Truth & Dare (29 page)

“He’ll know,” whispered Jon. “Your parents’ll guess it’s me. They’ll tell my dad.”

“They won’t. They’ll be too busy beating the tar out of me.”

“My dad’s going to find out.”

“How will he?” said Davy reasonably.

“He just will,” stuttered Jon. “He’ll kill me. He’ll get me by the throat and never let go.”

“Bollocks,” said Davy too lightly. “We’re not kids anymore. The sky’s not going to fall in on us. You’re just shitting your shorts at the thought of anyone calling you a faggot, aren’t you?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Touchy, aren’t you? It’s only a word.”

“We’re not, anyway,” he told Davy coldly. “That’s not what we are.”

The boy’s mouth crinkled with amusement. “Oh, so what are we then?”

“We’re mates,” said Jon through a clenched throat.

One coppery eyebrow went up.

“Mates who mess around a bit.”

“Fag-got! Fag-got!” Davy sang the words quietly.

Jon’s hand shot out to the stereo and turned it way up to drown him out.

Next door, Michaela started banging on the wall. “
Jonathan
!” she wailed.

He turned it down a little, but kept his hand on the knob.

“Get out,” he said.

Davy stared back at him blankly. Then he reached for his jacket and got up in one fluid movement. He looked like a scornful god. He looked like nothing could ever knock him down.

Jon avoided Davy all week. He walked home from training sessions while Davy was still in the shower. In the back of his mind, he was preparing a contingency plan.
Deny everything. Laugh. Say the sick pervert made it all up
.

Nobody else seemed to notice the two friends weren’t on speaking terms. Everyone was preoccupied with the big match on Saturday.

At night Jon gripped himself like a drowning man clinging to a spar.

Saturday came at last. The pitch was muddy and badly cut up before they even started. The other team were thugs, especially an enormous winger with a mustache. From the kickoff, Saul’s team played worse than they’d ever done before. The left-back crashed into his central defender, whose nose bled all down his shirt. Jon moved like he was shackled.
Whenever he had to pass the ball to Davy, it fell short or went wide by a mile. It was as if there was a shield around the
red-haired
boy and nothing could get through. Davy was caught offside three times in the first half. Then, when Jon pitched up a loose ball on the edge of his own penalty area, one of the other team’s forwards big-toed a fluke shot into the top
right-hand
corner.

“You’re running round like blind men,” Saul told his team at half-time, with sorrow and contempt.

By the start of the second half, the rain was falling
unremittingly
. The fat winger stood on Peter’s foot, and the ref never saw a thing. “Look,” bawled Peter, trying to pull his shoe off to show the marks of the studs.

The other team found this hilarious. “Wankers! Faggots!” crowed the fat boy.

Rage fired up Jon’s thudding heart, stoking his muscles. He would have liked to take the winger by the throat and press his thumbs in till they met vertebrae. What was it Saul always used to tell him?
No son of mine ever gets himself sent off for temper
. Jon made himself turn and jog away.
No son of mine
, said the voice in his head.

Naz chipped the ball high over the defense. Jon was there first, poising himself under the flight of the ball. It was going to be a beautiful header. It might even turn the match around.

“Davy’s,” barked Davy, jogging backwards toward Jon.

Jon kept his eyes glued to the falling ball. “Jon’s.”

“It’s mine!” Davy repeated, at his elbow, crowding him.

“Fuck off!” He didn’t look. He shouldered Davy away, harder than he meant to. Then all of a sudden Jon knew how it was going to go. He wasn’t ready to meet the ball; he didn’t believe he could do it. He lost his balance, and the ball came down on the side of his head and crushed him into the mud.

Jon had whiplash.

Saul came home from the next training session and said Davy was off the team.

“You cunt,” said Jon.

His father stared, slack-jawed. Michaela’s fork froze halfway to her mouth. “Jonathan!” appealed their mother.

Above his foam whiplash collar, Jon could feel his face burn. But he opened his mouth and it all spilled out. “You’re not a coach, you’re a drill sergeant. You picked Davy to bully because you know he’s going to be a better player than you ever were. And now you’ve kicked him off the team just to prove you can. So much for team-fucking-spirit!”

“Jonathan.” His father’s face was dark, unreadable. “It was the lad who dropped out. He’s quit the team and he’s not coming back.”

One afternoon at the end of a fortnight, Davy came round. Jon was on his own in the living room, watching an old France 1998 video of England versus Argentina. He thought Davy looked different—baggy-eyed, older somehow.

Davy stared at the television. “Has Owen scored yet?”

“Ages ago. They’re nearly at penalties.” Jon kept his eyes on the screen.

