Out: A Schoolboy's Tale

by David Brining

  23: Haven't you heard?

  SCORING 95, I came first in the Woodwind 14-16 with the Brahms clarinet sonata. Robin Keighley came second, again, ha ha, Paul Driver third, playing Finzi's 'Forlana' which I'd won with like a gazillion years ago, and Maxton a lowly fourth. Max was doing Grade 5 on Tuesday. I mean, Driver was Grade 6. Only Keighley, Grade 8, ever offered a contest. Confidence riding sky-high, I stormed the Piano 14-16 class with the Chopin Berceuse, scoring 98 out of 100. Arnold's Brahms was good (92), Gray's Schumann passable (88), Driver's 'Country Gardens' lumpy (85), Tredwell's Mozart characterless (83), Lewis's Bach stodgy (81), Lees' Tchaikovsky pleasant (80) and, for the fourth year in a row, I blew them all away. The adjudicator praised my pedalling, my singing right-hand and control of tone which called 'limpidly, translucently, heart-breakingly beautiful.' It was 'a very musical and highly impressive performance.' Hissing out all the air I'd been holding back, I grinned self-consciously. Although I was expected to win, I felt a little sorry for Arnold, second again, and Gray, with his Grade 7 next week, third again, and there was always a crackle of tension when the results were read out, just in case. Anyway, when the final notes had drifted away into the spell-bound audience, and the adjudicator had said his piece, the teachers descended on me in a pack.

  ''That,'' Ashton declared to 300 people, ''Was the most beautiful performance I have ever heard a schoolboy give. Jonathan, you are a shining light in our school. You have played for other boys and helped them win prizes. You have shared your talent for the benefit of others, and your talent is supreme. We take pride in your gifts and pride in your willingness to share them.'' There was loud, warm applause. I wished my parents had been there to hear it, but they were busy, Mum with yoga and ylang ylang, and Dad with sweet peas and manure. Besides, they'd heard it every day for ten weeks. Dad claimed he knew every note by now. Ali, awe-struck, just gazed at me. I'd played it for him, and he knew it.

  ''My God,'' he muttered softly, ''You are so good 'good' seems inadequate. I don't know what word I could use.''

  ''That's my problem,'' said Holt. ''I'll use 'satisfactory' like in Wheezy's reports.''

  I called him a cheeky sod through this massive hug from my Lion, 'cos even more importantly, he had won his first music prize ever, and Paulus had won his first in 3 years.

  Leo's G minor Sicilienne was ravishingly gorgeous, like the flautist himself. He was utterly, wonderfully superb, with a lovely, floating tone and the long G he had to hold and sustain at the end for three and half bars and which he'd consistently, annoyingly shortened in rehearsal was excellent, especially as he actually did manage to drop to ppp after all. I just kept playing the harp-like left hand arpeggios to hold him steady. He scored 96 marks, the adjudicator calling our performance 'beautifully, heart-achingly tender.' If only he knew, eh? Leo kissed my lips. He didn't seem to care any more. He said it was time to stop pretending. His exam was on Wednesday 26th at the college at 10.30. I had already booked Double Biology off. Ha fucking ha. Herbidacious was spitting blood apparently, but Gallagher basically told him to live with it.

  Paulus' Allegro Appassionato, 'driving and furious', also scored 96. We'd only practised it twice because the piano part was fairly easy and, unlike the 'cellist, I had bars of rests. Poorly was slashing scales almost non-stop but it was fun and actually, at last, he beat Adam Rubenstein who, with Perry, played the Allegro from Bach's A minor concerto, and played it superbly for 95. The Saint-Saens, though, had brought a deep-seated anger to the surface, and displayed it, burning brightly, to the school. Andy was doing this piece in his Grade 8 on Wednesday at 2, so that was Physics out for us both, ha ha again. As I hugged him, I told him he was gonna storm it and arranged a massive practice at my house on Sunday afternoon for him and Leo, and even promised Leo more coaching for his piano Grade 3 on December 1st. I invited Ali to turn the pages.

