He would even get up in the middle of the night to watch rugby, when the All Blacks played overseas test matches against the Lions or the French. I would be rudely roused awake to watch it with him, though I’d never expressed an interest in rugby at any hour of the day or night. He’d switch my light on and gleefully crow, ‘Footie’s about to start.’
It was another of the trials I suffered for being born a boy.
He always gave me rugby books for my birthday and at Christmas. It was the only time he ever bought anyone a present. I probably should have felt privileged. My mother bought the birthday and Christmas presents for the rest of the family. She chose. He paid. Yet he insisted on buying those books for me. Biographies of All Black greats. Grant Batty. Bryan Williams. Graham Meads. ‘Hardbacks are expensive Billy-Boy,’ he’d say, ‘but they’re worth it for the ambition they inspire.’
I didn’t even pretend to read them. I’d unwrap the book and hand it straight to him, mumbling that I’d read it after him. When he gave it back, I’d look to see if there were any photographs of those sporting heroes semi-nude in the changing rooms. Usually there was one or two.
It was never my decision whether or not I played rugby. It was my father’s. Watching me play rekindled all the glorious memories of his own triumphs on the field. There was nothing he adored more than dissecting a game I’d just played, in the car on the way home afterwards. Telling me how he would have played it and won. He got very excited when he realised how much weight I’d gained over the past year. He began plotting possible position changes for me on the team. ‘Pull you in off that wing. Get you in the forwards. Maybe lock. Or prop. Somewhere right in the thick of it.’
I had no desire to be promoted into the thick of it. I decided I quite liked playing wing, once he’d recited off these other possibilities. At least out on the wing, the odds were strong that the ball would get dropped or the boy in possession of it tackled, before it made its way out to me on the end of the line. That was why I’d been put there in the first place. So I was out of the way. But my father rang up Mr McTaggart, the rugby coach, and told him to put me in the forwards. He described me as if I was one of his cows he was trying to sell. ‘Bob, he’s beefing up at a helluva rate. He’s carrying a lot of weight. He’ll be an asset to you in the forwards.’
Mr McTaggart then had the gall to enquire as to my weight and my father was insensitive enough to answer truthfully.
‘Christ, he must be gettin’ onto ten stone. He’s a whopper, I’m telling you. You won’t know him from last season.’
I couldn’t believe it. Could not believe what my father had just said over the phone. He might as well have had it announced over the radio. People were always listening in on the telephone party line. Everyone in Mawera had to share a line with three or four other families. Evenings were a particularly popular time for eavesdropping entertainment. Our neighbours would lift the phone to see if it was busy and then if something interesting was being said, they’d only pretend to put it down again. How much I weighed would be all over school the next day for certain.
I dreaded the rugby season. I schemed to come up with an excuse good enough to avoid it. But I knew unless something really major (and very painful) befell me, like a cow charging me and battering me half to death or falling off my bike and breaking my leg, there was no escape. I wasn’t prepared to suffer physical agony to escape rugby. So I developed strategies to avoid playing, even when I was obliged to be in the middle of a game.
I was extremely unfit. For most of a game, I’d be loping a good twenty yards behind the action. My aim was to never touch the ball during a match, though my father would thwart these plans by yelling insistently from the sideline for other boys to pass it to me. Sometimes they would. They were used to obeying adults. I always dropped it smartly, so I didn’t get tackled. I loathed being tackled.
I also had the excuse of having to take my glasses off to play. This meant I spent the entire game in a hazy state of not being able to see properly. I always made out that I was more visually impaired than I actually was, in the vain hope that someone would declare me useless and order me off the field. Sometimes, I’d wander off of my own accord, pretending not to know where I was. But my father always kept a very close eye on me and would rush over and push me back in the direction of the ball. ‘Seize the ball, son, seize it and make a run for it,’ he’d instruct me. ‘For my sake.’ I had no intention of seizing the ball, although I would have liked to have seized Stuart Hale.
