Another Life Altogether (21 page)

A
FTER STOPPING AT SEVERAL OTHER VILLAGES TO TAKE ON MORE
children, our bus pulled into the car park in front of Liston Comprehensive and I was greeted by a sprawling complex of redbrick, flat-roofed buildings with big windows that looked out onto acres of playing fields in the back and well-kept gardens in the front.

“Here we bloody well are,” Tracey groaned as the bus rumbled to a halt and its aisles became a heaving, jostling mess of dark uniforms, swinging satchels, and shouts.

Tracey had sat next to me during our ride—something I’d had mixed feelings about since, when the bus arrived and Amanda was making adjustments to my blazer, I’d found myself hoping that I might sit beside her. But when the doors of the bus sighed open, Amanda had simply patted me on the shoulder, saying, “See you later, Jesse,” as she headed to the back of the bus to take her place among a group of older girls. I’d watched Amanda yell enthusiastic greetings to her friends and press herself between them on the backseat, so that they were all a bright and laughing mass of waving limbs, excited eyes, and talk. For a moment, I’d imagined myself squeezing in among them, next to Amanda, tucked between the warmth of their laughter and their bodies, letting their giggles roll over me like warm waves. But there really
wasn’t any room and, besides, I knew that wasn’t where I belonged. So instead I’d eased into one of the seats in front, a cold stone of fear in my chest. Amanda had abandoned me, Tracey was angry at me, and I was alone, friendless again. But then Tracey had stopped by my seat and muttered, “Shove over, then,” and I’d eased myself over to the window and she’d taken the seat beside me. During the ride, she didn’t mention the incident at the bus stop, nor did she call me by that dreadful nickname. By the time we reached the car park outside Liston Comprehensive, I realized, with profound relief, that we were still friends. When I stepped off the bus into the throng of uniformed bodies and Tracey threaded her arm through mine, I felt, for the first time, that I did not have to push my way through a seething school-day crowd alone.

“Look, look, it’s the Debbies,” Tracey said, waving toward three girls standing next to the school entrance.

“Hiya, Trace,” the tallest of the girls said as we joined their group. “God, can you believe we’re back at school already?” She smiled and knocked her hip into Tracey’s.

“Yeah, I know,” Tracey said, shoving the girl back. “And seven bloody more weeks until the half-term holiday. God, seems like forever.”

“Never mind, at least we can hang around together again. And, to tell the truth, I was bored to bloody tears after the first two weeks at home.” The girl peered around Tracey to look at me. “So, who’s this, then?” she asked. I met her look with a hopeful smile.

“This is Jesse,” Tracey said. “Jesse Bennett. She just moved to Midham.” At least she hadn’t introduced me as Jesse the Yeti. Though, from the dubious up-and-down looks the three girls gave me, she may as well have. I could see that their approval wasn’t going to come easily.

“Oh, yeah?” the tallest Debbie said, narrowing her eyes to scrutinize me further. “So, where you from, then?” She gave her hair a backward flip.

“Hull,” I answered warily, sure that she would find me wanting. Rejected from their little clique, I’d lose not only their approval but
Tracey’s as well. And then I’d definitely become known as Jesse the Yeti.

“Hull, eh?” The girl put both hands on her hips.

“Oh, leave off, Debbie,” Tracey said, issuing a slap to her friend’s arm. “She’s all right, is this one. Me and her have been hanging about together over the holidays. She’s my new friend.” Miraculously, with this seal of approval from Tracey the look on all three of their faces shifted. They smiled and introduced themselves to me.

Contrary to my earlier imaginings of the Debbies as identical triplets, the three could not have been more physically different: the tallest, Debbie Frost, was blond and big-boned; the second, Debbie Green, was olive-skinned, short, and pudgy; and the third, Debbie Mason, was a petite thread of a girl with dark hair and enormous brown eyes. Nevertheless, they did seem, in a way, to be a set, with all three of them—in obvious defiance of the strict uniform regulations outlined in the letter my parents had received—wearing tartan scarves around their necks, tartan socks, and huge white platform shoes that added at least three and a half inches to their height, making Debbie Frost tower over everyone like a giant and the tiny, skinny-legged Debbie Mason look about as unstable as if she were walking on stilts. They all wore their hair in the “shaggy dog” style of the band whose members were obviously their idols, the Bay City Rollers, and each of the three had the image of a different tartan-clad pop star on a huge round badge worn on her school blazer.