  Yet even in our moment of triumph, we sensed we had reached our apotheosis. The muttered comments and nasty jibes were becoming more barbed. Bunny had apparently made another crack about 'Peters blowing like an expert' with U5H pissing themselves and Crooks going 'That's so out of order, sir' and Bunny going 'Didn't know you'd joined the Queen's Club too, Michael,' and Crooks going 'That isn't me, sir, that's Peters.' I suppose it couldn't remain secret forever. What I'd done at that party was fairly common knowledge, Sooty knew I'd got off with Leo a couple of times and God only knew who might have seen me and Ali at the town hall concert. When I arrived in my form-room on Friday morning, someone had inscribed, with a key, like a cliché from a bad coming-out movie, the word 'GAY' on my locker. Bunny, brushing it off as boys' banter, said I should 'get over myself' but I was angry and anxious. Anyway, the storm broke in PE.

  It started, inevitably, in the changing room. I was sitting on a bench tying the Green Flash laces when Arnold bashed my shoulder with his bag and Morreson 'accidentally' kicked one of my shoes away. Glaring murderously, I followed the others into the gym where Vickers was organising basketball. I hated basketball at the best of times. I thought it a stupid game that only the freakishly tall could be good at. Dark vests went on one team, so green, dark blue, brown and purple, and bright vests on the other, so light blue, yellow, red and orange. The house-system provided the only rainbow in the school.

  Seymour, on my team, charged me into the wall, grazing my bare shoulder. When I protested, he shrugged and said I got in his way. No-one passed me the ball. OK, I wasn't very good, but it was supposed to be a team-game, wasn't it? At one point, the ball span loose and I managed to get it, bouncing it once, twice, considering who to pass to, when Brudenall elbowed me viciously in the ribs and I cried out.

  ''You're sooo gay,'' Lewis muttered, scraping me down the wall again.

  Fosbrook, the runty little twat, said something to Gardiner about my being 'a wet fish.'

  Behind me, Brudenall started singing ''Oh Ali's boy, his arse, his arse is aching.''

  Everyone laughed. Except Vickers. He went nuts, cancelling the basketball and making everyone run laps of the field instead. It was pouring with rain and everyone got soaked, hair plastered to skulls like it'd been painted on. Maxton barged me aside, muttering roughly it was my fault for being a fairy and Lewis tripped me so I fell headlong into a puddle. This made everyone laugh, except Vickers again, who put the whole class in detention, and Paulus, who looked upset and troubled. Gardiner growled I was 'so dead' as I mournfully picked myself up, water running down my shins, and Fosbrook smeared mud in my hair.

  Things got worse in French when Fosbrook and Stewart made these stupid slurping noises every time I answered a question. When Goddard yelled at them to pack it in, they flicked spit-balls at me instead. Then someone emptied my bag onto the floor and kicked my books and pencil-tin round the room. It took me ages to gather everything up again, and while I was on my hands and knees, Stewart kicked me up the arse and sent me sprawling.

  ''What the fuck is going on?'' I screamed.

  ''We don't want poofs in our class,'' said Stewart, gobbing on my sleeve.

  ''Who says I'm a poof?'' I demanded.

  ''Everyone,'' said Maxton coldly, looking more like a donkey than ever. ''Beaky Phillips reckons Ali Rose is bumming you. I heard him telling Wilf Reid.''

  ''Yeah,'' said Stewart, ''And Pete Dwyer reckons Leo Trent gave you a blowjob. Sooty Sutcliffe said you and Leo disappeared for ages into the bathroom…''

  ''Bollocks,'' I retorted.

  ''You snogged Mikey,'' said Gray quietly.

  ''That was a dare!'' I yelled. ''You were there. You saw it.''

  ''Yeah,'' he said ominously, ''I saw it, and I saw you going into the woods with Rosie on Bonfire Night. What did you do? Suck his cock? Fuck's sake, J. You hang around with him all the time, like some bloody little puppy, and everyone knows he's queer.''

  ''Michael said you told him you're queer,'' added Maxton. ''You fancy him, and Rosie. Mikey said so. He said you were gonna suck him off but his Dad came in.''

  Fucking Judas.

&
nbsp; I raged off to the toilet to rinse Stewart's spit from my blazer. There I confronted, with an overwhelming sense of desperation, a crude cartoon scribbled on the wall with a black board-marker. It showed a fat, bloated penis and blobs of semen dripping into a gaping mouth. Next to the mouth was scribbled JENNY PETERS (SUX COCKS). I drifted, half-dazed, out to the playground football game, not really sure what was happening, or why.

