Chalk Read online

  In the days when circumcision was a medical matter, before it was decided that nonretractibility of the prepuce was something that would sort itself out, a Plastibell under the foreskin with a piece of string on the outside, or something called a Gomco clamp, was used to gently separate the skin over a few days. “A neat cosmetic result,” I’ve read. Rabbis skilled in such matters, with sutures at hand, also leave something that looks tidy. My cock, however, does not look like anything cosmetic or traditional has happened to it. Unerect, it looks like a ragged lump, the foreskin parted down one side like a tear, red around the edges like lips, proceeding to the base as a glimpse into layers that were not meant to be glimpsed. Erect, it looks frighteningly exposed, painful, infected. It can’t get to the angle it’s supposed to. It’s awkwardly skewed to one side.

  Growing up, I saw penises in porn, clutched admiringly in the gentle hand of Shanine Linton. They looked comfortingly simple. That’s not me.

  In my life, whenever I’ve become close to a woman, there he is. There he is at every urinal. There he is. Drake. The closeness of a doctor or a mother. The intimacy. He made me.

  I pulled up my Y-Fronts, feeling the material press against the wound. I got into my trousers, and, after fumbling with it for a while, I managed to fasten my belt.

  The pain was getting worse. Walking was difficult. I did it slowly, with my legs as open as they could go. I hadn’t pissed myself. It would have splashed over his hands. I was glad I hadn’t done that. He would look at me and laugh next time I saw him, after half-term. All five of them would. They would make Jew jokes. They might tell other kids what they meant.

  I moved in a circle. I couldn’t find it. It was lost amongst the humus somewhere. Insects were already crawling in the blood. It was mine. It was mine. A doctor might need it to sew it back on. . . . Nobody was ever going to sew it back on. I got my hands and knees covered in mud. I couldn’t find it.

  Finally, I started heading back to the school. It took me a long time. Dad’s car was the last one waiting in the drive. He was standing beside it, talking to Mr. Rove. I would not let it out. I would not let Dad know how his money was being spent. I would not make his attempt to push me up above him on his shoulders stupid. I had a story. To protect Dad. To protect the five of them. No, to protect Dad. No, to save me from John Bentley.

  Between my legs was sticky with blood. So I had carefully smudged it on the pullover and the rest of the trousers, clenching my teeth at every downwards stretch. My muscles felt cold, the clench reaching up to my mouth, making my jaw hurt even more. The white lights along the drive would show it all. No getting straight into the car.

  Dad and Mr. Rove turned and stared at me as I came round the corner of the house. I started to tell them how none of this was real.

  Five

  It’s wrong to expect, to require, victims to be innocents. Victims often are the most difficult, the most aggressive, the nastiest, most compromised people. Of course they are. It’s so tempting for me, when someone in the pub says, ‘They should all be locked up’, about anyone, to agree. Because they all should be locked up. We all should. But, because it is tempting, I tend to violently disagree.

  I fight myself all the time.

  Popular music; fashion; sport; the whole business of sex, from romance to family life—these are the things denied to bullied kids. It doesn’t surprise me, these days, to see how geeks and hipsters have built whole subcultures on the absence, denial or modification of those things. The love of one of them, of pop music, was gifted to me. That break in the battle was Angie’s part. Apart from that, if ‘everyone’ likes it, I can’t. I associate mainstream culture with having my cock cut off. There are kids who went through school experiences like mine who will never watch football, and there are those who end up playing for Arsenal. Okay, who will end up with season tickets. Stockholm syndrome will only take you so far.

  Enough about what I am now. That comes later.

  * * *

  When I was a kid, the view outside my bedroom window was always a problem. It was of the Cherhill White Horse, up there on the downs above our house. When I was eight, Dad planted a row of trees along the fence. By the time I’d started at Fasley, they’d formed a dark corridor, with the downs visible above them.

  The corridor seemed to invite visitors. I’d look up from reading on my bed with the certainty that something had just passed the window.

