Link Arms with Toads! (22 page)

On one memorable occasion he cornered Sidney in the lavatory and managed to improve the notorious but generally overrated Water Torture by the simple but ingenious expedient of de-purifying the medium of its operating principle. Screams!

On another occasion he stripped Sidney, jabbed his pink flabby body full of rosebush thorns, then set fire to them one at a time with astounding dexterity until they were all ablaze and Sidney was persuaded to dance in an unconvincing fashion. Shrieks!

A third incident to be mentioned in passing was the forcing of Sidney to climb a ladder to the roof of the school, leaving him stranded when the ladder was removed. Not so innovative a prank, one might suppose, but Pincher had paid careful attention to the weather forecast. Furthermore he had clad Sidney in pots and pans and the violent clattering of this homely armour when the hailstorm broke so disturbed the afternoon lessons that Sidney was brutally and excessively whipped by the teachers when they managed to get him down. Wails!

And so it went on, day after day. For years.

The only evasive action that Sidney ever implemented was a sequence of pathetic attempts to avoid Pincher by taking complicated routes home. Instead of leaving school by the main gate, or even one of the side exits, he would climb the boundary wall and drop into the garden of a private house, making his way over several other walls and through a series of adjacent gardens until he found himself climbing the last crumbling wall and dropping down in the woods.

He attempted this ruse half a dozen times.

In the woods he felt marginally safer, but he always took to his heels immediately, weaving between the rotting trunks of ancient trees, putting as much distance between himself and school as possible, his unfit body straining with exertion to such a degree that it might even be argued that he bullied himself as he ran.

Deeper into the misty realm of rumoured bears and wolves he lurched, never heading in the direction of home, where an alcoholic mother and syphilitic father and crippled siblings rarely noticed his existence anyway, but always in random patterns, not caring where he ended up provided it was where Pincher Gottlieb was not.

But Pincher always appeared at the last instant, with a look of hideous delight on his face, popping up from behind a rock or bush when Sidney Fudge finally had to stop running, his lungs burning, legs trembling, heart exploding, and the bully always pointed a casual index finger and uttered the same exclamation, “Oh ho!”

Those two words became the essence of vocalised evil for Sidney, the victory shout of the personification of misery. How Pincher managed to work out where his victim would run to, when even Sidney did not know that, and how he was able to arrive first at the destination, were mysteries only compounding the horror.

“
Oh ho! What do we have here then?”

When Sidney was in the embrace of his nemesis anything unpleasant might happen, and usually it did. The woods provided fertile ground for all kinds of potentially fatal pranks. Pincher once fed Sidney a banquet of toadstools and Sidney was left to crawl with excruciating cramps to the nearest hospital, where his stomach was thoroughly pumped and he was berated for his ignorance of fungi.

Also must not be forgotten the day when a tramp discovered a body hanging from a branch on a noose. He climbed the tree, severed the rope with his knife and lowered the corpse to the ground, then plundered its pockets for loose change. The corpse gasped, for it was still alive, so the tramp ran off and alerted the police, who came with medics to revive and retrieve Sidney. His recovery was marred by a universal lack of pity for his ordeal and when he returned to school he was treated to a lecture on the immorality of suicide by the headmaster, who publicly flogged him in the refractory to emphasise his point.

The next morning Pincher Gottlieb chased Sidney into the cloakroom and dangled him by his collar from one of the hooks generally reserved for coats. “Oh ho!” he boomed.

Sidney hung there for six hours and was later caned by all the teachers whose classes he missed. It would be unfair to give the impression that his pleas for assistance were utterly ignored. At one point an anonymous member of staff emerged from his office to investigate the disturbance and subsequently stuffed his handkerchief into Sidney’s mouth to stifle the sounds before returning to work.

Waking life was an unremitting hell for the boy.

But not even the deeps of sleep were a refuge, because all his dreams were nightmares and involved Pincher springing up from unexpected and impossible hiding places to bellow “Oh ho!” before commencing some grotesque outrage on his person. If Sidney screamed or even whimpered in his sleep his alcoholic mother would be sure to enter his room and beat him mercilessly until he awoke.

Sidney developed an obsession that his mother somehow
was
Pincher, that if he reached out and tore off her rubber mask, the horrid face of the bully would loom there instead.

He even imagined the utterance she would make:

“
Oh ho! Fruit of my loins are you now? Is that what you are? My own son, runt of the litter. Oh ho!”

And one night, unable to sleep, Sidney thought he could hear Pincher’s voice coming from downstairs. Slipping out of bed, he listened with his ear to the floor but the words that rumbled below were incomprehensible, so he crept gently down the stairs. The lights were out but the voice still muttered and Sidney gained the bottom step. Then he lost his nerve and turned to go back up but missed his footing and sprawled awkwardly with a sprained ankle. The lights came on. Pincher and his mother stood there together and his theory was disproved.

“
Oh ho! Have a drink on the house, dear chap!”

An empty gin bottle rebounded off his skull and he lost consciousness. His scalp remained hairless and discoloured at the point of impact for the rest of his life, but this incident was only the opening of a new chapter in the annals of his suffering.

Pincher called round every day for almost a year. He had convinced Sidney’s parents that he was Sidney’s best friend and he often told them lies about their son calculated to induce cyclones of rage in their strange minds. The slander about what experiments Sidney had been conducting with his own disabled sisters had momentous consequences for the boy and his development. Details are scarce but garden shears and a talent for singing soprano were factors.

The missing anatomical segments were kept by Pincher in a little cloth bag which he frequently opened for Sidney’s appalled inspection with the ejaculation “Oh ho!” until they went too ripe and had to be discarded. The use of the word ‘ejaculation’ in the preceding sentence is correct but rather tasteless in context. Ah well.

