The Kissing Game: Stories of Defiance and Flash Fictions

  I’d better say straight off, Sir, that I cannot apologise.

  I know sports afternoons are compulsory, but that does not mean doing the sports you, Sir, approve of and organise.

  I have inquired about this with my form tutor, the Deputy Head of School, and the Head of Sixth Form. (I did not say why I was asking, or tell them about your threat. I simply put the question as a matter of general interest.) They each agreed that the purpose of sports afternoon is to ensure we take exercise. In other words, it isn’t about the sport itself, but about our health. They agreed that exercise can be taken in many ways, not only by playing football, which is your personal sporting preference. I admit it is my least favourite of all sports.

  I enjoy walking, climbing trees, and tennis in season. (As a matter of fact, I prefer sex to all of these, which I have read is as good exercise as any sport.) None of these (least of all sex) is laid on by you during compulsory sport. So I exercise myself in those ways at other times in the week, like after school and at weekends.

  According to the advice given in the government document Health and Exercise for School Children, DfESC5 66/B, p. 14 (available, Sir, on the government’s website, if you happen to have missed it), the recommended average for people of my age is a minimum of three hours of ‘strenuous activity’ per week. I exceed that minimum easily, especially if sex is included in the computation.

  We were told that these next two years before we leave were years in which we would be prepared for life after school, whether at university or in a job. I remember the Head telling us a key element was that we should ‘take responsibility for our studies’ (I quote from my notes at the time) rather than simply following instructions from teachers. And also that we should ‘use our initiative in self-directed study and extracurricular activities.’

  These past six weeks I have taken responsibility for my exercise and used my initiative in self-directed sporting activities.

  As this is what we were encouraged to do I see no reason to apologise for it.

  But that is not the only explanation for missing your Wednesday sport.

  I do not know, Mr. Pearson, Sir, if you were like me when you were my age. I doubt it somehow. I am one of those people who are always picked last for any team sport. It is true that I am not good at dashing about a sports field as if my life depended on it. (I know it doesn’t.) I am not good at kicking a ball about with any skill. I am not good at ‘tackling’ other players with aggressive intent and a competitive desire to take the ball from them. I am hopeless at catching objects thrown at me. I am not bothered whether I win or lose at any game. In fact I find all forms of competitive physical activity repulsive. It seems to me to be a form of legitimised violence. I am against all forms of violence, most of all those invented in order merely to take exercise.

  It is the people who are good at these things and like them who are appointed captains of sports teams, and choose the people to play with them. As I am known to be rubbish at the skills required, and because I make no secret of my dislike of competitive team games, it is no wonder I am only picked if there is no one else to make up the numbers. Mostly, during your sports afternoons, I am left out, unneeded, and spend the two and a half hours with the other leftovers, usually the same three or four of us, who are euphemistically and inaccurately called ‘the reserves’.

  I doubt, Mr. Pearson, Sir, that you have ever in your life been a leftover ‘reserve’. You cannot therefore know the sense of humiliation felt by those of us who suffer this fate. You cannot know what it is like to muck about with two or three other rejects, aimlessly kicking a ball in a pretence of playing a game so as not to be shouted at from time to time by your good self, Sir. You cannot know how depressing this is on a cold and wet winter day. I would hope, though, Mr. Pearson, Sir, that you would at least appreciate, after giving it a few minutes’ thought, what a waste of time this is. Time which I have decided, on my own initiative and taking responsibility for myself, to spend more valuably on my studies.

  As I say, I cannot apologise for doing this.

  Which brings me to the account you require of how I have spent my Wednesday afternoons for the past six weeks.

  I can tell you that I spent them in the school library. The librarian will, I’m sure, confirm this.

  But as I did not keep a diary of exactly what I accomplished during those afternoons, I cannot give you a detailed account. What I can tell you is that I spent the time doing self-directed study of extracurricular subjects, viz: the sexual habits of the natterjack toad, the psychology and corruption of power in human activities (including sport), and the politics of passive resistance.

