by Trevor Hoyle
The film was King Kong, and Terry had never seen anything like it.
When the first close-up of Kong’s grinning face filled the screen, with teeth that could snap lamposts, he nearly wet his pants. This – the frightening nature of the film – combined with the fact that they had sneaked in illegally meant that Terry sat uneasily, half-on and half-off the seat, prepared at any moment to drop to the floor out of view, or run like the clappers, or surrender himself to the usherette. As it was, he crept to the toilet four times during the picture, on one occasion to do his number two.
When the lights came up the three lads crouched in their seats, talking out of the corners of their mouths and passing a Park Drive back and forth inside their cupped hands. Terry knew that he ought to be getting back (his tea would be in the oven waiting for him) but he wasn’t brave enough to embark on the lone walk through the glare of the marble foyer under the suspicious glinting eye of the manager. He preferred to wait for Alec and Spenner, safety in numbers, and, if need be, endure his mam’s angry remonstrations.
It was odd coming out of the cinema into the daylight world, the sun still in the sky and people arriving by the busload, streams of them disgorging outside the Electricity Showrooms with that air of eager anticipation of a night on the town. It had the same disorientating effect of having slept during the afternoon and waking to find the day almost gone and night-time approaching.
Naturally they played at monster gorilllas all the way home, Spenner bagsing the part of the mighty Kong, chasing Terry and Alec with shoulders hunched and arms swinging, grunting and slobbering. The film had been so real to Terry that at any moment he half-expected the head and shoulders of Kong himself to appear over the rooftops, a hairy paw plucking double-decker buses from the main road and ripping the tops off like boxes of liquorice allsorts, crunching any stray hapless pedestrian between slavering jaws and spitting the mangled remnants onto the Nile Street paint depot. When the three of them made it to Denby without once having been hoisted into the sky and chewed to pulp he breathed a sigh of genuine relief.
But it was now after seven (he’d missed PC49) and he knew he was in trouble. His tea would be a dried-up mess with the peas lodged in the gravy, and if he was even allowed to eat it before being sent to bed, he would be lucky. He sidled through the gate into the backyard, his eyes glued to the kitchen window for sight of an angry face, so he didn’t see the note pinned to the door until his thumb was on the latch. The note read:
Terry,
Your dad’s gone to pay his Union. Have taken Sylvia to Nanas and Daddy Sams. Your tea is under a plate in the meat safe. Get the key from Mrs Hartley’s (Dot, next door). Back about nine. Be a good boy.
Love, Mam.
(Did she think he didn’t know who Mrs Hartley was, and where she lived?)
Terry ate his tea, which wasn’t dried-up after all, being a salad with two slices of corned beef, the Adventure propped against the Crosse & Blackwell salad cream bottle. Every so often the image of King Kong would loom in his imagination, eyes flashing, teeth gleaming, disrupting the story he was trying to read, ‘Keepers of the Scarlet Hand,’ and he found he was holding his breath, just waiting for the roof to be peeled away and a set of fingernails as big as car bonnets to descend into the kitchen and squash him like a gnat. So vivid was the vision that he went to the window and looked anxiously towards the ash-tips, convinced that even now the monster was bestriding the river and beating his chest, felling the Arches with a single swipe before turning his gaze directly and malevolently on number 77 Cayley Street.
To divert his fear he ate two pieces of currant flat (he loved his mam’s baking) and drank half a pint of milk, then went out into the peaceful still evening. Dusk was infiltrating stealthily, soft blue shadows deepening beneath the eaves of the houses and gathering in the alleyways. Denby lay becalmed in the summer twilight, the smoke from the chimneys rising vertically and winding itself in gentle spirals before forming hazy streamers above the steeple of Good Shepherd Church. The traffic on Entwisle Road was a distant background hum.
The Gang was out in force. They were hanging about outside the allotments on the Bottom Track, leaning against the fence and scuffing their shoes in the dirt; some girls were there as well: Sandra Weeks, Doreen Hartley, Fat Pat Sidebottom, and Laura Parfitt.
