constant state of stress, wondering what household item she’d lose that week. I sometimes worried for my parents, in that I imagined them dying having contributed nothing at all to the planet. Apart from me, of course, even though I’d hesitate to call myself a contribution.

The weather was typically British. Each day, a ball bearing would hurtle around a roulette wheel before slowing, not onto a diminishing blur of reds and blacks, but instead sun cream and mackintoshes. It didn’t bother me much. I preferred to stay inside and read. I read too much, according to my parents.

“Shouldn’t you be outside making friends?” my father would ask, as he pored over two halves of a clock that had been working perfectly directly before its autopsy.

“But I won’t see them again when we go back home.” I saw little point in expending energy to make friends who lived so far from our regular residence.

“You’ll see them next year perhaps.”

I’d shrug and turn my attention back to my favourite fictional worlds. But my mother was less quick to shrug off the conversation - if it could be called that.

“You need to start making the effort,” and then she’d address me by my full name as if that made what she said more pressing. “And, besides, you can still write to them between holidays,” she’d suggest, continuing a debate I’d thought finished the year before.

“People email nowadays. They don’t write.”

“That’s what I meant.”

And then she’d give up and leave me, mercifully, to my books, and no doubt try again another time.

I preferred books to people simply because they gave me everything I wanted. Company, friendship (as weird as that sounded in my head) and an escape. Books didn’t answer back or deny me their contents. They were willing to be opened any time of day or night and they didn’t enquire as to my current mood. They didn’t judge me either. They just let me be.

In many ways that summer was just a carbon copy of previous summers, but it turned out to be the most momentous of them all and that was in whole down to the fact that it was the holiday that bridged schools.

I’d not thought it to be any different at the time but I’d never imagined the first year of secondary school to be any different from the final year of my previous school. I’d supposed it would just be the same routines, the same trials and torments as before but relocated. And my best friend was going there too so we’d be there for each other, albeit in different classes. (The school deliberately split up students from the same primaries to ensure proper integration. This was either smart or sadistic and I couldn’t work out which.)

 With summer now just a collection of rapidly fading memories, I spent most of the first day in a daydream, while my new classmates made friends. I greeted people when spoken to but didn’t make much effort because, well, I simply didn’t feel like it. I just wanted to see my best friend again and I longed for the arrival of break time so I could seek him out and escape the claustrophobic classroom and forced jollity of meeting new people. What was the point in making new friends when I felt I had everything I needed in that one person?

I found him in the refectory near the toast queue. Buttered slices of rapidly cooling toast were 20p each and two boys were fighting over who got a crust.

I missed him initially. Dressed in his new navy uniform, he looked strikingly different. But there was something else too. He’d grown over the summer and when I reached up to tug on the back of his jacket, I felt ridiculously small, as if I were attracting a teacher’s attention after falling over and grazing my knee in the playground.

When he turned round to face me, it took me a moment to confirm that, yes, this was my best friend. How could someone change so much over a couple of months? And how much of this was simply down to the fact he was wearing a new uniform and standing in a location with which we were both unfamiliar? The uncertainty of everything rendered our friendship terrifyingly liquid, as if it might leak away given the chance.

“Hey,” I said, timidly.

“Hey,” he replied. I could tell he was conscious of the boys either side of him who were looking down at me to see who - or what, judging from their expressions - I was.

I knew something had changed when that was all he said initially. He didn’t attempt to ask me anything or joke about how my blazer looked too big on me or say something, anything, throwaway like we used to all the time. Coupled with that, his voice had changed and, while not as deep as my father’s, it was part way there and it somehow seemed to tug him a little further out of my reach, even though I knew it was something physical and out of his control.

“How’s your first day?” I asked, my own voice comparatively weak and embarrassingly squeaky. The boy to his left smiled, no doubt amused by me.

Had he made friends already? In the space of a morning? I could not help but feel betrayed. I could hardly begrudge him making new friends, being in a different class, but still... 

Perhaps I should have put more effort into making my own new friends that morning.

“Pretty good,” he said, a little gruffly.

His hair was different too. He’d used something on it and it was sort of messy. Messy but nice. 

I twisted my right foot against the scratched parquet flooring, the silence between us terribly evident even though the rest of the room seemed to be roaring around us.

I was about to say ‘bye’ and just turn away, deflated, when he asked me how my morning was going.

I brightened a little at his question. “Pretty good,” I replied, cringing at offering precisely the same answer he’d given not a minute earlier.

“Made some friends?” he asked.

Why was he asking that? Did he think we each needed new friends? Were we not enough for each other any more?

“Yeah,” I said. Then I added, falteringly, “They’re cool.”

I could see his new friends were becoming agitated and so I decided to spare us all the embarrassment and finish the exchange. “Maybe I’ll see you after school? At the front?”

“Yeah, cool,” he said, before flashing me a smile and turning away, whereupon he joked about something with the others almost immediately. I hoped it wasn’t in relation to me. He wouldn’t have joked about me behind my back. Before he wouldn’t have anyway, but now...

We were the same boys. Nothing had changed between us. But on one level, it was as if we were alien to each other. Or as if we’d just not yet met.

I was certain - absolutely certain - that he wouldn’t show that afternoon outside the school gates. 

He did show, though, and I had to mask my surprise and try to act coolly. We chatted about our day briefly. He had his doubts but seemed to be settling in pretty well. I suppose he thought the same of me but I was decidedly flexible with the truth.

That night, in bed, I cried myself to sleep and for the life of me couldn’t pinpoint why.

The next day he never showed at the gate after school. I knew we hadn’t arranged that again but I’d kind of assumed it was a given. 

My first lesson at my new school was that there are no givens when you’re growing up.

Booky

The next few weeks passed by much like the summer before and indeed my life up to that point. Unremarkably. The boys soon found their roles in the classroom, the teachers all calling us by surname, we calling each other by nickname.

Thankfully, mine could have been much worse. Booky. For obvious reasons. 

The boy I hung around with - we’d found each other over the first few days, being the ones left over from the very early friend-making opportunities - was a quiet one. Funnily enough, his nickname was Bucky, on account of his two front teeth, one of which was noticeably and bizarrely longer than the other.

We were often lumped together as Booky-Bucky and eventually just B-B. We got on well enough. We had similar backgrounds and we both shared a passion for reading, even if he did read more lightweight matter. There was a time when I needed to console him after he found his copy of The Beano stuffed down a toilet.

I could only offer words of comfort. I didn’t put my arm around him or pat him on the back or anything. I was a boy in an all boys’ school, after all. I just advised him not to get upset and then, after a delay, offered to reach in and take it out. Maybe all that was needed was a drying off and then it would be readable again, I suggested optimistically.

“It’s got shit on it,” he said emphatically. It was the first time I’d heard him use that word. I could see he was trying hard not to cry.

I peered into the toilet to check. He was right.

Shrugging, I said I’d buy him another copy.

“No point. I’d read most of it anyway.”

“I thought you kept them afterwards,” I replied.

He shrugged and said something I didn’t catch before exiting the toilets, leaving me standing there alone.

I didn’t feel as upset as perhaps I should have done, mainly because I was relieved it was him who’d been targeted and not me.

If I’d been pushed to name my best friend after those first few weeks of term, I guess it would be Bucky. He was the one I spent most of my time with inside school, although we had nowhere near the close relationship that I’d had with...

I wondered if he had a nickname. I resolved to find out and later that same week I caught him after school. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I was looking for him, but strangely it was he who spoke first to me. 

“How’s it going, Booky?”

I was stunned that he’d addressed me in this way. He must have understood my amazement, for he added, “Word gets around!”

I ignored his question. “Have you got a nickname?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Nah, don’t think so.”

“But everyone does.”

“Virtually everyone does,” he replied. “I’m one of the lucky ones.”

He seemed to have grown even taller, but when I compared in my head where I stood in relation to him, he was probably about the same height as before. It must have been the air of confidence he now carried. I admired him for that. It was like a skin of survival and I wished I could muster up the same, despite knowing that my skin would be an ill-fitting one.

He looked around edgily before speaking to me in a low voice.

“Look, be careful.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, not understanding at all.

“This guy you hang around with... Bucky?”

He’d heard about him as well?

“What about him?” I asked, cautiously. I surprised myself with the note of defensiveness my question carried.

“They’re saying things. You know?”

I didn’t know and I didn’t know who they were.

“Look, I’ve known you for ever and I know you’re not like that but just be careful. All right?”

I nodded, still not really understanding.

“Anyway, godda go.” He never used ‘godda’ before we came to this school.

As he left, he said to me, in a last minute rush of words, “Science block toilets, second from the end.” 

I stood there for a few seconds in a sort of daze. I almost shouted back to him: When?

Then I realised it would only be in my head that his words were referring to a meeting point. I thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t shown myself up with such a stupid reply. 

I started walking home but got half way down the road and turned back, knowing I’d never rest that evening without knowing what he was talking about.

I ran down the long driveway, cut across the forbidden lawn and pushed through the double-doors of the science block. A teacher I hadn’t yet encountered was coming the other way. He spun round and opened his mouth to speak.

“Forgot my books, Sir.”

It was plainly a lie; he watched as I ran straight into the toilets. They were empty as was to be expected at this time. I pushed open the penultimate cubicle door.

At first I didn’t see anything, but when I stood back, my legs brushing the toilet seat, I saw etched into the back of the door:

BUCKY BOOKY LIKE TO FUCKY.

A number of thoughts rushed through my head. And not just, who had done this? Just seeing that word ‘written down’ like that was alarming enough. Did people think that? Because we were friends? It also surprised me that it was Bucky-Booky and not Booky-Bucky as it had been in my mind. I hadn’t even considered that the reverse could also exist. In being placed second, did the others think me an even bigger irrelevance than I’d imagined?

Foolishly, I licked the tip of my finger and tried to erase the graffiti but, it being etched into the back of the door, there was no chance of its removal. I did notice, upon further inspection, that someone had used a pen to add faintly ‘FOOKY’ to make it read ‘BUCKY BOOKY LIKE TO FUCKY FOOKY’. I would have no doubt thought it a clever addition if it hadn’t been aimed half at me. 

I managed to all but remove that last word from the door but had to leave the rest intact.

On my way home, I pondered the significance of the scrawl, asking myself over and over questions that simply could not be answered, not by me alone anyway. 

I somehow managed to forget the explicit graffiti for most of the evening, having convinced myself that it had probably been there for a while now and people didn’t pay attention to it any more. 

But somehow this incident, if it could be called that, or more accurately my friend informing me of this ‘incident’, must have acted as a catalyst or lit a fuse. Perhaps it was purely coincidental but in bed that night, I dreamt that we were standing outside the school gates, just as we had been that day, and he was telling me to be careful, just as he had in reality, when all of a sudden he wrapped his arms around me.

I woke up at once, confused and wondering how my body had known to terminate the dream and wake up at that precise moment. When I shifted about, I felt a wetness in my pyjama bottoms. I was horrified. I’d wet the bed.

It was several weeks later, one lunchtime, my head buried in a book, when I overheard the other boys talking about ‘wet dreams’ and it dawned on me like a moment of scientific discovery that that was what had happened that night. I hadn’t simply wet the bed. What had occurred during the dream had been considerably more complex, and the likelihood of the fact that his arms around me had led directly to my nocturnal release terrified me.

Stains

The wet dreams did not stop coming. I had them at the rate of at least one a week. There was one night when I wished myself dead, listening to my parents talking about the state in which my mother had found my sheets while she’d changed my bed. I was upstairs on the landing and they’d left the living room door carelessly ajar. It would have provoked laughter to the point of tears had it not been about me.

