It's Not What You Think (8 page)

So there I was, left feeling like the man who built his own private Idaho and then in a moment of typical male ego-fuelled madness, took a match to it and razed it to the ground.

Of course I made overtures to try to win back my lost love but Tina was having none of it—her mum even less. Mrs Y. even tracked me down to tell me what an idiot I had been for throwing away the chance to be with her wonderful daughter. She was entirely right.

Tina did agree to see me several weeks later and expressed her genuine desire to get back together, but in the end she decided ultimately for her own sake that this was not the most sensible approach to take in life towards the first man she had given her heart to. She had done so sincerely and fully and I had repayed her by scarpering at the mere sniff of a new testosterone-filled adventure. Oh if only all the girls of the world were half as wise. Tina was never going to be a loser and nor was she going to allow herself to be with one. She was made of far stronger stuff than her now ex boyfriend. She owed him nothing. He had told her that he would love her for ever and yet he had not been able to love her for little more than a year. He had lied, plain and simple.

From this moment school was still school but no longer as I’d known it: it was now Tina-less, the biggest reason yet to get it over and done with once and for all.

10 Skiing (I have been over thirty times, had lessons, the lot: complete waste of time)

  9 Snowboarding (even worse—if that’s possible)

  8 Football (even though I have played at Wembley 12 times—a crime for such a bad footballer)
*

  7 Rugby (truly awful)

  6 Motor mechanics (I don’t have the finger strength required)

  5 Looking after money (more about that later)

  4 Staying away from the wrong kind of people

  3 Sleeping

  2 Crying

  1 Fighting

I have never been good at fighting but for years
I was happy to get stuck in regardless. That is, until over time, I gradually came to realise that fighting was not a prerequisite for either getting on in life or being a man particularly—in short, it was neither big nor clever. It was also becoming patently obvious, due to the number of pastings I continually found myself on the receiving end of, that I was in fact rubbish at it.

Fighting is just one of the many things I am not cut out to do. I have little strength, never have had, my bones are thin and brittle and I also bruise easily.

So let’s face it, if you hit me I’m pretty much guaranteed to break and if I do manage to hit you back—well, don’t worry about having to call the medic as I was also at the back of the queue on the day God was dishing out the manly hands.

My hands are ridiculously little for a guy of my height, stature and weight. It’s almost as if The Lord was trying to tell me not to fight. I would have had no problem with this if he’d thought to make up for his ‘handy’ oversight in other areas of my physicality but alas no, there’s little to get excited about anywhere else either, I regret to say. Little hands mean little…knuckles and in my case they also meant smooth and round knuckles—almost completely useless for fighting with. Put them next to a half-decent man-sized set of ugly, gnarled, knobbly destroyers and it’s the equivalent of putting your grandma in the ring with Mike Tyson.

But fights were going to come and fights were going to go so I had to have a plan, which I did. It was a plan that basically consisted of me getting the first punch in hard and fast after which I would whip my glasses off, close my eyes and hope for the best.

This is what had happened on the morning of the launch of the Space Shuttle
Columbia.
I had become involved in a playground altercation with another kid. Having received the aforementioned Evans first and only punch, he had to my astonishment gone down as a result—also with such apparent force it didn’t look like he would be getting up any time soon! I was more shocked than he was. My plans thus far had not allowed for any such an occurrence. I had to revise my strategy and quickly. Having already opened my eyes, I decided to replace my glasses and make a run for it, which is exactly what I did.

I was safe, for now at least. However, when my adversary did come round, I was more than aware he was bound to want revenge. I was reliably informed he had been declaring as much shortly after coming to. To put it more precisely, he had vowed that come home-time he was going to kill me outside the school gates.

Suffice to say, upon hearing this I had been peeing my pants ever since.

The news of my forthcoming assassination had been eagerly telegrammed to me several times—more than I needed to hear but of course this was the usual guaranteed scenario. There was never a shortage of gleeful messengers around when there was an after-school duel to be advertised and the more likely you were to lose, the more desperate the messengers were to let you know the exact details of when and where you were going to get your head kicked in.