  ''Bugger off, Peters,'' said Lewis. ''No-one wants you looking at their arse.''

  Seymour kicked the ball at my chest then Tim Wilson launched this ferocious assault.

  ''They're saying you're gay. Is it true? Are you gay? Eh, Peters? Are you? Gay?'' He stabbed at me with his index-finger.

  I was about to say 'No, don't be so stupid' when I realised that if I said that, I would be the stupid one.

  ''What if I am?'' I said. ''Who cares?''

  ''Who cares?'' Tim booted the ball viciously into my thigh. ''I fucking care, Peters.'' He was actually crying with rage. ''I've done sleepovers with you. I've shared fucking changing cubicles with you. You were my best friend, you know? Best friend, and all the time you were drooling over my arse, you fucking, fucking pervert.''

  ''I wasn't,'' I said mildly. ''I don't fancy you, Tim.'' I hadn't known I was queer then.

  ''You're all the same, you fucking benders!'' he raged, pushing furiously through Driver and Rix to grab my sweater. ''Eyeing us up, wanking over us.'' Spraying spittle, he shook me like a dog might a cat. ''I hope you die of AIDS, you little poof! It's all you deserve!''

  Rix, solemnly adjusting his specs, started banging on about demons, like I was possessed or something. Gayness, he reckoned, was caused by the Devil.

  ''Like in The Omen?'' I scoffed. ''The number of the beast is sex sex sex?''

  He said I could get cured. I could have aversion therapy which, I gathered, involved watching hard-core man-on-man ass-fucking and, if I had an erection, getting my brain electric-shocked till I vomited. Or there was exorcism. Wingnut could, in the name of Jesus, cast the spirits out, 'cos Satan was living in my loins. He even offered to pray for me at the Christian Union meeting that afternoon. Then I heard someone mutter they should rape it out of me and, feeling sick, I went inside. Christians, eh? Jesus wept.

  Chamber orchestra was just shit. Maxton kept turning pages at the wrong time, Keighley just kept sniggering, Williams muttered I made his skin crawl and Lees slid his chair backwards into my knees. Finch just glared at me stonily. Trent, Paulus and Shelton, the cowards, just kept their eyes fixed on the music or on Wilf, who avoided my desperate gaze altogether. Later I heard him tell Fred ''He's been in my car, Alan, my car! Where my baby daughter sits! Christ Almighty. The wife'd kill me. A queer in the car? I could lose my job!''

  In Physics, Millie, handing back some homework, told me my description of the last experiment was too flowery, which brought forth howls of laughter from the others and a delighted yell from Fosbrook ''You mean like a pansy, sir?''

  Irritably, Millie called me, Bainbridge and Walton to help him carry these cardboard boxes of equipment from his store-room. Bainbridge dumped one box unceremoniously on the bench and got told off for treating the equipment so roughly.

  ''We're doing an experiment involving lights and a stroboscope. Usual groups. One to record the results, the rest to carry the stuff. One stroboscope per group of four. We haven't any more, and don't break them. The Department's not made of money.'' Millie tossed over a handful of electric leads. ''Right, get started.''

  ''Fuck off, Peters,'' said Maxton. ''Go find another group.''

  ''Yeah,'' Stewart said spitefully. ''Go finger the other bummers, Peters.''

  Paulus, presumably, who was in a group with Cooke and Huxley.

  ''Fine,'' I said, snatching up the cardboard box of stroboscopes and lamps. ''I'll take the fucking box an' all. Go get your own fucking lamps.''

  I waltzed sideways to dodge Stewart's lunge and collided with Collins. The bottom fell out of the box and stroboscope and lamps crashed to the floor. Millie went ballistic.

  ''Didn't you hear what I said about the equipment, you bloody fool?''

  ''Wasn't my fault, sir!'' I yelled back. ''It was an accident!''

  ''You're a bloody accident, Peters,'' said Maxton.

  ''Fuck off, you stupid twat!''

  ''PETERS, you imbecile! Get out!''

  ''Don't worry, you bunch of tossers! I'm going!''

  As I crashed the door of the lab behind me, and Millie bellowed at the class for laughing, I felt like crying then, overwhelmed with anger, booted a hole in this plasterboard wall. Millie went mental again, saying he'd tell Mr Gallagher.

