‘Go on,’ chuckled Derek, his slowly descending foot plunging you into ever deepening shadow. ‘Make me laugh like your life depends on it.’ On your back, you attempted to squirm, head first, hurriedly backwards out of darkness. However, the lowering of an Adidas trainer, more than three times longer than you now stood, slowly but steadily put pay to all further struggle. ‘Last chance to bring a smile to my face, little Joe,’ whispered the giant beneath his breath, beneath whose tread you struggled in a predicament as dire as any you might never imagine could befall a fellow human being. ‘It’s crunch time, Mister!’ He laughed quietly, without any real conviction. ‘D’ya hear that, Joe? Crunch time. That’s funny, isn’t it? Who’d have thought back then I’d be the one getting in the last laugh?’
Without a rational thought in your head, you bellowed, a scream of hysterical terror as a scoured sole imprinted discomfort and then fully blown pain which promised agony in a very limited fullness. Within this chaos of deranged panic, words formed out of a howl you couldn’t stifle.
‘But, I’m not Joe!’
Forthwith, the underside of a foot withdrew and, in its place, you stared heavenward in nigh on superstitious terror, upon the downward facing supremacy of a bully grown up, enormous, horribly real and horribly happy to crush you on a whim.
‘What?’ Derek demanded, an indignant disbelief pursing his lips. ‘Not Joe?’
‘I’m Jon!’
Frowning in consternation, the gargantuan expression of uncomprehending confusion suspected a trick or, at the very least, an imminent riddle which, wait as he might, you didn’t deliver. Still, he paused.
‘So, not Joe?’
‘Jon!’
Derek crouched very suddenly on his haunches, bringing his terrible frown closer to the object of his current confusion.
‘Are you telling me I was about to tread on the wrong tiny man?’
Sprawled on your back, you needed to think on your feet. ‘No!’ you answered unwisely.
‘I should hope so because, unless you know better, I don’t see any other tiny man for me tread on.’
‘There’s only us! You have to believe me!’
‘But you just said you’re not Joe.’
‘I’m Jon and we were friends at school!’ you began in honesty, but concluded with a fib.
‘So why did you tell me you were Joe?’
The hair-trigger of his wrath evident, you’d no desire to rile this capricious ogre, where placation or even flattery might facilitate outliving the next ill-considered utterance. ‘It’s all so long ago! I must have babbled it!’
‘What?’ His already terrible face clouded angrily with a further forecast of thunder.
‘It’s my fault,’ you shouted almost flippantly, a sizeable gamble for a three inch man who, seconds before, only avoided a summary crushing beneath the foot of an aggravated, seeming one-hundred-and-fifty foot thug, on a technicality. ‘I must have mumbled.’
‘Oh. Mumbled,’ he frowned. ‘Yes. That’s what I thought you said.’ Seeming to search the floor about for some absent prompt, he muttered, as if self conscious. ‘I always thought you were Joe.’
‘I could change into Joe.’
‘Why?’ His temper surfaced again. ‘I came in here to squash Joe not Jon. I like Jon.’
‘Nobody calls me Joe!’
‘No, Jon’s better. It makes you sound little.’
‘Well, if the cap fits,’ you prattled, practically gagging in panic, whilst affecting smalltalk. For an unbearable interlude, the moment simply hung in excruciating silence and, in spite of the precarious necessity of survival, your eyes wandered.
Still on your back, you lay toe to toe with a resurrected and horribly corporeal monster of past imaginings. The alarming disparity of his toes exceeding your legs in length and your waist in girth, neither settled your churning stomach nor calmed your palpitations. Suspended in sullen inscrutability on high, his engrossed, dense expression fixed on yours, as if carefully reading the antennae on an interesting but slow moving insect he’d certainly squash, before moving on. The dull intensity of his unswerving glare didn’t inspire confidence you might live to prosper from this exchange.
Since leaving school, you’d barely given this colossus a waking thought. On occasion, he had cropped up in dreams of the inexplicable, anxiety themed variety but only as a peripheral, non-talking doubt. The nature of his unusual cloakroom confession was clearly the main credential for such inclusion, both in its unorthodox narrative and urgent, rehearsed delivery. So formidable an unthinking beast, rushing so personal a confession was hardly a daily adolescent occurrence. The uncomfortable incongruity of the exchange had sealed the wax on an unspoken treaty you would never utter a word of your illicit tête-à-tête to a living soul. But looming here, in the present, this terrifyingly magnified presence from a half forgotten past had reappeared to scrutinise your inexplicable inferiority, ruminating upon a fate it would decide you may or may not deserve but meting out such a fate, regardless.
Crouching, all the better to peer, Derek balanced on his toes, rucking his jeans above the top of his trainers. Concentration caused his mouth to fall slightly open, his chin to jut in an expression implying neither empathy nor intelligence and his eyes to squint, dark and unfathomable. Staring with the unflinching self assurance of delinquency in supremacy, he appeared to await a call to act, probably decisively, in haste and without consideration for any other party concerned. Helpless, exposed and at this beast’s complete mercy, your gut reaction was to beg but a basic understanding of ex-school bullies gleaned from current-school bullies advised emphatically against reiterating Derek’s absolute power.
His trainers, whilst maintained, didn’t seem new, with creasing where his toes naturally contorted the manufacturer’s design. The act of balance, perching where the instep and heel rose to higher than the height you now stood caused Derek to rock, irregular shifts in his weight suspending his mass in an artificial poise. Unaware the movement in his feet illustrated the terrible weight they balanced, he continued to gape, not quite expressionless but not indicating whether a sentence had been passed or even if the jury still deliberated. Where vamp met quarter, the cracks leered, inconclusive in their judgement but resolute in their authority. And only then did your stomach somersault in recognition at the changing room stink you had, until now, banished from all recollection. The unbearable smell of feet oozed from every pore of otherwise unblemished leather, like the spectre of post-rugby showers and the dreaded assault on the olfactory sense, of all those male bodies.
With timid hesitation, you allowed your gaze to wander higher, to the gatekeeper of the oppressive man stink, slate grey, drooping and somehow all the more terrifying in their familiarity. His socks, not unlike those of school uniform, lurked, concealed beneath the trappings of the grown man, as the thug in stubble backstage, revealed the bully in wait by the coats. Handsome, if hideous in volume and mass, Derek’s eyes, slightly too close together, glittered in what appeared almost carnal interest. Well proportioned, his round face bedded comfortably beneath neatly messy, short but ample hair. His mouth, an insolent sneer of comely self satisfaction, smiled with the dismissive confidence any last word would be his.
Clearly covetous of his little discovery from a past he seemed to have enshrined in the reimagining, this unpredictable tower of contradictions nevertheless offered no reassurance he’d hesitate to unexpectedly end his radical retelling by wasting you, any way that struck him as lightly entertaining. ‘Yeah, he whispered to himself, licking his top lip. Your blood ran cold as his hand reached down to straighten his turn up. Licking his bottom lip, his mouth remained open. ‘I tell you what I’m going to do,’ he salivated.
Attempting to not think, you nevertheless did. ‘Oh, God. I think he’s going to eat me.’
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