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Authors: Matthew Chapman

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Trials of the Monkey (19 page)

BOOK: Trials of the Monkey
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When my mother died, the following letter from the headmaster was found among the few mementoes she’d kept of my childhood.
Dear Mr and Mrs Chapman,
I think I should just report that Matthew is spending a week as my ‘guest’ at Arunfield because he has been rather a lot of nuisance at Arunwood, particularly with regard to night time visits to the girls’ dormitory. As you probably know this is one of the rules we do insist on being kept, even as young as Arunwood, and as Matthew is still very much in the process of finding out how to get along sensibly with the girls, I think it is as well to take a firm line with him about this from now on …
I do not remember my parents being particularly upset. In fact, I don’t think they did anything to hide their amusement. Get along sensibly with the girls!
We were allowed home every few weekends and I would usually go. My mother’s drinking was less of a problem for me now than at almost any other time. I was too old to be a victim and not old enough to be attacked as an adult. I was a teenager, egotistical and cruel, and far more interested in developing into a man than worrying about her. When I brought a friend home, she was welcoming and warm. As soon as we entered the room, she came toward us with her arms open and embraced first my friend, ‘Ah, my dear William. How
are
you?’ and then me. As my friends tended to be delinquent boys from dysfunctional middle-class families where physical contact was rare and expressions of affection muted, she was adored. When she got drunk around them, it upset me, but it didn’t seem to bother them. She was a heavy drinker. She closed her eyes when talking. So what? And, no matter how bad things got, I loved her.
When I returned to the dorm after my stay with the headmaster, the fire escapes were painted with purple dye and every morning before breakfast my hands were inspected. I suppose you couldn’t blame them for trying, but like all prohibitions on personal desire, this one was doomed to failure. There were other things in my life apart from sex, but all were coloured with desire. I would play sport and play it well, but refused to do it on weekends because that would cut into my romancing hours. I had some bikes, including a tandem, and loved to ride around on them, but on every trip out into the country, I hoped I’d meet a girl or catch a peek of illicit lovers in the back seat of a car.
My friendship with William was the only security I had. A far better scholar than me, he had a bitter, nihilistic air about him and read Sartre and Camus and despised convention. One time he read something—something Buddhist I suspect—about the nature of experience and for a while insisted on eating his food in silence, with his eyes closed. As girls tempted and withdrew, fell in love with me and then fell out, often leaving me in such anguish I’d sob myself to sleep while masturbating, the eccentric William remained my good and constant companion. Sometimes he’d even spend the holidays with me. His mother was dead and his father lived alone in the New Forest and I sensed it was a gloomy place, although I never visited.
Not all the boys came from rich homes. I remember two boys who didn’t, both of whom were friends of mine from time to time. Nigel was a short, wiry boy, a great footballer and an exceptional pisser. We once put him on the jumping-off mark of the long-jump pit and found he could piss an incredible eighteen feet, a phenomenal arc of urine. (Bet he can’t do that anymore.) Throughout the three years I was there, he and I were at times rivals for the affection of a girl named Nina. He did better than me, until I did better than anyone—and got expelled for it.
Then there was Andrew. Andrew was also a good footballer. He was handsome, or would have been had his face not been a galaxy of leaking pimples from which his narrow, aggressive eyes stared out. Like William, he was a good student but unpredictable
and savage. He’d punch you without a second thought and then finish the job swiftly and without flourish, like he’d done it many times before. He, William, and I were probably the toughest kids of our age and, apart from the nerds, the brightest.