“There were stains,” she told my father.

“Stains? Has he been eating in bed?”

“For heaven’s sake, not those sorts of stains. Stains... from... from down there.”

My father replied with his usual nuanced detail and concern. “Oh.”

“Is that all you have to say? Is this normal for a boy of his age?”

My mother sounded so middle class it was painful to listen to her. But how could I not keep listening?

“I suppose it is.”

“You suppose it is? Were you not a boy too once? Did the same thing happen to you? Did you make stains and, if so, when?”

“For god’s sake, it’s a part of growing up.”

“But at his age? Is it normal? Is our son normal?”

I didn’t catch my father’s muffled response and the next thing I heard was him shushing my mother as Newsnight came on.

I knew there was a cure for wet dreams and had tried it the week before but hadn’t understood the fuss that the boys made of it amidst their hushed giggling and faux-mature conversations. It had taken a lot of effort and nothing had really happened apart from a sudden urge to urinate and then I’d had a sort of waking wet dream followed by an ‘Is that it?’ moment. Presumably, the advantage was that you could control where it went, instead of randomly splattering your sheets and pyjamas for Mother to find open-mouthed. I resolved to experiment at some unspecified date in the future and see if more fun could be derived from what had been a rather tiring way to provoke release.

No one attempted to elucidate the purpose of all this business. I understood it was ‘a part of growing up’ but the only information I picked up was from eavesdropping on the boys in my class and the factual accuracy of that was often dubious.

I was watching Bucky one lesson when I was meant to be working on algebra. Or more accurately, I was staring at his workbook. He used a proper fountain pen and his writing was pleasing on the eye, bordering on flowery. I considered whether this was an indication to there being truth in the rumours around what he was. After all, the boy who’d brought in the pornographic magazine showing women with their legs spread wide had utterly appalling handwriting.

I was also wondering whether Bucky had wet dreams too or had touched himself down there. I was debating if there was a parallel universe in which I would have been able to ask him outright, when I was aware of the teacher talking to me.

He’d said something about looking at Bucky - although he used his proper name, his surname, obviously - and this had triggered ripples of sniggering around the classroom. A smirk may even have flickered over the teacher’s face.

“Sorry, Sir,” I said, although I didn’t know what I was apologising for. Being a dreamer, I supposed. It wasn’t the first time a teacher had caught me not concentrating on the lesson, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. This was the cross I had to bear, the punishment for being someone who pondered, well, pretty much everything except what I was meant to be pondering.

This brief incident did make me reflect afterwards, though, that the message behind what had been etched in the back of the penultimate toilet door in the science block - I hadn’t been back to check, mainly because I dreaded reading further annotations - was indeed alive in the boys’ heads.

Initially, I could not help but feel... well, amused. That the other boys claimed to know my own sexuality when it was something I gave precious little thought to myself was something that I just had to laugh at. I was fairly certain I wasn’t what they thought I was and this was further backed up by the fact that I’d got on with girls so well at primary school, much to the bafflement, amusement and sometimes jealousy of other boys. 

As to whether Bucky was that way inclined, the only pieces of ‘evidence’ I had were his ornate handwriting and an unbroken voice that was slightly girly. But then again, most boys in my class didn’t have deep voices yet. I certainly didn’t.

And even if he was... I had a sort of fascination about it and in some bizarre way, that I would never admit to anyone, I hoped he was. In my mind, it was almost as if it was a privilege to know someone like that... someone different.

And then the dream-like haze would clear and I’d be sitting bolt upright in the classroom, thanking my lucky stars that it was him like that and not me.

Art

It was towards the end of the first summer term when I finally decided to ask Bucky if he’d given any thought to whom he liked.

The art class had only just started and the teacher had managed to stay with us for a record eight and a half minutes before wandering off to other classrooms or outside for a smoke or whatever he did instead of supervising us. 

He was a talented man and, at the start of each lesson, I’d marvel at how he’d transform, with energetic hands, a blank piece of A3 paper into something full of colour and life in a matter of minutes. He’d show us new techniques each week and said if we practised hard we might become half as good as he was. And then he’d bugger off and any enthusiasm he’d previously displayed ebbed away to be replaced by thirty boys shouting at one another and seeing which paint had the most disgusting smell.

Another boy asked me to fetch something from the store cupboard. I ignored him the first time as I was busy trying to make a leaf on my plant drawing look more like a leaf and less like a thin floppy pancake. I hoped that he’d move on to pick on somebody else.

“Why me?” I asked, after his second request. “Don’t you have legs?”

I looked down again at my artwork - using the word loosely - and exhaled shakily, cringing at what I’d just dared say.

“Am I going to have to ask you again?”

This time I didn’t answer, just slid my chair back and went to the store cupboard. Bucky was in there too looking for something. I felt myself jerked forward as a hand pushed against my back and then it all went dark and the door slammed and was locked.

There were fists pummelling on the other side. Laughs seemed distant owing to the thick wooden door that separated us.

“Let me out,” I shouted. Then I remembered Bucky was in there too. “Let us out.” I swiped out blindly at the door and hurt my fist in doing so. “Bastards,” I yelled.

“Help me find the light switch,” Bucky said. He sounded calm, unbothered, but he was more used to this sort of thing than I was.

We both felt around the door for the switch, the darkness having robbed us both of sight and me of memory. 

“There is a light switch inside, isn’t there?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m sure there is. I put it on just now.”

“Now’s your chance!” I heard one of the boys call through the door. “You’ve got till he’s back.”

Of course, the teacher might be back in another half hour. He so often graced us with his presence at either end of the lesson and not between. He was like a pair of bookends, talented bookends but bookends that just didn’t give a shit.

“I’m sure it was this side,” Bucky said, evidently still feeling the walls.

“Bucky?” I asked. “Why were you in here in the first place?”

“He asked me to get something for him.”

I clarified who ‘he’ was and sure enough it was the same boy who had asked me to fetch him something.

Then there was a crash, Bucky yelped - “Ouch!” - and a metallic clang coincided with the light coming on.

“Found it,” Bucky said, drily.

“What the hell?” I said, seeing half of his body covered in bright red blood. Reality descended after a second or two and I realised it was paint. Bucky looked down at himself and seemed far less shocked than I was. The tin lid was resting against my left foot. I picked it off and groaned at the partial ring it had left on my leather shoe.

I licked my finger and scrubbed at it but this just made it worse, and by the time I’d finished, it looked as if I’d kicked a small animal to death.

When I stood upright again, I felt foolish and a little ashamed at fussing over my shoe when Bucky was covered head to toe in the stuff. He wasn’t even moving and it reminded me of an old movie poster I’d seen in a rental shop but I couldn’t remember what the film was. I knew it was one they’d refused to let me rent, on account of not looking eighteen. The guy behind the counter had told me to come back in a couple of years even though I’d plainly still not be eighteen then.

“Aren’t you bothered?” I asked him. Straight after my question, something hit the outside of the door. As if we needed reminding that they were the other side.

“My mum will be annoyed,” he said.

“Annoyed? My mum would kill me!”

“Really?” he said, seeming genuinely amazed.

“Well,” I said, sliding to the ground and leaning back against the door, “she’d at least cut off a limb or something.”

Bucky smiled and mirrored my action, sliding to the floor himself, taking care to lean to one side so the paint touched the floor in as few places as possible.

“Aren’t you going to try to get out?” I asked, despite the fact I’d been the first to sit.

“What’s the point?”

I nodded, still bemused and weirdly impressed by how calm he was being. It was then that the thought struck me. Supposing he wanted to be locked in here with me...

Was this another piece of semi-evidence to add to my portfolio?

I phrased different questions in my mind but none of them sounded right or in any way casual. The one I settled on sounded better in my head than out. 

“Do you plan to get a girlfriend?”

Whether or not it was the whiplash change of topic, I didn’t know, but he looked at me like a deer in headlights prior to being hurled off the road. I suddenly felt a stab of something for him and might have considered putting my arm round him by way of apology for asking but I had enough paint on me as it was.

He shrugged after a while and then said simply, “Of course.”

“Oh,” I said, a little disappointed.

We stayed quiet then and the only sounds were the occasional thud on the door that sent a vibration up my back, and muffled, frustrated laughter. I thought I heard one say that we must be kissing. I looked at Bucky, terrified he might have heard the same but he was looking at the floor and didn’t seem to have heard anything. Afterwards, I thought I might have imagined the words altogether. 

They kept their promise and let us out before the teacher returned, reeking of smoke. Bucky got an after-school detention for misuse of school art materials. My seemingly bloodied shoe hidden casually behind my other leg meant that I escaped one.

Ice cream

When the second school year started, I decided not to speak to Bucky again. 

It wasn’t a choice I made after long deliberation. I just turned up on the first day and, whilst walking through the school gates, decided I’d ignore him. I wasn’t sure if the spontaneity of that choice made me seem more or less callous.

It hurt, not least when in the refectory he pleaded for me to tell him what he’d done to deserve such treatment. It hurt more when I abandoned my intention to buy a slice of toast and instead turned and left.

Was I ashamed of turning my back on my friend?

I wasn’t unashamed. If I were asked as to why I’d stopped speaking to him (and I wasn’t, not by anyone but him, and of course I was still standing by my policy of pretending he didn’t exist), I wasn’t sure I could have given a concise reason. And the rationale wasn’t entirely clear to me even much later on, the original idea no doubt muddied by hormones and immaturity, although of course it never felt like immaturity at the time. 

My defence was that I was essentially still a child and I could only hope that the decisions of a child differed from those made by an adult. I hadn’t seen much evidence of this but I still held out hope. Otherwise, what was the point of it all?

I supposed - and I was well aware this painted me as a coward - it was the easiest thing to do, sever myself from him. Split up B-B. I’d grown tired of all the comments, the insults, the implications that we were deeply in love, even if they were only bandied about in infantile jest under teacher radar.

Of course, following my decision to turn my back on Bucky, there were the inevitable jibes - it was merely a lover’s tiff, one of us had had an affair etc... - but they were short-lived and eventually I blurred into the background and left the others to treat Bucky as they wished. I could have stood up for him. Or at least I could have tried. 

Is there anything more cruel than the condition that comes from hindsight coupled with experience?

But at the time, standing up for him was the last thing I... I’d like to say ‘felt up to’ here but I cannot shake off the word ‘wanted’. Which painted me not only as a coward but a heartless one at that. 

I felt more alone afterwards but the feeling was not all that different from when I’d been friends with Bucky which suggested we’d not been that close after all and had perhaps just clung onto each other like two drowning men in a rocky sea. As a means of survival.

Yet I could survive alone. I was determined to prove that.

I often wondered whether my decision to push him away was at all influenced by the answer he gave in the art store cupboard that afternoon. The answer that cryptically disappointed me and made me feel as if Bucky had somehow let me down terribly.

Whatever the reasons - and I was fairly sure the plural was accurate, unless that was my way of justifying how I’d acted - the rest of the second year elapsed smoothly enough. I even started to enjoy school, if ‘enjoy’ was the appropriate word, my distance from Bucky something of a new lease of life, a blast of fresh air, release from something I hadn’t previously thought of as being claustrophobic. 

The other boys talked to me and I talked to them. Not as proper friends, but it was all I desired from them, that basic form of communication. They recognised me as a person. A being. That was enough.

