Dance On My Grave (6 page)

On another occasion Neill exploded himself through the kitchen door, luckily open at the time, into the back yard, where he scattered the dustbin in an elaborate and noisy landing which exaggerated the violence of the explosion and from which the dustbin never recovered.

On a third occasion, and for what electronic purpose I cannot remember, we were bending glass tubing over a bunsen burner. Neill got over-confident, went too fast, snapped the glass, and was cut by a flying splinter on the vein that passes over the knuckle of the thumb. Blood spurted like an oil strike, splattering the kitchen walls in a profusion so alarming as to make Neill, who could never stand the sight of blood even in the Sunday joint, suppose death must be only seconds away.

Before I could think what to do, Neill raced screaming into the street, where he literally ran into his mother who was returning from the shops burdened with food parcels to keep Neill alive for the next couple of days. A scene of Mediterranean proportions ensued. Voices were raised in arias of panic, hands were waved, people rushed to the
rescue from all directions. Blood and emotion flowed like lava.

Eventually an ambulance arrived. Neill was sirened away. Only to return an hour later by public transport, his thumb patched with a humiliatingly minute piece of sticky tape, his devotion to science quelled but by no means quenched. By evening we were busy with a wholly new electronic project which had suggested itself to Neill while he was at the hospital. He had seen some clinical machine or other, the purpose of which remained obscure to me but which he understood perfectly, and which he was certain he could improve on in a design of his own invention.

In the end I decided Neill was a genius. But I tell you—if geniuses are all like Neill, they aren’t much cop as friends. They’re interesting, no doubt of it. And eccentrically companionable. But Neill made me realize that there was something more I wanted of my bosom pal than cosy companionship.

Not that I could then have described what that extra something was, not even after Neill, by which time I was fourteen. Except that it had to do with cutting your hand, and blood, and grasping your friend’s wounded mitt and swearing a binding oath.

I was to learn about the missing something when I came across another potential BF a few months after I gave up seeing Neill all the time, and just before we moved to Southend. I won’t bore you with the unhappier details. I’ll just mention that the candidate’s name was Brian Biffen, better known as Buster. He was two years older than me, and a lock forward in the school’s rugby team. He was the only one of the three who wanted me to be his friend and chased after me, rather than me setting the ball rolling and wanting him to be mine.

I guess it was flattering to be chased after instead of
chasing after someone else. Which is why I agreed to watch Buster perform on the rugger field—not something I’d usually be seen dead doing. And it was after I’d watched him play in a match one evening that he took me behind the gym and taught me the pleasures of mutual comfit (or, rather, dis-comfit when Buster was your instructor), a learning process that slotted the missing piece into my understanding of bosom palship, even though Buster proved himself undesirable because being hugged by him was like being hugged by a teenage cactus with large biceps. I have avoided rugger players ever since. ‘I wish you were a girl,’ breathed Buster at the climactic moment. As I did not wish Buster were a girl, only less cactal and overpowering, an essential difference between his ideas about himself and mine about myself became all too clear to my astonished mind.

There remains only one more item to add to the fraying emotional embarrassment of this confessional catalogue:

One day a few months ago Holy Joe Harrison, our religious teacher unextraordinary, read out from the Holy Bible certain unexpected passages about David (the little guy who gave Goliath the chop with a sling stone) and Jonathan (the tearaway son of fierce King Saul). David and Jonathan got a thing going between them, apparently, because they started talking about the soul of Jonathan being knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loving David as his own soul.

I’m not sure Holy Joe can have realized what he was getting into, because this isn’t exactly the sort of Biblical revelation it is advisable to read out to burgeoning sixteen-year-olds, especially if you are as uptight and morally fundamentalist as HJH and have poor classroom discipline into the bargain. Everybody woke up and hooted of course, and there were scrawny cries of ‘Hello-o-o-o-o!’ But I found myself sitting up and taking
notice just like I had all those years ago in front of the telly.

To be honest, the can of magic beans and the cut hands were losing their potency as images of bosomry by this time. They were tainted with kiddishness. But this stuff about souls being knit, and all of it Biblical too, was a lot more engaging. So afterwards I got the reference from HJH—who must have thought he’d made a convert because no one ever asked him anything—and read it all for myself in i Samuel 18
et seq.
I then discovered the even more riveting information that D. and J. found their love, as the Bible puts it, ‘passing the love of women’.

This really set the juices flowing. Whatever had I stumbled upon? The two boys with their can of magic beans as processed as TV dinners disappeared into the mists of babyhood in one evening’s Bible reading. Here was meat far more nourishing to feed a growing lad.

Not that the Bible goes into too much detail. It never does. That book is full of all sorts of terrific ideas, and is always telling you what you should and should not to, but it never gets round to telling you how to do them and how to stop yourself from doing them. So here I was with a tantalizingly dazzling phrase cried out by David at the death (
DEATH
!) of Jonathan—‘Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women’ (2 Samuel i, 26)—but left to wonder what it meant, and, more importantly, what exactly had happened between them to make David think like that. For God’s sake, what had they
done
to—with?—each other?

One thing was sure. David and Jonathan were archetypal bosom friends. No question. This explained also the message I had seen scrawled on a wall under the pier a few days before:
BRIAN LOVES JONATHAN
. To which someone else had added the words:
SO DID DAVID. READ YOUR BIBLE.
Since then I have come across further
evidences of the same fun.
BATMAN LOVES ROBIN
, for instance.