Laura Parfitt was thirteen and lived in a detached house (with garage attached) on the corner of Hovingham Street. Her father had his own business, had a van and a car – a red two-seater MG whose shattering exhaust could be heard two streets away. She was a tall slender girl with an aloof expression that Terry found sexually stimulating. She didn’t usually fraternise with the Gang and for that reason was regarded as a snob, though she was always friendly when you spoke to her and had a lovely pair of knockers. Terry liked her. On the few occasions they had exchanged more than a couple of words he had been surprised to discover an intelligent girl with an independent mind. Girls with both brains and spirit – whenever he encountered them – never failed to astonish him.
Spenner was holding everyone transfixed, acting out King Kong’s battle in the jungle with the prehistoric monster and demonstrating how Kong had twisted the monster’s neck and tied it in knots as though it were a bicycle inner-tube. He said to Terry, seeking his support: ‘Weren’t it great?’
‘Yeh, smashing,’ Terry confirmed. ‘And he had teeth, I’m not kidding, this big’ – extending his arms to full stretch. (He hoped that Kong wasn’t lurking behind the church listening to all this.)
‘We’ll have to go and see it,’ Kevin Hartley said.
‘Where’s it on at, the Regal?’ Billy Mitchell asked.
Alec Bland said excitedly, ‘And guess what – we got in by the back—’ and yelped when Spenner kicked him on the shinbone.
‘Did what?’ Roy Pickup said.
‘It were nearly full and we had to queue right round the back,’ Spenner said glibly. ‘There was this long queue so you’d be better off going early. Right, eh, Terry?’
‘Yeh.’ Terry guessed what Spenner was up to. He didn’t want the others to know about the secret way in through the fire exit because the more people that knew, the greater the risk of the Regal’s manager tumbling to it: were he to find the first ten rows crammed with boys who hadn’t been through the box-office, his suspicions would doubtless be aroused. ‘We had to queue for ages.’
Terry saw Spenner’s almost imperceptible nod of approval, which swelled him with pride to be trusted by the older lad, and in his confidence.
‘I went to see Copper Canyon last night at the Victory,’ Male said, which provoked a long yawning silence. ‘Ray Milland was in it.’
‘Fan-bloody-tastic,’ Spenner said, bending at the waist and without any warning charging head-first into Terry’s stomach. It was the ultimate seal of his approval. They wrestled in the grass, giving it everything even while mindful of the dog muck, each trying to stab the other with imaginary Bowie knives. Terry received three wounds in the chest and stomach before getting in a fatal thrust between Spenner’s shoulder blades. He died spectacularly, straightening up on the tips of his toes, clawed hands clutching the air, screaming Aaaaaaiiiiiieeee! ! ! as he fell backwards down the grassy slope to lie spreadeagled, mouth gaping horribly, eyes crossed, fingers twitching, with convincing flecks of foam on his lips.
‘Mad,’ Laura Parfitt said, shaking her head. ‘A total loony.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if I was King Kong coming to get you,’ Spenner said, jumping up and shambling towards her with his hands trailing in the dust. The girls squealed (even Laura Parfitt stiffened and backed away) and ran off with Spenner, doubled over and growling, chasing after them. Terry said to Laura Parfitt:
‘You favour the girl in the film a bit.’ In fact she looked nothing like the girl in the film, but Terry could precisely visualise a semi-nude Laura Parfitt lying helpless in the monster’s hairy paw.
‘Who was it?’ Laura Parfitt asked.
‘Dunno. Forgotten h
er name.’
‘Somebody well known?’ She was clearly flattered to be likened to a film star, especially if it was Linda Darnell or Hedy Lamarr or somebody else with a beauty spot.
‘Never heard of her before,’ Terry was forced to admit, which was a disappointment to Laura Parfitt and also to Terry, because it brought the promising exchange to an end.
Spenner appeared carrying Sandra Weeks in his arms and slobbering over her, trying to sink his large yellow teeth into her neck. She was screaming and threshing her legs.
‘I am Dracula,’ Spenner intoned, in a change of dramatic persona, ‘and tonight is the night of the full moon. This night I shall drink virgin’s blood …’
Terry waited, and sure enough Alec Bland piped up with, ‘What’s a virgin?’
