Moab Is My Washpot

  Fu-u-u-u-u-uck! I want to vomit it all out now, the whole healthy spew of it. It ate into my soul like acid and ate its way out again like cancer. I despised it so much … so much … so much. A depth and height and weight and scale of all-consuming hatred that nearly sent me mad.

  “Games!” How dared they use that grand and noble word to describe such low, mud-caked barbarian filth as rugby football and hockey? How dared they think that what they were doing was a game? It wasn’t ludic, it was ludicrous. It wasn’t gamesome, it was gamey, as a rotten partridge is gamey.

  It was shit, it was a wallowing in shouting, roaring, brutal, tribal shit. And the shittiest shit of it all was the showers.

  Yes, I might have been tall, yes, I might have been growing almost visibly, yes, my voice might have broken, but what was happening down there? Fuck all, that was what was happening.

  If I heard the word “immature” used, even in the most innocent context, I would blush scarlet. Immature meant me having no hair down there. Immature meant me having a salted snail for a cock. Immature meant shame, inadequacy, defeat and misery. They could peacock around without towels, they could jump up and down and giggle as bell end slapped against belly button, and heavy ball sack bounced and swung, they could shampoo their shaggy pubes and sing their brainless rugby songs in the hiss of the shower room, it was all right for them, the muddy, bloody, merciless, apemen cunts.

  And you want to know the joke, the sick, repulsive joke?

  I love sport.

  I love “games.”

  I a-fucking-dore them. All of them. From rugby league to indoor bowls. From darts to baseball. Can’t get enough. Cannot get e-fucking-nough.

  Now I do, now.

  Part of the reason for this book being a month and half late in delivery is that the England-Australia test matches and Wimbledon, and the British Lions Rugby Fifteen’s tour of South Africa have all been tumbling out of the screen at once. I had to watch every match. Then there were the golf majors, the Formula One season building to its climax and Goodwood too. And now the soccer season is about to begin, and it’ll be Ford Monday Night Football and more precious hours sat in front of the television lapping up sport, sport, sport, one of the great passions of my life. Those poor buggers in the gym trying to get my hopeless weedy body to do something healthy like climb a rope or spring over a vaulting horse, they did their best. They weren’t stupid, they weren’t mean. They would write witty reports on me: “The only exercise he takes is the gentle walk to the sports centre to present his off-games chit,” that kind of thing. “Physical exertion and Stephen Fry are strangers. I have tried to introduce them, but I feel they will never get on.” Good men, trying to do a good job.

  Talk about betrayal.

  How am I ever going to apologise to that miserable, furious, wretched thirteen-year-old, huddled in a scared bony heap on the changing room bench trying to work out how to shuffle to the showers without being seen? All he has is his anger, his fury, his verbal arrogance, his pride. Without that, he would shrivel into a social nothingness that would match his shrivelled physical nothingness. So forgive him the intemperance of his fury, forgive him his rage, his insolence and the laughing cockiness he is prey to: they are just a ragged towel. A towel to hide his shame, to cover up the laughable no-cockiness he is prey to.

  Can so much be explained by (literally) so little?

  Le nez de Cléopâtre: s’il eût plus court, toute la face de le terre aurait changé … didn’t Pascal write that? If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter the whole face of the world would have been changed. I’ve never quite understood why he said “shorter,” not “longer”—maybe in Pascal’s day, or Mark Antony’s for that matter, a short nose was considered uglier than a long one. Maybe I’ve misunderstood the whole thrust of the thought. Anyway, when I first came upon that pensée (a favourite with French masters in dictation on account of its silent, subjunctive circumflex), I remember thinking about the face of my world. Le noeud d’Etienne: s’il eût plus long …

  But then, as Pascal also said, the heart has its reasons, which Reason knows nothing about. Your guess is almost certainly better than mine. The spectator sees more of the game.

  So back to that sad little creature.