The Sixties were beginning and black, elastic-sided boots with Cuban heels were in fashion. I desired a pair with almost fetishistic passion, convinced, as one can be at that age, that if I had them, everyone would look at me differently, and life would change completely and forever. I biked to a nearby town where rumour had it you could get these boots. I found a pair with three-inch heels and was biking back when I got a puncture and had to walk the rest of the way. My feet hurt for a week, but I continued to wear the magic boots which were not magic. Soon after this, William, Andrew, and I managed to convince the school we were spending the day with my parents and jumped a train to London to go visit Carnaby Street. Carnaby Street was
the
street,
the
place to be in all of England, in all the world. I was wearing my boots under jeans with inverted Vs sewn into the sides below the knee so they flapped rakishly around my calves as I walked. William was similarly dressed. But when I looked down at Andrew’s feet, I saw he was wearing a pair of
tartan bedroom slippers.
I was appalled. He didn’t care. Some years later, having taken a lot of acid, he jumped off a bridge and killed himself.
After a year, we all moved on to another house. We returned to Arunwood only when we learned the bearded one was departing. On his last night, William and I went over there and urinated extensively into the petrol tank of his van. The next day we were told he only got to the bottom of the drive before the vehicle spluttered and died.
I can’t remember much about the next house, except for the night President Kennedy was killed. It was in the evening and we were all watching TV. Gaby was wearing stockings with a suspender belt and her flesh bulged softly from the tops of them. I had my hand between these legs. When the news came on, the hand was ejected and was never invited back.
Two new girls came to the school. One of them was Rebecca. She had dark hair, big eyes, a long nose and a wide mouth. There was something exotic and gypsy-like about her. She was by far the coolest girl of our age, slender, sophisticated, and beautiful. I fell in love with her instantly, but she was from London, Hampstead, I think, and although I went out with her for a short while during term-time, I could not compete with the big city boys, older boys mostly, who were already smoking dope and screwing. We had a brief romance and kissed a lot. She let me touch her here and there, but I was too possessive and insecure and we broke up. There was one time,
one time
when I could, I’m
sure
I could, have made love to her.
We had broken up, but I never stopped wanting her. By now we had moved to the dormitories of the main school building. There was a dance in the assembly hall and I persuaded her to leave it and come and smoke a cigarette with me in a loft above the pottery classroom. We had a cigarette and then lay down and started kissing in the darkness. She was adept and willing. Her lips were huge and lazy and hot. Suddenly, her long-wristed, long-fingered hand scurried down inside my trousers and felt me. I put my hand up her skirt and felt her. She opened her legs. She was wet. I was wet.
My
nose
was wet.
‘What’s wrong with your nose?’
‘Nothing,’ I panted, ‘just a cold.’ I wiped it across her blouse as if pursuing a nipple, sniffed hard, then brought up my sticky-fingered hand and tried to staunch the snout with a sleeve before plunging the hand back down her stomach.
‘No, what is it? It tastes like blood!’
‘No, no, it isn’t, I promise. It’s not blood, it’s not.’
But it was. In my excitement, my blood pressure had risen to an intolerable level, my nose had started to bleed, and I’d covered her in blood. She hurried off to change her clothes and I never got another chance. I was depressed for weeks. After all these years, I had had one real, genuine, delicious opportunity—
and my nose had failed me. My
nose,
for God’s sake … It was intolerable.
I was thirteen when eventually, the great day of penetration came—and I was prepared. The geography master, a cold, falsely enthusiastic young man, had recently got married. Someone had found out, I can’t remember who or how, that he’d bought, in bulk, a year or two’s supply of what we then called ‘rubber johnnies,’ condoms, rubbers. I suppose in this at least, his enthusiasm was genuine.
I was in the habit of burglary. I was always hungry and honed my burglatorial skills by repeatedly breaking into the kitchens at night using a semicircle of Perspex to spring the locks and catches. Then, with another boy, I robbed the clubhouse of the local golf course. I don’t know if the place had a secret alarm or if someone saw us, but suddenly we heard a siren and saw blue flashing lights approach. To make my escape, I had to scale a tall gate with spikes at the top and jump down the other side. As I jumped, the back of my sweater caught on one of the spikes and I hung ten feet up, suspended by my armpits. Luckily, the police went in through another gate and I was able to extricate myself before they got to me.
