Burden, what do you know about this? Was it planned?
Colin gulped and glanced around him, as if looking for a door.
Tell me the truth, Burden. Did Diamonte plan this in advance?
Colin writhed and shook slightly, pulled his lips together, then said, Dunno, sir.
Both Tony and the head glanced at him furiously. Inside my mind, I begged him to stand up for Tony, to do what he needed to do. Instead he just looked shifty, suspicious. He was undermining the whole scam.
What do you mean you don’t know? Either something was planned or it wasn’t. Either you knew something about it or you didn’t. Did you know something about it?
Sir, I s’pose so.
What? What did you know?
Long pause.
Dunno.
It was as close as Colin could come to lying. Not enough. The head let out a sigh of frustration, then waved his hand in dismissal. We were let out of the room together. Tony ignored Colin, but looked slyly at me and spoke to me, I think, for the first time since we had been at school.
Blue, I always thought Mummy told you not to tell lies.
It wasn’t a lie, I muttered, still flush with the moment, the power of it.
You knew what was going on. Don’t bullshit me, said Tony.
It wasn’t a lie, I repeated, more clearly. It was a fib.
Tony turned his head upwards and laughed to the ceiling, a big round juicy laugh that made a teacher twenty yards in front turn and shhhh him. He quietened down.
A fib. Not a lie, a fib. That’s good, Blue. Francis the Fib. Frank the fucking Fib.
He smiled at me, one of his dazzling smiles, accepting me, approving of me, noticing me. Embarrassed, shocked by his swearing – it was still taboo in our house – but delighted, I smiled back. And then he ran off and was gone, chanting, Frank the Fib, Frank the Fib.
And so I had a name. A big improvement on Scarface or Freako. And with it, you might say, I acquired an identity, a persona. Persona was a word I learned when I was at university.
I also learned there, of course, that the word persona – person – means, is identical to, the Latin word for mask. Which makes perfect sense to me. What I didn’t understand, and still don’t, is once it’s there, why can’t you ever get it off again? It gets so… stuck.
When I made a secret wish after snagging the long part of the chicken wishbone that Sunday lunch time, for the first time that I could ever remember I didn’t wish for my birthmark to disappear. I wished instead for Tony to become my friend. I wished that I would no longer be the outsider. And to my amazement and barely hidden joy, my wish began to come true. Tony, the kingpin, the keeper of the court, began speaking to me.
The fact that I hadn’t ratted – had positively stood up for him – meant something in the schoolboy code, that first unwritten game in which I was actually aware of participating. He grinned at me the next day when we came into class, gave a friendly nod. Up until that moment, he had completely ignored me. I didn’t like him much, was scared of him even, but I was flattered. For the first time, I felt I could be a someone. That I might escape the invisibility that the combination of difference and shyness and cleverness had imposed on both Colin and me.
Nothing happened for a while after that. Colin and I continued the same as ever – walking home together, kicking a tennis ball down the street, stopping at each other’s houses before going home.
More often than ever now, Colin came to my house rather than me going to his. Something, I knew, had happened to his father. This was not something Colin had told me but that I had overheard from my parents one night, sitting on the stairs before bed. My mother went to bingo with Colin’s mother once a month–that practically constituted her entire social life – and we were in fact distantly related, Olive Burden being my mum’s uncle’s younger half-sister. That made her a semi-great-aunt to me, I think, and Colin some sort of weird, disconnected cousin. Also Colin’s father had worked on the coal round with my father years ago. For some time now he had been at a saucepan factory in Acton, but then he had been sacked for being drunk while on shift.
I knew that Colin’s father drank. Sometimes he loomed over me at Colin’s house, and I could smell it on his breath – brandy, usually. Since losing his job, the smell had got worse. Often when I went round, he would rant and scream in a way I could never imagine my father doing. I was shy because my father had taught me to be shy, because he himself was that way. Colin was shy because his father, I realized years later, badgered him, bullied him, belittled him, struck him and his mother with his fists, stripped him of confidence and sentiment and hope. Sometimes there were strange bruises on his arms and body when he dressed for PE. He never said anything about them; if pushed, he would say that he took a fall playing football.
