Dance on My Grave

by Aidan Chambers

  These two boys were a couple or three years older than me, and together they had a series of adventures of the kind that, at seven, you think must be the most exciting events known to man. In the first adventure they found an old tin can that was supposed to be full of magic beans. These magic beans possessed the power of transporting people back in time. So Our Heroes had day trips to such wonders as Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, the Spanish Armada on the High Seas, Hadrian’s Wall at the time of the Romans, and the Court of King Arthur during a period when the knights weren’t getting on too well together. Wherever they went Our Heroes sorted out everybody’s troubles by dint of native twentieth-century knowhow and stunningly precocious intelligence, like commonsense. I am ashamed to admit that I was thirteen before I stopped enjoying that kind of gunk. As Barry used to say about me in a slightly different circumstance, there are times when I can be a late developer.

  The important thing is that at one glorious moment near the end of the first adventure Our Heroes swore eternal fealty, one to another, by each cutting his hand with a forage knife freshly sharpened on King Arthur’s stone, and then, holding their bleeding wounds together, mingled their blood while chanting a solemn oath and gazing deep into each other’s eyes.

  ‘Now,’ said one of them afterwards, ‘we are bosom friends forever.’

  I remember those words exactly for two reasons. The first reason is that I had just that week learned that a woman’s breasts are sometimes called her bosom. (The fact that bosom also means chest, man or woman’s, had not yet become clear to me.) One of those TV boys calling the other the friend of his breast was therefore a little startling to a small boy with a fresh interest in mammary glands.

  The second reason isn’t so easy to explain. It wasn’t so much the phrase ‘bosom friends’ that struck me, but the idea behind the phrase. It put into words something I have always wanted since I can remember: an out-and-out, no-holds-barred, one-for-both and both-for-one, totally faithful, ever-present friend. And I do not mean a pet dog.

  Here was this bilgewater TV show putting words and pictures to my till then unspoken desire. Ah-ha!, I must have said to myself, or whatever gasp you emit when you are seven and talking to yourself about something as surprisingly illuminating as a flash of mental lightning, Ah-ha! So other people want to have friends like that as well! I am not alone, I must have thought. Somewhere out there is someone looking for me, just as I am looking for him. A boy with a can full of magic beans.

  I’ve thought about that moment of surprise often since. The only way I can explain it to myself is to suppose that because I did not have any brothers or sisters to knock romantic ideas of friendship out of me at an early age, this irrational desire for a bosom pal took hold. Or maybe my mother should have let me roam the streets and get beaten up sooner than she did. Or maybe it was all genetic, or had something to do with what I ate, or didn’t eat, or maybe it was the result of not being taught to say my prayers at night because my father is a raving atheist.

  I might add that nobody warned me at an appropriate age about wet dreams, and maybe these had something to do with the persistence of my desire for a bosom buddy into adolescence so that it was still with me, as strong as ever, when I was sixteen. But then, nobody warned me earlier about television and how a little of it tends to corrupt the mind and a lot of it corrupts the mind completely. And, after all, it was television which gave me, during one of its frequent wet emissions, the words and pictures to imagine this idea of a possible reality—the hope for a bosom friend. Remember Vonnegut: We are what we pretend to be. So in the end it is probably all television’s fault that I became a bosom-pal freak.

  Whatever, here I was at sixteen years six months corrupted by a long-lasting desire for a bosom friend without ever having found a friend to be truly bosomy with. Mind you, I did have some close calls in my search for a soul mate. There was Harvey, for instance.

  Harvey came to live in our street when I was nine and growing despondent, having by then searched for two years without success for someone to cut a hand with. Harvey, I was sure, was He. And for a while everything went just like on TV. We had adventures. Not, sadly, with a can of magic beans, but more routine stuff like sleeping at the bottom of our garden in a tent made of an old blanket over a washing line. (God, the daring! The day it was due to happen I broke out in a rash at the excitement of it all.)

