Byron Easy (58 page)

‘Sir, I’ve got a tummy upset.’ My voice was loud in the drab hallway, the yellow lights abruptly flickering off as their timer expired.

‘Well, well, well! Mr Easy has a tummy ache, has he?’ gloated the headmaster. ‘Let’s see if I can be of assistance to a wounded soldier.’ His sealed eyes, slitted as a lizard’s, full of fraudulent friendliness and malice, assessed me. They were alive with excitement.

‘That’s all right, sir. My mum gives me bicarbonate of soda, if you’ve got any of that. Or a Rennies.’

‘How do I know what to give you if I haven’t examined you?!’ roared Mr Cave, forgetting for a moment that he was a reverend and not a doctor. ‘Come in and take a pew.’

The door closed behind me and I took in the room, with its sickly light. It was bigger than our dorm, with two cases neatly stacked against a wall and a desk which bore a Bible and a spare pair of thick-lensed reading glasses. For a moment he circled me, then went to what I assumed was a medicine chest in the strongly lit portal of the bathroom. I felt I had to say something to fill the silence.

‘It’s okay, sir,’ I trembled, my voice cracking beyond control. ‘I’m feeling a bit better all of a sudden.’

‘Now, now,’ he chuckled, like a demented Faustus in his study. ‘You’re just a bit anxious, I can see that.’ He was in front of me now, reptilian and hungry, bearing a glass fizzing with Alka Seltzer. ‘What I’m about to give you won’t hurt. Quite the opposite. It will set you right … my, my, you are a wounded soldier.’ He gave me the glass, invading my personal space, a perfunctory smile on his pursed lips. ‘Never doubt the wisdom of your Dr Cave. The lion must lie down with the lamb. Drink it up now. To the last drop.’

It didn’t take long. He had to resort to scriptural quotation on every occasion. That was part of his salesman’s patter. And he was trying to sell me something. An experience I had to buy whether I wanted it or not.

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, my knees knocking together, wishing very much that he wouldn’t stand so unbearably close.

‘Is it all down?’ he asked, taking the glass from me and examining the dregs under the pale yellow light in the ceiling. ‘I saw one of our coloured brethren earlier—Singh. He had an upset tummy too. Informed me that it was against his religion to eat such a repast as the good Lord gave us tonight.’

Ah yes, the race issue. Mr Cave would often start assemblies with the phrase, ‘Children whose parents are from hot countries …’ Singh’s parents, as we all knew, were born in Luton.

‘I think the word he used was “rubbish”, sir.’

‘What?’

‘Not repast—rubbish.’

‘Well, that’s as may be. Now, I just need to examine your abdomen, to check there’s nothing seriously wrong. Take off your pyjama top.’

Terrified, I did as I was told. Mr Cave’s unusually cold right hand pressed my stomach and I flinched. It felt like a fish fresh from its packing of ice.

‘Are you as obliging as your name suggests, Mr Easy?’

‘Your hands are cold, sir.’

He pressed again, even harder. ‘Now, that didn’t hurt did it? Believe me, boy, I’ve seen it all. There’s nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes.’

‘If it’s all right, I’d like to go now,’ I stammered, and swallowed hard.

‘All in good time,’ he grinned, his broad face colossally near to mine, like a lover’s about to bestow a kiss. I observed that his respectably greying temples were narcissistically trimmed and neat. His brisk and cordial glance had narrowed to almost nothing, like gun-slits on a pill-box. I felt uniquely powerless, as his white, slablike hands journeyed lower. Hands that held hymn book and Bible every Sunday while he advised his congregation how to live.

‘Now, let’s just check if your waterworks are in order and we’ll be finished.’

His free hand gripped my shoulder to steady us both for the possible recoil. Then he fondled me for what seemed like fifteen, twenty seconds. I thought, in those dismal moments, of Mr Cave’s wife—often at the school, mute and shy, a silly gormless prude. I wondered whether she knew he got up to this. Picturing her tiny body and mouse-like hands (an almost representative picture of suppliant femininity), I pondered whether Mr Cave thought of little boys as he did it to her. Even if she knew his true proclivities, I concluded, she would have no say over whether it was right or wrong. She would conspire with him, forgive him, in the Christian manner. She would try to understand him; let him have his way. At any trial in a court of law she would cite St Paul and the sacrosanct doctrine of a husband’s supremacy in every matter. She obeyed, and enjoyed her subordination. Yes, Mr Cave had chosen well in his wife.