Davy dropped his bag by the sofa but didn’t sit down, didn’t take his jacket off. In silence they watched the agonizing
shootout
.

When it was over, Jon hit rewind. “If Beckham hadn’t got himself sent off, we’d have demolished them,” he remarked.

“In your dreams,” said Davy. They watched the flickering figures. After a long minute he added, “I’ve been meaning to come round, actually, to say, you know, sorry and all that.”

“It’s nothing much, just a bit of whiplash,” said Jon, deliberately obtuse. He put his hand to his neck, but his fingers were blocked by the foam collar.

“You’ll get over it. No bother.”

“Yeah,” said Jon bleakly. “So,” he added, not looking at Davy, “did you talk to your parents?”

“Yeah.” The syllable was flat. “Don’t worry, your name didn’t come up.”

“I didn’t—”

“Forget it,” interrupted Davy softly. He was staring at the video as it rewound; a green square covered in little frenzied figures who ran backwards, fleeing from the ball.

That subject seemed closed. “I hear you’re not playing, these days,” said Jon.

“That’s right,” said Davy, more briskly. “Thought I should get down to the books for a while, before my A-levels.”

Jon stared at him.

“I’m off to college next September, touch wood.” Davy rapped on the coffee table. “I’ve already got an offer of a place in Law at Lancaster but I’ll need two Bs and an A.”

Law? Jon nodded, then winced as his neck twinged. So much he’d never known about Davy, never thought to ask. “You could sign up again in the summer, though, after your exams, couldn’t you?” he asked, as neutrally as he could.

There was a long second’s pause before Davy shook his head. “I don’t think so, Jon-boy.”

So that was it, Jon registered. Not a proper ending. More like a match called off because of a hailstorm or because the star player just walked off the pitch.

“I mean, I’ll miss it, but when it comes down to it, it’s only a game, eh? … Win or lose,” Davy added after a moment.

Jon couldn’t speak. His eyes were wet, blinded.

Davy picked up his bag. Then he did something strange. He swung down and kissed Jon on the lips, for the first time, on his way out the door.

“W
HY D’YOU HAVE
all those pencils anyway?” Trace
demanded
in her loud, playing-to-an-audience voice. “It’s not like you even
use
them. Who in their right mind needs seven identical pencils?”

A titter ran round the room and all eyes watched for the inevitable action that would follow.

Trace jabbed at the pencils so that they scattered out of line and skidded across the desk.

“It makes me mad to just
look
at them!” she announced and swept them off the desk. They flew helter-skelter over the wooden floor and rolled under the desks. Trace glowered at me defiantly.

Like a trained monkey I did what was expected of me and collected them silently, sweating all down my back and trembling in case the lead had broken inside one of them. I sat down in front of the desk and pulled my chair in as far as possible and slowly wiggled each lead. Luckily none of them was seriously damaged, but I had to sharpen them again as one had lost the tip of its point—I needed them all to be the same length, exactly.

Pencil sharpening calms me down, although it obviously has the opposite effect on Trace. I get agitated easily and I’m not considered quite “normal” (although I think the definition of
“normal’ is often quite abnormal). For instance, I like to put everything in place and have routines to feel secure and I don’t like people much. They don’t understand me and I certainly don’t understand them.

“Ergh!” Trace groaned in exasperation and flounced off with her little group of chosen friends. The drones—the useless males—just stand about looking on with bored, expressionless faces. Out of lesson time they stick to the wall day after day doing nothing and hoping that some desperate girl will fling herself at them, wanting to get laid. I have no contact at all with the drones.

Ed on the other hand is a different kind of male, the kind that all the girls fancy—big, blond, beautiful and brainless—and is geared up to becoming a professional footballer. And he is going out with Trace. Everyone wants to be in the alpha group with Ed and Trace. I am allowed on the very edge of the group “just for comedy value.” I know this because I can hear them discussing it and laughing at me (for some reason, they think that because I wear glasses and keep to myself that my hearing’s impaired). I know what “comedy value” means, of course, but I have never found anything funny or comic in my life. Why
do
people laugh?

“Oh, let him sit at our table,” said Trace. “He’s so—like—weird. Though he makes me mad, I like him ’cos he’s different. I like to try and wind him up till he doesn’t know what to do. Mostly I can’t get a reaction but sometimes he explodes and then boing! He’s off like a manic spring.”

“Well, he just pisses me off,” said Ed, “but we’ll keep him just for comedy value. (There’s that expression, you see.) He fancies you anyway; he’ll do anything you tell him.”