  In the middle of the night we swapped our best jokes, by which you’ll recall, everyone at nine years old means their dirtiest jokes. The joke that kept Harvey and me giggling longest that night was this one:

  There’s this little girl and this little boy and the little boy says, ‘Can I come to your house?’ and the little girl says, ‘You’re not supposed to, but seeing you’re my friend I’ll let you.’ So they go to her house and the little boy says, ‘Can I come to your bedroom with you?’ so she says, ‘Well you’re not supposed to, but seeing you’re my friend I’ll let you.’ The little boy says, ‘Can I get in bed with you?’ so she says, ‘Well you’re not supposed to, but seeing you’re my friend I’ll let you.’ The little boy says, ‘Can I put my finger on your belly-button?’ so she says, ‘You’re not supposed to, but seeing you’re my friend I’ll let you.’ So the little boy does, and the little girl says, ‘That’s not my belly-button,’ and the little boy says, ‘No, and that’s not my finger.’

  Of course, when we’d gone through it two or three times and worn ourselves out with giggling, we tried acting it out, which I enjoyed very much and couldn’t understand why Harvey got tired of the game so soon.

  Another time we built a secret den behind a back yard garage rarely used by its owner. Harvey said the owner was a 102-year-old man who lived on Coke and mashed cornflakes. A young and pretty District Nurse visited him a lot, which gave rise to much speculation between Harvey and myself about the extraordinary properties such a diet must possess. We tried it for a while, but it did nothing for Harvey.

  Before long Harvey turned out to be a disappointment. His idea of bosom friendship was all for him and none for me. For days I supplied every demand of this self-indulgent creep, hoping my unselfish devotion would eventually win him for the cause of true and lasting amity. But the more I did to please him, the more his appetite for slavery increased. I’ve noticed since that this is how a lot of friendships are. I soon decided palship meant more to me than being dogsbody to an egotist. We split up after a nasty row that ended in a scuffle on the pavement outside Harvey’s house, and remained sullen enemies thereafter.

  Next there was Neill. He came along about a year after my friendship with Harvey broke up. Harvey had had one good effect. He had made me suspicious. Harvey looked clean-cut, open-faced, honest. The sort of kid your mother says you should try and be more like. But behind that innocently cute phizzog was a scheming and selfish mind. People are not always, I realized after Harvey, just what they look. Even less are they what they say.

  Neill was overweight, mother-coddled, and quiet. He had a long nose that was fat at the end and sometimes dripped on cold mornings, like a leaking pear. He was also an only son. After Harvey I felt safe with Neill. Life was never exactly sparkling and he certainly did not possess the can of magic beans. But he was always there, willing and faithful. We went to school together every day, watched TV, flew kites, shared meals, sat around talking. Also Neill was a big reader; he took me to the local library and made me join, which I hated him doing at the time, but now I’m grateful because it was something I would never have done on my own. We spent hours thereafter lying side by side on his bedroom floor with our noses stuck in books.

  But none of this is really what kept me friends with Neill for three years. What did was one thing: obsession. In this case, Neill’s, not mine. Neill knew exactly what he wanted to do in life. You’d never have thought so to look at him; you’d have thought he was a wet slob with a mind as flabby as his overfed body. But not a bit of it. He fascinated me because till I met him I had never known anyone else but myself wh
o had an obsession. And he had something more. He had a concentrated personality. He did not just have an obsession, he devoted himself to it totally. What we did as we apparently did nothing but lie about talking and reading, was to talk and read about Neill’s obsession. Neill wanted to devote his life entirely to experimenting with electricity. It was this that provided a few mind-blowing moments of such high excitement that the long boring stretches of life with Neill were well worth suffering.

  These big moments happened because it never occurred to Neill that you are supposed to wait till you are grown up before you engage in scientific experiments of the kind that might push out the barriers of human knowledge but might also kill you in the process. He was already getting on with the job when I met him. He had commandeered the spare bedroom and turned it into a laboratory stuffed with gear he had begged, bought and filched—wire, and meters of various sorts and sizes, and inexplicable gadgets, and control units as ominous as robots. And from time to time the entire house seemed to be nothing more than a testbed for Neill’s latest experimental wizardry.