“So, who do you like best, Les or Woody or Derek?” the diminutive Debbie Mason demanded almost as soon as she had told me her name. I frowned and looked over at Tracey, hoping for guidance. I had no idea what she was talking about. “Les or Woody or Derek?” she asked again. This time she nodded toward the badge on her chest, and I realized that she was talking about the members of the Bay City Rollers.

Since I really had not given this very much thought until that moment, I was genuinely bewildered. Certainly, it had been impossible to escape the Bay City Rollers—their pictures in magazines, the television
footage of frenzied fans chasing them down the street, their songs on the radio or trilled by groups of girls at my last school—but I’d never actually looked at the faces of those band members to rank who might be better-looking, and I certainly hadn’t remembered their names.

“I’m not sure, I …” I stalled, made increasingly nervous now that the three Debbies were staring eagerly at me, wondering which of them would end up hating me when I picked the wrong name. It occurred to me that my future social success could rest on this one decision. I had no idea what to say. Fortunately, Tracey spoke up.

“God, are you three still going on about that bunch of Scottish morons? How can you think any bloke who prances about in trousers six inches above his ankles is sexy? Besides, their music is a pile of bloody crap.”

I looked from Tracey to the three girls, all of whom were glowering and gripping both ends of their tartan scarves so tightly that I could see blue veins pushing against the skin on the backs of their hands. For a moment, I was afraid they might explode at Tracey, pounding her with those veiny fists. Instead, Debbie Mason again turned to me. “So, who do you like best?” she demanded.

“Oh, David Cassidy,” I said, this time without hesitation. “I think he’s sexier than them all.”

The three girls scowled at me, but Tracey was grinning. “See, I told you she was all right,” she said. And, much to my surprise, all three girls shrugged an acquiescent agreement.

The Debbies, Tracey, and I were all in Form 2D, and our form-room teacher was Mr. Davies, a Welshman with a big, booming voice and an enormous belly that, if he hadn’t been a man, would have convinced me that he was pregnant. After he took registration, he handed out our new timetables, made a few remarks about the critical importance of quiet and orderly conduct when moving about the school, and told us to make our way to morning assembly. At that, there was the deafening shriek and clatter of thirty chairs pushed back and a rampaging rush to exit the room. Battered by swinging satchels and bags, I followed
Tracey and the Debbies as they flew, with everyone else, toward the door.

By the time I reached the corridor, I found myself detached from Tracey and the Debbies, trailing at the very back of the crowd heading toward the assembly hall. Then, as I reached the corridor that led to the hall, I saw someone I knew. “Hiya,” I said.

“Hiya, Jesse Bennett.” It was Malcolm. He was standing in a little alcove away from the river of moving students, leaning against the wall, his face pressed into a book. It was much fatter than the one he’d been reading the first time I saw him, and it had a more mature title, too:
Crime and Punishment
. Something I might find in the adult section of the mobile library, I thought—if the librarian didn’t deem it pornographic.

“Aren’t you going to assembly?” I asked Malcolm, gesturing toward the crowd of students flooding past us.

He shrugged. “What’s the rush? All it’s going to be is a few boring hymns, the Lord’s Prayer, and the headmaster giving us a lecture about working hard and obeying school rules.” He made a theatrical cough and adopted a pompous expression. “Though you might be descended from apes,” he said, in a voice clearly meant to imitate that of an elderly teacher, “this does not mean that you should act like apes. So, I’d appreciate it if you’d cease swinging from the coat hooks in the cloakroom.”

I laughed. “Sounds like the headmaster here is a lot like the one at my old school.”

“They make them all out of the same mold,” Malcolm said. “Doddery and boring. If that old fart tells one more story about how he served his king and country in the war and we should think of Liston Comprehensive as our country and bad reports as the enemy we have to conquer, I think I’ll shoot myself.” He put two fingers to his temple and mimed pulling a trigger.

I laughed again.

“So, what class are you in?” he asked.

“2D.”

“Oh, with Taffy Davis. He’s all right, is Taffy. I’m in 2J with Jefferson.
He’s a little fascist. But maybe you and me will have some lessons together. I hope so. And listen, you’re still invited to come to the library with me if you want.”

“Oh, yes, I—” I was just about to tell Malcolm how I could definitely come next time his father planned a visit to Bleakwick when I noticed Tracey stalking down the corridor toward us, a deep scowl on her face.

