Mr Toppit (7 page)

There was a clang and a gurney pushed by two other men bounced off the pavement onto the road and raced towards them. The man next to her was almost physically lifting her away and then an extraordinary thing happened: someone took the oxygen mask off Arthur’s face and he said to her, in the clearest voice, “Don’t go.”

The man holding her said, “Are you family?” and she said, “Yes, yes, I am,” and then she added, for good measure, “I work in a hospital,” but she didn’t say this time that she was a nurse. The man eased his hands away from her middle and let her move back to Arthur. She knew she didn’t have long because they were unfurling a canvas stretcher and they would be using it to get him onto the gurney. She took his hand and said, “I won’t go,” but his eyes were closed now. She wished she were closer to him, that she could hold him in her arms.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

She didn’t have to think about it for long: she knew who she was now and the certainty of it banished everything else from her mind. Laurie might have said it out loud or she might not. She wasn’t sure because everything around her was so noisy, but she certainly said it in her head, over and over again, as she held on tightly to Arthur’s hand: “I am the Princess Anaglypta, and I have come home.”

On that Monday, after lunch, Adam finally got the magazine and let me have it first. It had acquired legendary status around the school and the pages were already scuffed and torn from overuse. I could hear Weeks thundering down the corridor shouting my name: he had been due to have it next, but he was the last person we were going to give it to. I headed straight for the butts and locked the stall door. I was in the one at the end by the wall, which everyone used because it had only one other stall next to it.

I unbuttoned my trousers and let them fall round my ankles. My prick was on the move in my underpants. They came down, too, and I sat on the loo seat. I should have wiped it first because it was liberally sprayed with piss, but I was in a hurry. I had hardly opened the magazine before I was stiff.

In the showers one day, Adam had said to me conversationally, “It’s not very big, is it?” His was rather large and had an enviable weight to it.

“Some people develop faster than others,” I said, in an attempt at coolness. “I’m not in any hurry.”

“Aren’t you?” he said. “I am.”

I was thirteen and going through a phantom puberty. Something was happening, but not much. The testosterone was there but it had run out of steam. My voice occasionally had a nice croak, and I did have a light undergrowth of pubic hair. Sometimes I put Vaseline on it and combed it, but I had no hair under
my arms, and my prick stubbornly refused to grow. The worst thing was that no spunk came when I wanked.

I’d only been in the butts for about three minutes. I had taken a length of loo paper and laid it over my thigh. One hand was holding the magazine and the other was holding my prick. The spread in front of me showed a girl with long blond hair. She was called Donna. The text was in Dutch, but her name kept cropping up in the captions. The headline at the top of the page said:
DONNA KRIJGT HET VAN TWEE KANTEN
. There were two men with her. One was called Dirk and the other was called Rex. I couldn’t read Dutch: I didn’t know whether Donna was being fucked by Dirk while she was sucking Rex’s cock or whether it was the other way round.

A crash made me jump. The door to the butts had been kicked open and banged against the wall.

“Luke?” Adam shouted.

I stood on the toilet and peered over the stall wall.

Adam’s face was solemn. “The Head Man wants you.”

We knew it was only a matter of time, but I hadn’t expected it so soon. “Me? Why is it just me?”

Adam looked sheepish. It wasn’t his fault the joke had backfired, but it had been his idea to play it on Weeks in the first place, although I’d had my own reasons, too. Earlier in the term, Weeks had done a blown-up Xerox of one of the drawings of Luke from the books and stuck it on the notice board with a big felt-tip caption, saying, “Puke Hayseed.”

Adam’s plan was brilliant. He had worked out how we should do it, how we should get Weeks hooked. Two nights ago, we had gone to Weeks’s room after supper. We’d been there a while when Adam winked at me to let me know he was going to start. Suddenly he gave a pained grimace and grabbed
his crotch. “Christ,” he said to me, “I must be early. Has yours started yet?”

Weeks’s eyes narrowed.

I shook my head. “I’m not due till next week. Actually, maybe it’s the week after.”

“What?” said Weeks.
“What?”

Adam looked at me as if to ask whether or not it was okay to tell Weeks. I shrugged my shoulders.