  * * *

  Halloween night, 1982, coming back from the disco after Drake had done that to me. Dad put a rug on the seat, and kept questioning me as he drove. That was my best pullover. How had I gotten fake blood all over it? Who were these other kids I’d been playing with? I said Rove, the headmaster’s son. Dad was quiet for a bit. He asked me where my snooker cues were. I said I’d forgotten them, and he nodded. The pain between my legs was building now. How could it be getting worse? I wanted to curl up around it, but I didn’t.

  When we got home, I made the pullover the problem, taking it off and putting it straight into the washing machine. I was sly in a way that kids only think they are, like in stories, sly in the way that gets real kids caught. Mum cried out in anger and fright when she saw it, and I was gone into my bedroom and leaning on the door.

  I listened to Dad telling Mum what had happened, at the tops of their voices. They were both going increasingly deaf. I still find myself yelling on the phone to them, to get through to Dad past what Mum’s yelling in the background.

  I sat on the bed, and, with a chair propped against the door, I started to undress. I nearly passed out getting my Y-Fronts off. That was something I’d never felt before. I had to hold myself up, breathing deeply, thinking about them finding me on the ground in the morning. The blood had stopped flowing. There was a caked wound at the end of my dick, and down it that streak I’m now familiar with. It looked like rust, gobbets of it in my pubic hair, all down my legs, and inside my trousers. I needed to wash it. I couldn’t bring myself to.

  There was a week off now, the half-term break. I wouldn’t see the five of them for a week.

  I put the dirty clothes in the wash basket. I’d wash them myself after everyone was asleep. I’d say I felt bad about the mess. Mum and Dad would ask, wouldn’t they? I didn’t want to be sly and get away with it. Parents in a TV show, the mum and dad from Happy Days, they’d know something was wrong and wouldn’t rest until they got to the bottom of it.

  I called to them that I was going to bed. They called back good night.

  I sat on my bed. What did what had been done to me mean? I wasn’t going to die. Probably. It only meant something if I let it mean something.

  If I showed Mum and Dad and told them what had happened, Dad would march into the school and start yelling hopelessly about the headmaster’s son, and that’d be the end of his ambitions for me, the end of his hopes that one of us would . . . escape. I’m not sure my young self could have put that feeling into words.

  I waited until I was absolutely sure the bleeding had stopped, then got into my pyjamas. I could feel the dried blood against the fabric. It was like I’d grown spikes. I wasn’t comfortable lying down or standing, so I sat on the edge of the bed. I hadn’t closed the curtains. I’d been locked into a little box on the edge of the bed, hurting and afraid to move. So I was looking straight at the frame of the window, with the avenue of trees there and the downs above. I wanted to close the curtains, but I had it in my head, as I often did back then, that if I got up to do that, something else would get up from the other side of the window, and I would be facing it when I got there.

  I usually closed my eyes and leapt at the window, and then made sure with my hands that there were no gaps in the curtains before I looked.

  So I sat there, looking and looking. I found that for once I wasn’t trying to stop the fear from coming in. I was wanting it, inviting it to join me. Above the downs that night was the moon, just off full. So close to full, in fact, that it looked like the light might slip round the edge at any momen
t, and the globe would be complete. The white light made the downs stand out. I could see the ridges and the troughs. I could see the horse sparkling like water. I waited until the sounds from the lounge and kitchen had stopped, and for the clunk of Mum’s and Dad’s bedroom door closing, and then I waited some more. I looked at the watch on my bedside table, and it had been an hour. I put my messed-up clothes in the washing machine.

  In the kitchen, Dad had left the blinds open as well. The nearly full moon stood above me there too. Normally, Dad remembered to close the blinds for Mum’s sake. She liked to have every window completely covered. There were two locks, four bolts and a security chain on the big wooden door. I went and undid them, as quietly as I had to. I went outside.