“Bloody hell, Jesse, first you disappear and then I find you talking to the biggest bloody poofter in all Yorkshire.”

“I just—”

“Stop hanging about in the corridor, nancy boy,” she said, ignoring me and turning to Malcolm.

“Don’t tell me what to do, Tracey Grasby,” Malcolm said, a bright flush flooding his face. “Who died and made you queen, anyway?”

“There’s only one queen round here, and it’s not me,” Tracey said, her face twisted in disdain. “What are you doing here, anyway? Hanging about in a dark corner so you can wank off while you think about little boys?”

“God, you are so ridiculous,” Malcolm said, trying to dismiss Tracey with a haughty look. But I could see how those words stung him. Poofter. Nancy boy. Queen. Suddenly, I realized that this was how a boy like Malcolm was summed up. There had been a few other boys like him at my last school, boys whose movements were sweeping and fluid, whose voices weren’t big and booming, whose expressions were more animated than boys’ were supposed to be. They were the boys who stood on the sidelines when the others played football or rugby, whom everyone laughed at when they ran or threw a ball. Those boys were teased far more relentlessly than I ever had been. They were not just mocked; they were hated. And no one, not even the teachers, ever stood up for them.

“Malcolm lives on the edge of a cliff,” I said, hoping somehow to ease Tracey out of her animosity. “In a caravan. The council said they’re going to have to move it or it’ll fall off.”

“Bloody hell,” Tracey said, laughing. “Is that true, nancy boy? Hey, with a bit of luck maybe you’ll be in it when it goes over the edge.”

“Hah, hah, very funny.” Malcolm’s voice was flat, his face now a blazing beetroot red.

“It is as far as I’m concerned. Right, Jesse?”

She peered at me, belligerent, expectant. Malcolm stared at me, a question folded into his face. I bit my lip.

“Hey, what’s that you’re reading?” Tracey made a grab for the book nestled under Malcolm’s arm. Malcolm tried to turn away, but he was too slow and she wrenched it from his grip.
“Crime and Punishment?”
She began flipping through the pages. “A book about poofs and homos, is it? Now, that’s a crime that needs to be punished.”

“Give it back,” Malcolm demanded, his voice high and thin, his arms scrabbling at the air. I watched while delight bloomed across Tracey’s features and Malcolm’s twisted in distress. “Give it back, you bloody cow,” Malcolm said again.

“Right, that’s it,” Tracey said. “I’ll teach you to call me a cow.” And with that she turned and ran down the corridor to a window and began wrestling it open. Malcolm stumbled after her, slack-limbed and uncoordinated. He did run like those boys that everyone laughed at, and in my mind I could hear the taunts: “poofter,” “nancy boy,” “the homo runs just like a girl.”

Before Malcolm caught her, Tracey managed to open the window and hurl the book outside. I watched it glide in a single sweeping arc, its pages fluttering like flimsy futile wings as it curved upward, then plunged onto the hard asphalt of the playground outside.

Malcolm shuddered to a halt, staring, open-mouthed, through the window as the book made its hopeless trajectory. “What the hell did you do that for?”

Tracey grinned. “Because I felt like it, you little poofter.”

“God, you really are a bloody cow, Tracey Grasby,” Malcolm said, his voice cracked and hollow. Then he turned away from her and began
walking back toward me. He marched, his shoulders hunched, his face folded in defeated fury, so that his eyes seemed nothing more than flickering lashes and his lips were compressed into a hard, flat line.

I knew that look. It was the one I had worn so many times myself. I also knew the helpless anger and humiliation that Malcolm carried, the way he must be struggling to hold back tears. I glanced at Tracey, her eyes wide and shimmering, her smile a crescent of satisfaction across her face. I had seen that look, too—on the faces of the girls and boys who had taunted me, their pleasure rising like heat as my hope plummeted as fast and inevitably as Malcolm’s book had fallen and hit the ground.

“What the hell are you doing hanging around with
her?”
Malcolm demanded when he reached me.

I pictured his battered caravan. I saw myself standing beside it on a crumbling cliff edge, where the soft boulder clay of the East Yorkshire coast cascaded down to the sea. I could stay in place, on safe ground with Tracey, or I could step toward Malcolm, to the very edge of that cliff, and risk tumbling into the relentless waves. It was a choice that was easy to make.