“Your … you know … your …” Adam said.

Weeks stood up. “What?”

Adam appeared embarrassed.

I said, “No, he should ask his parents.”

Weeks couldn’t bear to miss out on anything, a trait common in those who always missed out on everything. He backed against the door and put his arms across it as if we were about to force our way out. “Tell me. Now. Please.”

Adam glanced at me and I gave him a reluctant shrug. “You haven’t got a sister, have you?” he said to Weeks.

“No, I don’t. So what?” Weeks said suspiciously.

“Then you won’t know about periods.”

“Course I do,” Weeks said uncertainly.

“You know that boys have them, too? I mean, in a different way but sort of the same,” Adam said.

Weeks’s eyes flitted nervously between us. “Yeah? So?”

“Yours probably haven’t started yet. Mine only just have. So have Luke’s. It doesn’t
matter
if they haven’t started. They will eventually.”

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “You’ve just got to be ready.”

“Well, you don’t want it
going
everywhere, do you?” Adam said, eyeing his crotch.

There was a pause. “Well, I’m quite careful,” Weeks said.

“Anyway, you can get them at the chemist. The pads.”

“Yeah.” Weeks nodded in agreement.

“Your parents should have told you.”

“No, no, they did. In a roundabout way.”

“Only, you know, it would be awful if you didn’t know and all that blood came pouring out of your prick. Still, it’s only once a month, isn’t it? Twelve times a year.”

“Yeah.”

“Actually,” I interjected, “it’s really thirteen. It’s lunar months, not calendar ones.”

“Yeah, full-moon stuff,” Adam said, and made the baying sound of a werewolf.

“It’s only happened a bit with me so far,” Weeks said confidently. “I mean, it gets more every month, doesn’t it?”

That morning, we learned with mounting horror that Weeks had gone to the medical center and asked the doctor if there was a problem because his periods hadn’t started, so the call to see the Head was not much of a surprise.

In the event, it all turned out quite differently. I was back from seeing the Head Man in less than ten minutes. I ignored everyone waiting in the corridor to find out what had happened and went into Adam’s room. I shut the door and let out a sigh of relief.

“What happened?” Adam said. “Tell me.”

I smiled, savoring every second.

“Come
on
!”

“My father’s broken his leg or something. I’ve got to go up to London.”

Adam was mystified. “What are you talking about?”

“My old man’s broken his leg. That’s what it was about—my dad. Nothing about Weeks.”

Adam whooped with delight. He put his arm round my shoulder and we kicked the door open, then pushed past the crowd outside. We were roaring with laughter.

“Close call, man,” Adam said.

“Yeah, close call,” I replied. “Close fucking call.”

When I had told Adam I had to go to London because of my father’s broken leg, it wasn’t strictly true. I didn’t have to go at all. Martha had rung the school and said there had been an accident, a traffic accident. Someone—a passerby, apparently—had called her and told her that Arthur had been run over in the street, had broken his leg, and was being taken to hospital. “Nothing to worry about,” the Head Man said brightly. “Your mother’s going straight to the hospital.” That defined something to worry about, but it wasn’t what I was thinking of. I had seen an opportunity, and while I weighed it up, I slipped a frown onto my face to keep the Head Man occupied.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine, Hayman. They’re miracle workers, these days. A splint, a lick of plaster …”

I had had a very specific vision: on the other side of the closed door to the Head Man’s study, Weeks might be lurking, waiting to tell his story. Or there was going to be an urgent call from someone at the medical center to tell the Head Man about the cruel joke that had been played on Weeks. It didn’t take me long to decide what to do. “I think I should go, sir. Don’t you?”

“Go?”

“To the hospital.”

He gave a blustery laugh. “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought there was any need for that.”

“But nobody’s actually, well,
heard
what happened, have they? I mean
properly.”

He looked confused. “Well, your mother—”

“She’s not been well, sir.”

“Hasn’t she?”

“No, sir.”

I thought I might get away with leaving it like that but I could see he was waiting for me to go on. I studied my hands, as if I was embarrassed, while I tried to think of something to say. A conveyor belt of medical conditions passed by me and I grabbed one off it. “It’s the menopause, sir.”