  It’s an average weekday lunchtime halfway through his first term. As the meal has progressed, he has become quieter and quieter because he knows that after lunch he must face the house polly and the Ekker Book. He has to tick everyone off, this officious polly. He will want to see either a note from Matron explaining why you are Off Ekker, or he will Put You Down for a game.

  I wait in the queue, my stomach pumping out hot lead. The polly looks up briefly.

  “Fry. Unders Rugger. House pitch.”

  “Oh. No. I can’t.”

  “What?”

  “I’m fencing.”

  “Fencing?”

  I had heard someone say this the other day and they seemed to have got away with it. The polly flips through his book. “You’re not on the list as a fencer.”

  Bollocks, there’s a list. I hadn’t thought of that.

  “But Mr. Tozer told me to turn up,” I whine. Mr. Tozer, known inevitably as Spermy Tozer, was big in the world of sports like fencing and badminton and archery. “I had expressed an interest.”

  “Oh. Okay. Fencing, then. Make sure you bring back a chit from him so I can put you in the book.”

  Hurray!

  One afternoon taken care of. One afternoon where, so long as that polly doesn’t see me, I can do what I like, roam where I like. He’ll forget about that chit from Spermy Tozer.

  But there will be other afternoons, and new excuses needed. Every day is a fresh hell of invention and sometimes, just sometimes, I actually have to turn up and sometimes I am caught skulking unhealthily, and I am punished.

  Peck, I think, was the last house captain to have the right to beat boys without the housemaster’s permission. The most common form of punishment not corporal was something called the tish call. Tishes, as I have already explained, were the cubicles that divided up the beds of the dormitory. Everyone, in every House in the school, slept in a tish.

  A single tish call was a small slip of paper given by a polly to an offender. On it was written the name of a polly from another House. A double tish call contained two names of two different pollies, again from two different Houses. I was forever getting triple tish calls, three different pollies, three different Houses.

  The recipient of a tish call had to get up early, change into games clothes, run to the House of the first polly on the list, enter the polly’s tish, wake him up and get him to sign next to his name on the slip of paper. Then on to the next polly on the list, who was usually in a House right at the other end of the town. When all the signatures had been collected, it was back to your own House and into uniform in time for breakfast at eight o’clock. So that offenders couldn’t cheat by going round in the most convenient geographical order, or by getting up before seven, the official start time, the pollies on the list had to write down, next to their signatures, the exact time at which they were woken up.

  A stupid punishment really, as irritating for the pollies who were shaken awake as it was for the poor sod doing the running about. The system was open to massive abuse. Pollies could settle scores with colleagues they disliked by sending them tish callers every day for a week. Tit-for-tat tish call wars between pollies could go on like this for whole terms.

  Of course pollies could do each other favours too.

  “Oh, Braddock, there’s a not half-scrummy scrum-half in your Colts Fifteen, what’s his name?”

  “What, Yelland you mean?”

  “That’s the one. Rather fabulous. You … er … couldn’t find your way clear to sending him over one morning, could you? As a little tishie?”

  “Oh, all right. If you’ll send me Finlay.”

  “Done.”

  The only really enjoyable part of the tish-call for me was the burglary. Officially all the Ho
uses were locked until seven, which was supposed to make it pointless to set off early and take the thing at a leisurely pace. But there were larder, kitchen and changing room windows that could be prised open and latches that could yield to a flexible sheet of mica. Once inside all you had to do was creep up to the dorm, tiptoe into the target polly’s tish, adjust his alarm clock and wake him. That way you could start the call at half-past five or six, bicycle about at a gentle pace and save yourself all the flap and faff of trying to complete the whole run in forty minutes.

  That entire description of the tish call is lifted, almost whole, from The Liar, but then, when I wrote The Liar I lifted that description, almost whole, from my life, so it seems fair to take it back.