The bruises became worse, more frequent, after Colin’s dad lost his job. Still Colin said nothing. But when I suggested going back to his house he would always make excuses. Then he would come back to our house and stay for as long as he could. Eventually it got to a point when my mother actually had to ask him to go home, when tea was being served. He always apologized and went off right away. I would watch him disappearing into the distance, hanging back, as if elastic was mooring him to our street, to me and my house. In a way it was; sooner or later it had to snap.
At school, my life was changing. I had filled out physically and discovered skills at football and cricket that made me more and more in demand. Colin remained the last to be picked for any team. Tony had kept up his interest in me since the day with Koinange, offering daily hi’s and howaryas? He had also shown a worrying iciness towards Colin, more disturbing than his previous indifference.
But his interest in me made a positive difference to my life. Other boys there, boys who had previously had nothing to do with me, began to acknowledge my existence. Even then he was a trophy friend. If a prank was to be played on a teacher, I would be enlisted along with the rest of Tony’s crew. If a new joke was making the rounds – something cruel about Ethiopians or the disabled, who were universally categorized as spackers – Tony would include me in the circle where the joke was told, would invite my laughter, which I learned to supply whether the joke was funny or not. It was just one more kind of fib, after all.
All this had a real effect on me: I began to get bigger inside, less frightened of the outside world. Something in my walk changed, something in the way I held my head. Colin, conversely, seemed to shrink as I grew. Sometimes, I would be heading off with Tony’s gang and I would see him lurking around the corner of a corridor. I knew he was waiting for me to separate myself, so that we could go and talk, and play together. But lately, when I saw him, he had begun to irritate me. It wasn’t that he was clingy, but it was increasingly clear that he was weak, which was almost the same thing.
Meanwhile, Colin’s father began to get a reputation around the school. His drunkenness had become public. Not only was he involved in fights at the local pub, but he had been seen sitting on park benches near the school clutching cans of beer and cider, unshaven and bedraggled. Colin never said a word about it, but kids would whisper sometimes when he was in the room and throw glances at him.
Tony and I were by now if not exactly mates, then approaching something of equivalent status. We had formed a partnership at football, him at the centre, me on the left wing, finding his height with long, looping, well-timed balls. Crossing the ball was a special skill of mine; I would send it on to Tony’s waiting head with devastating precision. It delighted him – sometimes on the pitch, after nodding in another goal, he would hug me in full view of the other kids. On a few occasions, we hung outside the school gates together, smoking cigarettes that he supplied, while Colin walked home alone. I didn’t have much to say for myself, but this hardly seemed to matter. Acceptance is a strange thing, it seems to arrive unasked for, and the moment you make an effort it eludes you.
At first this was maybe once a fortnight, but I found myself making excuses to
Colin more and more. Tony was cruel, but he was funny, and he had power, and he had friends. He defined the group, and if you weren’t in with the group at school then you were no one. And I had discovered that I didn’t want to be no one any more. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to matter.
I didn’t realize then that there was a price to pay. I found out during one free period, just before the summer term broke up. I was thirteen years old and coming out of my shell, while Colin retreated into his. I felt nevertheless sure that somehow Colin and I would always remain friends – I always believe I will always remain friends with those I love, until the world proves differently, as it does again and again.
It had started even before I walked in the room. There was a gathering of boys together in the corner, just to the left of the chalkboard. Laughter gathered in the air; not the innocent kind that followed a well-delivered punchline or a fresh anecdote. It was laughter that cut, the laughter of attack.
There were about fifteen boys in the room. Nodge was there, standing slightly apart from the others. Like me, he was part of Tony’s group – albeit a separate part, so we barely knew each other. I knew, though, that he was one of the few boys Tony really respected, because even then he was so stubborn, so immovable.