“I see,” he said nervously.

I was on very shaky ground now. Maybe I meant hysterectomy. I added tentatively, “Yes, it’s been … a tricky one.”

“Well …”

“So it’ll be difficult if she needs to lift him … you know … onto the lavatory.”

There was a pause. “Won’t the nurses do that?”

“He’s rather particular about that kind of thing, sir.”

He looked at me in astonishment. I wondered whether I was going to have to blub as well. There was a brief silence, and then he said reluctantly, “Well, I suppose you’d better take the train up to London.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, in a humble voice with a little crack in it. It was the least I could do.

As I was getting up, he said, “Oh, yes—your mother asked if you would ring your sister. She hasn’t been able to track her down.”

That wasn’t a surprise. Although Rachel was nominally sharing an apartment in Golders Green with two girls who were at the same secretarial college, she never seemed to be either
there or the college. Where she could normally be found was at Claude’s. They had been best friends at school and still behaved most of the time as if they were in the playground, their relationship an endless cycle of argument and reconciliation. They rather liked people thinking they were girlfriend and boyfriend, even though it amazed me that you could think that Claude was anything other than gay.

After the taxi had dropped me at the station, I rang Claude’s number. He lived in a house of bedsits in Earls Court. Claude had a room next to his new friend Damian, who had just arrived from South Africa and might or might not have been his boyfriend. Since his grandfather had cut off his allowance, Claude sometimes worked as a tour guide, taking Americans round London, and Damian was helping him. Rachel said that most of their work was in the evenings, so I hoped he’d be in.

I had a lot of coins in my hand because the phone in Claude’s house was on the ground floor and someone had to go up three flights to get him.

“What time is it?” Claude said, when he finally got to the phone.

“Three o’clock.”

“Who is this?” he said, in an outraged tone.

“It’s Luke.”

“Oh,
Luke
. I thought it might be Todd.”

“Who?”

“Todd’s in my tour group—” Claude’s voice was cut off as the phone began beeping. I put some more money in. He was still talking when the coins went through. “—from Chicago. A lawyer. So he says. Though he certainly doesn’t seem to have much idea of what’s legal and what isn’t in this country. You should have seen him at that club he begged us to take him to.”

“Do you know where Rachel is?”

“Anyway, Todd’s not the point. It’s his
friend
who’s the point. Do you know what he wanted Damian to do?”

“Claude,” I said wearily, “I’m in a phone box and I’m running out of money. Where’s Rachel?”

“I’ve no idea,” he said. I knew he was lying.

“Look, if you speak to her, will you tell her that Arthur’s broken his leg and’s in hospital?”

“How awful. I must get Damian to organize flowers.”

The train was coming in on the opposite platform. “Claude, I’ve got to go.” I gave him the name of the hospital.

“Luke, wait,” he wailed, as I put the phone down.

In the blank little room at the hospital where I had been sent to wait, there were many things I could have been thinking about. I could have been thinking about Arthur, who was on some other floor but seemed so distant he might have been on the moon. I could have been thinking about Rachel, who probably was on the moon. I could have been thinking about Martha, who, I’d been told, was up with Arthur and was probably making everyone wish they were on the moon. What I was actually thinking about was having left Adam to face the music on his own and how long I could spin out Arthur’s broken leg.

There was a certain vagueness about the messages I had been getting from the hospital people I had talked to. People had been in and out. Cups of tea were brought. Faces were crinkled with sympathy. Lately I had noticed that eyes were averted, which made me think that maybe Arthur had broken his leg quite badly and would have to stay for a while. Weeks had broken his leg playing football and had been in hospital for a
fortnight. Adam and I had scrawled obscenities on his cast with a red felt-tip pen.

After half an hour, there was a knock on the door and a doctor came in. It was nice of him to knock: nobody else had.

“I’m Dr. Massingbird,” he said. “You bearing up all right?” He looked me straight in the eyes, so intently, in fact, that I lowered them.

“How do you mean?” I was feeling uneasy now.

“Have you talked to your mother yet?”