  Because of the simplicity with which the rules of the tish call game could be circumvented, because of the frisson of sexual possibility that they hinted at and because I always enjoyed early mornings anyway, they held no particular terror for me as a punishment. Some boys came away from being given a tish call with their faces white as a sheet. They would dutifully get up at the right time, actually get into full games kit, actually run from House to House, puffing and sweating, and actually shower before coming into breakfast and presenting their filled-in slip of paper to the polly who had punished them. I never presented it, always waited for the polly to chase me up, allowing him a moment’s triumphant thought that maybe I had actually dared not to do the tish call and that this time I was really for it.

  “Where is it, Fry?”

  “Second on the left, you can’t miss it. Smells of urine and excrement.”

  “Don’t be clever. I gave you a triple tish call yesterday.”

  “You did? Are you sure you’re not thinking of my brother?”

  “Don’t be cheeky, you know bloody well.”

  “I’m afraid it entirely slipped my mind.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. Awful, isn’t it?”

  “Well, in that case …”

  “And then I remembered, just in time. Here it is … Copping’s signature is especially elegant don’t you think? Such a handsome swagger in the curve of the ‘c’ … such careless grace in the down swoop of that final ‘g’ …”

  Another duty to enjoy was that of morning fag. Most juniors hated it when their turn came round, but I counted off the days with mounting excitement. It involved some of the things I loved best: early mornings, the sound of my own voice, efficient service and a hint of eroticism. Maybe I should have been an airline steward …

  At seven fifteen at the latest I would spring out of bed, get dressed and tiptoe out of the dormitory. I would go downstairs to the Hall, where the skivvies would be laying the table for breakfast, bid them good morning, maybe blag a slice of bread and butter off them and check my watch against the clock on the wall. Then upstairs to a table on the landing where was laid out a huge brass bell with a leather loop for a handle. At precisely half past seven I would lift the bell and start to ring. It was heavy and took three or four shakes before the clapper really set itself in rhythm. I would go to each of the dormitories in turn and then, ringing the bell furiously all the time, shout as loudly as I could in an incantatory chant that was identical to that of all morning fags, and is impossible to set down here without musical entablature:

  “Time half past seven!”

  As soon as that had been done in the threshold of each of the four dormitories I would then have to dash from tish to tish waking each boy individually, counting—and this was the tricky part—backwards in five second increments. That is to say, I would have to tell them how long they had to go before ten to eight, which was the last time call they received before eight o’clock and brekker.

  Thus, entering each tish and shaking each shoulder I would yell in each ear, “Eighteen minutes and forty-five seconds tooo go … eighteen minutes and forty-five seconds tooo go … eighteen minutes and thirty-five seconds tooo go” and so on until the time for the next general cry and the next ring of the bell which came at twenty to eight.

  “Ten minutes toooooo go!” was the chant, and then back to the tishes. “Nine minutes and twenty-five seconds tooo go … nine minutes and twenty seconds tooo go …” before returning to the bell and the final, triumphant pealing and roaring of:

  “TI-I-I-ME TEN TO EIGHT!”

  By which time boys would be clattering and roaring and streaming past me, swearing, cursing, doing up their final buttons, foaming with toothpaste and bad temper.

  Some boys were terribly hard to wake, and if you didn’t succeed in rousing them fully and they were senior, they would blame you for not being up in time and make your life hell. Other boys were deliberately hard to wake and played secret unspoken games with you. They might sleep nude, under one sheet and present you as you entered the tish with all the signs of deep sleep and an innocent but perky morning erection. The unspoken game was that, as you tried to shake them awake by their shoulder, your elbow or a lower part of the arm might just accidentally rub against their twitching dick. Never a word spoken, this game sometimes went all the way, sometimes was just a little game. In my year as morning fag one got to know which boys played this game and which didn’t, just as they presumably got to know which morning fags played it, and which didn’t.

  This was before I had ever masturbated myself, and although I knew all the theory and was titillated by the idea of sex, I didn’t really get the whole fuss of it. At Stouts Hill I had already learned the hard way just how complex the attitude of the healthy boy was towards queering.