‘A girl who doesn’t have any elastic in her knickerlegs,’ Terry said. Roy Pickup laughed, strings of spittle hanging from his buck teeth, and glanced at Terry as if making a new appraisal of this ‘kid’. Terry grinned, aware of his own quick-witted cleverness, and began to show off. He adopted the posture of an ape and went after Doreen Hartley, chasing her past the rickety fences and wooden sheds covered in tarpaulin, and eventually cornered her (it seemed she had deliberately run into a cul-de-sac) against the wall of a garage. Now that they were alone, without an audience, he didn’t quite know what to do. Before he could make up his mind, Doreen said – her shoulders flat against the garage wall, her eyes large and round with the whites showing – ‘What was it you said to me last week?’
‘Eh?’ Terry said, straightening up. ‘When?’
‘Last Thursday. In our back. You said summat.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You know: you ran past and said something.’
From the corner of his eye Terry could see her pale hands, fingers spread, pressing against the black oily wood, and it seemed as though a blast of hot air had entered his lungs. He fixed his eyes on her and said deliberately:
‘I said I wasn’t going to stuff you.’
‘What does it mean?’ Doreen said. Her lips were parted. ‘What does “stuff you” mean?’
‘You know. “Do” you.’
‘“Do” me? I don’t know what that means,’ Doreen said, the breath whispering in her nostrils.
‘You do know,’ Terry said. He let the moment drag itself out. ‘It means pull your knickers off and shag you.’ He put out his hand and looked into her eyes. ‘But first,’ he said mercilessly, ‘I want to feel your tits.’
Doreen lay against the garage wall, her chest moving, as Terry, arms at full stretch, covered both her breasts with his hands. She submitted to him as in a trance, her mouth open and dry. It was like a ritual. No words were spoken. His hands moved over her, not mechanically, but almost perfunctorily, as if this were a function that required a prescribed methodical approach. He felt no desire, and it was only when Doreen made an effort to resist, pushing his hands away, that drove him to grasp her wrists, his mouth coming down onto hers in a kiss that jarred the breath from her body.
‘I thought you didn’t like playing with girls’ titties?’ said a voice behind him.
It was Colin Purvis, standing a yard or so away with his hands in his pockets and a smirk on his face.
Down the Figure 7
BY HALF-PAST NINE DARKNESS HAD ALMOST TAKEN over and the gaslamps spluttered into life. The sky was clear, shading imperceptibly from deepest black to pale translucent pink in the west, a few faint stars winking on overhead.
Some of the Gang had melted away, but Terry, Alec, Spenner, Kevin Hartley and Billy Mitchell were still there, the girls too; and so was Colin Purvis. He had the lads in stitches, the girls outraged yet agog, with a non-stop flow of dirty jokes and limericks he knew by heart. He never flagged, his memory never failed him, able to relate a dirty joke on any subject you cared to name, from skinny spinsters living alone to hunchbacks with deformed organs.
Terry was fascinated by the performance, and strangely unsettled: it was a side to Colin Purvis he had never seen before. At first Terry had steeled himself for the worst, because the butcher’s son still haunted his dreams and turned them into sweating nightmares; but this Colin Purvis – the genial jokester, the life and soul of the party – just dismissed everything that had gone before as so much good-humoured tomfoolery, remarking at one point: ‘That night we pinched your bike on Oswald Street and hid it behind’t fence. D’you remember? We had a good laugh that night.’
Terry nodded and discovered himself to be smiling. The big lad wasn’t so bad after all, once you got to know him; he didn’t mean any real harm. Even Laura Parfitt, the snooty one, couldn’t tear herself away, listening mesmerised as the jokes got filthier and the language more crude.
‘Do you know the one about the nun who ordered a gross of candles for Christmas?’ Colin Purvis said, not bothering to wait for an answer before telling the story, which relied for its point on the extraordinary masturbatory prowess of the abbess.
‘Where do you get ’em all from?’ asked Alec, goggle-eyed.
‘All over’t shop, but mostly from the van drivers who deliver me dad’s meat. One of them’s a right randy little fart, not as big as me,’ which wasn’t hard to believe, Colin Purvis being gargantuan for a boy of fourteen. Somehow, in a way that Terry couldn’t fathom, he had a magnetic quality that compelled you to look at him and listen to him. It was partly to do with his bigness, his grossness; he was everything to excess, in manner and speech and gesture, the kind of person you had to dislike yet couldn’t keep your eyes off.