  ''Whatever.'' Folding my arms defiantly, I slumped sulkily against the doorframe for the next twenty minutes then flounced off to German.

  ''Have you brought any fudge today, sir?'' asked Brudenall innocently.

  ''Peters likes fudge, sir,'' called Seymour.

  ''I expect he does,'' said Beaky. ''Would you like some fudge, Herr Peters?''

  Howls of hysterical laughter accompanied Brudenall's cry ''he prefers packing fudge, sir.'' Then for the next fifteen minutes, he, Lewis and Morreson threw more bits of spit-soaked paper at me while Beaky wore this kind of 'told-you-so' look on his parrot face and made deadpan remarks about fudge and chocolate fingers which brought the class to tears of laughter. Fucking parrot-nosed cunt. My tears were something different.

  Stewart stuck a Post-It on my back which read 'KICK ME, I'M GAY.' All these gimps, even that cunt Sumner ran up, booted my shins, screeched 'faggot' and scooted away again. Sutcliffe and Hartley ducked away in embarrassment. The Sixth Formers were even worse, shooting me looks of scorn and hatred. Pete Dwyer, Harry Turner, Chris Crooks, Palmer and Liddell, just scowled at me, or made stupid kissy-kissy noises.

  The bus-ride home was hell. There were no teachers to protect me and no Ali to cling to. It was just me and Leo, and Leo was as useful as a chocolate teapot. He just sat there, rhubarb-red face buried in some Latin vocab. Maxton and Gray studiously ignored me whilst some of the younger boys sniggered and whispered, and Bobby Rose flew furiously down the top deck towards me.

  ''Hey, Peters! Is it true you're bumming my brother?''

  ''No,'' I said wearily, ''It isn't.''

  Bobby punched me really hard on the cheekbone. The exploding pain momentarily blacked my vision. I really could see stars.

  ''Go on, Bobby. Batter the bender,'' cried someone from the back of the bus.

  He hit me again, really hard, in the same place then in the centre of my forehead and then on the jaw before Maxton caught him by the shoulders and pushed him away.

  ''Thanks, Phil,'' I gasped, touching the bruise already swelling under my left eye.

  Maxton, glaring at me stonily, returned to his seat as Warburton started singing:

  Four and twenty virgins came down from Inverness,

  And when they went home again there were four and twenty less.

  Singing balls to your partner, arse against the wall,

  If you've never been fucked on a Saturday night, you've never been fucked at all.

  Jonny Peters he was there, sucking Ali Rose,

  And when the paedo came, well, the spunk shot out his nose…

  Maxton, face set like concrete, joined in the chorus. I shrank into my trench-coat.

  Jonny Peters, queer as fuck, shagging Leo Trent,

  Who'd have ever thought that the bastards were so bent?

  Jonny Peters, sucking cock, getting fucked by Fred,

  Wanking over every gimp and giving Paulus head…

  It was a fucking long journey, cheered only when Leo gently touched my arm.

  ''Oh, Jonny. If I could be as brave as you…'' He choked, then added through some tears ''You're so brave.'' I gathered his life had turned to shit too with boys in the Fourth Form kicking him, spitting at him and, in the case of some bastard from the Lower Fifth, trying to headlock him into a blowjob.

  Curry Night was depressing, even though Dad w
as doing his black-pork special and even though I got my £5 pocket money. I was exhausted and actually a little frightened. I'd never been scared of school before. Now I was. The level of hatred was something I'd never, ever imagined, and it was all because I preferred kissing boys, not girls. How mental is that?

  I rang Ali, got his father, who refused to let me speak to him, and basically yelled at me for getting him into trouble. Mum too was angry when she saw yet another bruised face and lectured me, over poppadums and dabs of tea-tree oil, about the perils of fighting.

  ''Who was it?'' she kept demanding.

  ''Bobby Rose,'' I finally yelled. ''It was Bobby Rose.''