  At my last year at prep school, it had become very much the thing amongst a handful of us in our senior dormitory to do a fair amount of fooling around when the others were asleep. A couple of the boys were equipped with a set of fully operational testicles and bushy pubic undergrowth, others like me were not. I greatly enjoyed creeping over to another boy’s bed and having a good old rummage about. I never quite knew what it was that I enjoyed, and certainly the first time I saw semen erupt from a penis it gave me the fright of my life. I have to confess I found it frankly rather disgusting and wondered at nature’s eccentricity: like Noël Coward’s Alice I felt that things could have been organised better. One of the boys in that dorm, we’ll call him Halford, like me not fully ripened but of a sportive disposition, took the same pleasure that I did in wandering around the school naked. Together we would, with roaring stiffies, or what passed for roaring stiffies in our cases, creep around the bathrooms simply glorying in the fact of our nakedness. We might point and prod and giggle and fondle each other a little, and experiment with that curious squashing of dicks in closing doors and desk lids that seems to please the young, but it was the nakedness and the secrecy that provided all the excitement we needed.

  One afternoon, this same Halford was climbing out of the swimming pool when he suddenly got the most terrible cramp in one leg. He yowled with pain, flopped forward on to the grass and started to thrash his legs up and down in agony. I was standing close by so I went and helped him up and then walked him around the pool until the cramp had gone. Fully recovered, he streaked away to change and I thought no more about it.

  As the afternoon wore on it became apparent to me that I seemed suddenly to have become extremely unpopular. One is highly sensitive to these things at twelve, I was at least. Highly. My popularity rating was something I was more aware of than the most sophisticated political spin doctor. But I simply couldn’t understand it. It must have been one of those rare afternoons when I knew I had done absolutely nothing wrong. It was bewildering, but inescapable: boys were cutting me dead, sneering openly at me, sending me to Coventry and falling sullenly silent when I entered rooms.

  At last I ran into someone who could explain. I found myself approaching a fat boy called McCallum in the corridor and he whispered something as I passed.

  “What did you say?” I asked, stopping and spinning round.

  “Nothing,” he said and tried to move on. McCallum was someone of little account and I knew that I c
ould master him.

  “You muttered something just now,” I said grasping him by both shoulders, “you will tell me what it was or I will kill you. It is that simple. I will end your life by setting fire to you in bed while you are asleep.”

  McCallum was the sort of gullible panicky fool who took that kind of threat very seriously indeed.

  “You wouldn’t dare!” he said, proving my point.

  “I most certainly would,” I replied. “Now. Tell me what it was that you said just now.”

  “I just said … I said …” he spluttered to a halt and coloured up.

  “Yes?” I said. “I’m waiting. You just said …?”

  “I just said ‘Queer.’ ”

  “Queer?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said ‘Queer,’ did you? And why was that?”

  “Everyone knows. Let me go.”

  “Everyone knows,” I said, strengthening my grip on his shoulders, “but me. What is it that everyone knows?”

  “This afternoon … ow! You’re hurting me!”

  “Of course I’m bloody hurting you! Do you think I would be exerting this much pressure for any other reason? Go on. ‘This afternoon …’ you said.”

  “When Halford got out of the pool …”

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “You … you put your arm round him like a queer. Halford is hopping mad. He wants to beat you up.”

  In my shock, outrage, horror and indignation I let go of McCallum completely and he took his opportunity, scuttling away like a fat beetle, shouting “Queer!” as he rounded the corner out of sight.

  I didn’t even remember putting my arm round Halford’s shoulder. I suppose I must have done as I had walked him round the pool.

  All the blood drained from my face and I came close to one of those early adolescent fainting fits which sometimes stay with you till late in life, a physical sensation that can overwhelm you if you stand up very suddenly—a feeling that you are close to blacking out and falling down.