Darren Williams - Angel Rock

He sat looking out across the river and soon forgot where he was, his mind enchanted by images of moon landings and rockets, astronauts and parachuting capsules. He wondered if the Apollo II patch he’d ordered from the Post would ever arrive. He sat, the ice block dripping onto the ground, until the sound of a commotion filtered through to him. He turned and looked back towards town. The bus from the high school in Laurence had just finished setting down a dozen hot and cranky kids in the main street and now, walking towards him through the rippling heat-waves rising up from the road, was Sonny Steele and his little mate Leonard. He groaned. From about the same spot – just past the bowsers of the Golden Fleece – he’d once seen Jack Webber swing an axe at his brother Joe as if Joe were a tree that needed felling. A summer afternoon just like this one. In the time it had taken him to run to where they faced each other the axe was in Joe – right in his side – though he was still walking, but wrong, like the man up the valley who had polio, and going for his brother with his fists up, the blood draining out of his face. Then Pop Mather, the local copper, had come running up the road and tackled Jack and smacked him one. Then he’d saved Joe’s life by jamming his shirt into his wound to keep in the blood. Henry said it was drink and women that had made them fight and he said neither was any good reason to put an axe in someone, especially family.

Tom remembered it as he watched the two older boys increase their pace and he wished wholeheartedly there was an axe handy now. He stood and started walking towards home, jamming the packet of Marlboros down inside the elastic of his shorts. He wouldn’t run – he knew there wasn’t much point.

When they caught up with him he stopped and turned to face them. Sonny and Leonard stopped too, both dripping with sweat, their mouths open like panting dogs. Sonny stared at him. Sonny had gone to the Catholic primary before high school. Tom thought he must have been like some of the boys in his own class who were always in trouble, who would never do as they were told, whose fathers had short-back-and-sides and wore their trousers up high, whose mothers were heavy and brown-armed and stiff in their floral frocks when they shopped on a Saturday morning. Sonny was one of those. He was nearly three years older than Tom; a foot taller and twice as broad. He had dark curly hair and a curiously flat and featureless face. One eye was dark brown and the other so pale it was almost no colour at all. Tom thought it might once have been blue but had since faded. Wall-eyed , Henry called him. He said his family was ignorant and not to bother with him but that was hard when Sonny kept bailing him up. He liked Indians and cover and ambushes and pretending to take scalps. This, however, was no ambush – nothing worthy of Indians – just a crude assault from behind. Tom gritted his teeth, a little twist of fear worming around in his stomach despite his contempt.

‘Look at this, a pimple eatin’ an ice block!’ started Sonny. ‘Look, Leonard, a big pimple with a mouth!’

Leonard giggled. ‘Yeah!’ he said, his idiot chorus to every joke or comment Sonny ever made. Leonard was so lean and freckled he wouldn’t have looked out of place in Africa with the leopards and hyenas.

‘What do you want?’ Tom asked, sighing.

Sonny raised his eyebrows, hung out a smirk, left it there until Tom’s irritation outgrew his nervousness. It was Friday afternoon, the world was changing and he along with it and it was unfair that he had to be standing here again, putting up with Sonny just as he’d always done.

‘Give us that, shit-for-brains!’ the big boy demanded suddenly, pointing to the ice block. Tom looked at it. There was hardly anything left on the stick and a fly was circling the remains like a tiny vulture.

‘Give us your damn ice block I said!’ Sonny repeated.

Tom shifted the ice block to his left hand and brought up his right fist and spat on the knuckles as he had seen movie men do and Henry once or twice.

‘You’ll have to take it off me,’ he said, and immediately there was a contraction of the world between him and Sonny, as though a vacuum had drawn them together, pushed everything else into the background. It had always been this way – a battle of flesh and wills – and Tom had never bothered to question it before.

The sounds of the world faded and soon he could hear only the blood roaring through his ears, the sky now nothing but a silent exhibition of blue and grey overhead. Sonny leapt at him and grabbed his wrist with one hand and twisted the ice block free with the other while Leonard nipped in and out like a cattle dog and pinched him – hard enough to leave little half-moons of broken skin. Then Sonny used his weight to push him backwards and he teetered, flailing his arms, until Leonard stuck his bony shin behind his knee and sent him sprawling.

‘Good, Leonard, good!’ Sonny shouted.

He sat down hard on Tom’s chest before he could squirm free and proceeded to eat the remains of the ice block. Tom struggled for breath and felt his face grow hot and sweat break out on his forehead. Leonard alternated between looking at Sonny for cues and giving Tom’s wrist Chinese burns.

‘You … fat … bastard … Steele!’ he managed to spit.

Sonny didn’t answer, but dribbled red-stained spittle across Tom’s face from his pursed lips.

‘Open his mouth, Len.’

Leonard tried, cautiously, but Tom bit his finger and he retreated, cursing. Tom tried to wriggle free from underneath Sonny, but when he failed miserably it occurred to him that he had other weapons he could use. He thought of a question, something to distract him. The question he came up with seemed straightforward and reasonable, and something he wouldn’t have minded having the answer to.

‘Why do you do this, Sonny?’ he spat, panting.

Sonny stared at him for a moment and then looked up and down the street. The time limit on his fun was fast running out. There were adults about who might spot him at any moment. He looked down at Tom again. He seemed to be giving the question serious consideration, but then he flipped Tom over onto his stomach and held his head down in the grass and gravel. He pushed harder and harder and when grit had worked its way into Tom’s eyes and nose, and tears were running down his face Sonny leant in close so his smooth, clammy face – lips edged in sticky red, teeth holed by brown decay – filled Tom’s field of vision like a noxious moon.

‘Because your father’s a drunk and your mother’s a rotten whore !’ he hissed, his face contorting.

Tom blinked, frozen for a moment by the malice in Sonny’s eyes, but then a car came rolling down the street and in a second Sonny and Leonard were up and away. Tom sat up and rubbed the gravel off his cheek and out of his hair. The old farmer driving by slowed his car to better see him there on the verge, then waved slowly when he saw he was none the worse for wear, just the victim of schoolboy rough-and-tumble. Tom nodded at him and the farmer lifted his finger off the steering wheel and straightened his head. When he’d passed, Tom looked down the road at the backs of Sonny and Leonard. Every so often Sonny would turn and glare at him and spit onto the road.

He brushed the dust and grass off his clothes and walked home along the river, looking across at the water as he always did, just in case something interesting was floating by. When he reached his house after fifteen minutes or so he bent by the tap in the front yard and washed his face and rinsed out his mouth and spat a lot. He ran cold water over the places where Leonard had pinched him. Chicken bastard! he fumed, under his breath.