Chalk Read online

  That’s why I went to the annual Fasley Grange School fancy dress Halloween disco in 1982 in exactly what I normally wore, and I carried my two sticks. I went dressed as myself, but was able to say that it was a costume. I was the Long Man.

  You can see why I was such a target. Fucking little shit of a boy, pointing at himself. Didn’t have brains enough to hide. What kind of costume requires an explanation?

  * * *

  The Halloween disco was on a Sunday night that year, with the half-term break having started on the Saturday, so it was one of those awkward going-back-into-school things. It was held, as always, in a room under the school, in what looked like it was originally a wine cellar. It was supposed to be rented out for corporate parties that we never saw, and might have been a pipe dream of Mr. Rove’s. It was accessed by a narrow flight of steps. A disco had been set up with Mr. Rushden as DJ. Mr. Rushden was quite young, and looked and spoke like the pop star B. A. Robertson. He had very hairy legs. We knew this because he was the PE teacher. He was also the Religious Education teacher. His RE lessons were full of stories about sport. ‘Just because I told Goff off in class before the match,’ he would say, on the subject of forgiveness, ‘doesn’t mean I wouldn’t pass the ball to him on the pitch, yeah?’

  The sport metaphors meant I never had any idea what he was trying to say.

  That night, he had big black and silver decks and two boxes of discs, mostly seven-inch singles. There was a dance floor of polished wood. There was a nonalcoholic bar, with a red cloth hung over the optics of the bottles of spirits and the beer barrel taps covered in little black smocks of felt. They looked ragged, like they’d been cut out at the last moment. A few of the teachers stood awkwardly around the room, dressed as monsters. Mr. Coxwell was there, looking round as if swearing under his breath, not dressed as anything other than himself. Mr. Coxwell was the deputy head. He taught French, and he was always angry. Whenever he entered a room, you felt the tension. He once told a joke in French, and then bellowed when somebody laughed. Because, he said, they couldn’t possibly be laughing at the joke itself. ‘This isn’t a good enough school for that,’ he’d said.

  * * *

  So here’s the big memory I can hang everything else on, the break in the horror that lets me think about what happened that Halloween: Angie Boden in her witch outfit, a green ra-ra dress with black tights and a tiny witch hat, dancing to Culture Club. She had big black eye shadow on.

  Back then, Angie Boden and I had never talked. There would have been laughter at me even approaching her.

  Angie and her only friends, Netty, Jenn and Louise, wrote lyrics in Biro under their shirt collars. They had a different kind of shoes, they put badges on their lapels, but they were still good girls who did well in class. They were not popular with other girls. Even boys knew that. I once saw a girl slap Angie so hard she drew blood. It had been for saying the music the girl liked was old-fashioned; that’s what the boys said afterwards. The boys had all laughed at that fight, trying to be above what girls did, scared by how big it felt.

  Angie had a ferociously deep Wiltshire accent. I can hear it now, saying the lyrics to ‘Cruel Summer’, slowly and carefully. She had a face like she should be posh. Not as much as some of the girls, the ones who had braided hair right down their backs. Just posh enough so the accent was a shock. Angie had a short, flicked-over haircut, very Human League. It suited the frown she usually wore. That night, she was dancing like she always did, her hands balled into fists, leaping inappropriately up and down to ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’, which was Number One at the time, her three friends beside her. The other girls who were dancing did it away from them, and were swaying tastefully. I’d only see makeup on these girls at the Halloween and Christmas discos, and then it’d look like part of their costumes, with big pink blusher and huge darkness around their eyes.

  The only one of my lot to come along was Mark Ford, known as Fiesta. He was dressed as some sort of devil. He had his face painted red, but he was wearing a white jacket with the sleeves pushed up and a white vest underneath. Fiesta had that harmless nickname: Ford Fiesta. Teachers started to use it, because it was harmless, and then his parents became Mr. and Mrs. Fiesta, even to their faces. I saw once—at an assembly, from a wince when Mr. Rove made exactly that mistake, and of course didn’t correct himself—that Fiesta hated that nickname. But he never asked us not to use it, because that would mean we’d use it more.