  I will supply bibliographical references for the books consulted, if you require it.

  To conclude, Mr. Pearson, Sir, I want to say that I regard sport as a peripheral activity in school life. It should not be allowed to take the place of the proper function of a school, which, in my humble opinion, is to educate young people in the study of human life through the arts and sciences. Taking exercise, which I agree is a wise thing to do, should take place outside school time in voluntary selection of the activities which most appeal to the individual and are best suited to his or her nature and aptitudes.

  These are my reasons and explanations for not attending compulsory sports these last six weeks.

  Yours sincerely,

  Jason Hind.

  To Head of School. Not only on the grounds of this pupil’s nonattendance at compulsory sport, but also for the insulting tone of his letter and refusal to apologise for his misdemeanour, I recommend expulsion. If such behaviour and rudeness are allowed without a firm stand being taken we’ll lose all authority and worse misdemeanours will spread like wildfire.

  J.R.D. Pearson. Head of Sports.

  To Head of Sports. Not accepted. I agree the boy was wrong in ducking out of a compulsory activity without speaking to you first, and I agree the sardonic tone and some of the content of his letter might be taken as an insult if one wants to look at it that way. But his point about our stated aims for the sixth form is well taken. We can’t tell them to do something and then get upset when they do it.

  I have seen Hind and given him a good talking to. I’ve instructed him to see you and apologise properly, and to attend on Wednesdays without fail. I made it clear that if he lapses I will review my decision not to expel him. However, I’ve also taken his point about the ‘reserves’. (Perhaps you could do something better with those left out?) And have told him he may play indoor tennis with any of the other ‘reserves’ who may care to partner him.

  That done, I suggest we let the matter drop.

  W. P. Turnbull. Head of School.

  said, patient and smiling. ‘I’ve explained it to you three times, Martin.’

  His son sighed and stared at the Ordnance Survey map spread out on the camper table.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’m sure there was a tower exactly where I’ve marked it.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong, nitwit. I keep telling you, there’s a pond there, that’s all.’ The smile had gone now.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘What do you mean, you suppose!’

  ‘But the map could be wrong. Or you could be wrong yourself.’

  Mr. Phelps drew in his breath. ‘Martin, there are times when I wonder if you have any brains at all. I’ve told you—I’ve seen it. The map is accurate and I am not wrong!’

  ‘Don?’ Mrs. Phelps was lying facedown on a picnic blanket spread on the grass just outside the camper door. ‘Remember, dear, we’re on holiday.’ Though pretending to sleep as she sunbathed in her bikini, she had been eavesdropping on the conversation, half expecting it to end in a row.

  Mr. Phelps shuffled from his seat behind the table and went to the door, his walking boots clumping on the floor and his angry weight making the camper tremble.

  ‘Well,’ he chuntered, ‘he really is stupid as well as stubborn sometimes, Mary. I’ve explained till I’m blue in the
face but he just doesn’t seem capable of taking it in.’

  ‘Maybe he has a blind spot for maps.’

  ‘A blind spot for maps! Mary, you can’t have a blind spot for maps. You can, perhaps, for French or maths. But not for maps. They’re designed so any fool can understand.’

  He stared across the heat-hazed field to the woods beyond and wondered why he hadn’t gone off on his walk alone instead of listening to his son blathering about a tower that wasn’t there and the map being wrong.

  Mrs. Phelps flopped onto her back, put her sunglasses on and patted the rug at her side.

  ‘Come and sit here for a few minutes,’ she said.

  Her husband obeyed, squatting cross-legged, his arms hugging his knees.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said, more in regret than anger now, ‘if he just listened a bit more carefully. But he argues. Doesn’t try to learn first.’

  ‘It’s his age,’ Mrs. Phelps said. ‘I bet you were just the same when you were fifteen.’

  ‘Never!’

  His wife laughed, gently. ‘Course you were, everyone is.’

