Always the smallest boy in the class, you’d nevertheless sailed through schooling. With a distinct sense of the ridiculous, you utilised a formidable imagination to include others in the joke without making anybody the brunt. As intelligent as you still were insubstantial, you’d found making friends almost as easy as being sought as a friend or, at the very least, a friendly acquaintance. This all didn’t, however, prevent you from making a few, generally covert, enemies.
One boy, a year older, a little broader and taller, but not much, harbored an unspoken grudge. His friend by default was a notorious bully in your own year, a great tank of a young man with neither acumen nor charisma to attract a more agreeable mate.
Educated within the same small rooms as this unfortunate coupling, the seeming riches of your company furnished their union with only discomfort. For the lesser scoundrel, you were a persistent thorn in the side of his own opportunism, his greed, thwarted self interest and scheming. To the larger villain, however, you were the source of an ambivalent fascination. Never understanding just how you got away with never putting up a fight, never needing to fight battles, belittle or slight, the slow cogs of interest inevitably initiated the awakening of an adolescent chemistry.
Derek, thug-in-chief and top dog, once cornered you in the cloak rooms and asked, as if looming over a fellow in a secluded spot was a regular method of securing a mutually beneficial interaction. ‘Who,’ he’d demanded, ‘are your favourite band?’
Judging by the almost surly contemplation etched across his already stern expression, you answered with a slightly defensive but truthful immediacy. ‘Duran Duran.’
Frowning, he gave grim consideration to this revelation and, with all the gravity of a Leviticus sermon, replied, ‘yes, I like them, too. If,’ he continued as though, having observed prerequisite small talk, he could now get to the point, ‘you suddenly shrunk, right now, here, as you are, to the size of an insect, what do you think I’d do?’
‘It depends what insect,’ you replied, at a decided ill-ease concerning wherever this unsolicited tête-à-tête was headed.
He laughed, a genuine laugh of real delight, a little too loud and a lot too close. Wiping away a drizzle of spit, you pretended to itch your nose. ‘I knew you’d say something clever!’ he roared. ‘I knew it. Yeah, but no - ‘ his tone lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘What I mean is - and don’t pretend you don’t get it, I mean a little insect, about that little,’ his great fingers, practically touching your eyebrows, indicated an inch. ‘One that can’t run away, you can’t just fly off - and you’ve got nowhere to hide. Just running around on the floor between my shoes. What would you do. No. I’m dead serious. What would you do?’
‘I’d go to my next lesson.’
His frown returned with a vengeance. ‘No. Not another clever answer. You can stop that, right now. I’ve already let you do that, so what would you do?’
‘No. I mean the bell’s rung. We’ve got to go to the next lesson.’
‘Well,’ a so-near-and-yet-so-far frustration contorted his boorish but not unattractive face. ‘I’ll tell you what I’d do, would be,’ he hurried, ‘pick you up before any of the teachers could stop me and keep you in my pocket for whenever I feel sad and you’d make me laugh, again.’
‘What if I couldn’t,’ you insisted, as if more importance balanced on the lasting legality of this answer than normally would, beside the coats, quite near the lavatories.
This unforeseen quibble stirred what appeared to be a deep, quasi-spiritual meditation upon the grave matter of pocket happiness, as Derek stared straight ahead, directly across your crown. ‘If you were small enough to squash,’ he dwelt, ‘I think you’d think of something.’ For another half minute, the two of you stood in awkward silence, eyes locked with your nose at the level of his Adam’s Apple and his breathing a little too deep and rather too ragged. You received detention for arriving late to your German class whilst the smaller, older jilt resented something he, needless to say, would never comprehend.
A bane to classmates for their entire school days, Derek the hard case, as an adult, slipped readily into a career of petty criminality whilst his erstwhile partner in mischief achieved fleeting fame when construction of an airport building was delayed on account of several unexplained disappearances. So soon after the millennium, the inexplicable nature of this industrial-estate Bermuda-Triangle excited the public imagination, until a morning television presenter once again denied an afternoon of tepid depravity, despite evidential photographs (and alibi-busting bus tickets.) However, despite a front page splash, leading over two non-consecutive days, you couldn’t remember the name of the friend, and no satisfactory epilogue to his, or the other forgotten disappearance has ever, thus far, been penned.
‘And you wouldn’t have to put up with him getting in the way,’ Derek continued, out of the blue, nearly two years post cloakroom episode. ‘If you were that small, I’d squash him first. He already knows that. I’ve told him. He understands where he stands.’
And now, you found yourself backstage in a theatre of mixed narratives, the incongruity of an inexplicable present in unfortunate, proximity to an unsettling past. What wasn’t certain was whether the soot which blew into your face (off an old sand bag, on a disused piano) had any effect, let alone the current, perplexing, certainty that, but for an improperly placed box, which somebody would contractually have to shift before the advertised drama could begin, you would now be facing the ankle hems on the jeans worn by the former school bully whose interest you’d piqued, all those years ago.
‘Oh dear,’ you shivered convulsively, quickly sitting, before you fell.
‘You two!’ bawled an unseen manager, as your hands automatically clapped, in pain, to your ears. ‘Break’s over! Get those fags out! Chop, chop! And somebody - for pity’s sake! I’ve already asked nicely - shift that box!’
Oh dear, indeed. Without time to reconcile yourself to the unexpected shock of finding yourself three inches in height, mere feet from the feet of the huge small time crook who once said he’d as happily crush you to death as let you humour his melancholy, you were about to find yourself further revealed to Derek’s Adidas clad engines of execution as well as -
‘I’ll do it,’ grunted the slightly larger, slightly more unsavoury David, as he dropped his cigarette to the floor, grinding it to an ash shadow beneath an enormous, weathered and malodorous, brown brogue.
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author