  Another storm erupted along the lines of 'we told you to stay away from the Rosses. Didn't we tell you? Honestly, Jonathan, you must have mango chutney for brains.' I decided now was not the time to tell them about my real problems and turned wearily to Terry Wig-on and Esther Rants-on doing Children in Need on BBC1. Bollocks. I was a child in need, but nothing was coming my way, was it? I thought of phoning in after It Ain't Half Hot, Mum to say 'yes, it was hot, thanks to my Mum' and could someone please help me? I'm getting bullied at school, because I'm gay, and then realised they'd probably send the pigs round to Ali's and tell me to sod off. I mean, our lovely new Government had just decreed that me and Ali were illegal and had no rights whatsoever. Angered by the hypocrisy of 'Children in Need (that we like)', I went to bed to finish the Dr Who book, switching off the light at ten as the autumn rain lashed my window and then had the worst asthma attack I'd had in years. I sat upright with my bare back against the hard wooden headboard gasping shallowly, dragging Ventolin out of my inhaler and breathing into a brown paper bag. My chest felt like Hissing Sid was crushing me to death in his coils while Artful Owl was smothering my face with his feathers. But I didn't tell Mum. Hissing Sid may have been innocent, but Ali Rose? No way.

  When Saturday came, I didn't turn on my radio for CD Review's comparison of Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique, though I love it, just cuddled into my yellow duvet with another hot-water bottle, Pickles and New Bear, and Ali's and Leo's socks and listened to the rain. The wind-chimes hung lifelessly behind the curtains. I didn't even have a wank. Even when Mum and Dad returned from Sainsbury's, I didn't get up. I just wanted to stay where I was forever.

  ''You all right, Jonny?'' Dad, setting down a cup of camomile tea, put his hand on my bruised forehead. ''Are you coming down with something?''

  ''Can I have some toast and honey?'' I asked in this really small, pathetic voice.

  He begged me to talk to them.

  ''I'm just coming down with a cold,'' I muttered.

  Though he wasn't fooled, he had the wisdom to drop it. I imagined the kitchen conference, the folks seeing my distress, powerless to help, becoming stressed themselves.

  I spent Saturday in this weird state of suspended animation. Hangng about the house in blue trackies and white rugby shirt, I couldn't read, I couldn't study, I couldn't focus on my homework, I couldn't even play the piano. I felt sick a lot of the time and scared all of the time. My breathing was coarse and rattly and my chest felt like it was caught in a gigantic steel hand. It was a waking nightmare but it was worse for Ali, I knew that, and I thought about him all the time. I phoned him again but this time his mother snapped at me to leave him alone. I read Dead Ned by John Masefield, the story of a young doctor wrongly accused of the murder of his benefactor, a crusty old Admiral who had fought with pirates and intriguingly subtitled 'Autobiography of a Corpse', tried to do some homework, a bit of Biology and this English essay on the relationship between Henchard and Mary-Jane.

  I watched a film from happier times, Watership Down, about a bunch of rabbits trying to save their doomed burrow from developers and fight off some despotic Fascist rabbit called Woundwort and cried a lot when [SPOILER…. Yeah] Hazel died and that song came on: 'There's a fog along the horizon, a strange glow in the sky, and nobody seems to know where it goes, and what does it mean? Oh, is it a dream? Bright eyes, burning like fire,' and cried some more. I played Frogger (you have to get frogs across a busy road without trucks and stuff splatting them) and Ground Force Zero, taking out New York twice before I got fried, then dug out Search and Destroy so I could nuke Charley and his Gooks. I found some instructions written in cyan felt-tip on a page from an exercise book which I no longer understood:

  USNLF

  1 US Coy1 NVA Bn.

  1 ARVN Platoon1 VC Platoon.

  1 APC/Tank Platoon

  (1 Artillery Battery)

  6 Peasants{4 Mines}

  5 Porters{4 Ambush}

  1 Arms(3 Dummies)

  1 Ammo

  'NVA Stationed around road and bridge. US must capture all territory beyond bridge. NVA must hold bridge and beyond.

  Length 15 turns.

  US enter 2nd on W. side.

  NVA '' 1st on Rd side.

  The Battle of Kien Phuong

  Standard Game Rules for Combat/Movement. Variable NLF Battle Order. OPTIONAL RULES INC. are. AMBUSH, CASUALTY POINTS, MEDEVAC, HE FIRE for TANKS and ARTILLERY, and INTERROGATION.

  TANKS = 12 strength Pts1 Hex 32 pts

  ARTILLARY = 8 strength Pts1 Hex 32 pts

  ( ) optional { } needed.'