The contraceptives were liberated. Imagine the man’s embarrassment: how could he launch an investigation without admitting that he’d been robbed of not one, but
hundreds
of condoms? He stalked around glowering for a few days, but the theft was never mentioned. I kept a johnnie in my pocket at all times, a talisman of hope.
Because smoking was banned, it provided the perfect excuse for furtive encounters which often led to sex. ‘Want to come for a cigarette?’ enabled everyone to pretend that all they wanted to suck on was a cigarette. By this time, I carried a silver hip flask which I kept filled with whisky stolen from my mother, so I had two lures in my armoury of seductive tools. My favourite place for this consensual bait and switch was the groundsman’s shed, a wooden hut with a couple of fixed benches along the sides. The
floor was littered with cigarette ends and it had a damp, sour smell. To me it was the most wonderfully dark and erotic place.
It was here that I invited sweet Sally.
We had been here before a couple of times, fumbling and kissing and negotiating. She was a short, swelling girl with long hair and plump lips and I think she was in love with me. She wanted to do it, she told me, but was afraid if we did I would not respect her.
On the great night, we didn’t even bother to smoke, but started to kiss and touch each other right away. She allowed me to undress her item by item (‘Just the sweater, Sally, please.’ ‘Take your bra off, just for a second, just one second,
please.’
) until, finally, she was completely naked, white and shivering in the chill of winter. There was enough light to make out her chubby figure and her pale, upturned face with its expression of embarrassed arousal. I embraced her. How warm she felt, how round and resiliently female. I took off my shirt and my trousers and embraced her again and kissed her. After so many years of rejection, a naked body was pressed against my naked body. After so many years, a girl wanted me as I wanted her. Because it was cold and my desire was so urgent, I kept my socks on, but Sally draped all our other clothes over a bench as I clumsily rolled the geography master’s condom down onto my penis.
Now she arranged herself on the bench and I got on top of her. She was afraid and asked me not to hurt her.
‘No, no, it won’t hurt. This is lovely,’ I said.
I put it in (actually, I think it put itself in) and then stayed still for a second, shocked by the hot, enveloping sensation.
And then I came.
I don’t even know if it was in there long enough to have taken her virginity, if it had not been taken already, but as far as I was concerned this counted. If she hadn’t lost hers, I’d certainly lost mine. I had been inside a woman. I was a man.
I got up and we stood and kissed some more, me still in my socks, and then I pulled off the condom and we hurried back into our clothes before other smokers and fornicators came visiting.
I kept the rubber in my hand and when I was fully dressed, surreptitiously pocketed it. We walked back towards the school. She held my left hand. The sticky rubber lay cradled in my right. I’m sure I made promises along the way. I’m sure that one of them was never to speak of what had happened.
As soon as we parted, I started to run. When I got to the dormitory all the other boys were there, doing their homework, getting ready for bed, lounging around in their childish pyjamas and reading
Guns and Ammo
and
Exchange & Mart
. I burst in the door, pulled the loaded condom from my pocket, and held it dangling above my head.
‘There!’ I yelled. ‘I did it! I did it!’
Sex had been my main preoccupation since I was five years old, vague at first, just a strong, indefinable urge, but defining rapidly toward this, this intercourse, this putting yourself inside someone—and what a thing it was when finally achieved. The perfection of it and the relief! It was not only possible, but just as good as advertised. My bragging was a crude betrayal, but I couldn’t help it. I had been kept waiting so long and I was so happy; and when I lay in bed that night and thought of Sally, it was with tenderness and gratitude. She had allowed me inside her. I had been
inside
her!
Inside!
This pathetically brief moment of connection stretched out and became a permanent repudiation of my sense of alienation, of ugliness and difference. It was as if we’d left earth and floated in space, rolling in the darkness, indivisible in our desire. It was a moment of such intense and complete involvement I could never again think of myself as being entirely alone.
BOOK: Trials of the Monkey
2.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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