One afternoon, near the end of another summer term, I found myself in the library, several dusty books spread out before me. Sun poured through the windows and cast blinding white rectangles onto the wooden desks which had been pushed together from a previous class. I couldn’t concentrate on whatever it was I was studying and had only got as far as sniffing the musty pages and recoiling in disgust. I was daydreaming and thinking of the forthcoming trip to the cottage with my parents. A summer alone with my books. It was going to be great!

Then he slid into a chair next to me. 

“Hiya,” he said, smiling sideways.

I hadn’t spoken to him for a number of weeks and now here he was, sitting beside me. I must have looked at him as if he were Father Christmas having just come down the chimney.

“Remember me?” he said, laughing.

“Yes, of course I remember,” I replied. 

Of course I remembered. Before we’d come to this school hardly a day had gone by when we hadn’t spend time together.

“How’s things?” he asked.

“Good. You?”

“Yeah, can’t wait till we get out of this place.”

“Any plans for the summer?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I’m going away with a couple of lads from my class. You?”

I ignored the question for my answer could not possibly compete. “How have you got away with that? What about your parents?”

“They’ve agreed because the mum and dad of one of them are going so we’re not exactly unsupervised. But it’s as close as we’ll get.”

I’d have liked to go away with him too, I realised. I’d still have preferred to be alone, with my books, in an unobserved corner, but being closer to him, him being closer to me... it would have made it different somehow. 

I nodded and tried to look at him as much as possible without him noticing. He looked so much older than I did. How was this fair? There was a hint of hair above his lip and his deep brown eyes shone like melted chocolate in the sunlight. He’d grown his hair too. It was longer than it had ever been when we were younger. And now it was sort of pushed up and back from his forehead. It suited him and I wanted to tell him this but couldn’t bring myself to. How would it sound?! Yet a tiny part of me would not let go and was desperate to let him know that I liked it, or at least that I’d noticed it.

“You’ve changed your hair,” I said, trying not to make eye contact as I spoke.

He shrugged. “It’s just a bit longer, I guess.”

It suits you.

No, I wouldn’t say it. Couldn’t.

He probably looked similarly mature last time we spoke - when had it been? - and the time before, but it was only now, sitting there in the corner of the library, our own little bubble, that I could take the time to look at him and register these details without dreading that one of his friends was about to come bounding up behind him. 

Wanting to carry on talking to him - I was sure he’d up and leave at any moment - I tried desperately to think of something to say but couldn’t. And it pained me to think that perhaps we no longer had much in common. 

In the end, all I could come up with was common ground from before the summer when everything had changed.

“Remember when you almost got run over when we chased that ice cream van?”

His face broke out into a smile and I could tell it wasn’t forced. To provoke such a natural smile filled me with... I didn’t know what, but it made me feel pleasingly... full. 

“Yeah, how could I forget? And you left me lying on the pavement while you flagged it down!”

“I had to stop it.”

“You left me lying on the pavement,” he said, the smile diminished but still there.

“You tripped. It’s not like you did get run over! And at least we got our ice cream.”

“Yeah but mine fell on the floor, remember? All I had was the cone.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah!”

I was shocked at not having remembered this. It had only been a few years back. How could I have forgotten this?

“Oh. And I didn’t give you any of mine?”

“You did actually, yes.”

“I did?” Why did I not remember such a gesture? Or was it just that at the time it was something and nothing?

And then he put his hand on my forehead and it was all I could do not to flinch.

“Hellooooo? Are you feeling all right in there?” He left his hand there for one second, two, three. I was sure I couldn’t last a fourth second but then he removed it and laughed. The sheer relief at the termination of his agonising skin contact was matched only by my deepest dismay.

I eventually responded to his question with another.

“Do you remember The Clearing?”

He didn’t answer immediately and I began to panic. Started to wonder if he’d actually forgotten or, worse, erased the place from his mind. It had been an oasis in our lives, away from the cramping effect of adults and bullies and the never-ending bad news that was discussed ad nauseam on Newsnight. A place where we played together for hours until we were almost too tired to make our way back home. A place where we wrestled and rolled about and made body contact an infinite number of times, all of them innocent. 

I’d been back there alone a few months back, just out of interest, but the magic had somehow gone and it seemed a lot smaller than I remembered. And it was now frequented by the more dominating boys from school, who’d mercifully been absent when I’d visited. Perhaps that had accelerated The Clearing’s demise. When I’d turned to leave, deflated but not surprised, I’d spotted a woodlouse crawling into the entrance of a used condom.

I’d drifted off briefly and he was now smiling at me. I wondered if I’d missed his answer but it appeared I hadn’t for he gave it, naturally, as if for the first time.

“Of course I remember it.”

Then he did the worst thing he could have done. He checked his watch and said he had to go.

And I was left sitting there, the dusty books gathering more dust. My dust. His dust.

Why had he even come to sit next to me? He hadn’t unpacked any books from his own rucksack. What had been his purpose for entering the library? Had he seen me and said ‘hi’ out of politeness, out of guilt for all but abandoning me in favour of his more recently acquired friends?

I was thinking too much into it, as usual. But something kept picking and pecking at my mind. I was facing the windows, my back to the door. If he’d come into the library and seen me, he could just as easily have left and I’d never have known he’d been there at all. He’d made the decision, I told myself, to sit next to me and say something. He didn’t have to.

The caretaker was mowing the cricket field using his sit-down contraption. We called him Lazy Bastard, because if he could do a job sitting down then he would. We were probably unfair on him, especially as he looked ninety.

I listened to the mower’s hum advancing and retreating for a few minutes, then lifted a hand to my forehead and pressed it there, precisely where he’d rested his.

Deep

The day we left for the family cottage the heavens opened and rain fell for the entire journey. My father spent the whole time worrying aloud about one of the windows which he’d fixed last year. He doubted it would withhold such forceful rain if the angle was right. Eventually, my mother told him to shut up, snapping that it wasn’t the first time it had rained since last summer and if it had lasted almost a year then the chances were it would survive the current downpour.

He did quieten down but I could tell he was still worrying because he kept adjusting his trousers round his knees, pinching the material this way and that as if he were a tailor, uncertain of how to proceed, and he worked his way through an entire packet of Polos (crunching not sucking). I’d read on a packet once that they had a laxative effect if you ate too many in one go but I didn’t say that aloud. It would just be another thing for him to worry about and we’d be stopping off at the services ‘just in case’.

As our car pulled up to the cottage, my mother hadn’t switched off the engine when my father leapt out like a wildly excited child at the seaside. He disappeared round the back then came back after less than a minute with a wide grin across his face and giving two thumbs up. 

In my mind, I shook my head.

My mother must have seen the look on my face for she continued my thought process aloud.

“He’ll be unbearable now, won’t he?”

I smiled at her in the rear-view mirror. “How long do you think he’ll brag about this for?” I said.

“Oh... this could run for years!”

It was one of those rare moments a teenager shares with a parent - when they feel they’re on the same wavelength, actually connected, and I could envisage myself coming out of her all those years ago and not being swapped at birth as I’d imagined on more than one occasion since.

Our first full day away happened to be my birthday. My body’s gift to myself was to make my voice as erratic as possible so it would go unfathomably deep one second (deeper than my father’s even) and then squeakily high the next. 

I had as much control over the pitch of my voice as my mother had had over the icing which topped my cake. It had slid all down the sides and was still sticky when we ate it. Early on, my father asked for a fork and my mother flew into an ever so slightly over-the-top rage, screaming when did we ever eat cake with a fork? 

She still got herself one, though, when she finally relented and went over to the kitchen drawer. And I thought I was the one with hormone problems.

Over the course of our time away, my parents went on their usual daily walks and catalogued all the different plant life they saw. How many different plants could there be? Lots, apparently. They usually stopped off at some pub or other and they’d come back in a state of mild merriment, which I was sure they exaggerated specifically to annoy me. At dinner, they’d brag about how wild they’d been, having not one but two drinks.

“Why don’t you come with us? You used to,” she said, one evening.

“I don’t want to. I’d rather read.” My mother and I finished off my sentence in unison. “And anyway,” I continued, “it’s practically the same walk you do every day.”

“But you see different things all the time.” She waved her notebooks at me as if that might entice a boy slap bang in the middle of puberty. “Oh, why can’t you come with us like a normal son?”

That word again. Normal. Every time she tried to persuade me to do something she’d trawl it out as if I’d magically change my mind because the thought of being anything but normal was so terrifying and incomprehensible.

“Maybe another day,” I sort of snapped, half-heartedly. My voice played its joke again and the words came out like the strangulated notes of an out-of-tune trombone.

“And you’ll have to sort that voice out, won’t you?”

I stared at her as if she were stupid. She must have been stupid to have said that. As if I had any control over it. And anyway wasn’t that normal at my age, considering she was so desperate for normal?

I didn’t reply, just flew up the stairs, almost knocking my father off the bottom step. In my temporary bedroom I slammed the door with typical teenage force.

I heard my father come half way back up the stairs.

“Be careful! It’s an old building.”

“Well I didn’t fucking ask to come here, did I?” This time, my voice was pleasingly, consistently deep.

I didn’t know if they’d heard the word and chosen to overlook it, or not heard it altogether. All I knew was that the almost tender moment I’d shared with my mother in the car upon our arrival, joking with affection about my father and his precious window, now belonged to another universe entirely.

Several minutes later, another door slammed, this time the front door, and I was left alone in peace.

Francois

I wasn’t drawn into the stories my books offered up that holiday and it felt as if the characters didn’t open the doors to their universes for me. I knew that it wasn’t entirely owing to a propensity to think about what my friend was doing on his holiday and where he was at a particular moment and what he was wearing and whether he’d had his hair cut before travelling... but plainly it was in part.

Perhaps it was also down to that frustrating term ‘growing up’, and while hair sprouted from places it never used to and my voice’s deeper tones became more constant, more solid, perhaps hand in hand came the departure from trusting and revelling in the land of make-believe. 

Which was a shame. I mourned my neutrality towards books and all the worlds contained within them but somehow didn’t long for the day when my interest would be reignited again. As if perhaps I’d unconsciously accepted that I’d moved on and that I now understood there was a world of interest for me beyond fiction.

And whether he’d had his hair cut before travelling...

Eventually, I succumbed and went on a walk, having tossed yet another book aside. Not the same route my parents took but one which began by clambering over and through some awfully scratchy bushes behind our cottage. I didn’t mind the scratches and marks they made on, and in, my skin. They made me feel alive, not least when beads of blood bubbled up to rest on the surface.

As I was wading through a field of corn, I became vaguely aware of movement to my right, then after a short while to my left. At one point, the sense of disturbance seemed to come from behind, then ahead and then directly level with me. I was trying to work out what sort of creature would move about so erratically amongst the stalks of maize when a boy appeared ahead of me in a cleared part of the field. The sun was shining fiercely, highlighting a dusty halo around his body. He was like something from a dream and I was half convinced, until he spoke, that he was indeed some sort of mirage.

The boy, my brief stalker, was named Francois. Or at least that’s what it sounded like. I couldn’t be certain and didn’t like to ask him to repeat it when he introduced himself. Besides, I didn’t think it an important detail, seeing as there was only him and myself and it would be plainly obvious to whom each of us was speaking.

His accent was somewhat phlegmy and, if I’d heard his name correctly, that perhaps confirmed he was French. Although, heaven knew what he was doing in this part of the world. 

Phlegmy perhaps did his voice a disservice. It was the word that sprang to my mind initially but there was something pleasing about his honey-like timbre and the roll of his Rs. Water gurgling over smooth worn-down pebbles.