  Hey, Charley. Colonel Kurtz, he dead. Ride of the Valkyries and the smell of napalm in the morning… I laid the counters out then couldn't find the damn dice. I think they were under my bed with half a jigsaw of Tower Bridge, a tennis ball, Action Man's gold-coloured deep-sea diving helmet, the Slinky (again) and a green and white hooped rugby sock. Instead, I raced a Dinky Lotus, a Corgi Ferrari, a Matchbox Cortina and a chunky Tonka Tipper-truck up and down the landing in the WORLD MOTOR RACING Championship. I even invented some drivers and scribbled their names on a scrap of paper so I could keep a score of the points – Ferdy Diaghilev from Russia for the Lotus, Carlo Feroda from Italy in the Ferrari, Fred Garrison of Australia in the Cortina and Jan Ǿlsȅn of Norway in the Tipper. The Ferrari won, so I added Dougie Sexton of the US in a Playmobil SUV but he had a dodgy front axle from an encounter with a Lego castle wall and ended up going over the edge and bouncing down the stairs. Then Ǿlsȅn, the moose-eating tosser, crashed the Tonka Tipper into the skirting board by the bathroom just as Mum came up with a load of laundry. Obviously she went absolutely mental, made me clear them away and help her fold the bedsheets. Inevitably I kept turning them the wrong way. When she told all the kangaroos in Australia that I was a stupid bloody kid with the brains of a rice pudding, I actually cried. I stood on the landing and cried. She just tutted contemptuously and flung the pillow-cases at my head. Christ, I had never felt so unhappy. I switched on my bedroom light and started a story.

  'Depression by Jon. D. Peters.

  'He walked along the deserted street, head sunk between his shoulders, feet dragging as he trod the steps that brought him nearer and nearer the river. There was a sort of reluctant compulsion inside him. He did not want to go but he had to. He felt he must go to the river. There was just a hesitancy in his step, a sadness, an aura of finality.

  'A newspaper, yellowed by age and exposure to sun, fluttered across the path before him. Bus tickets, cigarette ends and sweet wrappers were tossed in the air and settled to rest a few yards away in the gutter. Dead, dying leaves whirled round his ankles like brown fog.'

  As I put down the Waterman, the 'phone rang. I hoped it was Ali. It wasn't.

  ''Hey, Peters, you poof, you know what we're gonna do next week? We're gonna shove a broomstick up your arse and melt your cock and balls in sulphuric acid.''

  I recognized neither the voice nor the giggling. I didn't think it was anyone in U5H.

  ''Hey, Peters, you poof, we're gonna shit all over you, then stamp on your balls till they burst. We're gonna set fire to your pubes and piss on you to put the flames out.''

  Was it someone from the Sixth Form?

  ''Hey, Peters, you poof, we're gonna gang-rape you with bottles then get your cock…''


  Scared and angry, I turned off the 'phone and went to rake up leaves in the dusk with Dad, anything to escape from that house for a while. We burned them all in a big bonfire. Wondering how much burning pubes would hurt made me feel sick. Then Mum screamed at me again for leaving my bedroom light on. I told Dad it was the wood-smoke making my eyes smart but really it wasn't.

  I watched racing from Newbury then Final Score, but even Man United's four-goal win at Brighton and Norwich beating Sunderland 1-0 failed to move me. I couldn't even bear The Muppets. It was so bloody stupid, Swedish Chef going bloody 'bork bork'. I mean, what the fuck? And Basil fucking 'boom-boom' Brush, a glove-puppet talking fox? Like get a fucking life! Even the new Doctor Who, some mediaeval vampire story with a phallic spaceship and fuel-tanks brimful of blood, and Ronnie Barker wearing a frock and a moustache was bloody stupid. I picked up my pen.

  'The sun made a brief, fleeting appearance from behind the thick grey clouds and then appeared to vanish again, plunging the sky into darkness. As it did so, his mind went the same way, thoughts receding into morbidity, the sun of life being extinguished by the gloom of death, the despair of dark evil, the emptiness of loneliness...'

  On Sunday, Mum, having phoned Leo and Andrew to cancel our music practice because I was sick, ha ha, returned from church white-lipped with anger. Marching into my room, where I was still in my navy PJs huddled under the duvet with Pickles and fending off another asthma attack, she launched a Polaris missile at my head.