  ‘Not me. I was keen to know about things. Everything. Information, that’s what it’s about. You don’t get to know things by arguing the toss with someone who knows more than you do. You listen. Question. Pick their brains.’

  Mrs. Phelps stroked her husband’s knee. ‘Well, you aren’t in school now. Just relax. Enjoy yourself. That’s what holidays are for.’

  Mr. Phelps edged his legs out of range of his wife’s hand.

  The summer afternoon sang.

  ‘Maybe,’ Mrs. Phelps said after a while, but quietly so that Martin wouldn’t hear, ‘maybe we should have let him go off with his friends after all.’

  ‘Camping with a bunch of yobs? Not on!’

  ‘You’re too hard on him.’

  ‘He’ll appreciate it later.’

  ‘At his age you need some freedom, Don. A life of your own.’

  ‘Ho!’ Mr. Phelps snorted. ‘Freedom to act like an idiot, you mean. Freedom to roam the streets and vandalize bus shelters. Freedom to terrorize old people and mess yourself up with drugs. Some freedom that is!’

  ‘What makes you think Martin would behave like that?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mary. You’ve seen the rubbish who hang around our place. I passed a gang of them the other night. Half of them smoking their heads off while they watched the other half make a meal of the local females. About which enough said!’

  Mrs. Phelps sighed. ‘That’s a kind of learning too, I suppose.’

  Her husband flicked a hand at a bombarding fly. ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a lesson Martin can do without, thanks.’

  For a few moments neither spoke.

  Mr. Phelps whisked at more attacking flies, but with less ferocity now.

  ‘Why not go for your walk?’ Mrs. Phelps said when she was sure the storm had blown over.

  Her husband stood up in one smooth movement without using his hands. ‘Perhaps I will.’ He tucked his shirt in and hitched his trousers. ‘There’s a long barrow just north of us. No record of it being excavated. I’ll poke about there for a while. Might be interesting.’

  He collected his stick from the back of the car, said, ‘See you in a couple of hours,’ and stalked away.

  From his seat in the camper Martin watched his father stride across the field, climb the gate in the hedge and disappear up the lane. Then he returned his gaze to the map lying on the table at his elbows. A week ago he had been looking at it with excited anticipation. Now he regarded it with distaste. Nothing ever turned out as well as you hoped.

  He slipped out from behind the table, took an apple from the basket in the food cupboard, bit into its juicy crispness, went to the door and sat on the step, his feet square on the ground.

  The noise of his munching was loud in the country silence.

  ‘Enjoying it?’ his mother said.

  Martin nodded, knowing she was watching from behind her shades.

  ‘He’ll feel better after his walk,’ Mrs. Phelps said.

  Martin nodded again.

  He gnawed his apple to the core, then lobbed it high over his mother’s body to fall in the long grass beyond. From where it landed a small dark bird he didn’t recognize flew up, startled. If his father had still been here, he would have insisted that he look it up in his recognition book.

  ‘Could I help?’ Mrs. Phelps asked.

  ‘Doubt it,’ Martin said, squinting as he tried to follow the bird’s flight into the sun.

  Mrs. Phelps sat up and turned to face him. ‘Won’t you tell me what the trouble is?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You were having quite a set-to for something that doesn’t matter.’

  Martin shrugged. ‘It’s just that I say the map is wrong, and Dad says I don’t know how to read it properly.’

  Mrs. Phelps took her sunglasses off. ‘What do you say is wrong?’

  Martin sighed. ‘You know how he set me a route to walk this morning to prove I could use the map on my own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I managed all right really. Just missed a couple of details. Only little things. But on the last leg down Tinkley Lane—’

  ‘The one that runs along the far side of this field?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a quarry along there, about a mile away, and a benchmark, and a couple of disused farm buildings, and I got them all OK.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘In a field with a pond in it about three quarters of a mile away—four sixths, actually, to be exact—I saw a tower.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It isn’t marked on the map so I put it in.’