The abominable, arrested moment over, Mr Cave withdrew his hand and became dismissive in his manner. His top lip was glossy with sweat. He was doing the perfunctory dance of the lover who has taken his fill. ‘Everything seems shipshape, young man. Now, get to your bed. If you need me, you know where I am.’

He gave me a last look, one that seemed mired with depravity; with the joy he took in his own dissimulation. I bolted towards the door, hastily pulling on my pyjama top.

‘Easy!’ he shouted as my hand found the brown plastic knob.

‘Yes, sir?’ I said, startled.

‘What do you say?’

‘Thank you.’

‘Thank you what?’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Then I was out into the abyss of the corridor, scrambling in the dark for the timer-light switches that were nowhere to be found.

He’d been at it for years, I later discovered. Decades of experience and practice had gone into that moment. There was a definite feeling that Mr Cave delighted in doing something well, with swiftness and skill—almost as much as he delighted in the sexual objective itself. A vain, narcissistic conceit, the flatulent stench of powerful abilities successfully demonstrated, had filled the sickly room that night. For years I marvelled at the ingenuity and persistence of men such as Delph and my headmaster. The brazen fraudulence of their actions. But then, how skilled do you have to be to stick your hands down the pyjama trousers of a terrified child? Not very, I concluded. And maybe I got off lightly. Maybe other boys had tales of sodomitical terror that would haunt them for the rest of their lives, whereas I only had the cold, fishlike hand of Mr Cave cupping my balls to contend with.

The fact I found hardest to reconcile at that age was that both Delph and Mr Cave were either married or soon would be. How could men who dug chicks find such practices arousing? When my mother tied the knot for the second time, on that nuptial day in June, the vision of Delph on the sofa came back to me as I watched his big hands push the wedding band up my mother’s fleshy finger. The vicar stood impassively, unaware of who he was dealing with. But did this vicar also secretly fondle little boys, or worse? Was the world just a stinking cesspool of lies, evasions and perverse sexual desire? Or was it the Eden I walked into after the ceremony, with Sarah skipping through the late blossoms outside the church?

A parallel question could be, how skilled do you have to be to hit an eight-year-old boy? How much talent does that take? To hit another grown man demands a high degree of courage and skill. Tactical, physical, medical even. There is a great deal of prior assessment to make in that moment before the blow is dealt. One has to consider: will this result in great pain, injury and even my own death? Or will I get away with it—will I be vindicated through a combination of strategy, physical strength and dexterity? Not so with an eight-year-old. To all intents and purposes an eight-year-old is a punch-bag, the softest of all targets. The one thing any man contemplating hitting an eight-year-old boy can be sure of is that it doesn’t take much skill. Also that he won’t receive a pasting in return.

These latter considerations must have been dimly, atavistically, present in Delph’s mind as he slammed the car door that night in Wakefield after the wedding reception and thrust forward in first gear. Everything I mentioned before about that night was only part of the story. Things got a lot worse. I could tell at once that he was in the mood for a scrap. If he thought an eight-year-old boy wouldn’t put up a fight he was wholly correct. Because after we left the razed community centre and its pube-bearded ushers (facial hair which denoted manliness up north, but would’ve raised an eyebrow in even the hardest Old Compton Street gay bars down south), a terrible event occurred. I remember the rain-dripping intensity of the black Wakefield streets as the car did sixty over hump-backed bridges; Delph’s hunched, cleft-chinned visage bent over the wheel. The veins improbably big on the backs of his hands. Through the rear window of the vehicle I could see the blue cloud-cover had parted, magically revealing the moon, cold and voiceless and ancient. A disco song—Elton John and Kiki Dee’s ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’—had been the last disc spun by the DJ, and was now on a loop in my head. Moments before the record had come on, Delph had been trumped in some argument with my mother. He had insulted her. Threatened to hit her. Now he was a seething pressure-cooker of pent-up fury. Muttered curses rose over the rapid, grinding gear changes, the tyres squealing around the bends of residential streets. Heart pounding, hoping we would reach the blighted hutch of his parents’ house soon—a surprising desire, as I despised being there—I held onto the back of the passenger seat. But I could tell we were nowhere near. We seemed to be on the outskirts of the town: big raw-smelling stretches of water were suddenly visible under stone bridges, lit by the strange lunar glow. Nearby, the crowning lamps of unfamiliar estates whipped past, with their steam-blowing men walking unhappy dogs by dank walls. Dead flowerbeds on municipal greens appeared as plots in a graveyard; the chained gates of failing collieries black, meshed and mysterious in the moonlight.