  Fiesta asked what I’d come as, and I explained. ‘’Cos you look just like you would at home.’

  ‘You don’t know what I look like at home.’

  ‘Yes I do. You look like that.’

  Mrs. Parkin came over and said she didn’t think I should keep the sticks, and that I’d look ridiculous dancing with them and might have somebody’s eye out. She put them in the cloakroom. So now I was a man without a costume at a costume party. That’s when dangerous things from two universes took an interest in me.

  Three

  Mum had said she didn’t think it was much of a costume. ‘They’ll all laugh at you. I don’t know how you’ll ever get any friends. You’ll come home a laughing stock, mark my words.’ But in the end, she went along with it.

  When we were in town, and Dad was trying to park somewhere, Mum would cry out, ‘There’s a policeman!’ Once, when some medicine had tasted of aniseed, Mum had put the spoon in my mouth, and I’d thrown up. Mum had grabbed my lips and held them together, desperately trying to get me to keep it down. Then she’d burst into tears and run out of the room. I think that’s my earliest memory.

  This time, maybe I should have listened to her.

  * * *

  Drake had come as a werewolf. He had big sideburns glued to his face, in a deliberately half-hearted way, and was wearing a leather jacket and jeans. He hadn’t any fangs. He was hanging around with Lang and Rove and Selway and Blewly at the bar. He’d got pissed before he came here, and they were pretending they were too.

  Drake had been looking at me since I’d had my sticks taken away, pointing at me and then laughing to his mates. Angie looked in Drake’s direction and then looked away. I looked at her, and then looked away myself. Drake saw that. He came straight for me. The others followed him. Drake could see teachers, so he stopped just before he got to me. ‘Cunt,’ he said quietly. ‘Little cunt. We’re going to hang around with you. We want to come to your house and fuck your mum. Shouldn’t mind that. You do it all the time. Has she got a big, furry muff, then? Have you seen it? Do you like the taste of it?’ I was saying no, over and over. ‘We’ve got something to show you,’ he said. ‘After. Fucknor Waggoner. Fucknor Waggoner. You’ll be getting home to fuck your mum. That’s what you like. You love her. You are her.’ Then they went back to the bar.

  I tried to hang around with Fiesta, but he wasn’t interested. He danced by himself, at the side of where all the girls were dancing with each other, doing his Michael Jackson bit. He didn’t seem to mind the boys laughing at him. I think the Fiesta family were so rich that when Fiesta went home, he got told that in three years he’d be driving a sports car, and he thought, okay, I’ll just try and get through school without getting hit too much.

  Laurie Coxwell was there. She was Mr. Coxwell’s daughter. She was short, and had curly hair, like her mum, who taught us Maths. She’d played the flute at an assembly once. I’d clapped without being told to, and everyone had laughed at me. But afterwards, when we were passing in a corridor and there was nobody else in sight, she’d stopped and said thank you. She’d come tonight as a cat girl, with whiskers and a tail. ‘Hi,’ she said. Terrifyingly.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Are you going to be dancing later?’

  ‘I’m waiting for the music to be good.’

  ‘Don’t you like Culture Club?’

  I didn’t know what to say. I knew what the answer would have been for Drake, but for a girl? I spent too long trying to guess the answer. Finally, she took her drink and smiled awkwardly at me and
walked off back to her mum.

  Angie’s friend Louise Callidge put her arms up over her head to dance to Modern Romance’s ‘Best Years of Our Lives’. Louise, unlike Angie, had the accent to match her looks. She had hair that hung right down her back. It feels strange to be talking about her so offhandedly here. Right now, she’s just a normal kid. Well, as normal as any of Angie’s lot were. She’d brought a tray of cakes she’d made to the disco, like that was a thing you did, but girls were always doing things that boys didn’t think you could do, and Angie’s lot did that even more. The cakes sat there for the whole time I was there with nobody eating them until Angie’s lot ate them all. Louise would look around as she danced, her gaze sweeping over the other girls, then she’d stop, examine something, judge it, away again. She danced to show off, bouncing her hips off Angie and Netty and Jenn. They looked like they should be really enjoying dancing, but did it with a seriousness that suggested this was hard work, that they were trying to achieve something.