  What I could never understand was the way Neill’s mother encouraged him. In everything else she smothered him with maternal protection. Even in summer she made him wear a sweater, a thick jacket, an overcoat and a scarf if the sky went cloudy. And he wasn’t allowed to go into town on his own in case he got lost. Neill never protested; I suppose he couldn’t be bothered. But I was a godsend to them both. Neill’s mother trusted me for some reason (motherly women always trust me, to wit Mrs Gorman, I put it down to my sad eyes) and regarded me as a safe junior child-minder who could take care of her son for her when he was out of the house. Neill knew that if I was with him he could go places and do things otherwise forbidden unless accompanied by mum. Both showed their gratitude. Neill’s mother never stopped trying to feed me up to similar proportions as her son, and Neill allowed me to help with his experiments, a privilege no one else enjoyed. (I never saw Neill’s father, by the way. He was a merchant seaman and came home only rarely.)

  Not that I ever understood a thing Neill was doing. But the experiments provided the excitement. The first such I witnessed was when Neill set his next-door neighbour’s house on fire. He had designed a gadget which somehow involved the mains electric circuit. With my nervous assistance he rigged up oddments of equipment to the electricity meter controlling the household supply, which was located in a cupboard under the stairs. All seemed to be going according to Neill’s plan when we heard the unmistakable noise of a fire engine hurling itself down the street and skidding to a fierce stop, as we thought, outside Neill’s house. We raced to see what was going on only to find the engine had stopped next door, which was already smoking badly from every crevice. I’m sorry to admit that we watched with amused interest while the fire was put out. People are cruel when they are twelve. How Neill’s tampering with the mains supply accomplished such spectacular results neither he, nor anybody else, ever discovered.

  On another occasion Neill exploded himself through the kitchen door, luckily open at the time, into the back yard, where he scattered the dustbin in an elaborate and noisy landing which exaggerated the violence of the explosion and from which the dustbin never recovered.

  On a third occasion, and for what electronic purpose I cannot remember, we were bending glass tubing over a bunsen burner. Neill got over-confident, went too fast, snapped the glass, and was cut by a flying splinter on the vein that passes over the knuckle of the thumb. Blood spurted like an oil strike, splattering the kitchen walls in a profusion so alarming as to make Neill, who could never stand the sight of blood even in the Sunday joint, suppose death must be only seconds away.

  Before I could think what to do, Neill raced screaming into the street, where he literally ran into his mother who was returning from the shops burdened with food parcels to keep Neill alive for the next couple of days. A scene of Mediterranean proportions ensued. Voices were raised in arias of panic, hands were waved, people rushed to the rescue from all directions. Blood and emotion flowed like lava.

  Eventually an ambulance arrived. Neill was sirened away. Only to return an hour later by public transport, his thumb patched with a humiliatingly minute piece of sticky tape, his devotion to science quelled but by no means quenched. By evening we were busy with a wholly new electronic project which had suggested itself to Neill while he was at the hospital. He had seen some clinical machine or other, the purpose of which remained obscure to me but which he understood perfectly, and which he was certain he could improve on in a design of his own invention.

  In the end I decided Neill was a genius. But I tell you—if geniuses are all like Neill, they aren’t much cop as friends. They’re interesting, no doubt of it. And eccentrically companionable. But Neill made me realize that there was something more I wanted of my bosom pal than cosy companionship.

  Not that I could then have described what that extra something was, not even after Neill, by which time I was fourteen. Except that it had to do with cutting your hand, and blood, and grasping your friend’s wounded mitt and swearing a binding oath.

  I was to learn about the missing something when I came across another potential BF a few months after I gave up seeing Neill all the time, and just before we moved to Southend. I won’t bore you with the unhappier details. I’ll just mention that the candidate’s name was Brian Biffen, better known as Buster. He was two years older than me, and a lock forward in the school’s rugby team. He was the only one of the three who wanted me to be his friend and chased after me, rather than me setting the ball rolling and wanting him to be mine.