David’s illuminating cry stalked my mind for weeks. And was still haunting me the day Barry Gorman hove into view waving my jeans from the cockpit of his yellow
Calypso.
So, you see, I wasn’t exactly all wide-eyed innocence that day, whatever I may have tried to pretend—to him or to you.

18/Which explains why things were happening under the surface (if you’ll pardon the expression, given the seaborne nature of our meeting) from the time Barry begins his rescuing pick-up until the moment we sit facing each other across his kitchen table scoffing his mother’s nosh. So I’ll try again.

RETAKE

He comes alongside, and I know who he is at once. I’ve seen him around during my first two terms at school here before he left. And since he left I have passed him on the street, and caught glimpses of him sailing. Each time I size him up, as you do people you come across now and then. Nothing more than that: just pick him out of the crowd and think, ‘Interesting’ or ‘Nice’.

But it isn’t part of my nature to seek out people who I think I might like, and try to win them. I wouldn’t trust the result, not after Harvey and Buster. Besides, I don’t like rejection; it hurts. I also get some of this caution from my mother who has an old-fashioned, doomsday view of life. She says that what you have to ask for you don’t deserve and shouldn’t get. What’s more, she says if you do get it, retribution is bound to strike, like a kind of spiteful lightning. Ask and it shall be taken from you, and great shall be the pain thereof. My mother believes all this
superstitious gunk. I don’t, of course, but sometimes I catch myself acting as if I did, like the people who don’t believe it is bad luck to walk under ladders but don’t take the chance anyhow.

So I never make a pass at passing attractions, whatever the sex. But when Barry appears alongside, though I am cold and wet and miserable and expect to die, I take one look and I know he is the latest contender for the role of the boy with the can of magic beans. My death is imminent in this watery waste and there I am sitting on a wrecked dinghy thinking of acquiring a Jonathan for my David, and wondering how long you need to find out exactly what it is that passes the love of women.

The irony of this does not escape me. (Isn’t he a clever boy.) But I do not laugh aloud. O no. Instead I slip into a lost-and-hopeless-kid routine. Not deliberately, not by scheming design, you understand. I really am being freeze-dried in the angry Thames, after all; and anyway I am not
that
scheming even at the best of times. It all happens instinctively. As if there is something about Barry that triggers off this reaction. But all the same, I can
feel
myself acting the part. I almost watch myself perform.

What is more, I enjoy it. I put myself into his hands and love it. He tells me what to do be saved. I do what he tells me neatly, straightaway, as if he is working me by remote control. And how do I explain that feeling to anyone who hasn’t had it? Well, in the days when I was watching Buster play rugger, I remember seeing those hearty athletes revel in some moment when everything went just right between them. They said they felt like they were one man. They go flip afterwards in their amusingly bullish fashion. I used to wonder about it, and envy it too, secretly. Maybe this inter-being I am feeling at this moment of rescue is the same kind of experience? I don’t know, not just then. What I do know is that I glow inside.

Barry gets me ashore. I protest about going home with him, but this is all show. Of course I want to go home with him. I really do feel miserable, foolish, shocked. (Especially on the beach; that bloody gawking crowd!) But I don’t feel as bad as I put on just to keep the calamity alive and the mutual interest going. I’ve noticed before: there is nothing like a catastrophe that leaves you helpless for stoking up other people’s interest in you.

So we get to Barry’s house and there is all that fandango with his mother. But I enjoy my bath. Mrs Gorman is right about it as a cure for capsizing. Afterwards I know Barry is sizing me up while I dress in his room. I know I am sizing him up too. And the more I see the more I like him. Which is one of the great conundrums: how do you
know
that you like someone in just a few minutes? How does it happen with this person so quickly and not with hundreds, thousands of other people who cross your path every year? I’ve thought about that a lot and still haven’t a clue. Because it isn’t just that you like the look of a face or the shape of a body or even how someone lives that makes them attractive. It’s something else, something you can’t ever quite put your finger on. You just know it has happened, that’s all. And it happened that morning.

And then we are guzzling at his kitchen table, and I am pretending now to be cool, calm, collected, and O so mature. When actually I am coming apart at the seams with the blood-tingling thrill of it all. Hey-nonny-no.

19/‘Finished?’ Barry asked. ‘Want anything more?’

‘Great, thanks. I’d better be going . . .’

We cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher. Our dishwasher is my mother, hindered by my dad on Sunday afternoons, if he isn’t working.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to the boats while you attend the wizard of Oz. Why not drop in this evening? You could tell me what Ozzy says, and maybe we could go to a film or something?’

‘Okay, sure.’

‘See you about half six then?’

Hey, Nono: nonny-no.

20/When I found Oz that afternoon he took me into an empty classroom and handed me an essay I had written just before the exams started.

‘Your work, I think, Robinson,’ he said.

Ozzy is tall, wirily thin, balding. When he gets you at close quarters and peers at you through his glasses with their lenses like the bottoms of bottles you feel like you are trapped by an inquisitive shark afflicted by myopia and possessed of an over-active thyroid. Not a pretty sight. It took me weeks to realize that when he is putting you through the mill of his attention, he isn’t trying to pulverize you with the force of his superior intellect, but only trying to sharpen your powers of thought. ‘He could have fooled me,’ other kids say when I try to explain this. ‘It is a well-known fact,’ they say, ‘that even the Head is afraid of him. And that he eats new boys for breakfast.’

He sat me down and drew a chair up beside me.

‘Be good enough to read out what you have written.’