Then I saw Colin behind the gathering. He looked hunted, pale as bread. His body was drawn into itself, compacted, and his head slightly further down than it always was. He didn’t notice me enter. It was cold, early in the morning before the heating system had fully warmed the air in the draughty corridors and classrooms. You could see your breath.
Then I saw Tony in front of the smaller mob of five or six boys who surrounded Colin. Tony was slouched, hunched, walking with a wobble. I thought at first he must have been ill, then at once I realized he was acting a role. There was drool at the side of his mouth. He fell over and the laughter increased once more, while Colin seemed to retreat still further.
Tony got up again. Now I could hear him speak, in a mock-slur, as he once more swayed and faked an off-balance stagger.
Gshh shoo fuckin bsstrd, gis a drink. Come on na, just a little one for yer auld mate Billy. Whatchoo looking at, ye BASTARD? Ah, now, ye me best pal.
It wasn’t a funny or a good impersonation, but it was raising laughter none the less. He put his arm around Colin, who now looked as if he was going to be physically sick. I knew at once what Tony was doing. Unlike Colin, who had taken after his English mother, Billy Burden had a strong Glaswegian accent, which Tony was imitating, badly.
Ye na, ye ma son, and… He threw his arms around Colin and pretended to cry. And I love ya, by Christ I do. But I just… I just want just the one drink and I’ll buy ya some fuckin stamps for ya birthday, och the fuckin noo and hoots, you cunt, honest I will.
The laughter swelled into an ugly balloon. Colin, I knew well, collected stamps in lovingly tended albums. All the stamps were worthless, but he liked the colours and patterns and the ordering that could be achieved, by country, by colour, by price. As with his handwriting, it was a way for him to get to grips with a world that was falling out of control.
Colin looked up. I felt a wrenching in my stomach as he caught my eye. I knew I had to do something, I even moved to do something. But I’d started to be a somebody instead of a nobody. And I didn’t want to give it up. To stand between hunter and prey – it was like ratting. It was something you didn’t do. I wasn’t scared of being physically hurt. I was afraid of being thought of as someone like Colin.
Something changed in Colin when he saw my face, when he saw what was in it – or to be more accurate, what was absent from it. He knew at that moment I wasn’t going to help him, that the last thing in his life that he trusted had failed. Then it was like watching mercury disturbed: a rippling across the face, a strange development of reflexes that tightened his mouth, forced his eyes into slits, lengthened his neck.
Ah now, Colly, Colly me little feller. I think am ganna be sick. Could ya pass me that school cap of yours? I’ll get it cleaned out for ya, och I will.
Tony began to fake awful retching noises. Colin’s changed face turned towards him and held the large, dark globe of his head in its gaze. I knew then that Colin was about to make a fatal mistake – fatal for a tortoise. I saw his fists bunch, saw the knuckles whiten. Then at once he struck out, catching Tony clumsily, not on the cheek but on the forehead. Tony momentarily looked stunned, then reared up. The laughter immediately seized. When Tony spoke again, it was in his normal voice, compacted, tightened, openly threatening.
You little mongol. You fucking sell me out to the head over Koinange. Now you think you’re a big man again. But you’re not. You’re. A. Tiny. Little. Prick. In fact, let’s see it, shall we? Let’s see that tiny thing that barely qualifies as a cock.
Tony and the rest of the mob fell on Colin. I heard something that sounded like a yelp, then a scream. Still my feet were rooted to the floor. I wanted to turn and run, but I couldn’t help watching. I knew they weren’t hitting Colin. What they were doing was worse than that.
Colin was struggling like crazy now, but he didn’t have a chance. I saw his shoes come off, then be thrown out of the open window. His socks followed. Now Colin was silent, panting, all his energies turned furiously to try and prevent what was coming next. I saw his trousers come off and his sad little underpants. They too went out of the window. Colin began to sob hysterically. I could hear Tony’s voice shouting over the racket.
Crybaby! Crybaby!
Girls were giggling nervously in the corner of the room. Colin was naked now, his tragic, unformed penis a small worm under the white neon.
Crybaby! Crybaby!