  I guess it was flattering to be chased after instead of chasing after someone else. Which is why I agreed to watch Buster perform on the rugger field—not something I’d usually be seen dead doing. And it was after I’d watched him play in a match one evening that he took me behind the gym and taught me the pleasures of mutual comfit (or, rather, dis-comfit when Buster was your instructor), a learning process that slotted the missing piece into my understanding of bosom palship, even though Buster proved himself undesirable because being hugged by him was like being hugged by a teenage cactus with large biceps. I have avoided rugger players ever since. ‘I wish you were a girl,’ breathed Buster at the climactic moment. As I did not wish Buster were a girl, only less cactal and overpowering, an essential difference between his ideas about himself and mine about myself became all too clear to my astonished mind.

  There remains only one more item to add to the fraying emotional embarrassment of this confessional catalogue:

  One day a few months ago Holy Joe Harrison, our religious teacher unextraordinary, read out from the Holy Bible certain unexpected passages about David (the little guy who gave Goliath the chop with a sling stone) and Jonathan (the tearaway son of fierce King Saul). David and Jonathan got a thing going between them, apparently, because they started talking about the soul of Jonathan being knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loving David as his own soul.

  I’m not sure Holy Joe can have realized what he was getting into, because this isn’t exactly the sort of Biblical revelation it is advisable to read out to burgeoning sixteen-year-olds, especially if you are as uptight and morally fundamentalist as HJH and have poor classroom discipline into the bargain. Everybody woke up and hooted of course, and there were scrawny cries of ‘Hello-o-o-o-o!’ But I found myself sitting up and taking notice just like I had all those years ago in front of the telly.

  To be honest, the can of magic beans and the cut hands were losing their potency as images of bosomry by this time. They were tainted with kiddishness. But this stuff about souls being knit, and all of it Biblical too, was a lot more engaging. So afterwards I got the reference from HJH—who must have thought he’d made a convert because no one ever asked him anything—and read it all for myself in i Samuel 18 et seq. I then discovered the even more riveting information that D. and J. found their love, as the Bible puts it, ‘passing the love of women’.

  This really s
et the juices flowing. Whatever had I stumbled upon? The two boys with their can of magic beans as processed as TV dinners disappeared into the mists of babyhood in one evening’s Bible reading. Here was meat far more nourishing to feed a growing lad.

  Not that the Bible goes into too much detail. It never does. That book is full of all sorts of terrific ideas, and is always telling you what you should and should not to, but it never gets round to telling you how to do them and how to stop yourself from doing them. So here I was with a tantalizingly dazzling phrase cried out by David at the death (DEATH!) of Jonathan—‘Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women’ (2 Samuel i, 26)—but left to wonder what it meant, and, more importantly, what exactly had happened between them to make David think like that. For God’s sake, what had they done to—with?—each other?

  One thing was sure. David and Jonathan were archetypal bosom friends. No question. This explained also the message I had seen scrawled on a wall under the pier a few days before: BRIAN LOVES JONATHAN. To which someone else had added the words: SO DID DAVID. READ YOUR BIBLE. Since then I have come across further evidences of the same fun. BATMAN LOVES ROBIN, for instance.

  David’s illuminating cry stalked my mind for weeks. And was still haunting me the day Barry Gorman hove into view waving my jeans from the cockpit of his yellow Calypso. So, you see, I wasn’t exactly all wide-eyed innocence that day, whatever I may have tried to pretend—to him or to you.

  18/Which explains why things were happening under the surface (if you’ll pardon the expression, given the seaborne nature of our meeting) from the time Barry begins his rescuing pick-up until the moment we sit facing each other across his kitchen table scoffing his mother’s nosh. So I’ll try again.

  RETAKE

  He comes alongside, and I know who he is at once. I’ve seen him around during my first two terms at school here before he left. And since he left I have passed him on the street, and caught glimpses of him sailing. Each time I size him up, as you do people you come across now and then. Nothing more than that: just pick him out of the crowd and think, ‘Interesting’ or ‘Nice’.