  ''Pam Wilson says you're homosexual and the whole school knows.'' I pulled the duvet protectively round my chest. ''I told her she was a liar and you were just sensitive because of your music, then Timothy said you'd admitted it to him at break.''

  ''Admitted?'' I gasped. ''You make it sound like some crime.''

  ''It is a crime!'' yelled Mum for every wolf in Siberia. ''You're fifteen! You're a child!''

  ''At 15,'' I yelled back, ''Andy Collins, Mark Gray, Michael Crooks, everyone in my class, is having regular sex.'' Which they weren't, but what the hell?

  ''That's OK,'' she returned icily. ''That's normal. That's with girls.'' Shit. ''This infatuation with Alistair Ross has left you confused.''

  ''I'm not confused, and it's not an infatuation,'' I protested, ''And he's called Rose for Christ's sake! Why can't you get his bloody name right?''

  ''Because he's filling your head with all sorts of nonsense!'' she shouted. ''He's grooming you, Jonathan! God Almighty, he could do things to you, you know? Grope you, even rape you, you stupid little kid!''

  ''Well, he won't,'' I retorted, ''Because he loves me. We're gay, and he loves me.''

  ''I hate that word, 'gay','' Mum bristled. ''A perfectly good word corrupted by brainwashing perverts. It means happy, Jonathan! Happy! How are you happy? You've spent the weekend crying in bed with your bloody teddy-bear.''

  ''I'm happy when I'm with Ali,'' I said simply.

  ''Ali, Ali, Ali!'' she exploded. ''It's all we ever hear from you! You're like some soppy girl.''

  ''You think I chose to be gay?'' I suddenly shouted. ''You think I want this? You think I want people calling me names and hitting me and spitting at me? You think I want this? I know how hard this is. I know I hard this is going to be. But it's who I am! It's who I was born to be. I was made this way, Mum. I was born gay. Why, I don't know yet. But I was.''

  ''So it's our fault!'' She looked at Dad, hovering anxiously in the doorway. ''We made you, Jonathan. If you were born that way, it must be our fault?''

  ''It's nobody's fault,'' I said wearily. ''God decided.''

  ''So it's God's fault?'' she screamed. ''Don't talk about God. You're not fit to speak His name.'' She ripped the gold crucifix from my neck and told me to get dressed. ''After your piano lesson, we're going to your grandparents for tea.''

  ''I don't feel like it,'' I muttered mutinously. I was not gonna miss the climax of Tale of Two Cities, denuniciations, executions, guillotines galore and 'far far better thing than anything I've done before' as he sacrifices himself for his friends for the People's Friend puzzle page, some limp lettuce leaves, half a tomato and the bloody Royal Variety Show on BBC1. I mean, ticket to Snoresville, or what? A load of dancers, prancers and has-beens doing 'Roll out the barrel,' 'White cliffs of Dover' and telling jokes about washboards and outdoor lavvies. Man, I think there was gonna be a ventriloquist with a talking dog, like on That's Life, going 'Sausages' and 'gottle of gear,' and the Grunters giving it like 'this is entertainment, Jon-Jon, not that stuff you're in (Shakespeare and Dickens, presumably).' Someone just shoot me.

  ''I'm not paying £20 an hour for you not to 'feel like it'.'' She flung my jeans at me. ''You bloody well go. And get off your fucking soapbox, Jonathan. I don't want to hear your fucking opinions, you obnoxious little brat, not till you're an adult with kids of your own.''

  ''Fucking hell, it's like being in prison!'' She slapped me really hard across the cheek. ''I hate you!'' I screamed through the tears, ''I fucking hate you, you bitch!''

  ''Guess what, you insufferable pig?'' shouted Mum, face twisted with fury, ''I hate you too! So get out of bed and just for once shut your fucking mouth, you fucking little fairy.''

  Screaming another obscenity, I scrabbled through my Oxford Maths set for the compass. Last time it had hurt sooo much, despite tea-tree oil and a bandage. I'd eventually got a pain-killing jab in my arse from the hatchet-faced school nurse. This time I'd make it hurt so much she'd be like really sorry. And to follow it up I'd slash my arms with a pencil sharpener blade. Biting my duvet, I stabbed my thigh till the blood flowed and I passed out.