I’m known by many names at school: Saddo, Loser, Weirdo, Geek, Nerd, or Freak. I don’t usually answer but if I do, I’ll answer to any of these names—it’s easier than making a fuss,
and the teachers pretend they don’t hear how everyone talks to me. In fact, the teachers are just as bad. If they want to ask me a question they just point at me, and say, “You!” No one ever asks me if I have a real name.

There’s nothing odd about all of this. I’m completely used to it. It’s pleasantly predictable, in fact.

Even when I was very young I didn’t often speak, so my parents didn’t speak to me much either. Whenever I
did
speak they looked at me as if they couldn’t understand a word I was saying, or perhaps they couldn’t be bothered to listen.

When I was about eight-years-old, my father decided to make a bit of an effort with me and see if he could interest me in making things out of wood, like him. He took me out to his shed in the garden. I loved it in there—the smell of paint and creosote and the oily steel tools. I was desperate to explore everything behind this usually locked door.

And this is more or less how the conversation in the shed went. I know it’s correct because I wrote it down after it happened. I’m always writing things down so that I can try to work out what people mean and why they say what they do.

“Let’s start with a toy boat,” he’d said.

“What for?” I’d asked. (I had no interest in toys or boats.)

“Because it’s a nice first project to make and you can make some funnels and paint it. It’ll be fun and we can do it together.”

“I don’t understand why it will be ‘fun’. What does fun mean? The funnels won’t really work. I don’t need a toy boat. What would I
do
with it?”

“You can launch it on the pond and see if it floats,” Dad had said.

“But of course it will float, we know already that it will float
because it’ll be made of wood, and wood floats. I want to see what’s in that box instead,” I’d said, climbing on a stool and grabbing a large dusty cardboard box and at the same time knocking a full bottle of whiskey off the shelf, which smashed on to the floor. Alcohol vapours filled the shed. I’d ignored this new smell because I didn’t like it. I was more interested in the box.

“Wow!” I’d said, opening the box to reveal a large quantity of brand-new, best-quality HB graphite pencils.

“You useless little freak, look what you’ve done!” my father had shouted, staring at his shattered whiskey bottle and suddenly losing it. “You’re no son of mine, you’re bloody abnormal. Why the hell don’t you want to make things and play like normal kids? What is it with you and pencils? You can’t bloody well have my genes, you little misfit, you’re nothing to do with me—I always thought your mother was up to no good!”

I’d lined up all the pencils along the workbench and counted them. One hundred and forty-four!

He’d stormed into the house and upstairs. I could see him through the bedroom window taking clothes out of the wardrobe.

So you see it was nine years ago that I found out that I was a freak, abnormal, and a misfit. That’s quite a lot to discover all at once.

When we next heard from my father, he was living at the bottom of the road with a new woman and two new children. One day I saw the children close-up and they were both wearing glasses like me and had my prominent nose and would have had my protruding teeth, only they wore braces, so I think my father was wrong about the genes. They were clearly only a year or two younger than me so I think it must have been him who’d been up to no good, not Mum. One was
in the year below me at school and both were obviously drones so I had no interest in them.

I still share the house with my mother and we still only speak when necessary. I think, along with everyone else, she’s probably forgotten my name by now. And from when Dad first left, I was capable of looking after myself. I could cook eggs, buy my clothes, put them in the washing machine, and get myself to school.

Now I keep the kitchen spotless, scrubbing the floor and work surfaces and cleaning the cooker once a week. I like to try out new recipes from my
Cooking for One
cookbook. My mother keeps the fridge and cupboards well stocked. One day, a noticeboard appeared on the wall with a pencil attached by a string so that I could write down anything I needed. Once a year, a wrapped-up, usually pointless-looking toy, book, or game has been left on the kitchen table for my birthday. The
Cooking for One
cookbook is the only really useful thing my mother has ever given me. Our routine hasn’t changed in the last nine years, and the only other people who have entered the house are the meter man and the plumber.

The best thing about my father going to live with the new woman and my half-brothers is that I have his workshop to myself. When he moved out he left everything behind in the shed without a second thought. I have no more interest in making boxes and bowls than I had in making toy boats, but his tools and large box of pencils are another matter. The smell of cedar-wood pencils and the smell of the oily precision tools make me feel wild with desire and even give me exciting feelings in my trousers. I used to spend hours laying out the tools and measuring the length of everything in the workshop and writing the results down in my notebook.

When I was eleven, I noticed a little brown leather suitcase behind the shed door. It smelled musty and was scuffed and
had tarnished brass catches that snapped open and shut. I can’t think why I’d never noticed it before. From that day on I have always carried the suitcase to school, and everywhere else come to that. Every morning I pack my seven identical pencils, my sharpener, steel rule and engineer’s try square. Recently I added a pair of callipers. My father used them to check the diameter of bowls and candlesticks that he made on his lathe, but I have other ideas.