  I danced, the first time I’d done that with people watching. I leapt in and started jerking around, trying not to dance too much or too little, held within my tiny box of what was allowed. But dancing. Lots of laughter, but I felt like I was sticking it to them. I was a weird and normal kid then. I saw Drake watching. No expression. I think he’d already decided what was going to happen to me.

  * * *

  Around ten o’clock, kids started to leave to get to the driveway and find their parents getting out of their cars. I knew my dad was going to park his rusty white Renault Fourteen right up against the front of the school, and march in early in his cigar-smelling suit with chalk on the cuffs to have a quick word with a teacher.

  We only had so much money. Just enough. That’s why, for my parents, my school life was about me winning the bursary for my final year. The bursary was for the cleverest kids, the top boy and girl of each year. I’d been second last year. Mum and Dad kept mentioning the bursary to me, one and then the other, like they’d told each other they weren’t going to say anything, but neither could keep to that agreement. The bursary was based on end-of-year exams. So I heard the words ‘school fees’ all the time at home. Once, on a caravan holiday, Mum and Dad yelled at each other for two days about school fees. The John Bentley comprehensive was a terrible vision for all of us, the pit they were working hard to keep me from falling into, where those kids that spat at us on the town hall steps came from. Sometimes I asked, and Mum and Dad would laugh and say no, no, I shouldn’t worry; they’d do anything to keep me out of John Bentley. If Mr. Rove had had any kind of selection procedure based on class, Mum and Dad wouldn’t have got past the interview. All the really posh kids at Fasley always looked like they’d been tricked. Upper-middle-class kids like Fiesta seemed marooned in the wrong place. Some of the houses these kids came from would have made better private schools than Fasley did.

  I went to get my coat and sticks from Mrs. Parkin at the door. I was sweaty and worked up and thinking I’d done something really big, that I’d taken the test, and had sort of half failed and half passed it, but that tonight I was doing stuff for the girls watching, and not the boys, and that was weird, but great. That moment: my hand closing on the hood of my blue coat that could zip up to a tiny hole way in front of my face, and that had an orange lining.

  That’s our last sight of the normal and weird kid.

  Drake’s hands closed on me as I took the coat. ‘Come on, mate! You’re such an ace dancer!’ Drake put one arm round my shoulder and dug his fingers in. The other four were by his side, around me, cutting me off from Mrs. Parkin, who was looking for the next coat anyway. I didn’t get my sticks. I could see them in the corner of the cloakroom, but I couldn’t ask for them with Drake there. That was the last time I saw them.

  So, suddenly we hit the cold night, and I was looking round for my dad, hoping and not hoping he’d be there. There was no sign of him. Parents and kids thronged around us for a moment. That parent smell. Big coats and jewellery. Mothers slipping coats around their daughters’ shoulders on the way to big cars. Where were Lang’s parents? Why didn’t Mr. Rove see his son going out and call him back?

  ‘I have to wait for my dad!’ I was saying, trying to get out of their grasp.

  ‘What’s that? You’re waiting to fuck your mum?’ They were guiding me quickly around the back of the building. I could have yelled, but it would have been a scream. That would have made me a victim again, so soon after I’d started to get free. We went straight off the gravel into the bushes and from there into the woods.

  They kept me moving with shoves. They couldn’t have long. They’d have to be back there in minutes. That wouldn’t stop Drake, no rules for him. He was walking along quickly, knowing exactly where he was going, knowing his way through the trees. We entered a clearing. They pushed me up against a tree, so hard that the knots of wood punched my back. ‘Right,’ said Drake, and the others began to wrestle with me for the belt to my trousers.

  Four

  I started to yell. To scream. I was attempting to hold onto my belt as Lang grabbed my hands and Rove tried to undo the buckle, while the other two pulled my feet off the ground, and took off my shoes, throwing them aside. It felt terrible to have them take off my shoes. Rove was fumbling, his fingers slipping. I wrenched myself aside. Selway hit me hard across the jaw. I’d been hit a lot, but never so hard. The back of my skull bounced off the tree. My head rang. The world reeled. Several different pictures of the wood and the trees split off in my vision and collided again. I started to sob. They knew what they were after; they were going beyond anything they’d done to me before. All five cooperated in the task. There were just trees in all directions, darkness with lights beyond, help far off, all of us lit by the moon that was a night off full.