He was short but he oozed a maturity that didn’t match his petite stature. His skin was a light brown, tanned on French shores surely, rather than this corner of England. He had a head of dark curls and every now and again I had an urge to run a hand through it and allow my fingers to become tangled within, before freeing them and watching the curls tighten once more around where my hand had lain.

Francois spoke English passably and we had small bursts of chatter around pleasant intervals of silence. There came a point when he asked what was bothering me and I stared at him, amazed that someone so young (and from another part of the world!) should be so perceptive. 

“What do you mean?” I asked, eventually.

“You seem sad,” he replied, honesty and pity reflected in his eyes - wide and brown and chocolatey... and not unlike someone else’s.

“You’ve only just come,” I said.

“No. I watch you... for a while.” 

I’d had no idea, of course, until the point where I’d sensed the disturbance amongst the corn and I felt quite foolish, angry even. But then I saw it as a welcome sign. Francois, I understood, was leaving the following day. He’d be the perfect person to tell what had been on my mind so often over the past few days. I could give voice to my innermost thoughts and they’d still be as secret as if they’d been unspoken. The idea was thrilling.

But even so, I chickened out while speaking, convinced that the French boy would somehow manage to disseminate the information amongst my peers and family, even though this was surely impossible.

“I’ve known her for a while... since we were very young,” I said, clumsily, trying to make it easy for him to understand. “She’s tall, has the most... the most amazing hair... and her smile...”

I recounted several stories about him. Well, her, Francois would think.

“Does he feel the same way about you?”

I thought for a second then sighed. “I have no idea.” Then it hit me. “He? Why do you say ‘he’?” I looked into his innocent eyes and did not have the heart to lie. “How did you know?” I asked.

He shrugged. That was it. No words. Just a shrug. But, if anything, it meant more to me than if he’d spoken a million comforting words.

“In addition you say ‘he’ in the stories you tell me. Twice.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

He smiled.

And then he was standing and unzipping the fly in his shorts. I almost recoiled in horror but managed to conjure up a calm exterior. I was sure he’d stop but he carried on, taking me back to the moment I first saw him in that golden haze. Perhaps this all was a dream...

I watched with an awful fascination as his penis flopped through the gap in his shorts. He was not wearing underpants I observed. Its size was alarming. For such a short person, it was so... Perhaps he was older than he’d led me to believe. The base of the shaft was nestled in a cocoon of hair, the same colour as the curls on his head.

What struck me most, that moment, was how there could be something in existence that I was so repulsed by and yet could not look away from.

“Would you like to hold it?” he asked, eventually, with a half-smile. 

I almost laughed as his face was still the very picture of guiltlessness and, there he was, offering up his cock as if this were a normal everyday occurrence. 

Maybe, for him, it was, I suddenly thought. And perhaps I was not the first, nor the last, but just a being in an infinite line of people he had exposed, and would expose, himself to. I suddenly felt as if I were drowning in a bottomless pool of doubt and inexperience.

I managed to look away to stare into his eyes. I watched for a blink to confirm that I was in fact awake and not dreaming. But what hung three feet below those brown pools of innocence, an alluring but poisonous pendulum, kept pulling my gaze down like gravity.

My mouth dry, I croaked a ‘no’, then added, pathetically, “but thank you.”

I felt odd; slightly nauseous, palms sweating, heart racing. The reaction to what was essentially just a skinny extension of his body had affected me more than I could understand. It was all I could do to get myself to my feet again.

“Maybe another time,” he said mischievously, perhaps sensing I was about to leave. 

It was my turn to shrug although I had no clue what I meant by this. Well, I hadn’t really understood his earlier shrug either. And anyway, he was due to leave the next day. We’d probably not see each other again.

I glanced at my watch, conscious that I might be quashing his hopes just like my own had been quashed in the library with that very same action of looking at a wrist. 

“I’d better go.” I almost added his name but didn’t in case I hadn’t heard it correctly. 

“Maybe see you tomorrow,” he said. “Before I go?”

“Maybe,” I replied.

But I knew I wouldn’t. I didn’t know if my body could bear to go through that again.

However, when I closed my eyes that night in bed, television voices drifting upstairs - my father never missed Newsnight, not even on holiday - the image of Francois’ shorts filled my head, and that gaping hole and what lay within. I tried to distract myself by thinking instead of his face, but that had become a sketchy thing, soft round the edges and, bizarrely, much less easy to recall than the thing I wanted to forget (but remember) more than ever.

The Sadist

If I had to pinpoint a time when I knew, it was the start of our third year when there was a shake-up of classes to keep us on our toes. I suspected it was also a rather neat way of separating troublemakers who’d established themselves during the first two years and I imagined teachers arguing in the staffroom until fists were raised. 

You have that pupil. 

No, you have him.

We left our old classrooms solemnly and went to find our newly-assigned peers with more than a little trepidation. I knew most of the boys by face but not by name. Thankfully, Bucky wasn’t in my new class.

But he was.

It was the first time I’d seen him since we’d broken up for the summer and he looked almost a different person. Perhaps his holiday with his friends had somehow speeded up puberty. He was taller than ever, his skin a nutty brown - not too dissimilar to Francois’ complexion - and his hair was just how I remembered it. He must have had it cut and now it had grown back to the same sort of length. I watched him walk confidently into the classroom and my stomach went all funny. I didn’t know if I was more delighted or terrified that he was in my class. Maybe he’d even entered the wrong room? Because of that temporary doubt, I ordered myself not to let my hopes soar or my fears tear into me just yet.

But no, he settled near the back of the classroom, with one of his holiday pals. As he’d walked past, he’d raised his eyebrows at me by way of greeting and I’d sort of smiled. That was all I could do. It wasn’t even a proper smile. When our eyes had met, it was as if I’d melted and watching him walk past me and not stop by me was in its own way strangely agonising. 

I dared to look at him again during our first lesson - thankfully he didn’t see me as he was concentrating on what had been written on the whiteboard - and I tried to be objective. It occurred to me on a second viewing that he didn’t look too different after all and perhaps it was just what I felt inside that now rendered him different.

It was while I was imagining sitting on his bathroom shelf, a bottle of shampoo perhaps, watching him gaze into the mirror while carefully fixing his hair so it looked effortlessly casual that I realised I was not - and for some time hadn’t been - thinking like a boy my age should. 

I ought to have been daydreaming of bulging tits and moist cunts, not fantasising that I was a bottle of the shower gel he liked to use over his freshly-tanned body.

Shit. The teacher was speaking to me.

“I’m sorry?” I said. 

Sniggers of laughter.

The teacher smiled knowingly as if he’d just won a bet he’d placed with himself.

“They told me you were a dreamer,” he said.

I wanted to tell him to fuck off, both for humiliating me in front of my new classmates and for intruding on my thoughts which were, in my humble opinion, far more important than whatever book it was that we’d just started studying.

“Would you like to come and stand at the front and read the next passage?” he asked, and I knew his question was non-negotiable.

“I’ll read it here,” I said, terrified that he’d insist I stand and walk to the front. Something was already standing, or at least trying to in the confines of my underwear and trousers.

“Front,” he said.

“Last year, we didn’t have to -”

“This is my classroom and while you are in my classroom you will do as I say. Now walk to the front, face the class and read aloud the next passage until I tell you to stop.”

I waited several more seconds, hoping for a miracle but none came. It was as if the teacher knew I had an erection and wanted to get me murdered by my classmates. Or maybe he just wanted to see it himself, the dirty poofter. 

I congratulated myself for silently lashing out at him in this way but at the same time despised myself for it. Poofter. I heard the word in my head, tried to rationalise, explain and chase it away all at the same time, at the speed of light.

At the front, thirty or so pairs of eyes bored into me. I spoke rapidly, hoping that what I was reading would distract them but I knew they wouldn’t be listening. In their position, I wouldn’t be listening. It felt to me that it would be less obvious if a cricket bat were stuffed down my trousers but I didn’t dare look in case that only drew attention to my groin area. 

I stared at the words as they blurred in and out of focus but eventually it wasn’t my eyes that let me down but my voice which died to a sort of choke and no amount of coughing would clear it sufficiently.

The teacher sighed as if I’d let him down hugely and dismissed me back to my seat amidst giggles and whispers and I’d no idea whether these had been provoked by my voice, my red face, my now fading erection, or simply me.

Between lessons, when no one was looking, he came up to me and patted me on my back. “You survived your first lesson with The Sadist.” I knew from his tone that the nickname had to be capitalised.

“Barely,” I said, not managing to return a smile. I’d been humiliated in front of the one person I’d dreaded seeing me in that state. “Did you see me?”

Of course he’d seen me. I hadn’t properly looked up while at the head of the classroom but I still had hope that he’d been looking at the text initially. He was bound to have raised his head when he’d heard me hopelessly falling over words but perhaps by then the bulge in my pants hadn’t been so blindingly obvious. 

He smiled sympathetically. Then he said, as casually as ever, “I felt for you up there, mate. It was kind of...”

His friend was calling him, cutting him off.

“Anyway, catch you later,” he said and then he left my side, his head bobbing about above everyone else’s in the corridor.

Kind of what?!

Why the hell had his knob-head mate just shouted him at that one moment in time? Where had this been going?

I couldn’t shake the word from my head.

Sweet.

Kind of sweet.

I had, of course, no indication that he would have said that but it seemed the most natural word to have followed. In my wishful mind, at any rate. 

But he would never have said that, surely, in such a public place.

I was blurring actual reality with the reality that was exploding in my head and, at the worst possible times, my trousers. Somehow I had to make my head dominate the thing down there, but it was asking the impossible. It just happened as and when it chose. I felt powerless over it.

My reality was not - simply could not be - the right one.

But then I remembered that he’d chosen to sit next to me in the library that time at the end of term. Not remembered remembered as if I’d previously forgotten, but remembered as in told myself the fact again for the millionth time.

I felt for you up there. And then the killer word. Mate. Was that all I was to him? Or was it a word deliberately thrown in to build the ambiguity, to lessen the impact he was worried his words would have... even though he wanted them to have that impact?

So many questions.

And no answers.

I convinced myself that I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t anything, didn’t want to be anything. I just wanted... wanted to be with him.

There was precious little evidence, and certainly nothing concrete, to confirm that I liked boys. I just knew that I’d fallen for him. And if he’d been a girl or a... or a frog... maybe I would have felt just the same love towards her or it.

In other words, it was infinitely easier to accept the object of my affection than to label it for what it really was.

Alien life

Over the next few weeks, my wish that we hadn’t been thrown together in the same class grew exponentially. Never a day went by when I didn’t feel constantly overly conscious of myself. Consequently, I became clumsy, my list of embarrassments growing until I could no longer number them all. Of course, as with most embarrassments, an outsider may not have viewed them as such at all, but they felt that way to me and his perfection could only amplify this in my mind.

My marks, which had never been glowing, dropped considerably in tandem with my concentration levels. I was so hyper-aware of the possibility of him watching me that I couldn’t let my guard down or relax at any time of the school day. Only in a toilet cubicle when my stiff shoulders would slump, with difficulty, for a moment or two of something approaching respite. 

I began to resent the fact that he was in my class. Yet, when he was off sick, I felt a great sadness and the day seemed to drag interminably. I considered sending him a text but couldn’t bring myself to, the appropriate words proving as elusive as our first year art teacher.

I was in the toilets one break-time - on a day when, again, he was absent - when his friend came up to me, his arms outstretched, palms against the walls so I could not get past him without employing limbo or high-jump.

“You like him, don’t you?”

The words had the effect of a bomb going off in my head, every splinter of glass a new question, thought or supposition.

