Philip Hensher - The Friendly Ones

‘How adorable,’ Blossom said. ‘They’ve been playing captives, and Josh is on the losing side. He’ll be the pirate king or something. Conquered by the imperial forces, or by savage natives, one of the two. It’ll be his turn to rule and conquer next.’

‘Poor old Josh,’ Catherine said, attempting lightness in her tone. But something in the way she said it made Blossom turn to her, a half-smile of amused dismissal quickly forming. Poor old Josh, she was clearly thinking. A little bit less of that, a little bit less encouragement of Josh to stick in his ways and run from ordinary little-man savage pursuits that any child, surely, would like.

‘I have no idea,’ Blossom said, with dry amusement, ‘how – or if it’s even possible – to get mud and blood out of pale-blue velvet Faunties. I could simply kill Thomas for putting it on to romp around in the woods. They were for the Atwood wedding, those Faunties. They very sweetly asked Thomas if he’d be a pageboy.’

Across the lawn, like a cavalcade of shame, misery and death, came the children, panting, filthy and prancing. Their teeth glittered like those of carnivores, fresh from a pile of flesh and blood. They waved to the man upstairs, the father of three of them. He was yowling into the end of the morning over the lawns, lands, woods and gardens he had made the money to possess, singing his children home from a triumph, somewhere out there in the shadows of the woods.

This would have been in 1969, or maybe 1970. It was just a bag – that was all it was – and ten shillings. What was it then that kept rattling around his head years later, occupying brain cells that could have been used for preserving other facts instilled at school, how to draw a box with perspective and what the chemical symbol for beryllium was and how the passive went in German – the consequences of the playground event that kept him in dread for weeks, just sitting there like a useful lesson for survival learnt at school? It must have been 1969 or 1970, but definitely it must have been after school, because that was when

Here

Here over here

Dave it’s to me

Run and grab it there there’s a

Stuart Stuart Stuart

Grab it then it goes to Stuart that kid from Crookes is

Grab it grab it then

The kid was standing there looking at what was in his hands. It was his sports bag – a black plastic one like everyone’s, with a sports-shoe logo on the side. He looked up in rage – it was that kid Gavin who was in Mrs Tucker’s class – and pushed Leo, hard, with his bag in his fists. It was almost a punch. Leo was sweating, though it was a cold day, the air puffing into steam from their mouths even now in the late afternoon. Around them the others loosened their scarves and dropped their own sports bags.

‘You did that,’ Gavin said to Leo, pushing him again. ‘You did that. You little dwarf, you bloody did that.’

‘Sod off,’ Leo said. But Gavin was pushing his bag into Leo’s face and the others were looking concerned, grave, worried as trainee oncologists in a small circle. The bag was torn at the handle, a raw gash of cardboard under the smooth black plastic surface.

‘You bloody did that,’ Gavin said. ‘You’re going to pay for that, you dwarf.’

‘Piss off, you crater-faced TCP addict,’ Leo said. But he had done it – he had felt the handle tear under his grip as he pulled at it, hardly knowing whose bag he was tugging at. Gavin, the dour kid who always wore a shirt two days running, who sat in front of him in French and never knew the right answer, the kid with the worst acne in the year, the one they’d tried antibiotics on. He’d torn his bag.

‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ Leo said. ‘It was torn already.’

‘You did, though,’ Stuart said. ‘I saw, you know, Leo. You really tore it.’

‘Everyone was grabbing it,’ Leo said. Then he remembered why everyone had been grabbing at it – that boy Gavin, he’d taken Andy’s copy of The New Poetry . Everyone had seen him do it; it was because he hadn’t had his own copy this week and hadn’t had it last week and not the week before that. He’d lost it – Mr Batley had pointed it out and Gavin had said he’d forgotten it. And this week Mr Batley had said it again and Gavin had said it again and then at the end of class, after sharing Paul’s copy, he’d turned round and, when he thought no one was looking, he’d just picked up Andy’s copy and put it into his bag. That was why they were chasing after him and why he’d taken his bag and why it was torn now. But everyone had forgotten that, apparently. They weren’t bothered about A. Alvarez and his anthology of urgency and suffering.

‘I don’t care,’ Leo said. ‘Don’t be so pathetic.’ He went off, striding out of the school gates and up the road. It really was pathetic.

But the next day there was spotty Gavin, waiting for him when he came into the classroom, and again thrusting his bag into his face. ‘You’re going to have to pay to have that mended,’ he said. There were seven or eight kids sitting around. Of course she was there – She: she was sitting on top of a desk with her two friends and pretending not to notice that he’d come in. That was always the way in the half-hour before the register was called, kids sitting around. Gavin was right up against him, pushing his bag and his concerned, angry-red, pus-weeping face into his, leaning over him, his fists clenched. ‘You tore it. You’re going to pay to have that mended. It’s going to cost you ten shillings.’

‘I’m not paying for something I never did,’ Leo said. ‘Don’t be so pathetic. And what did you do with that book you stole from Andy yesterday?’

‘It’s you that’s pathetic,’ Gavin said. He went back to his desk.

But from the next day Leo lived in different worlds. In one, the main one, no one knew or cared about a torn bag; they had forgotten or never knew. They did not even see the way that Gavin came up to him, hissing. At home, it was as if a world of anger sat at the end of the drive outside the gates. In that other world, Gavin and he were bonded together by the vile and righteous demand, never shifting, never negotiating, just insistent on its correctness. I want that money, you dwarf, it said. Two or three times in the evening Mummy said, ‘You’re very quiet, Leo. Are you all right?’ The little ones, Lavinia and Hugh, they stopped their constant chatter to each other; they looked at their big brother; they were interested.

It took a week before Gavin started saying that new thing. He was slow on the uptake in class. He must have taken some days to work it out. One day, when he came up in his usual way, he said, ‘You owe me ten shillings. And if I don’t get it by the end of the week, I’m going to come and ask your mum and dad for it. I know where you live.’

‘They’d tell you to sod off,’ Leo said bravely. From the outside, it must look as if he and Gavin were just in an urgent, serious, friendly discussion in the corner of the playground, scuffing away at the gravel underneath their feet.

‘They wouldn’t say that to me,’ Gavin said. ‘They’re dwarfs too.’

‘I’m not giving it you,’ Leo said, and walked away. But all that week, it was Gavin at the beginning of the day and at the end of it; the horrible voice, the horrible face, raw with blood-sore swellings, sometimes actually bubbling up with blood or yellow pus; sometimes when Leo was alone, he thought he would dare anything.

That Thursday night, they were all at the table when the doorbell went. Leo knew exactly who it was. The soup spoons paused, halfway to the little ones’ mouths. Daddy continued talking as if nothing had happened. Mummy just said, ‘Oh, God,’ and dropped her spoon. ‘If that’s a patient …’ she went on, walking into the hall, because it had been known for desperate patients to look up the doctor they liked in the phone book. She opened the door and, from the table, Leo could hear the familiar voice. For the first time he realized how much bravado was in it. The story it was recounting was so familiar to Leo that he could hardly tell whether he would have been able to understand it from here. Certainly the others just went on as if they would hear about it sooner or later; Lavinia was poking little Hugh with the corner of the tablecloth, and Daddy was asking Blossom whether she could go to the library on Saturday to take Granny Spinster’s books back. In a moment Mummy put her head in. ‘Money,’ she said to Daddy.