“Neat as mumsy fuck.” His pony-tail quivered with anger.
“You want to loosen up a little, mate.” He yanked my tie and then, on second thoughts, tightened it totally. The other stabbed me again – this time right up into the armpit – and then scored me across the forehead with the same weapon.
“Record-keeping’s important. We got so many to get through we don’t want to be repeating ourselfs, innit.”
Michael saw us from the far end of the corridor and shouted to me that he was going to get his Uncle Denny to handle it after school.
“Nah, actually I’ll get him. He’ll come straight up school!” They turned towards Michael on his mobile and must have clocked the genetic link because they swore and dropped me over a fire extinguisher to hurry off in the opposite direction. Michael pulled me out of the corridor and into a classroom where he loosened my tie.
“Is it blood?” I asked, raising my head from my hands, gasping.
“Could be, man. Just in time, eh?” He was triumphant, breathing hard and fast, rabbit-punching the whiteboard and then plunging his face into a bag of crisps he’d ripped apart.
“Thanks for your help, mate.” I was still shaking and dabbing at my wound, which was in fact pink highlighter pen.
“It was nothing. Do you want me to take you somewhere? To Ronaldson? I’d like to tell him what made them run. Teach him to diss our Denny!”
“Nah, I’m fine…” But nor did I want to be left to face these corridors alone.
Dad came in late from Zürich, but there was enough time for him to get furious on my behalf. Tommy and Rosie didn’t even bother to take up their stair positions but I settled with some nervousness.
“Do you see now, Polly?”
“See what?” But she had caught a glimpse.
“Jack can’t cope. They are beasts in that school. They may be part of your blessed community but that hardly makes it better. They will beat up our son because of the way he looks. He is powerless. What can he do?”
“What did you do at your precious public school, Martin? How did you survive?”
“This didn’t happen, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t believe you weren’t bullied.”
“Don’t say it like that. I wasn’t terrorised. This Chevy Oak is an aggressive place. His primary school cardboard castles and peppermint creams, they won’t help him now. Football might have done but he seems to play that less and less.”
I shot downstairs and burst in. “I gave it up today!” They barely looked at me.
“So what, Martin? Games aren’t everything.” Mum was plunging her needle in and out of my blazer.
“Football isn’t a game. It’s a vital early form of communication. Before they can really talk, boys kick a ball. And if boy doesn’t kick ball, boy gets himself kicked. It’s body language at its simplest.”
Mum turned on me.
“Why don’t you play?”
Stay strong, Mum, I remember thinking. You don’t have to ask his questions for him. They both looked at me.
“It goes through my legs, especially at this new school. We have to play with tennis balls.”
“Tennis ball football?” cried Dad. “Now I’ve heard it all.”
My first break at Chevy Oak School had broken painfully. The second had to be much, much better. These twenty minutes, I could see, were the day’s key jostle time – preen-time, be-seen-time – even more important than the end of school at the front gate.
It poured with rain lesson three. Bumcheeks came on the loudspeaker to say we could spend break in our classrooms. I was relieved. But the sun mocked me, coming out brilliantly just before the buzzer, and I was soon being urged towards the sopping tarmac by hundreds of kids.
The airport was as busy as usual, executive jets from the side runway taking off directly across the playground. Would Dad actually be able to look down on my antics? The sudden sun warmed me a bit through the reinforced seams of my blazer. Lots of juniors were enjoying the new football rule, and even Michael and Razza were mincing about with tennis balls. Nothing there for me of course. I remained on the step, alone with the voices.
“This is where we live,” I could hear Mum say. “It may not be particularly peaceful or lovely, Martin, but…” I traced her sing-song tone with my finger on the pitted brickwork.
Two of our classmates were taking the opportunity to play mini-tennis with a couple of old racquets. I saw my pony-tailed attacker from yesterday casually interrupt the mini-tennis (“Can I be ball boy, children?”) and walk off with their ball to laugh coldly with his mates.
“He’ll be dragged down…” Dad’s insistence was loud inside my head.
“It’s a perfectly good school with a nice mix of all sorts. There aren’t that many difficult kids. Besides, what do you think he is going to be dragged down into? This is where he lives – he’s in it already. Difficult kids are part of the experience. They lead difficult, realistic lives.”
“And they tend to become very difficult adolescents. Difficult men.”
“All schools produce difficult men – all schools. Jack will learn to cope. He’s got so much going on here. He doesn’t need to go whizzing off. He can learn to whiz here.”
“He’s sensitive. He’ll be bullied.”
“And he won’t be bullied somewhere else?”
“Bullied in the wrong way.”
Suddenly I was standing, with what Razza was to describe later as “summat shining in your eye”. My legs were no longer lamb-like. It was coiled-spring time.
I grabbed a racquet and fired myself towards the older boys. Half a mile away a Lear jet was accelerating at us, forcing its noise towards the playground.
“Where you going?” Michael barked.
Ducking into the group of older boys, I snatched back the tennis ball from the bully and barged out through the other side. The roar of the plane did little to drown out “You little fuck!” and “Shit, back here now!” but I was running, running towards the fence and everyone in the playground was looking at me. I had just seconds before the plane took off and before I would be brought down, pulled off the chicken wire like a convict.
When I fancied I could see the olive in Dad’s Martini, I slid to a stop, swung the racquet and, with champagne timing, crashed the balding sphere into space. As we all watched it go I caught the look of amazement, crinkling into fury, on the pilot’s speeding face. The whites of his eyes lit up for an astonished moment as the ball hit his shiny jet.
“Right between the wheels,” yelled Michael, skidding to my side with a bunch of new admirers. “Wot a shot!”
They grabbed their groins and danced in mock agony, pretending to be nutted jets.
“Aim high!” I shouted. “Forget your fucking football and aim high!”
The sphere returned to planet Earth to be caught by a laughing senior. More and more kids were doing the groin dance now and pecking their heads up into the air. I began to laugh. If I had really, really caught the Lear between the legs, Dad might have felt the tremor too. Had I made him sit up and take note of me already?
Anything