“Who?” I asked, cringing that my reply should have queried to whom he referred rather than the fact I didn’t like boys full stop. 

He smiled as if I’d just confirmed his suspicions.

“You know who. It’s plainly obvious, Booky. Do you want to hear a secret?”

“Not really,” I replied. “And anyway, I’m not into boys. Maybe you are, but I’m not.” I spoke a sort of truth. I wasn’t into boys, plural. Not in general. In my mind, there was only one.

I made to move past him, but he lowered his arms as I tried to duck beneath.

“I thought you wanted to hear my secret.”

“I said I didn’t. Now just fuck off, will you?”

“Ooh, he has spunk inside him!”

His referring to me in third person, as if I were not there or as if he were talking to people on his side who were not even present, stoked the fire inside me. Again, I made as if to push past him on the left but at the very last second dived right and successfully reached the door. 

I’d half flung it open when he said, “He likes you too.”

I stopped.

Plumes of smoke and debris billowed up around me. A second bomb blast, the aftershock of an earthquake, the point at which the second of the Twin Towers was hit on 9/11 - that moment when you realise that something, this, is significant even if you have no idea precisely what or why...

That pause may have lasted for a fraction of a second but, instead of carrying on and moving forward, away from him out of the toilets, that briefest of moments must surely have been telling, even to someone of his, at best mediocre, intelligence. How hard was it to remember the definition of a stalactite? StalaCtite. C for ceiling.

I turned to him. He was watching my face, waiting for a reply. I gave him one.

C for...

“Cunt.”

I finally turned and floated out on a bed of exhilaration. The expulsion of the word, like a poisonous dart, elevated me, albeit briefly, from my depression. 

I tried not to let that exchange bother me. I knew deep down that it had been a trap, a means of trying to get me to open up to someone who would then torture me for the rest of my school days. I hadn’t given him ammunition verbally but how much my face and body language had let slip I could only suppose, playing and replaying the scene in my head countless times until it lost its natural vividness and became more like a dream.

And wasn’t there just the remotest chance that what he’d said had been correct? It was akin to alien life being found on other planets; it was possible but the chances of proving it presently were impossibly slim. Reciprocal feelings for me were that alien. They might - just might - exist, but in this lifetime or the next, what were the chances of that being true and of me finding out?

The next day, he was back in school, recovered from another short-lived mystery illness. (Three absences in one term?) I asked how he was feeling at lunch and he frowned, then, realisation spreading over his face, he nodded and said he felt better, thanks. 

Oh, if he’d just let me kiss his soft cheek, its tan slightly faded and now allowing the hint of a pink blush through, and if he were to return the kiss on my own, then I’d never ask for anything more. That would be enough.

But of course, it wouldn’t. I was lying to myself again. It would be like nuclear particles colliding, setting up a chain reaction which would go on and on and only ever die out following some sort of catastrophic destruction.

I realised why Bucky relied on his copy of The Beano so much, even in third year when he should have been reading Hardy, Dickens and Shakespeare. Its contents were at heart innocent, uncomplicated. You looked at the stuff once, smiled then forgot about it. I was jealous of that bliss. 

A bliss which I no longer knew.

Superheroes

I was sitting at my laptop, picking at a loose flap of skin on my finger, when my bedroom door opened and he walked in as if it were his sanctuary and not my own.

“What the...?” I uttered, closing my laptop instinctively, in case I still had an embarrassing tab open on my browser. I couldn’t have said what laptop I owned at that moment, let alone which pages I’d been browsing. “How? I mean... how?!”

“You look like a fish,” he said, closing the door quietly behind him.

I presumed he was referring to my alternately gaping and closed mouth.

“How did you get in?” I asked, finally managing to string a sentence together.

“Your mum let me in.”

“But Mum is out! I’m alone in the house!”

I stood to go downstairs and check the front door. Had I really been careless enough not to shut it properly?

“Well, someone let me in and she looked like your mum,” he said, his hands held out, a gesture bidding me to relax but also one to keep me from passing him.

A moment or two elapsed during which I tried to resist but it was as if he held a magic power over me and I actually did begin to relax. I walked over to my bed, cringing at the superheroes duvet cover, and sat down.

“Would you recognise my mum now?” I asked, pointedly.

He appeared wounded and I instantly regretted my words. But before I could apologise, he did. Well, he tried.

“Look... I guess I owe you an apology...”

I shrugged and pretended that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“What do you have to apologise for?” I returned. I could have listed a hundred things.

For not introducing me to your new friends at school.

For not texting me while on holiday last summer.

For not standing up for me when others teased me in front of you.

For not coming round to my house for what seemed like ever until now.

For looking at your watch in the library that day.

For abandoning me in the library that day.

For being there in my mind when I go to sleep.

For being there in my mind when I wake.

For coming into my life all those years ago.

For existing.

Still, I offered a puzzled look as if he’d done no wrong whatsoever. Perhaps he hadn’t. Who was to say that him doing wrong in my mind equated to him doing wrong in reality?

Reality. That word again. What the hell was reality anyway?

“You know why,” he said, brushing past my legs as he came to sit beside me on the bed. On the bloody superheroes duvet cover. Hadn’t Mum been due to change it about now? Why was it this one and not the beige one or the plain blue one?

His denim-clad buttocks kissed then smothered Batman’s chiselled face. His weight on my crappy mattress made me roll ever so slightly towards him and I was grateful for the focus needed to keep my balance and stay apart.

But then we were both still and his presence ballooned in my mind once more until its stretched skin hugged the insides of my skull.

“Didn’t my mum wonder why you’ve suddenly turned up for the first time in ages?” I tried to hear movement downstairs but could hear nothing. Perhaps she was having one of her sit-downs. 

“She recognised me,” he said, “and said she was delighted to see me again.”

“Oh.”

“And then she waved me upstairs.”

“Right.”

“She said I looked a lot older now. Like a young man rather than the boy she remembered.” 

And yet she had still recognised him, I reflected. 

“Well, that’s true,” I agreed, feeling my face flushing red.

His hair looked even more amazing close up and his face glowed as if he’d run all the way here. His skin had a pleasing shine to it as if he’d stopped just in time, on the cusp of breaking sweat. He smelt nice too. Aftershave. Or deodorant. It reminded me of the latest Lynx. Perhaps it was.

We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Well, it was probably more like seconds but...

Why had he come? What possible reason could he have had for visiting me? Did his friends know he was here? Were they waiting outside for him?

I tried to stand to look out of the window but his hand pushed down against my leg. Stay here, the hand said, each finger depressing a sliver of flesh beneath my taut jeans so that the bits in between pushed up to fit a little more snugly between his fingers. I liked the warmth his hand transferred to my leg. It was a gift from him, one that he didn’t even know existed.

Was this a trap? Was this linked to the incident in the toilet when his friend had ensnared and probed me? 

No. We’d been friends for too long. And even if we were no longer friends like we’d once been, the roots of our relationship were still too far underground to be exposed and ripped into daylight.

“It was when we changed schools.” His deep voice seemed impossibly loud in my small bedroom. There was no escape from it. “I dunno what happened. It just... I mean, when we changed schools... it sort of...”

I understood from his garbled message that he’d picked up his earlier thread of apology and was trying unsuccessfully to communicate his reasons for all but abandoning me. But I knew. Looking at him right there and then and sensing his movements on the bed and feeling his lungs expand and contract inches from me and hearing his clumsily selected words stumbling over one another... I knew precisely why he’d abandoned me. And then I breathed and blinked and had no idea why he had. 

I breathed and blinked again and his beautiful, sweet teenage reasoning came flooding back in.

His words petered out and an interminable silence followed, the sort which renders those enduring it exhausted, both physically and mentally.

And then other words came and I could almost hear him wrestling with them for a few moments before he uttered them. I could almost watch them growing from seeds of wavering doubt and blooming into flowers of certainty, the greatest certainty that could possibly exist.

“I like you,” he said.

I had to be dreaming. I had to be.

Had to be.

He looked at me, his beautiful brown eyes penetrating me so fiercely I knew he could see deep, deep inside me and I so desperately wanted to be able to do the same. To him, of course, although I would have welcomed the chance to look inside myself too and work out just who and what I was.

“You remember when I fell?” he said, suddenly.

“No.”

“Sure you do. When we were younger and you left me lying there to stop the ice cream man...”

I blushed. Why did he have to bring this up again?

“And when we got our ice creams, I dropped mine...”

“Yeah.”

“And I said, in the library that day, that you’d given me some of yours...”

I nodded.

“Well, I kind of lied.”

I dared to turn to face him, stared uncomprehendingly.

“You didn’t give me any of yours,” he confirmed.

Relief descended for a moment (I hadn’t forgotten this then, for it hadn’t been there to forget!), replaced by shame (I hadn’t shared my own, but I’d been much younger then, of course), replaced finally by complete puzzlement.

“But... why say that then? Why say I gave you some of mine?”

“I really don’t know,” he replied.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “You don’t know?!”

He shrugged. “I guess I wanted you to think that you’d done that for me.”

I felt dizzy, not in control of what was unfolding, what was being said. And then his words came back at me again, an echo. But it wasn’t an echo because the words sounded stronger than before and echoes were always weaker.

“I like you,” he said.

But even then I couldn’t bring myself to return the words.

Instead I said, “I like your hair.”

Shit.

“Gee,” he said. “Thanks.”

“That’s not all,” I said, scrabbling about for a recovery.

“I like your eyes,” I said.

He didn’t reply.

“Your nose, your lips, your skin,” I continued. And now I had gone so far there was no turning back, no chance of throwing in nervous laughter indicating it was a joke gone on too long.

It had gone on too long but it wasn’t a joke.

We both knew it.

And then he ruffled my hair and ran his fingers through it, brushing it up away from my eyes. I could not hide the electricity that shivered through me.

“Now your hair is a little like mine,” he said.

And then his lips were on my own, at first tentatively and then with increasing insistence. His lips were demanding my full attention. That’s what their firmness communicated. And for all that firmness, I had surely not touched anything as soft before...

Our faces sprang apart at the sound of my bedroom door opening.

“Darling?”

“What?” I said, frustrated, as if I’d just been forced to open my eyes in the midst of a deep sleep.

“Do you want something to drink before I start dinner?”

I stared at her. I’d forgotten how to speak and was painfully aware of the wet patch I could feel against my crotch. It was quite possibly invisible to her, but it felt as though I held an ocean in my lap.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost? Are you feeling all right?”

She walked over and rested the back of her hand against my forehead. It was definitely my mother’s hand. It wasn’t like his at all.

The contact severed whatever thread it was that tied me to the previous few minutes and I found my voice.

“I’m fine. And no thanks,” I said, finally hearing her earlier question, “I’ll wait until dinner.”

I sat there alone, waiting for him to return. Just like when we’d played hide and seek together in the woods around The Clearing and I’d known he was not far away. But, of course, this time, he was not coming back to me. I looked down at my lap again and noticed the finger I’d been picking at was bleeding. I must have been digging my nail deeply under the flap of skin for it wasn’t just a single bead of blood. Several had joined together to form a large droplet the size of a fingernail.

Ready or not, here I come! 

I watched the tiny red lake for a few moments, mesmerised by its dark sheen, and then tilted my finger so the blood ran off and landed in the centre of the damp patch on my jeans.

I can hear you!

He was coming. There was movement in the bushes nearby. Any minute now and he’d find me. Soon, I’d be caught.

Bucky

The next day, I received a folded piece of paper during Maths when we were supposed to be solving quadratic equations. 

