I like it here. There are no men, and there are no other boys. I don’t seem to be very good at being a boy and I’m afraid of men.
One man in particular.
‘Hello, boy, only Dad. You’re probably already in the pub. I watched y’dance on the box. Your, erm Comic Relief . . . spectacular. Huh! Bloody well done, mate. Bloody well done. I saw you being interviewed and worrying what I’d think. Dressed like that. Cobblers, mate! You looked good! You looked bloody marvellous, on that stage. I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m proud of you, boy. I probably don’t say it enough. You know me, silly old sod, I go me own way and I’ll probably die on me own. Haha. [brief pause] Proud of you, Rob. [another pause] I’m sorry I wasn’t much of a family man when you was a little boy. Couldn’t help it, mate; couldn’t help it. [voice cracking] All right, boy, I’ll let you go. Have a pint for me. You know how I feel about you. Cheerio, boy. Cheerio.’
I didn’t call him back. When I first heard that message, I didn’t know what to do.
I know what to do now. Come with me.
ACT ONE
1
Boys Can’t Get Enough of Dad
‘What is a history teacher? He’s someone who teaches mistakes.’
Graham Swift, Waterland
‘Pass it to Webb!’ shouts Pete Garvey, ‘Webb hasn’t had a kick yet!’ It’s 1984 and this is the first Games lesson at grammar school. Pete has known me for nearly a week and although it was kind of him to say ‘pass it to Webb’, he cannot know that he is making me, at best, a complicated offer.
He doesn’t know what happens when someone tries to pass me a football or what happens when I try to kick one. He comes from a different primary school and so wasn’t there when I was consistently the second-to-last boy to be picked for any team; the last being Mark Sharpe, who had cerebral palsy. No, Pete (or rather ‘Garvey’ because at this school girls keep their given names while boys won’t hear theirs again for years) is a kindly Top Male who wants to help. I wish he didn’t.
‘Why, you’ll be charging about like Bryan Robson!’ Auntie Trudy had said once she’d finished sewing ‘Webb’ labels into my new kit. The severity of the ‘Webb’ was at odds with the loving neatness of her stitches. Bryan Robson, I think. Yes, I’ve heard of that one. And Luther Blissett: that’s another one. What teams do they play for? England. I’ll just say they play for England and pretend I’m making a joke. And this top – blue with a white collar – what team is that? Definitely not England. Everton, then? Newcastle Rovers? Denmark?
As it happens, I’m not even wearing the top. It’s a warm afternoon in early September and the Games teacher, Mr Leighton, has divided us into ‘shirts’ and ‘skins’; i.e. the boys on the skins team are topless. Great. What happened to coloured armbands? What happened to those coloured sash things that you wore over one shoulder at junior school to show what team you were on? No, just shorts and boots now, apparently. It’s all a bit fucking Hitler Youth if you ask me. I’m running around with my arms weirdly by my sides so that my ribs don’t stick out so much. Aged eleven, my body makes an average garden rake look like it just had a great Christmas and could do with a nap.
It’s a long pass and I welcome the sight of the ball arching towards me in the same way that a quadriplegic nudist covered in jam welcomes the sight of a hornet. The ball is going to take a horribly long time to arrive because I have ‘found a space’. This is the football skill at which I excel. Oh, I can ‘find a space’ all right. Show me an empty patch of games field and I’ll stand in it. Or rather, I’ll hop around in it, looking desperately alert. My alertness is based on the knowledge that, at any moment, the empty patch could suddenly close up and fill with other players; that I might be made to come into contact with a football. I usually manage to avoid this. When the empty patch moves, I move.
But today my negative-space triangulation has gone wrong and I’ve found not just a ‘space’ but a ‘great space’. The ball is over halfway towards me and I note wretchedly that it’s an excellent pass. The bloody thing is going to drop at my feet like a gatepost swinging onto a latch. I have just enough time to look left and right as if checking for an interception from an opposing player. Actually, I’m looking left and right in the frantic hope of an interception from an opposing player. But no. No one is near enough. It’s just me, the ball, the good faith of Pete Garvey, and everyone watching.
Most of my concentration goes into fighting the urge to put my arms up to protect my nipples. Simultaneously, I extend my right foot up and forward in an attempt to trap the ball, which of course bounces straight under it and goes off the pitch. To complete the demonstration, I lose my balance and fall on my arse.
The consolation of this is that while getting up I can make sure I get muddy knees like the other boys. This will save me the usual bit of admin where I fall onto them deliberately when no one is looking. The general laughter isn’t especially cruel and Garvey yells, ‘Football isn’t really your game, is it, Webby?’ I muster the Wildean response ‘Not really!’ and notice the sound came through my nose. It’s his kindness that makes me nearly cry. Obviously I do nothing of the sort. That would be like showing an interest in poetry or getting a stiffy in the showers.
Communal showering is a fresh hell that concludes every Games lesson the way an awkward exchange of details concludes a car crash. At home, the bathroom door is always locked and, ‘bath night’ aside, I never change the top half and bottom half of me at the same time. I am, in short, a never-nude. In the changing room, I just about get from the bench to the shower without having a heart attack, watching my bare feet step daintily over the stud-punctured turf clods on the tiled floor. I also manage not to physically flinch at the echoed shouts from my fellow eleven-year-olds and the acrid smell of Ralgex and Right Guard which some of them are optimistically wafting about. I’m very proud of the fine sprinkling of pubic hairs I’ve managed to grow, although that area in general looks like the head of a ninety-year-old woman recently returned from a perm too many at the hairdresser’s. The hairs keep a discrete distance from each other and the essential baldness beneath catches the light. We are all, of course, surreptitiously checking each other out. I’m relieved to find that I have neither a small penis nor an unsettlingly large one. But in general I’m hopelessly skinny and I’m still recovering from the No. 2 hit that year, ‘So Macho!’, in which Sinitta made her feelings about what was required very clear: ‘I don’t want no seven stone weakling / Or a boy who thinks he’s a girl . . .’
On the field, following another mortifying screw-up, Mr Leighton had approached for a bit of referee/Games coach banter: ‘Good gracious me, Webb. Did your mother drop you on your head when you were a small child?’ He delivers this with the well-practised air of a teacher’s catchphrase and his good humour beams out of him. It’s actually the friendliest thing I’ve heard all week. I smile back.
‘But then, if she did, you probably wouldn’t remember!’ he adds, supplying the punchline which I will spend the next hour wishing I’d thought of.
As it happens, Mr Leighton, I do remember. Nobody dropped me on my head, but I did fall down a flight of stairs. As earliest childhood memories go, this is satisfyingly dramatic. My mother was there at the bottom and so was my father, your ex-pupil, Paul – the other Webb. The one who was very good at football, as well as all the other sports you taught him.
Not that Dad ever boasted about that kind of thing. One of the good things I can say about him is that he was no show-off. And there are plenty of other good things to say about Paul Webb at his best. But first, dear reader, I think it’s about time we had a look at the place I’ve so far managed to avoid, the place where we find Paul Webb, to put it mildly, not at his best. Time to go to the beginning.
‘Purple,’ I thought, as I bounced down the last few steps. It’s unlikely that