It was only now that I turned and ran, as I saw the lower half of Colin’s body naked on the floor. The other boys were standing back and laughing, while my friend, my best friend, lay on the floor and tried to cover his privates with his hands, shaking with anger and humiliation.
It was then I heard Nodge’s voice, saw him move in between Tony and Colin.
Give it a rest, Tone. Enough’s enough, eh?
Tony glared at him. But Nodge was big and solid and, as I say, totally stubborn. Tony took a step backwards. Colin wept on the floor. The scene was static. Then I turned, and I ran and ran, ran down the stairs and out into the playground. I could still hear Tony’s voice in my head.
He’s a fucking crybaby!
The clothes were scattered forlornly in a pile, by the line that marked the long side of a tennis court. I fetched them desperately up and turned and ran upstairs.
By the time I got back to the classroom, Colin had gone, and the boys and girls were sitting at their desks waiting for the next lesson to begin. Tony was laughing, unrepentant – there was a small red mark on his forehead where Colin had caught him. Nodge was staring out of the window, apparently disconnected from events now.
I knew where Colin was without asking. There was a boys’ toilet two doors along. I made my way down the corridor holding the pathetic pile of clothes. More than once, in my rush, I dropped a shoe and had to run and retrieve it. The heating made a noise as it cranked up like breaking metal. I pushed through the door. The toilet appeared to be empty, but one of the cubicle doors was closed. The urinals began to flush automatically. Above the sound, there was a small sobbing noise. I made my way towards the locked door. When I spoke, my voice sounded tiny, ridiculous. I remember being unsure of what it was I was meant to sound like, what tone I was meant to adopt.
Colin. Colin, it’s me.
The sobbing continued. There was a slight movement inside.
Colin, are you all right?
I looked under the cubicle door. I could see his ankles, bluish white. There was a small puddle of water on the floor where someone had missed the seat. A scrap of hard toilet paper.
Can you hear me? I’ve brought your clothes back.
I knew that it wasn’t nearly enough. That there was something craven in the very act of trying to obtain absolution through a gesture so trivial, so after
-the-event. Nodge had particularly disgraced me by stepping in, when it should have been me, Colin’s best friend, who stood between Tony and his prey. It was at this moment, I think, that I began to cast Nodge as a self-righteous prick. It was my only way of defending myself against my own shame.
The toilets finished flushing, leaving only the sound of our breathing, him on one side of the rusted metal door, me on the other. I could smell urine now, for the first time. I prayed no one would walk in. Still no answer from Colin.
Come on, Col. I… I…
I sought for the words that would heal the wound between us, that would put together what had been broken. Then I did not know there was an invisible world within us, in which events move on, irrespective of what we want. Connections here are made and unmade, opportunities are offered, taken or refused. Tentacles of connection reach out or are withdrawn, sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually. Tectonic plates move, unseen, and cannot move back. So no words could come, not without being fake, or melodramatic, or unbearably true.
I heard Colin begin to cry again, then I turned to face inside me what I already knew. Whatever was between Colin and me, whatever love had been there, had now cracked, or transformed, diminished. It had, I suddenly knew, been coming apart for a long time, and my betrayal in the classroom was simply a symptom of this. I was craven, I knew. But at the same time, as I silently pushed Colin’s trousers, pants, shoes and socks into the gap under the cubicle, there was a lightness that entered into me. I had outgrown him. He was a drag on my… on my career. My lifelong vocation of wanting to be liked, by people I wanted to know. It’s the start of ambition. It’s the end of simplicity. It’s recognition of the way things are.
I knew that the door now would remain locked, and I knew that was the way I wanted it to be. Colin on the inside in that cramped, sealed-off space, me on the outside, with doors into doors into doors. I turned away and moved back to the classroom. The lesson was about to begin. The teacher pushed past me towards his desk at the front of the class. Tony winked at me and, God help me, I winked back. The teacher scanned the desks, read the roll call. The room had warmed up at last. I looked at Colin’s empty desk and I felt – nothing. I felt nothing at all.