These messenger kids are the worst. Destined to become wasters of perfectly good oxygen as they grow older, they are the child apprentices of the kind of adults that take pleasure in the art of spreading bad news, the kind of people who need bad news to use as a currency to make themselves briefly more interesting. You know, the kind of people who take part in and watch those terrible daytime talk shows and trash each other live on national television.

My opponent meanwhile was odds-on favourite to have me over in any discernable ‘proper’ fight and by all accounts he was now fuming—angry as a wasp in a jar apparently. The weird kid had knocked him to the ground in full view of his contemporaries and he had lost face; not only that but that face was now a little bent and he owed me—something he would have to put right at the first available opportunity. He was in no mood to delay the process for a second longer than was required. Home-time it was to be: cometh the hour—cometh the beating. I was left feeling in no uncertain terms that when the school bell went for the final time that day I was going to get it and I was going to get it good.

I was able to think of little else. I felt sick, I wanted to go to the toilet, I wanted to cry and I wanted to die. All four of which were likely to happen before the day was over.

So, as you can probably imagine, the Space Shuttle launch was a much welcome diversion—especially seeing as we were going to be allowed to watch it on television. I even considered it might be the type of event to make the angry kid realise the bigger picture for the human race as a whole and that killing another thirteen year old in cold blood may not be in the spirit of the day.

The television room, not unlike my bottom that day, was packed and full of apprehension, so much so, that some of us were forced to sit on the floor—not that we minded, we were spellbound by what was going on, plus it meant we didn’t have to do our normal lessons as they’d been put on hold until after the launch.

This was an all-round cool situation, and it was getting cooler by the minute as NASA was suffering technical problems giving rise to an ongoing delay.

‘Please, let the launch be delayed for several years,’ I thought to myself, long enough for the angry boy to meet the girl of his dreams, have a small
family and retire to Southport. Long enough for him to realise the ultimate futility of inane hand-to-hand combat between fellow men…and more importantly, fellow schoolboys.

But alas it was not to be. Before long the
Columbia
countdown over in Houston had restarted along with the impending ‘death by fight’ countdown that was currently taking place in my head.

This situation had now officially morphed into becoming another one of those moments in my life that I wished would never end, for the second it did my intended fate would surely befall me and in front of all the world to see. Like my brick wall moment with Tina, it was now that I pleaded for the planets and the solar system to pull together and show mercy upon this young and needy soul by miraculously and cosmically bringing time to a grinding halt and in so doing, save this shaking, quaking juvenile wreck of a child from pissing himself into oblivion. I swear, if
Discovery
were still waiting to take off here and now that would have been fine by me.

I decided it was time for a prayer.

‘Dear God, please let time stop here for ever. Sure I know it would mean I’ll never realise my potential as a human being past this point, I will never know what it feels like to take my first trip to the seaside behind the wheel of my own car, to buy my first home, to have a child, to witness another Labour government, to truly become acquainted with the ways of a woman, to stare on in wonder at the simplicity yet effectiveness of the format of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
(a game show currently over fifteen years away from even being conceived), but frankly I don’t care because it would also mean that I’m never going to have to face the school gates pummelling that’s most definitely coming my way in what’s now just a couple of hours. Please God, out of the two options I am more than happy to sacrifice all of the former for even the slightest chance of the latter.

Amen.’

Time may sometimes seem like it stands still but the clouds and the clocks tell us it doesn’t. Perhaps a moment is as close as we ever get. Maybe a moment is the stillness between the ticking of time, the bridge over the river, if you like, the halfway house between the now and the then.

For me this stillness is usually enough and I have learnt to enjoy such ‘moments’, diving into them and pushing them apart to make them last as
long as possible, but back then, in the early Eighties, sat in front of that television, in that classroom, there was no such pleasure to be had, time was very much against me.

Acceptance though is often liberation. ‘Let go, let go, let, go,’ I said to myself and as I did so miraculously my prayers were answered.

Unconsciously, as I was sat on the floor, I began to stroke the carpet tiles—partly I suppose for some kind of self-soothing, contemplative comfort, like a wise man might stroke his chin or a dog might lick his private parts, and partly I suppose out of resignation, my resignation to the fact that, whichever way I looked at it, my goose was cooked—I was a dead man walking.