  ‘I’ll tell!’ I shouted. ‘You can’t stop me telling! You can’t stop me telling!’

  ‘You tell and we’ll fucking kill you,’ muttered Selway.

  Drake took a step back, took his knife out, flicked the switch and pulled out the very long blade with the serrated edge. ‘Get his cock out,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to touch it,’ said Rove. ‘Wait a sec.’ He fumbled in his coat pockets and pulled out big, fur-lined driving gloves, which he struggled to put on.

  My jaw had started to ache so hard I was having trouble speaking. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please don’t.’

  Lang held me hard against the tree, his breath wet in my face. ‘Shut up. This is so you can’t fuck your mum any more. It’s disguuuuuuuusting.’

  I thrashed and struggled, but then Selway slammed his body into my lower half, and I was pinned against the tree. Blewly got my belt loose, tried it round his own waist, then threw it away. He pulled the top of my trousers down. He sniggered at my blue Y-Fronts. He looked at the others, not knowing what to do now. He couldn’t see any way he could touch me any further.

  ‘Give it here.’ Drake stepped forward.

  He took the front of my underwear in his hand and pulled it down. He jerked the material about until my tiny dick and balls fell out. I could smell myself. They laughed. There was a fearful smile on Rove’s face, a kind of awe at what Drake was doing.

  Drake took me in his fist. ‘Right, let’s get rid of these.’

  I screamed at the top of my voice. It carried as far as it could.

  He tugged suddenly on my dick, pulling the skin forward.

  Selway and Blewly had to hold my arms behind my back. I was thrashing and flailing. Drake raised the knife high over his head.

  This is when he lets go, and they all run away laughing, I thought. That in itself was going to be so bad.

  He chopped the knife down. There was a moment of intense pain. Like an injection.

  I looked down. A tiny cord, a vein you might find in an egg, spitting blood. A flapping of meat that looked like nothing that could ever be part of me. A deep red gouge and strange colours inside it. I had been opened up. Drake held up a thin taper of flesh in his hand. ‘You
’re a Jewboy now,’ he said. He flicked it away with his finger. It landed amongst the mulch on the ground. He closed the knife and turned and started to walk away.

  Selway and Blewly let go of me. They were looking at me carefully now. I was a thing of wonder. Lang reached down to try and pull up my underpants, but Rove stopped him.

  ‘You’re going to be all right,’ said Selway. ‘Aren’t you?’

  I actually nodded.

  They walked off, looking back over their shoulders, following Drake. After a moment, all of them ran. They were running scared, but also they were running like they’d just scored a goal. I was that goal.

  For a while, I stood there. I couldn’t touch myself. Blood was running down my legs. Dribbling from the end of my dick. The shape of me was different. They’d made me different. I could feel a bunch of things flapping against my thigh, where there had been one thing.

  That’s still what it’s like. It looks painful even now, and sometimes it is, when I piss or when I come. I’m suddenly panting, injured, freezing, and a long way away.

  I’ve told everyone with whom I’ve been intimate, had to tell them way before we got to that, that I had an accident involving farm machinery.

  I made myself step out from the tree. I nearly fell. I wanted to vomit, but I held it in. I fell to the ground and felt around until I found my belt and used the tree to get to my feet again. Everything felt slow and thumping. Everything was open. I was afraid of the mud getting into the blood, of becoming infected.

  Over the years, I’ve found several mentions of infection in my reading on this subject. Thank God I was inoculated against tetanus. My urethra was almost certainly narrowed. Which means I was lucky. If that process had gone slightly further, I would have begun to retain urine, which would have resulted in what is possibly the single most painful form of death. Perhaps I would have been made to see a doctor before it got that far. I doubt it. I think I would have fooled my parents, not told to the point where I fell into a coma. I’ve never shown it to a doctor. I’ve never had to. The average lad’s doses of the clap are far less likely when you’re someone whose cock requires an explanation.