Stuart Hale. Thirteen years old, the county sprint star, tall, dark and leggy, with a smile that Pink would have described as ‘dreamy’.
Unfortunately, being the county sprint star, he was also very fast around the field. He was the one person I would have been prepared to tackle and risk the mud and potential damage, but there was no way I could ever catch him. Occasionally I’d amble after him earnestly, and my father would urge me on ecstatically from the sideline, but it was hopeless. Stuart was too fast, too elusive, swerving, darting and dashing about, which made him all the more desirable to me.
I eventually realised that even though I couldn’t see or keep up with the ball, there would be no getting out of playing. There were barely enough players for a team. We had to combine with the Crayburn school to make up the numbers. No matter how inept I contrived to be, they would still make me play because they had to have fifteen players on the team.
At the start of the season my father bribed me, offering me a dollar for every try I scored. It encouraged me for about ten minutes into our first match. I actually kept up with the ball and received a pass, only to be tackled immediately and thrown down into the mud. That experience quelled any desire to touch the ball again that season.
The changing room meant further tortures. I was torn two ways. I was curious to see the other boys naked under the shower, but I was reluctant to allow them to see me. I was self-conscious about my size and the fact that instead of a chest, I had a bosom. I knew my breasts would provoke unprecedented ridicule if they were noticed. So I always dawdled off the field, and let everyone else get there ahead of me. Once they’d all been through, I’d slink into the showers with my arms firmly crossed over my chest, so nothing could be seen. If I did end up in the shower next to someone else, I’d ignore them (though I was dying to peek) and pretend to be washing my hair. Keeping my hands above my head made things look more streamlined.
I was lucky that at our first tournament game that season there was a distraction in the changing room. Roy Schluter. Arch was determined to prove to everyone what Roy had between his legs. Everyone formed a circle around Roy, waiting for him to get undressed. Roy just sat there on the bench, staring at the concrete floor, saying nothing. Meantime, I enjoyed the luxury of a hot, solitary shower. I was out and dried off with my shirt back on, when Arch finally tried to pull Roy’s shorts off. Roy gave an awful sounding scream and punched out wildly at Arch. The next thing, Arch was crouching on the floor with a bleeding nose. Roy refused to get in the shower. When Mr McTaggart questioned him about it, he said he’d forgotten to bring a towel.
Roy neglected to bring a towel to rugby for the next few weeks. Arch tried a new tack, taunting Roy that he was dirty and that he stank. He even complained to Mr McTaggart about Roy, hoping that he’d order him to have a shower like everyone else. Mr McTaggart did have a quiet word with him, but Roy must have had a good excuse, because he wasn’t made to shower. He stopped coming into the changing room after practice or games. He’d sit outside on the bench, until it was time to go home.
I was disappointed that Roy never came back in the changing room. Not that I wanted him to be humiliated in front of everyone, but I would’ve liked to get another peek at his cock. I often thought of that evening, when we’d been huddled up in the hedge together, and I’d reached out to find it hard and swollen. Just the memory of the moment was enough to make me feel the way I’d felt that night: as though my heart was beating in my head and as if I might
faint and as if I should go to the toilet, all at the same time. It was a muddle of all sorts of sensations with fear and guilt churning round in there too. I got hard myself remembering that evening.
Not that I ever thought about Roy the way I did about Stuart Hale. Physically, Roy repulsed me. I wondered if he’d been better looking before adolescence started in on him. Not that I was great looking myself, but because that fact was only reinforced when I made the mistake of looking in a mirror, I tended to forget it. In my own mind, I was Judy with her beautiful blonde hair and slinky spacesuits. I was ravishing.
I was fairly sure that if the circumstances were right, Roy would permit me another squeeze. The fact that he’d cracked a stiffy last time seemed to indicate he’d enjoyed it. We hadn’t spoken since that evening. Our eyes had met on a number of occasions and we’d stared uncertainly at one another. Roy was so difficult to read. I couldn’t tell if he was angry over what had happened or whether he was just shy and loath to smile.