I continued to brush my right hand, palm down, across the carpet in a thoughtful arcing motion, half contemplating the wonder of what was taking place across the Atlantic, half wondering whether the mad kid was going to start killing me by punching me in the stomach or in the face first and whether I would bother trying to defend myself or just let him get it over and done with. But, as these thoughts danced around my consciousness, I found myself becoming distracted, distracted by something on the floor, something under my right hand. There was a bump in the carpet.

It felt like there was something running under the texture of the weave. I ceased my stroking and lifted my hand so I could see what it was, but there was nothing there.

‘Strange,’ I thought. I checked again—the carpet tile was dark brown and quite hard to see so I leant down this time to get a little closer but, nope, there was definitely nothing to report.

I resumed my self soothing, running my hand across the carpet but again I felt the bump, almost immediately this time. Again I looked to see what it was, but again nothing. Was I going mad? It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, I was under a great deal of schoolboy stress at the time—maybe my mind had had enough of me and wanted out.

I went to stroke the carpet a third time and whatever it was, blow me it was still there; it may have been invisible but it was definitely still there. What on earth was it? And then I noticed my hand, the hand that had been doing the stroking—the three outer fingers looked like they were swollen and quite severely—not only this but they appeared to be slightly blue.

I became confused and felt the vague undertones of blind panic begin to set in. Upon further inspection, I turned my hand over and there, revealed, was the source of the mystery, a lump in my palm, the size of a golf ball.

This time, I had broken myself.

My one punch to the chin of the angry kid had been too much for my soft, little round knuckles to take, they really did hate fighting and this was the last straw, they had chosen to defend themselves instead of me and to show their disdain for such a pastime they had physically retreated into the palm of my hand.

‘Ouch,’ I thought as I realised it was now hurting, ‘that looks awful.’ ‘Brilliant,’ I thought next. ‘This is my passport out of here. The angry kid will be fighting his own shadow at home-time if this is half as bad as it looks. My fingers are obviously broken. There must be a hospital trip in this. It might even be an ambulance job. Hurrah, thank you God, let me know how much I owe you.’

Of course I waited for
Columbia
to launch before approaching the teacher. My hand had now begun to throb and no doubt was becoming less salvageable by the minute but there was no way I wanted to miss the launch. Besides, now that I knew I was off the hook with the angry kid, my hand may have been hurting like hell but my heart was singing—to the high heavens. With
Columbia
safely on her way it was time for me to disclose the nature of my injury and get the heck out of there.

There’s nothing like presenting a teacher with a genuine injury, is there?

Teachers are so ready for lesson-dodging excuses that when one is able to confront them with the real deal, one is flushed with a swell of satisfaction as the expression on their face gradually makes the journey from scepticism, all the way through to concern—stopping off somewhere in between to register a mixture of disappointment and guilt when they realise they might have to actually do something about the situation.

And so out came the trowel as I prepared to lay on the thick stuff. I took great pleasure in informing my class mistress of the obvious pain and anguish I was experiencing while offering up my increasingly ballooning right paw as evidence to such truths. I had to admit, it did look pretty dramatic, I also let her know, in no uncertain terms, that I had heroically
postponed the reporting of my serious injury so as not to interrupt such momentous an event as the Space Shuttle ‘take-off ’ with such a trifling matter as my hand, which was about to ‘drop off ’.

Twenty minutes later I was home and free—well, I was actually in the hospital and free and boy, did it feel good. I had gone from condemned zero to resilient hero in less than half an hour. My initial sense of relief was quickly developing into a wave of unbearable ecstasy. Life felt mighty sweet, I can tell you. I was out of the woods and would soon be scampering down into the valley. I might have to go back to school the next day but there was no way the angry kid could pick a fight with me if I had a plaster on my arm. It wouldn’t be worth the bad ‘rep’. He would have to hold on to his anger for at least six weeks and anything could happen in that time—there could even be a war!

But, as we know, the karma police are never far away and they were about to rain on my parade, big time. One hour later I would be screaming with agony.