Eventually the car slowed and we turned into a cul-de sac. With a wrench of the wheel, Delph pulled up in a narrow driveway and turned off the engine. He swung round to face me.

‘Now you just stop here and say nowt,’ he snarled, showing his big square teeth. Then he added for good measure: ‘You little bastard.’

Booting open the car door, he headed up the drive towards the pale orange gleam of a porch. I trembled, not knowing where we were or what would happen next. A figure of a woman, big and voluptuous, obscure in the murky light, appeared in the doorway. Delph quickly disappeared inside.

Waiting there, the car at an angle on the steep drive, the moon big and sinister through the misty back window of the Vauxhall Viva, turned out to be one of the central moments of my childhood. But negatively central. Not the sun-epiphany you carry forever like a brimming bowl of milk, but its opposite. The yin to its yang. A cancer that coils malignantly inside, feeding on the healthy body for years to come. There was an oppressive silence in the car, with me straining to hear noises from inside the house, wondering who on earth this woman was, where the hell we were, what my mother was doing on her own, and, ultimately, what Delph would do to me. My heart was high in my mouth for what felt like hours: sodden, desultory hours, my soul as wet and heavy as a sheet on a washing line.
Don’t go breaking my heart. I couldn’t if I tried.
To revisit that scene is like standing in the anteroom of Hades, with Pluto waiting in the central labyrinth, biding his time until my arrival.

Then a rankling, ratcheting sound as the front door opened fiercely, expelling Delph into the night. I heard voices, suddenly loud, that must have been speaking all along. The mysterious woman was straightening her top in the orange light, an angry defiance in her stance. Delph tumbled back into the car, flicked on the engine and roared in reverse down the drive in what seemed like one continuous movement. With me more terrified than ever, we tore along until we reached the first set of lights. I sensed that Delph was angrier, if that was possible, than before. His contorted, papery-skinned face turned to me as we stood on red.

‘This is all your fault, you little bastard,’ he sneered, the grimace distorting his features, allowing his full ugliness to appear in his face. ‘You’re in everybody’s way. Can’t you bloody see that at least?’

Then a back-hand blow sent me flying onto the stinging plastic seats. My head span with white points of light. There was psychopathic force in his punch. Some inwardly monitoring voice told me this was all consistent with the behaviour of a bully—they wait to get you alone and let you have it. That way, any testimony after the event can be made to seem like your exaggeration. But there was no time to ponder this as the car catapulted forward, throwing me into the footwell as we took off.

No, it doesn’t take much to hit an eight-year-old boy. Not much courage or skill. Not much in the way of adding up the pros and cons of his retaliation. Because he won’t retaliate. Because he is weaker and smaller. Delph, bullied at school before he in turn became a bully, knew the ins and outs of picking on somebody weaker and smaller. You could be a bully too, he discovered, if you chose your mark with care. As my head swam with stars, I recalled his boastful tales of drowning puppies in the canal as a boy, or dressing up male corpses in women’s clothes at his mortuary job. Gratuitous cruelty to things weaker and smaller—if not actually dead—was his speciality. I watched his enraged hands grip the wheel as we tore back towards the centre of town, the car now flying through red lights. His speed was reckless. I worried more for pedestrians than for our safety. Every time his cigarette burnt down he scrambled for his pack of Rothmans on the passenger seat and lit another with the butt of the last. The blow to my face now started to smart. A flash of powerful pain, modulating to a leaden ache by the time his parents’ terraced street was in sight. The song again—‘
Woo hoo
…
nobody knows it
…
but when I was down, I was your clown.’ A
bubble of self-pity welled in my throat, but I stayed it. Something told me that crying would do me no good. Tears would act like drops of petroleum on the embers of his scorn, so I held them in—water behind a dam.

At long last the car’s speed dipped, and we pulled up in front of the dimly lit miner’s house. I contemplated with dread the scrubbed concrete stoop, the gaggle of empties, like gossiping women, left out for the milkman. A comfortless inner sanctum where alien-accented, resentful strangers awaited me. Delph killed the engine and ordered me from the car. Something super-intensified about the reflections in the street struck me. The cobbled road was silver and platinum. I turned to see the moon again, a big eye at the end of the street.