I tried to avoid him at school. Arch had been suspicious of me ever since I’d lied to protect Roy the night of the party. I didn’t want to attract his attention any more than I already did. He’d single-handedly established my identity as Fatty. Occasionally he came up with inspired variations on that name, such as Billy-Boy Bunter and Tubby Titanic. They were bad enough. Allying myself with Roy would have tainted me with the same label as him: the Freak. If there was one name that was worse than Fatty, that was it. What’s more, Fatty and the Freak had a certain resonance when said together aloud, which I didn’t want anyone else to discover.
Roy was a loner. Everyone reckoned he was weird and it wasn’t just that he looked different. He never really spoke unless he was asked a question. He didn’t seem to understand the natural order of things either. He was the oldest boy in the school and by rights, should have been the natural leader and voice of authority. But he never showed any initiative in that direction. He would meekly do what just about anyone told him, with the exception of Arch, who he completely ignored.
I kept my distance from Roy and wondered.
When we played rugby I couldn’t avoid him. We were forced to get as physically close as two guys usually ever get. Mr McTaggart had taken one look at me and declared me a prop. This was in the front row of the scrum. There was no use protesting. I would only have been sent to run around the field three times for presuming to know better than him. Roy, he decided, would be a lock because of his height. Every time we went down for a scrum, he was there, slotted in against my hip, his hand up between my legs, gripping the hem of my jersey.
My father was delighted with my new position. ‘Go into the mauls hard Billy-Boy,’ he’d say, his eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘Just like Big Ken Grey. Show no mercy.’
I was more inclined to stand off to the side and watch the mauls, though Arch as halfback often gave me a malicious shove into the thick of it. Yet, for all my reluctance, everyone seemed to consider me a great asset to the team because of my superior weight. Mr McTaggart told me I was a certainty for the county representative side, the overweights division. I was horrified. Firstly, to actually be playing in a grade called the overweights and secondly, that it would mean even more games of rugby against bigger, fiercer boys.
There were two teams in representative rugby. The underweights (under six stone seven) and the overweights (over six stone seven). At the trials, I knew the showdown would come. I would be weighed in front of all the other boys. Everyone was going to learn exactly how much I weighed. I couldn’t see any way of avoiding it.
Naturally, Mr McTaggart mentioned his ambitions for me to my father, who became terribly excited and insisted that I begin a training program in readiness for the trials. He started giving me jobs to do across on the other side of the farm and told me to run there and back, carrying a spade or a sledgehammer. He claimed this was how Colin Meads trained. ‘He used to run up the hill on his farm with stacks of waratahs balanced on his shoulders. Maybe in time you’ll be doing that too. Run up the hill to that hide-out you’ve got up there.’
There was no way I was ever going to do anything other than stagger there, but I said nothing. The fence up the hill was shot and my father knew it. I didn’t want to be sent up there lugging replacement standards.
When the day of the trials came I felt sick through. But it wasn’t vomiting sick – a visible excuse to stay at home – I was sick with dread. I tried to get my father to leave early, so that we would arrive at the grounds first, and I could get on the scales before anyone else arrived. But of course, he had little jobs for both of us to do first. We ended up leaving late. It was a typical winter’s day. Hard frost and a weak sun. The ground was frozen solid. It would feel like rock if I got tackled. In the car, my mind raced with avoidance tactics. If I went last and dawdled, maybe I could avoid everyone else hearing. Or perhaps I could simply whisper my weight to Mr McTaggart and avoid getting on the scales at all. I had little faith in either plan. I felt doomed for further humiliation.
When we arrived at Glenora, everyone was milling around Mr McTaggart and Cracker Watt, the Glenora coach. Cracker had been a trialist for the All Blacks twenty years ago and had earned his nickname because he tackled his opponents so ferociously that on several occasions, he left them with broken bones. My father parked and walked me over to join the others. My reluctance must have been obvious as he put his hand on my neck to guide me forward. The scales were positioned on the frosty grass between Cracker and Mr McTaggart. One by one, the boys were getting on. To my enormous relief, Mr McTaggart wasn’t actually calling out the weights. He simply said ‘over’ or ‘under’, then sent the boy to join the appropriate team. I was so relieved. I noticed with pleasure that Stuart Hale had been assigned into the overweight division.