  I stood under the moon. My breath bloomed, reflecting the light. There was the smell of the cold. There was just me, and the garden, and the curve of the road, and Aunt Dar next door, long in her bed, and the fields obscured by the tree hedge and the downs over all.

  I walked around the back of the house. I walked anticlockwise around the house.

  I walked down the dark corridor of trees. I walked past the window of the darkened bedroom of my parents.

  I looked into my own bedroom window, and saw myself lying in my bed, asleep.

  Because I had also started the washing machine, and gone back to my room, and got into my bed and gone to sleep.

  It’s all my fault. I had reached out for what had always fluttered around my window. This is where Waggoner began. He wasn’t exactly what he had to be yet. He still bore my wound then. He was conceived at the moment of the cut. He was born outside my window, looking at me. That night on the downs, he was baptised into his own self.

  Six

  Waggoner left the window, and headed down the gravel track that led to the overgrown lane, that led to the downs. Waggoner walked quickly. The hedgerows hid him. Soon he was out of sight of the house. I always used my sticks to push the briars and blackberry bushes out of the way. Waggoner did it with his pyjama sleeves wrapped over his hands, catching thorns and leaves in the paisley material. Badgers lived up in the lane, in burrows with sprays of flint and dried chalk mud in front of them. Waggoner stepped between them as they snuffled. He fell sideways into a bush, and Mrs. Pheasant, as Mum called the bird, burst out into the night, screaming. Bats flickered around his head.

  It’s about a mile, at a sharp incline, up onto the back of the downs. His feet slipped in the mud, and gradually it coated up the sides of his pyjama trousers. Mum would say he got clarted. He kept walking, determined. He hauled himself up onto the stile at the end of the path. Beyond it were the uplands of the downs, marked with the National Trust sign. Waggoner sat getting his breath, and looked back to where he had come. Over there, RAF Lyneham, bright lines of white and yellow. In the distance, Waggoner saw the glow of Swindon, and there was Calne. The lights were cut off by the dark square of the Red Barn at the top of Mr. Maundrell’s farm. The Maundrell and Angell farms both rented land off the big estates. Waggoner looked up the hill. He was fearless. Suddenly there were lights.

  There were often lights on the downs. Mum used to say they were torches. Hikers. Everyone seemed to say that, whenever I asked, without thinking any more about it.

  These lights weren’t the points of torches that flashed as someone moved through the ditches. These were big blue and red lights that swam into the sky and stayed there, floating like suspended fireworks, silently. The blue ones whipped off into the side of Waggoner’s eyes and stayed there, no matter which way he turned his head. Waggoner put his freezing hands to his freezing face. The lights shrank back into the downs again. He shouted. He fell off the stile, into the mud.

  I’ve heard such things called earthlights. It’s said they’re made when one huge thing rumbles against another, and both compete for the same space.

  Waggoner scrambled to his feet and ran up the hill towards what he’d seen, the wind buffeting his ears, his shoes slipping. His body was cold like a stone. He used his hands to pull himself along, the wound in his groin opening, bleeding again. He pushed himself up the first hillside, to where the copse stood above the landscape of the valleys. There were no sheep now. They were taken in on winter nights. He leaned on one of the fallen trees. The elms were being cut down then, because of Dutch elm disease. He turned to look at the hill fort, across the dip that lay between this copse and the main body of the downs.

  He couldn’t see the fort. The whole of the downs was in shadow.

  Not a shadow. It moved in the wind. It joined up in one moment, as if Waggoner had just realised it should be there, or it had moved suddenly out of the corners of his eyes and into full view. It swallowed the copse around him. He shouted. He was in darkness now. The darkness stayed put around him, and was in the way now, when he looked back to where he’d come from.

  The darkness whispered. It was a natural darkness. It rustled. Creaked. Leafless branches, all around him now. Shadows that stood irregularly all around.

  Suddenly, the downs had become home to a forest.