It was slightly moist from all the boys who had fingered it. I unfolded it with a prophetic dread that was validated when I saw the cartoon; it depicted a boy kneeling before another, the latter’s cock in the former’s mouth. They’d been drawn generically enough so that they could have been anyone. And without annotations, I could have just refolded the paper and sent it on its way to the next desk. But my name, my real full name - and this, so foreign throughout my school career thus far, was almost as shocking to see in print as the act of fellatio - was connected to the kneeling boy by a long, maliciously thick, black arrow. The boy being pleasured went unnamed, and so there was no doubt as to who was the intended victim.

There was something about my drawn self that unsettled me in addition to the dismay and horror of being present in this scene at all. I reflected that, if the arrow were joined to the other boy, I wouldn’t feel quite so victimised. Perhaps it was the unflattering kneeling position, low down on the ground like a dog or a supplicant slave.

Of course, if I were the other boy, I would be no less homosexual in the drawing, but at least I’d be achieving a two-dimensional orgasm instead of receiving a mouthful of...

I scrunched up the scrap of paper and slipped it deep into my pocket. Its journey round the classroom had reached the terminus.

The rest of the lesson was lost in a blur of thought. The fact that the rest of the class seemed so sure of my sexuality when it was anything but solid to the one person it concerned felt preposterous to me. It was as if my body were transparent to all around me but opaque to my own eyes.

What could they see that I couldn’t? Was it how I spoke? How I walked? How I carried my rucksack? Had they seen the way I looked at him? 

Had he seen the crude cartoon? I hoped more than anything that he hadn’t and, if I’d been presented with a choice of, say, a parent not dying, or him not seeing the obscene bit of paper, to my shame, I would have selected the latter.

And if he had seen the picture, what had been his reaction? And did I want to know? If I’d somehow been aware of the precise moment his slender confident fingers had been wrapped around the slip of paper, would I have dared to look at his face, his expression?

By the end of class, I’d barely solved any quadratic equations and I resolved to catch up later that evening. I may have been a bad person but I could still be a good pupil.

Between lessons, I went to the toilets. I didn’t particularly need to go but it was easier than the alternative, milling about in corridors of hungry adolescents. 

I’d just washed my hands when Bucky walked in.

I hadn’t spoken to him, nor made eye contact for I couldn’t remember how long. But there, in the privacy of an empty bathroom, it seemed we had no choice but to look into each other’s eyes and greet each other with a slight movement of our heads.

I made to walk past him then stopped. 

“You doing okay?” I asked.

I knew, from chit-chat amongst the boys, that he wasn’t, and it occurred to me that, in severing myself from him, I had left him in isolation and opened the door to more intense bullying. I had, in effect, signed his death warrant. Perhaps this was overly dramatic but, for a schoolboy trying to survive in secondary school, both the horror and bliss of death were nearer the surface than people dared admit.

Bucky just shrugged. His hair needed cutting. And washing, if I were blunt. If it had been back when we were good friends, I would have told him so and he would have punched me lightly and told me to piss off. And I might have said something about him having washed his hair in piss and he would have punched me again, slightly harder, but not forcefully enough to hurt me.

But of course we were no longer friends and he didn’t reply.

“Still reading The Beano?” I asked, hoping to receive at least just a word of response. 

He looked at me as if I’d just urinated all over his shoes.

We’d once been so close and reliant on each other. He clearly hadn’t forgiven me for cutting him off without explanation. And I couldn’t blame him.

I shrugged to indicate I’d tried my best, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to apologise. How could I be so sure of having treated him badly but not say sorry for it? It made me hate myself but even then I didn’t say anything in an attempt to smooth over our past. Perhaps, deep down, I wanted to hate myself and so wished to continue without making amends. Or perhaps it wasn’t anything so complicated at all and it was just that I still blamed him for the other boys labelling me gay, even if this wasn’t verbalised as often as it could have been. 

In school, labels stuck. They weren’t like the name tags which Mother carefully sewed into your clothing only for them to come loose somehow, despite not having been fiddled with. They were written inside the boys’ heads in permanent black marker and even if they weren’t uttered aloud, they were still there, ready to be shouted out in a moment of revenge and humiliation. 

I imagined that if two boys met each other coincidentally much, much later on in life, in a nursing home, say, they might no longer know the current prime minister or remember the faces of their family or know the difference between a tablet and a banana, but they’d still remember each other’s nickname, tag, label from school.

And even if I married and had three children and found the cure for cancer, I’d still be remembered, above all, for being that way inclined at school.

It seemed like that, anyway.

I’d given Bucky enough chance to acknowledge me and so opened the door now to leave. He headed in the opposite direction, towards a cubicle. I turned at the sound of something clattering to the floor and this time we both made definite undeniable eye contact.

It lay there like an unexploded bomb.

He didn’t bend to pick it up. Maybe he thought he could get away with acting as if it was nothing to do with him.

Why had Bucky been carrying a pocket knife?

Its handle was red, the blade folded in, dormant but alive.

We were both standing motionless, looking at each other. I wondered how this would end. Would we just stay there, frozen in time forever?

Its presence in his pocket could mean one of two things. Either he was planning to cut himself or someone else. Or was it merely a form of defence, a sort of visual ‘Back Off!’?

I couldn’t take the chance that he never intended to use it and so I made the decision to dive forward and pick up the knife.

We both reached it at the same time despite him being closer. He probably hadn’t been expecting me to go for it.

As I scooped it up, he tried to wrestle it from my grip and the only way I could keep hold of it was to shove him forcefully back with my other hand. He fell into the toilet door and it slammed against the cubicle’s side wall with a thunderous crack.

A silent conversation played out between us, the lengths of unspoken sentences compressed so that it was over before it had really begun. 

Why?

None of your business.

Were you planning to use it?

I don’t know.

Then I’m not giving it you back.

You can’t keep it. It’s mine.

Are you all right? I mean, really all right?

Why did you stop talking to me?

I swallowed, turning away and pocketing the knife alongside the balled-up cartoon.

As I opened the door to leave, he spoke for the first time during our encounter. His voice was deeper than I remembered.

“I’m seeing someone,” he told me.

I turned to face him, not comprehending why he was telling me this nor exactly what he meant.

“I’m seeing a girl,” he said, before disappearing into the cubicle.

The bolt being slid across sounded as loud as the cracking of the door moments before but it could not possibly have been.

And that was it. I left. Two minutes, if that, and yet it had played out in the manner of a Greek tragedy. As if it had been momentous. 

It felt momentous.

The rest of the day drifted along as usual, without incident, but with one key difference which I can only attribute to the blade in my pocket. Whatever was thrown my way, whether it was a snigger or insult from a boy or a glare from a teacher, I felt I could cope with it a little more easily. It was as if the knife imbued me with a sense of power, its smooth handle gently nudging my thigh and reminding me that I had the upper hand, even if I knew deep down I didn’t. 

Was this why Bucky owned the knife? To inject him with a secret sense of superiority to make the hard school hours pass by more bearably? 

There was something primal about holding a weapon, something horrifying but also oddly exciting. I nailed this down as the ‘I won’t use it, but I could...’ feeling which flittered through my mind and, I was sure, the minds of anyone else who held such an object.

I would never use the knife, of course. I was not a violent boy. Just watching two minutes of boxing on the television with my father had once rendered me so nauseous I hadn’t managed any dinner that day.

At the end of school, I was pulling books out of my locker when another piece of paper floated to the floor. Again folded, but I could see this was more crisp, less handled than the one from earlier.

Boys rushed and pushed past me as I read it, the enticement of home outweighing any desire to pay attention to those weaker than themselves. 

Meet me after school at 415 in the clearing. I need to tell you something important. Please don’t show anyone this note. (Everything will be alright.)

I could no longer hear the boys rushing and pushing past me. They were still there, charging to and from lockers - I could feel the breeze they created - but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything, except my heart pounding somewhere. My chest, my ears, my throat?

The note was from him. The fact that the proposed meeting place was The Clearing rang loud and clear in my mind. It was from him. He hadn’t capitalised it like we used to but that was a small detail that had stayed with me and there was no reason it should have lasted in his mind all these years.

Everything would be alright.

He’d said so.

I looked at my wrist. 

15:46

Ready or not

Suddenly everything made sense. I now knew why he’d distanced himself from me, why he’d sat next to me briefly in the library that day late on in summer term, why he’d told me to be careful when he heard my name had been scrawled on the back of the toilet door, why he’d come round to my house and sat on the edge of my superheroes duvet and kissed me...

The last, of course, never happened, although the vividness through which I had lived it told differently. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, there was a me and a him exactly like me and him and what happened in my virtual bedroom actually did take place.

But the rest... it was all slotting together. He felt the same way as I and his mechanism of coping with his uncontrollable, probably unwanted, feelings was to push me away, just as I had pushed away Bucky, albeit for different reasons.

Pushing someone away was a coping mechanism. I knew that was true for me, and now I knew that I was not unique in this respect.

And I realised that two people could distance themselves from each other as much as possible, but if there was something there, however hidden or forbidden it may be, pulling them closer together... then not even the strongest minds could overpower that.

He’d fought and now, to my delight, he’d lost.

Much as I had been defeated in a battle that had been lost long before the lives of every man, past and present, had been written.

I also realised, less profoundly, that worrying a lot about something makes you sweat a lot. Hence my stop-off at Sanjeev’s Conveniance Store. (Sanjeev couldn’t spell.)

I scanned the shelves but could not see what I wanted.

“Men’s deodorant?” I asked, once a lady had finished moaning about the state of the National Health Service while buying two packets of cigarettes.

“Over there,” Sanjeev said, pointing to where I’d just looked.

“I can’t see any.”

“Well, try harder,” he said, chuckling to himself as if he’d just cracked the joke of the century.

I stared at him, could feel the seconds ticking by. Vital seconds.

Ready or not, here I come!

“It must have all gone. We had an offer on the Lynx. The Lynx is very popular with the schoolchildren.”

Schoolchildren. He made me sound about six. He had no idea what I’d been through. Was going through.

“Do you have any more in the back?” I asked. “It’s quite important.”

“Maybe I do but I cannot leave the shop unattended.”

“I’ll look after it for you, if you’re quick,” I offered.

He smiled and said, “I cannot leave the shop unattended because of you. Forgive me, but I have learnt not to trust anyone in this business, not even my brother.”

I frowned and stared.

“I was counting the papers once and came back to find him chewing gum,” he continued.

Another pause. It was like a game to him, peeling back layers of story to reach the centre, which never turned out to be particularly interesting or relevant.

“Gum he had not paid for! Now, we have deodorant for the ladies.”

How on earth was that any use? 

So, I had two options. I could smell of sweat or flowers and in my current state of mind I could not possibly decide which was better.

In the end, I bought some just to end the stalemate. He sold it to me, laughing and shaking his head as if I were doing something ridiculous.

Maybe I was.

Outside, I waited for the passing traffic then squirted a small spray of lavender under each arm. I sniffed and grimaced. With a bit of luck, the smell would die down and perhaps neutralise the sweat before I met him.

16:02

Should I arrive promptly? Early? Slightly late so as not to seem overeager?

Another batch of questions to remain unanswered. What was it about childhood and adolescence that threw up so many questions?

It didn’t take long to reach The Clearing. Down the main road, off a small side road then another and soon the trees were looming tall before me. I half ran and half slid down the slope, before making my way through trees that bent and twisted round my path to the centre of the wood. It almost certainly wasn’t the centre. The stretch beyond was probably much, much larger than the distance I’d covered but The Clearing always felt like it should be the natural centre of a wood, and so I thought of it as such.