When my turn came, I didn’t feel nervous at all. Mr McTaggart would call out ‘over’ and I would trot across and stand near Stuart. I got on the scales. Conversation dwindled away. All eyes suddenly turned in my direction. Mr McTaggart was taking his time pronouncing me ‘over’. He was scrutinising the scales, bending down even closer. ‘Christ Cracker,’ he finally said, ‘we’ve got an over the overweights here.’
I felt cheated. No one else had attracted any remarks on their weight. It was so unfair. I was deeply mortified. Some of the other boys tried to edge forward to get a look at the scales. They didn’t need to. Cracker came over to take a look and announced my weight to the world. ‘Eleven stone,’ he said in awe.
Everyone was staring at me and whispering. My father rushed over. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked.
‘He’s too heavy,’ said Cracker. ‘He’s over six stone seven of course, but he’s over the upper limit of nine stone seven as well. There’s no division for him.’
I digested that information. Was I actually going to be pronounced too fat to play? All of the indignity would be bearable if that was the case. Then I noticed Arch Sampson. His grin was jeering. His eyes gloating. My brief flare of hope curdled. It would never be worth it. Arch was going to torment me mercilessly.
‘But you’re short of players in the overs,’ my father started to argue, much to my horror. ‘No one’ll know anyway. There’ll be no scales about when you’re playing matches. No one’s going to think twice about it.’
‘That’s true,’ Cracker nodded vigorously. ‘We shouldn’t let the boy miss out when he’s keen.’
I wanted to protest, but my father was nodding as vigorously as Cracker. ‘Oh, he’s keen as mustard. Been in training for the trials for weeks.’
I felt like crying. But knew it would only make things worse, become another source of ridicule for Arch and his cronies. I squeezed my eyes tight to hold the tears back. I couldn’t believe that salvation had come so teasingly close and then been so brusquely snatched away. I’d managed to check my tears, but a fury of emotions were seething within me. My father placed an encouraging hand on my shoulder and I wrenched away from him as if I’d been stung. I caught a brief gli
mpse of his bewildered face, surprised at my sudden reaction and what he saw burning in my face. Hatred. He, who was always trying to cajole me into killing something – an old ewe for dog tucker, the vegetable-garden rabbits – had finally succeeded in arousing the killer instinct in me. At that moment, I hated my father with a murderous intensity.
My father had stepped back from me in surprise. It was Mr McTaggart who guided me in the direction of the overweight team. ‘Off you go, son,’ he said kindly.
With that, the flame of feeling faded as quickly as it had sparked. ‘He’s got a bit of spirit in him after all,’ Cracker remarked to my father as I plodded over to join the other boys.
There were only thirteen of us over six stone seven. It was a foregone conclusion that all of us would be selected for the team and two more players scraped up from somewhere. Nevertheless, Cracker and Mr McTaggart insisted we still had to go through the formality of the trial. They stood on the sideline bellowing instructions at us, trying us out in various positions. I began to feel like one of my father’s dogs after a while.
Going into a scrum, close to the goalposts, Stuart approached me and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Push hard this time,’ he said, ‘I want this ball.’
For the first time, I actually saw some purpose to the game. Trying to push our opponents back off the ball, so Stuart could scoop it up and dash through for a try. I heaved, the ball disappeared and when I finally emerged out of the scrum, Stuart was diving for a try. A tremor of excitement pulsed through me at the sight of him. I felt uplifted for a moment by the thrill of our victory. I could hear my father cheering. I jogged modestly back down the paddock, anticipating that Stuart would come leaping after me, jump on my back and rub up against me, like they did in British soccer matches on television.