  He made his way through it. He came to the banks and troughs of the hill fort. He stumbled down into the biggest of the troughs, the one that leads around to the ‘gate’ of the hill fort, where there’s a gap in the banks that leads into the inner area. It really had been a gate once, archaeologists think, the place where large wooden doors had swung inwards. There was a light somewhere around the curve of the trough, from the other direction to the gate, anticlockwise around the hill fort. He headed towards it. It was a flickering white. It was like no real fire. Its origin came into view around the curve. The fire was like an animation of bright paper, sparkling in stop-motion. It was coming from between two sticks, held by a figure standing in the trough. He had one long stick in each hand, holding them wide apart, controlling the fire between them, buffeting and fluttering. The figure was like a sticker made to fit into a bigger picture in a sticker album. His edges and the background he stood in front of didn’t quite match up. His features were concealed by the light. Waggoner could feel heat on his brow from the fire, prickling, like he was being sunburned.

  The man with two sticks had placed himself at exactly the right point. He’d made things that usually ground together like two continents open up, creating a gap. Because of that, everything near him was under pressure. There was such stiff pain in him. He was a bottomless pit where a person had been. Carefully carrying the sticks and the fire, he inclined his head to Waggoner, then turned and began to walk away. Waggoner knew he should follow.

  The man with two sticks led Waggoner round the outer wall. He turned off the main ditch, climbed the next bank and headed in a straight line away from the hill fort. Ahead of them, the trees thinned out a little. They reached the place where the monument stands. That night, however, Waggoner came to the edge of the trees and found he was looking down into a giant pit in the ground, its chalk wall round and white, with tree roots growing in from every side. In the centre of it stood a huge bright spur of chalk, imbedded flints shining. On top of it stood a big tree, the only oak of the forest, its branches covering and overhanging the pit, making the white walls ripple with the moon through the leaves. The bottom of the pit was full of water. The roots of the tree spread out down into the water like veins through the flesh of the rock. Between them were bones and skulls sticking out. The thing was at least as much bone as it was chalk.

  My reading tells me that what Waggoner saw is called an omphalos. The tribes of Britain might have led huge processions around them. Perhaps when Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice looked at the Cherhill Downs, he realised something was missing, or wanted to keep something locked down, and so he built the monument.

  The man with two sticks went to the edge of the pit. He shoved his sticks into the ground, squatted down, and took a cup from somewhere inside himself. It was golden, and it shone with reflected light. It was simple, smooth and perfect. Waggoner looked at the cup and thought it was beautiful. He had an ache for it, a nostalgia for
something he’d never experienced. It was like an often-told story in the shape of an object. The man with two sticks dipped the cup into the water, then brought it back to him. He showed Waggoner the cup in his nothing hands. Waggoner understood. He pulled his pyjama trousers down around his ankles. The man with two sticks looked at him. He poured the water from the cup onto the wound. Waggoner winced at the pressure of it. The dried blood was caked there, it felt like it was holding things together, but as the water found every concealed place upon him–

  Waggoner became clean and whole again. His wound vanished. The pain was just an ache now, exciting, a new fire inside him.

  The man stepped back, his task accomplished, expectant. He waited until Waggoner had pulled his trousers back on, pulled his sticks from the ground, then led him away once again.

  * * *

  They were on guard at the hill fort that night, like they were every night. The empire would come for them. If it didn’t happen tonight it would tomorrow. They held their iron shields to reflect the moon, and watched through a chink beside their eyes. They could see right to the horizon. They were never unaware of anything that approached. They were never dull to any possibility of future harm.

  They valued revenge, above all, because of what had been done to them. Their law was absolute, to protect those who had had such wrong done to them. They were the only ones who remembered the importance of their culture, the epic nature of their plight, so they would remember it hard and carefully, in important songs and serious verse. They had been here forever, since the point they had escaped from the real world, and time meant nothing to them now, except on this one night, when the wise ones among them could escape their trap and see the world they kept themselves from. They had no children of their own now, and wanted them desperately, but there were terrible penalties for admitting desires like that, as for so many things.