At the beginning of every day when I arrive at school I sharpen my seven pencils and lay them in a perfect line on my desk, each one exactly the same length as the others and the same distance apart, meticulously measuring with the steel rule and making sure they are square with the edge of the desk using the engineer’s square. I keep the same seven pencils until they are down to 75 mm long and then I replace them with seven more pencils from the box in the shed. It’s not an obsession; it is just something I do.

School is tedious but I work hard at math on my own at home. Although there are a few other fairly bright kids at school, I don’t think there has ever been any as clever as me. The drones make a point of not being clever on purpose. And the girls are really only drone-fodder so I ignore them—except, of course, for Trace.

It takes a lot to distract me from my pencils, but it’s a fact that I’m nearly as interested in Trace’s breasts as I am in them. I desperately want to discover whether her breasts are perfect or not. I have an awful suspicion that they might not be, and that one might be bigger than the other. This worries me a lot. I think about it so much that sometimes I can’t even concentrate on my math.

Once when Ed went out of the room, Trace seized the
opportunity to tease me. First she slowly undid the buttons of her blouse, revealing a pale pink lacy bra with a deep-pink rosebud in the middle, then she snatched one of my lined-up pencils—and plunged it behind the rosebud and down her cleavage and danced around the room.

“Come and get it, Weirdo!” she taunted in a sing-song voice. “No hands allowed!”

Having only six pencils lined up on my desk brought me out in a cold sweat—I could feel it dripping down my back, down my bottom, and down my legs into my socks. On the one hand I wanted to get my pencil back as quickly as possible, but on the other hand I wanted to linger over Trace’s breasts to try and gauge which breast, if either, was larger. I rushed toward her, tripping over a chair leg in my haste, and lunged at Trace’s cleavage, with everyone (except the drones) shouting and whistling. I grabbed the pencil with my teeth and then went into a trance-like stare. Unfortunately I was so close to Trace’s breasts that instead of the wonderful view I’d anticipated, all I could see were two large fuzzy pink blobs with what looked disconcertingly like one rose-colored nipple between them. I began to feel trembly and stirrings in my trousers.

“Hurry up, Perv!” (a new name to add to the others) Trace demanded.

“Errgh! Gross! How
could
you!” the girls squealed. The drones stayed stuck to their wall without a sound.

I slunk back to my desk and placed the pencil back safely with the others, after checking for damage (luckily there wasn’t any). But I was none the wiser about Trace’s breasts. Probably that is just as well, as the thought of any lack of symmetry about her—I shudder at the thought of the misplaced nipple—is too unsettling. However, I think it’s only fair at this point to reveal a little secret of my own.

Imagine my horror when one day I noticed, while standing naked in front of the full-length bathroom mirror, that my left testicle hung a little lower than my right. I panicked and tried to prise it up but of course it just dropped down to its previous level again. I realized that I’d have to devise a plan to rectify the matter.

Every night I tape the testicle, or rather that side of my scrotum, up so that it is level with the right side in the hope that it will eventually cure itself. I read that, like uneven breast sizes (and feet, but I have no interest in feet other than for their normal use), a lower-hanging testicle, especially a left one, is entirely “normal”. Eighty percent fall into this category. Why aren’t the remaining twenty percent the “normal” ones? Why isn’t perfection considered normal and imperfection abnormal? What reason can there possibly be for one testicle to be lower than the other? And why would one breast decide to grow larger than the other? I start applying the tape even more tightly, giving it an extra hard yank.

Our school is in the north of England on the edge of a small town surrounded by moorland with sheep and rocky outcrops and crags. The area is famous for its beauty, but most of the kids at the school think the town is boring, and the hills are even more boring, and so on Saturdays they head for the city. I like walking in the hills and sitting reading on the rocks. Sometimes I take my binoculars to look at the other people on the hills.

One day, during a study period, Trace and others were sitting squashed together on a metal table, kicking the table legs monotonously. I was doing calculus at another table, when Trace—looking out of the window—suddenly said,
“What’s up them hills?” I couldn’t help looking up at the window along with the others.

“They’re just hills,” said Ed.

“Anyone been up ’em?” asked Trace, after a pause.

(A longer pause.) “What for?” said Ed.

The drones looked round at me.

“Hey, what about you, Freako? You been up ’em?” demanded Trace, staring at me. I nodded my head and looked down. I hated being stared at, even by Trace.

“Why?” asked Trace. Here we go, I thought. Now she’d started on me I knew she wasn’t going to let go.