16:08 and I had reached The Clearing way too early.

He wasn’t yet there but that was nothing to worry about. 

Seven minutes.

Four hundred and twenty seconds.

I could count them to pass the time. But I’d probably lose track past a hundred.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through. I’d half been expecting a message from him to say that he was on his way or nearly there.

I took out his note and reread it, feeling my heart beat more strongly with every word. Then something occurred to me which shook me for just a brief second, like when you’re descending steps and expect another but it’s just level ground. Why had he not just texted me? Why write a note, which was a much more risky means of communication and one that could unmask us both? Unless he’d not wanted an audit trail back to his own phone, should a friend get hold of it...

I looked down at the slip of paper half satisfied with the answer, was even glad he’d written in this way. It meant more. It was more, well, romantic, even though I hated that word. I’d never used it before. It was a word I associated with older lovers who showered each other with nauseating and pointless gestures. It was not a word that should be passing through the head of a schoolboy. 

I held the slip of paper, its existence pleasingly, thrillingly solid in my fingers. I knew I’d keep the message forever. A symbol of my first true love.

I folded it back up, the rustle of paper overlapped by another, more distant rustling.

Ready or not... here I come!

He was coming.

I breathed deeply.

Slowly and deeply.

To calm myself.

Everything would be alright.

He said so.

He said so himself.

The Clearing

Nervous excitement switched to confusion and fear with a suddenness I had never before encountered. It was as if my body had crashed causing the most intense whiplash. The stony and twiggy ground beneath my shoes no longer felt solid and may even have been retreating. The trees closed ranks and conspired to block out the afternoon sun. The Clearing was no longer an oasis but a pit of snakes. And I was the prey.

There were four of them and it was only when they got closer that I could see one of them was him. His hair was messier than usual - and not deliberately so - as if his product had worn off throughout the day or perhaps branches had interfered, tugging it into wild tufts. A flap of white shirt had come untucked, the same side that always did by the end of a school day. I observed this not with my usual affection but as a mere fact.

He had brought others. This was a trap.

I repeated the words in my head but the second time questioningly to offer me some shred of hope. This time, questions proved elusive. There was little doubt now.

He had brought others and this was a trap.

He had tricked and betrayed me. And not just betrayed me but everything we had ever shared between us, going back to when we’d first played cowboys and Indians in this very setting, with one cowboy and one Indian, a plastic gun (its trigger snapped off) and a bow and suckered arrow.

I stood up so I could better defend myself, feeling ridiculous as I was clearly outnumbered. Perhaps it would have been better to remain seated as if I didn’t care.

But the situation was still evolving and everything changed again when I saw his expression of surprise upon seeing me. An expression so genuine that it touched me deeply and I wanted to run up to him and throw my arms around him and cry into his dusty jacket shoulder and cling onto his untucked flap of white shirt, my surrender.

They’d now all reached the clearing properly, their faces visible. He looked from me to the others, as if he were trying to understand what was going on. The others looked at me as if I were a part of the clearing. They had expected me. He hadn’t. In a sense, we were now both victims, although I had a fairly good idea who was about to come off worse.

And then, just as everything in my life had seemed to be falling into place not half an hour earlier, so new bits drifted into position, changing what I thought I’d known and solidifying a new, terrible truth.

He had not texted me because the note had not come from him at all. And it dawned on me like a scientific discovery that he hadn’t capitalised ‘the clearing’ because whoever of the other three had emulated his handwriting wouldn’t - couldn’t possibly - have known that. 

The slip of paper, which had meant so much to me, now was like a vial of poison in my pocket, its words as tender and reassuring as the ink which had depicted me sucking a cock. It was worthless, degrading and I, in my hopeless state, had fallen for it.

As they neared, spreading out to form a ring around me, I took heart in the fact that he might not have forgotten the capitals at all. Then the smell of their sweat and Lynx and testosterone washed away such thoughts and replaced it with one. Whether I would live or die. 

“Afternoon, Booky,” one of them said.

“Funny we should meet you here of all places,” said another.

“What are you doing here?” the other asked, knowing full well.

He remained silent. His face was twisted into an expression of worried concentration, as if he were desperately plotting a chess move to save his skin. Or my skin...

What had the others told him? That they were just going for a muck about in the wood? His role in my life had been reduced to being mere bait for me.

“Leave me alone,” I said, my voice breaking.

One of them guffawed.

Another overlapped the laughter with a deliberately effeminate voice. “Ooh, the bitch has a temper.”

The third smiled, his face a lake of adolescent sebum cracking with gleeful anticipation.

They all had names. Irrelevant, though, for they all blurred into one, like Macbeth’s witches, a cackling coven with one uniform purpose. The three of them alone had no individual identity. They existed together as an entity. There was nothing about them. Not like him, who stood there now, unable (not unwilling) to interject and unable (not unwilling) to defend me.

One of them pulled the phone from my hand, another pushed me so forcefully I fell onto my backside, catching a brief snapshot of sky as I hit the ground. I was trying to return to my feet when a pair of hands grabbed my own and twisted them behind my back. It was now impossible to stand unless they hauled me upright and all I could do was half shift my legs about while they became hopelessly crushed beneath my weight.

“Throw me your tie,” the one behind me snapped, twisting my hand so I could not help but squeal like a trapped pig.

He secured my hands, yelling at me to keep still otherwise the other’s shoe, its toe intermittently prodding my chest, would kick the air out of my lungs. 

To my shame, I was now crying. My eyes had been pricked with tears of pain but the tears that now fell were because of something much deeper. How could he be letting this happen? Why could it not have been him who’d written the note? We should have been here together, alone. And beyond that perhaps there was a sense of relief that all this that had happened over the preceding months - whatever this was - was now coming to a final, merciful end.

“Do it now,” I heard from behind me. He’d now stood up and was using his right foot to pin down my left calf. As if I could have got myself to my feet without him there...

The effort of writhing about, trying to find some momentum to stand and escape, was futile and just left me panting for breath. Perhaps I was destined just to accept my fate.

Something appeared before my face. I couldn’t focus initially because my vision had been clouded by those unexpected and unwelcome tears. I tried to blink them away.

“Guys, what’s going on? Leave him alone.”

He said that. Or he said something like that. I only caught a fragment but it was the most important thing in the world to me that he said that. And so, whether or not he did utter those exact words, in my mind they became instant fact. I needed for him to have said that.

And then he spoke again. “Honestly, he’s not worth it.”

I forgave him that immediately. I knew why he’d added those words. He was trying to survive too, after all.

The thing before my face came into focus as a lipstick and one of them held my head in between a vice of hands as another daubed it across my mouth in three aggressive strokes. I could smell it. It reminded me of my mother.

Jesus, I was now wearing women’s deodorant and lipstick. The thought almost made me laugh, which seemed preposterous under the circumstances. But these thoughts were good. As long as I was having these thoughts, it meant I was alive. 

And if I didn’t think such things, I’d probably just let go and wet myself.

They weren’t laughing any more. This was a serious business to them and they went about their work with concentration furrowed in their brows. I didn’t know what he was doing - my vision had blurred again - but he had to be figuring out how to put a stop to this before it went any further. 

Because if he wasn’t, then there was no future for the human race, let alone for me.

“Beautiful,” one of them said. 

“You look gorgeous.” That effeminate voice again, even though I didn’t think I sounded like that at all.

And then a phone was being held up in front of me.

“All we want is a confession.”

“Then you’re free to go.”

I knelt there, a foot still pressing into my calf. Each pulse of pain, previously weakening me, now reignited a determination, that had been until now almost wholly absent, not to bow to these bullies.

I recalled a phrase that had stayed in my mind, although its source was now forgotten. That it was better to die upright than to live life on your knees.

I was different. I knew that. I didn’t know how different or even if I was different in the way they wanted me to confess. 

Confess? I had nothing to confess.

“Free to go,” I echoed. “How kind of you.”

They ignored my response. Perhaps they hadn’t expected me to put up a fight. Perhaps they didn’t know how to respond to such bold sarcasm.

“I think we should practise first.”

“Practise what?” I said, regretting the question for it let slip my frustration and fear. My hands hurt and so did my back, and my legs were starting to go numb. I wanted to tell them to let go of me, to let the fuck go of me, but I would not ask to be freed. It was my right to be free. I would not ask for that right.

“Okay,” the one with the cameraphone said, “you’re going to say the following... Are you listening? Hey, are you listening?”

I hurled a globule of spit at the lens on the cameraphone, my punishment a slap so loud that it sent a bird flapping off towards the sky. A witness gone.

“You’re gonna repeat after me...”

Gonna. It reminded me of how he’d said the word ‘godda’ that time at the school gates just before he’d left me. 

“You’re gonna repeat after me... ‘My name is Alfie Thomas and I’m a faggot.’”

“And then... and then... he should blow a kiss at the camera.”

“Make him blow a kiss.”

Suggestions were hurled enthusiastically at the director. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. But not him. He remained silent, somewhere, out of my line of vision. I bit my lips alternately, trying to scrape off some of the lipstick with my teeth.

“You ready?” the director shouted at me. Or maybe it was aimed behind me because the foot left my calf and its owner disappeared out of camera-shot. “Aaaand... action...”

The clearing went silent, the film set for my confession. Its capitals had gone. This was no longer The Clearing, My Clearing, or Our Clearing. This was a clearing and the words I was about to utter would no doubt be spread all over social media within minutes. My school life, as I now knew it, would be no more. What had previously gone unspoken and suspected was about to be yelled from the rooftops. They would all be in no doubt now.

I closed my eyes, swallowed and started speaking...

Him

“My name is Alfie...”

“Cut! Open your eyes. They need to see you looking at the camera.”

I opened my eyes, tears I no longer had any control over leaking out.

“Go on.”

“My name is Alfie and I...”

“Cut! Cut! Fucking Cut! Your name is Alfie Thomas. You have to give your full name.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, genuinely surprised at how calmly I was uttering the words.

He paused and it was as if my question had temporarily stopped the cogs of their plan turning. 

“Because...” he said, falteringly, “... It’s not what we gain, but what you lose.”

“And because we don’t like you,” one of the others chipped in.

It struck me that if each of them were to sit down, alone, and actually think this whole thing through, not one of them would be able to come up with a reason which entirely satisfied him. Was I actually starting to pity these idiots, with whom my life was now entrusted?

I stared at the back of the phone again, waiting, still waiting for him to save me.

“My name is Alfie Thomas,” I said, holding my head as high as I could manage, “and I...” 

The clearing was silent. Absolute silence, interrupted only by the intermittent call of some bird.

“... like boys.”

Those words had the oddest effect on me and, for reasons which differed entirely from what the gang had surely hoped, fresh tears flooded over my cheeks and leaked into my mouth, onto my neck and down onto the mud in which I knelt.

He had moved into my line of vision and I could have sworn he had tears in his eyes. Or was I just blinded by my desire to see tears in his eyes? Tears of final understanding. Or was I simply blinded by my own tears, a physical distortion of reality?

The director lowered the phone, apparently frustrated by this anticlimax and the relative ease with which the words had left my mouth, even if they weren’t the precise words I’d been ordered to speak. He slipped the phone into his pocket, the others waiting for his next move.

 And then they were laying into me, kicking me and kicking me and kicking me.

And kicking me.

Whether it was because I’d given them what they wanted so easily, or whether it was because of what I’d said and the effect it had had on me, I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was about to die. 