  ‘But Dad says it isn’t there?’

  Martin nodded.

  Mrs. Phelps put her sunglasses on again. ‘But, sweetheart, I don’t see the problem. Either the tower is there or it isn’t.’

  ‘That’s what we were rowing about.’

  Mrs. Phelps laughed. ‘Men! Why row? Why not just go and find out together?’

  ‘I wanted to. But Dad wouldn’t.’ Martin stood up. ‘He said he knew it wasn’t there. He said he’d been along that way twice already since we got here and he’d never seen a tower. But I know it’s there, Mum, I saw it this morning for certain.’

  ‘All right, all right!’ Agitation in her son’s voice warned that care was needed. ‘Come here. Sit down. Let’s have that shirt off. Get some sunlight on you. You’re as bad as your dad. You both think you’ll evaporate if you get sun on your skin.’

  Reluctantly, Martin tugged his shirt off and sat so that his mother could rub sun oil onto his back.

  ‘This tower,’ she said as she anointed him, ‘what did it look like?’

  ‘A bit weird really. Built of stone and quite high. Fifteen metres. Twenty maybe. And it was round. With little slit windows, and pointed tops like in a church. But there wasn’t a spire or anything, the roof was flat, with battlements round the edge like a castle. There was a biggish doorway at the bottom, with an arch like the windows. But there was no door. And the wall was partly covered in ivy, and weeds and even clumps of flowers were growing out of the cracks between some of the stones.’

  ‘How exciting. Lie down and I’ll do your front.’

  ‘No, I’ll do myself.’

  Martin took the tube and began oiling his chest.

  ‘Did you go inside?’

  ‘I started pacing towards it because I wanted to try and fix its position on the map exactly. But after thirty paces, well before I even reached the pond . . . I don’t know . . . the air went chilly. Just all of a sudden. Like I’d come up against a wall of cold.’

  He stopped rubbing the oil and looked at his mother’s masked eyes.

  ‘Made me feel a bit scared. Don’t know why. There weren’t any cattle in the field, nothing to be scared of, you know. But I stopped pacing and just stood. And then I noticed how quiet the place was. I mean quiet in an odd sort of way.’

  Marti
n paused, his eyes now not focused, though he was looking straight at his mother.

  ‘And what was so odd?’ Mrs. Phelps said as calmly as she could.

  Martin’s eyes focused again.

  ‘No birds,’ he said. ‘None flying anywhere near and not a sound of any birdsong either. Not even insects. Nothing. Just dead silence.’

  Mother and son stared at each other.

  ‘Perhaps a kestrel lives in the tower? Or some other bird of prey?’

  Martin shook his head.

  ‘You can’t be sure.’

  ‘Can.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Went in.’

  ‘Even though you were scared?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you!’

  ‘All right, OK, I’m listening.’

  ‘It was pretty hot this morning, right?’

  His mother nodded.

  ‘A heat haze, just like now?’

  ‘Was there?’

  ‘I didn’t notice either till I was in the field. I’d noticed about the birds and was looking at the tower. It seemed normal, just an old stone building, you know. The field all around is long grass, like this one, with a tall hedge, and a wood opposite from the lane side. And it was while I was looking at the wood that it hit me.’

  He stopped, uncertain of himself.

  ‘Go on, sweetheart,’ Mrs. Phelps said.

  ‘Well, everything, the wood and the hedge and the grass in the field, even the pond—everything was shimmering in the haze. But the tower . . . It wasn’t. It was quite still. The shape of it was clear-cut.’

  Mrs. Phelps gave an involuntary shudder. She didn’t really believe Martin’s story. Not that he would lie. He never lied. But he did get carried away by his imagination sometimes. Even so—a tower standing cold and silent in the middle of a summer field. She shuddered again. Curious how a few words, just by association, can chill you on a lovely day in hot sunshine.

  She came back to herself. Martin was still telling his story and she had missed something. She said, ‘Sorry, darling, I was distracted. What did you say?’