To add stinging insult to hideous injury, Sidney’s parents allowed the bully to ‘borrow’ every treasured possession Sidney ever owned. The few items that had given the boy some small measure of comfort, his toys and books and photographs, vanished forever. Sidney was left with nothing at all save the deepest despair.

“
Oh ho! Set them all on fire, I did!”

The passing years became a decade and Sidney left school and ended up working in a factory. Unlike many bullied children he did not manage to escape his tormentor by entering the world of adult work, for Pincher applied for a job at the same factory and secured a position as a manager directly above Sidney. He would materialise behind Sidney and scream at the top of his voice, “Oh ho!”

So entertaining did his colleagues find Sidney’s reaction to this mantra that they adopted it for themselves and utilised it as a reliable method of decreasing the ambient monotony of their environment. Scarcely an hour passed without an “Oh ho!” triggering a series of convulsions in Sidney’s undeveloped frame. But Pincher was too conscientious a bully to delegate tyranny to underlings and never ceased to involve himself personally in Sidney’s systematic degradation.

“
You will avoid my attentions,” he mockingly explained, “not for the full span of your existence. Seventy years are our allotted time on earth, a figure determined by the religion and healthcare of our society. So that’s the length of your hell. Oh ho!”

The incessant shock ruined the nerves of Sidney Fudge, turning him into a quivering wreck of a man who dribbled uncontrollably and made so many mistakes on the production line that his wages were cut to the bare minimum as a punitive measure.

One afternoon he decided to run away.

He requested permission to empty a bladder, presumably his own, then abandoned his position at the conveyor belt and hastened in the direction of the communal bathrooms.

His absence was noted half an hour later and the manager sent for, but Pincher was also found to be absent. There was no ambiguity about what this meant. The bully had anticipated the escape bid of his victim and had gone to intercept him. The workers grinned to themselves and shook their heads and puffed their cheeks in admiration of Pincher’s prescience. Truly he was the perfect oppressor!

Sidney recalled his school predilection for climbing boundary walls, scaled the factory fence and hurried over a dark wasteland littered with a decadent civilisation’s premature fossils. Discarded bedsteads and broken washing machines impeded his progress, used nappies and condoms vied for dominance of tar pits, the blackened chassis of a stolen car smoked in the drizzle and our unfortunate hero used the oily vapours as cover for his flight, gibbering as he ran.

Genuinely he believed he was heading into freedom, and his mind was unable to confront the inevitable fact that his fate was his own at no point but belonged to Pincher Gottlieb.

He reached the lip of an embankment that sloped down to a motorway and frowned as he regarded this impassable river of moving steel, a visual scream that deafened his eyes, blinded his ears, did other mixed up things to his other bewildered senses.

He would have to turn back and find some other route. At that instant he felt damp sardonic breath on the nape of his neck and time froze into jagged blocks of chronic ice that scraped their way through his organism one by one. Pincher was right behind him, had been behind every step of the way. He realised that now.

A mouth fixed itself to his ear and a clawed whisper more awful than any shout plucked his nerves so utterly they would have vibrated forever had they been given the chance.

“
Oh ho! Fancy meeting
you
here. Oh ho!”

Sidney did not turn but slid and rolled down the embankment. The oncoming vehicles were part of the bullying, or so it seemed, in league with Pincher, a stream of giant bullets aimed at his entire existence. He would never make it alive to the other side. Then he noticed a speeding ambulance and a desperate hope seized him.

If he had to be run down by a vehicle, an ambulance was a fine choice. An ambulance would contain people who knew how to save his life, if any spark of it remained, and it would also be in a position to hurry him to hospital for further treatment. He might as well throw himself in front of it before it went past. Yes. So he did.

The screech of brakes, the sickening thud, the slick of blood, the grin of Pincher far away, the voices, the rough manhandling into the back of the vehicle, all these elements and more became clues in a riddle that he attempted to solve as he lay on the stretcher and stared at the equipment and medicines around him.

At last the answer came. He was still alive.

That was the solution to the riddle! He was alive! In fact his injuries were minor, a few bruises and cuts, a tender spot on the side of his skull, blurred vision in one eye. His desperate stratagem had worked and he had outwitted Pincher in grand style.

A figure loomed above him, clearly a medic.

“
How far to the hospital?” Sidney inquired. “And may I have a room all to myself, with a television?”

“
Such matters aren’t my concern,” came the reply.

“
Indeed? And why is that?”

“
Because I’m not a member of the ambulance crew.”

“
Then who are you, pray?”

“
The ghost of the last person to die in this vehicle.”

“
Your answer isn’t one that pleases me to any extent. I assumed I was finally in a location of safety.”

The ghost chuckled darkly and said:

“
Did you not stop to wonder, before they lifted you inside, how many people have died in this small space, right here, on the way to hospital? The same holds true for every ambulance, of course, but this one has an especially poor track record.”

“
What do you intend to do with me?” asked Sidney.

“
Scare you to death, I’m afraid.”

“
But why? I have done nothing to you. My injuries are mild and not life threatening. The nastiness of your avowed intent is thus gratuitous and I must ask you to reconsider.”

“
Your request is denied. But let me tell you something about myself to help you understand my bitterness.”

“
Thanks. I would welcome that,” said Sidney.

“
Well, I too had only minor injuries when I was lifted into the back of this vehicle. Then the ghost of my predecessor appeared and frightened me so badly I died. Turned out he had gone through the same thing years before, and his predecessor too, and
his
, and so on all the way back to the first person to die inside this ambulance, who was actually the only one of us to expire from natural causes.”