Faces appeared before me. My mother and father and Francois and me... and him. We all watched as I fell sideways, receiving more and more kicks. The faces disappeared, bubbles popped, and I could see the blurred angry faces of the present. And then another face appeared. Bucky’s. And at that moment, the tie came loose, my hands finally freed, and it was as if Bucky himself had cut me free with his...

Something pushed at my leg, not just the bodies of my attackers but something else too, nudging my thigh, insisting its presence. And I saw what I needed to do. It was so clear to me I watched myself carrying out the actions before I actually did.

Another body joined us and we became a tumbling, writhing mass of hands and arms and legs. A hand covered my face, a finger digging into my eyeball. It was too much. I screamed out in pain. Then screamed again for all the kicks I’d silently taken. I heard them not as my own screams but those of an animal.

I slipped my right hand inside my trouser pocket. Pulled out the knife.

I fingered it until the blade flicked open and then I jabbed it forward blindly, the driving force the question: Why hadn’t he saved me?

It must have been something of a miracle in that mass of bodies that the knife sliced air and I held my arm extended, fully expecting for it to be knocked from my grip.

It wasn’t. Perhaps they hadn’t seen it.

I withdrew my hand, screwed up my face and lashed out again, wincing this time as I felt resistance before the blade slid into material and skin and beyond. I didn’t stop pushing until the handle prevented further penetration.

I didn’t feel anything any more. I didn’t feel power or anger or sadness or regret. I just knew that I’d done what I could and awaited my own death. But I wasn’t afforded anything so merciful and, after wanting to survive for so long, I now wished the knife had penetrated my own body.

They didn’t realise what I’d done until the mass of our writhing bodies became slick with blood. Only then did they all fall away, leaving me lying there, every inch of my body roaring in agony.

But I could breathe again. The knife had given me back my lungs. 

“Shit, what have you done?”

“Oh my god.”

“What have you done? What have you fucking done?”

They didn’t sound like boys any more. Their voices were strangely manic, high-pitched. They were children.

And then I saw him lying there motionless. And I re-enacted moments earlier, watching, from a position outside the clearing, the point at which a new body had joined the scrum, his body. Had he joined in or tried to break it up? And would I never know?

“Ambulance. No, police. Ambulance. Both. I don’t know,” I heard one of them saying, his voice strained, hoarse, choked, child-like.

The clearing spun and I half reached out, half fell forward onto his body. I heaved him over so I could see his face, hoping until the very last moment that I was mistaken and it was not him. A smudge of dirt streaked diagonally across his forehead. The front of his white shirt had turned red. The blood kept coming in pulsing gurgles from a hole, the outline of which was impossible to define. 

His blood kept coming. Over my hands, over my fingers, my nails, my skin...

It came from nowhere into my head that perhaps he hadn’t been ill at all on those days of absence from school. Perhaps he’d been with a girl...

I looked down at him and for the tiniest fraction of a second felt he perhaps deserved this fate, if that were true. But the guilt from this thought delivered a blow far greater than all those I’d previously received and I knew I could never wish any harm on this beautiful fragile being before me.

I started coughing. No, not coughing, choking. Or shaking or crying. I don’t know which. “He’s bleeding,” I heard myself say. “He’s bleeding.”

It was all I could utter as life flowed from his body. And although I was up close, right amidst the blood, I watched as if from afar. He didn’t look in pain. He seemed peaceful. It was how I’d imagined he’d look while sleeping.

I somehow knew that there was nothing to be done and so I just held him while the others stood there, in shock, their fingers running through muddy and bloody hair. The one who’d dialled the emergency services was waving his free arm about and I watched him mouthing words I could not hear.

I leaned in closer and shook him gently, knowing deep down he’d not respond.

“Joe,” I said. “Joe? Joe?”

I watched his motionless mouth, lips that had kissed me in that glorious parallel universe. And then I was aware that my head was lowering. I could smell him as I pushed my lips against his and kissed him for the first and only time.

When I knelt upright again, one of them had the knife in his hand. My heart drummed in my chest, ordering me to stay with him and stay holding him and die alongside him.

But the adrenaline surged through me, or the hopeless and pathetic coward in me surfaced, and I let go of him and scraped myself to my feet, losing a shoe in the process.

I did not stay to retrieve it. I just ran.

What followed became a blur, each step, each action, each breath recorded somewhere in my mind to be brought out in painful detail over future days and dreams.

I ran and hurt and ran and hurt and then a lady was talking to me... and behind her... a blue pulsating light, which should have been harsh and stark against the awful beauty of those woods... but, through my tears, it seemed soft and welcoming and...

Not just a boy

Six months later

From across the street, crouched down behind the battered old car which looks as if it will fall apart if anyone touches it, let alone attempts to move it, I watch him leave his house. I feel like a stalker or a predator, but his mother will not allow me near the house and it is the only way I can be sure of getting him alone.

He walks well enough and you’d never know that he almost lost his life just a few months ago. When I pull up alongside, he almost jumps out of his skin.

“Shit,” he says.

“Thanks, Joe,” I reply, hoping to break the ice. The last time we spoke to each other - actually communicated directly and not via official people - was in the hospital. It feels as if so much has happened since then and that we have both come out the other side different people. No, not different people, changed people. I believe we are essentially the same beneath our newly acquired layers. Or at least I hope we are.

He half laughs and turns off his road into the park. I match his step and we walk along in a silence that somehow doesn’t feel awkward, perhaps because it is a shared silence, and sit down on adjacent swings too small for us now.

“How have you been?” he asks.

I laugh.

“What?” he says.

“You’re asking how I’ve been?!”

He shakes his head, dismissively. 

“Oh come on, you almost...” I stop mid sentence, cursing myself for even attempting to say it. I don’t even consider the effect the words might have on him. It is their effect on me of which I am most afraid.

I stop, pause, feel grateful that he is even allowing me near him. “Sorry,” I continue. “I mean, sorry... for... for everything that...”

“It’s in the past,” he says, wincing comically. Then I begin to wonder if it is genuine pain.

“How can you be so...? I can’t even begin to describe how I’ve felt this entire time.”

“You were defending yourself. It was self-defence,” he replies, matter-of-factly. As if that can excuse anything and everything. For me, this time, the law also sees it as such, but the far more overwhelming thought in my mind is that I nearly killed him, and had the outcome been different, the swings on which we now sit might only have been moving under the force of a breeze. He shrugs. “I would have done the same.”

“But you wouldn’t have even got into that situation. I was... I mean... It should never have even got to that stage.” I need time to work out what to say, time of which I’ve had so much since, and still I haven’t stumbled upon an edit I am happy with.

He shrugs again and I feel briefly annoyed that he is acting as if we’re discussing something trivial.

“I’m sorry too.”

“Sorry? Why?” I ask.

“For not helping you. For not stopping them...”

“Not your fault,” I say, but I know that it partly is his fault and not a day has gone by since that awful day when I haven’t told myself that if only my friend had done something to intervene...

“You’re just saying that.”

I watch him wrestling with words in his head, just like I am, and I know that he has been through a hell too, and not just physically.

“How’s the new school?” he asks, changing the subject, mercifully for us both.

“Crap,” I reply.

We both smile, rocking gently on the swings, our too-long legs having to bend sideways to miss the ground.

“I told Mum I wouldn’t be long,” he says, after another minute or two of silence.

“Oh, right.”

“I’m lucky she lets me out on walks at all!”

“Yeah.”

“So, do you want to hang out again some time?”

I am temporarily stunned by the question. Not only can I not believe what he’s just said, but I never even thought of this encounter as ‘hanging out’ at all.

“What?” I reply.

“Hellooooo!” he says, and the sing-song, sarcastic way he drags out the word takes me back to a hot summer’s day when we were in a school library together and he rested his hand on my forehead.

I shake my head a little to free myself of the image. “I guess...”

“You guess?”

“I mean... yes, please... that’d be great.”

“Please?! Alfie, this is me you’re talking to. Your old friend!”

“Yeah, but...” I start, then trail off.

“I’d like to hang out with you again,” he says. “Like the good old days!” He smiles and I cannot help but laugh at his mimicry of an elderly person.

I almost say something about us being too old for hide and seek now but I don’t because it’s too close to The Clearing, and we will never visit that place again, nor mention it.

“On one condition,” he says.

“What?”

“I’ll hang out with you on one condition.”

I stare at him, blankly.

“You kiss me,” he continues.

I am conscious that I am staring now, and my mind is flipping a somersault.

“That’s the condition?” I reply, eventually and cautiously. “I kiss you?”

“Yeah, but just on the cheek.”

“I don’t get it.”

“If you kiss me, it might help you get it out of your system and then we can just get back to how things used to be, right?”

I sort of see the reasoning but cannot believe he is asking me to kiss him and sacrifice himself in this way.

“Shit,” I say. “I mean, I can’t... Don’t make me do this. Please.”

“Make you do it?” he says. “Am I really that repulsive?”

“You know what I mean.” I flush red.

“Are you going to kiss me or not? Mum is expecting me back soon. I said I’d only go round the block.”

My swing naturally reaches a standstill.

“Come on! Hurry up! Am I going to have to beg for you to kiss me?”

I look round to check nobody is nearby and then, purely to shut him up, lean over to where he is sitting and plant a quick gentle kiss on his cheek.

“Is that it? You’ll have to do better than that when you get a boyfriend, you know,” he says.

“Piss off!” I laugh, leaning in for another kiss, a second attempt.

But he moves his head and laughs himself. “I said a kiss, not several!”

I shrug. “Fair enough.”

“Better get back now. Mum’ll be having a fit.”

“Shall I...?”

“Nah, better not. If Mum is looking out of the window then...”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“Well, I’ll maybe text you then...”

“Cool.” I use all my strength to feign nonchalance.

“See you,” he says, turning to walk off. He has gone three paces when I have to call out to him. “Yeah?” he says, at my voice.

“You don’t mind, then?”

“Mind? Why should I mind?”

I nod, try hopelessly to put some words together but by the time I have come close to giving them sound - with reluctance, for they would only tell a fraction of what I really feel about his reaction - he has gone.

I scuff my shoes back, crook my legs and swing, tilting my face towards the sky. I feel the wind on my skin and see trees and clouds and grass. And I see myself swinging on a swing from afar. A boy swinging on a swing. And then I am myself again and feel the breeze afresh and I know I am not just a boy but so much more.

About the Author

Jonathan Hill is an author from Manchester, UK. His most significant work to date, FAG, a hard-hitting novel set in an English boarding school in the 1930s, was named as the overall winner in the Self-Published and Small Press 2014 Book Awards. Covering a wide range of genres, he has penned the hit comedy series of Maureen books and the novellas Pride, The Anniversary, and Is it Her? He has also published several collections of short stories and 100-word drabbles. He firmly believes that writing should not only entertain but also enhance and change the way readers view the world. When he’s not writing and working as a pharmacist, he enjoys reading, photography and going to the theatre.

www.jhillwriter.com

www.fagthenovel.com

http://facebook.com/jhillwriter

http://twitter.com/jhillwriter

mailto:jhillwriter@gmail.com

Also by Jonathan Hill

Novels

FAG

Novellas

Pride

The Anniversary

Is it Her? (with Kath Middleton)

The Maureen Series

Maureen goes to Venice (Maureen #1)

A Letter for Maureen (Maureen #2)

Maureen and The Big One (Maureen #3)

Maureen’s Christmas Carol (Maureen #4)

Maureen Gets Crafty (A short story)

Short Story Collections

Eclectic: Ten Very Different Tales

Beyond Eclectic

100 One Hundred Word Tales

Beyond 100 Drabbles (with Kath Middleton)

To view these books on Amazon:

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