The evening had now advanced into night, with only a glow on the horizon, fast fading, to mark the sunset. The fences enclosing the pens and allotments poked like sharpened staves into the dying streak of sky, and away towards the river the baying of a dozen hounds, kept for breeding purposes in a crude stockade of wire-netting, sounded sharp and clear on the still air. Terry knew that it was getting late but he didn’t want to leave just yet. He said:
‘Where are your pals tonight, Colin?’ It was amazing, and he realised it, that he could inquire after Eddie and Shaz as though they were old friends of his.
The big lad said, ‘Them dozy getts. They’ve gone to the flicks.’
‘We went this aft,’ Spenner said, and told him all about King Kong, which didn’t seem to interest Colin Purvis at all; nothing seemed to interest him unless he had done it or seen it or was talking about it. He asked the girls their names and they told him, giggling.
‘Bet you’ve never played Postman’s Knock.’
‘Course we have,’ they said.
‘How do you play it?’ he asked with sly cunning.
‘We’re not that thick,’ Laura Parfitt said, giving him a level stare. Yet she could have gone in, it was late, and didn’t. His manner was strangely hypnotic, even to her.
‘Ever played Strip Jack Naked?’
The word ‘strip’ was like a stick of gelignite in mixed company. The younger girls blushed and some of the lads laughed in a nervous, embarrassed way.
‘No,’ Laura said, her tone ironic. ‘But I bet you could show us.’
‘I could that,’ Colin Purvis said, lounging against the fence, the distant lamp near Wellens’s shop making craters of his bad complexion. When he grinned with his large loose mouth he was fascinating in his ugliness. Terry wondered what Carol – or any girl for that matter – could possibly see in him. Then reminded himself savagely that all girls were stupid, fickle, addle-headed creatures whose behaviour was as infuriating as it was mystifying. Far better to stay with the Gang than be pissed about by girls and their wiles and snares.
Mitch said, ‘I know Sandra Weeks does a bit.’
‘I do not,’ Sandra Weeks said, putting her hands on her hips. She gave him a look that could kill.
‘That’s not what I’ve heard.’
‘You haven’t heard nothing. What have you heard? Nothing, I bet.’
‘Come on, Sandra, don’t be shy,’ Colin Purvis said in a coaxing, t
easing voice. ‘If you’ve done a bit tell us about it.’
‘He’s a damn pigging liar,’ Sandra Weeks said, flushing and glaring at Billy Mitchell, who looked a bit abashed, Terry thought, as though he might have been guilty of betraying a confidence. He wondered what Mitch and Sandra Weeks had been up to, particularly as their bedroom windows faced each other across the back alley.
‘Nowt to be ashamed of – eh, Laura?’ Colin Purvis said, draping his arm across her shoulders. It struck Terry that, in spite of herself, Laura was attracted to him. He felt baffled and lost.
Kevin Hartley said he was going in and told their Doreen that she’d better come too. Fat Pat Sidebottom went with them. Spenner suggested that the rest of them go to the churchyard and tell ghost stories but nobody seemed keen on the idea: instead they wandered deeper into the maze of pens, known as the Figure 7, because it was a long straight track that turned a right-angle to form a 7, and eventually a dead end, finishing in a semi-circle of huts round a dirt clearing, bordered by hummocks of grass.
It was dark, not a light anywhere, faces and hands pale ghostlike blurs, black sockets for eyes.
Somehow or other (Terry had missed the start of it in the darkness) Colin Purvis was kissing Laura Parfitt, standing in front of her with his legs braced, pressing her against one of the creosoted huts. The others stood round in an awkward, self-conscious group as though they might have been waiting for a bus. Wet smacking sounds, unnaturally loud in the quietness, issued from the huddled pair. Colin Purvis broke away to say:
‘There’s a spare ’un, you know.’
Terry was about to reach for Sandra Weeks, delayed a fatal indecisive half-second, and, surprisingly, Alec beat him to it, pushing Sandra against the side of the hut and sliding his hands around her waist. This left Terry, Spenner and Mitch with nothing better to do than to stare unseeingly into the darkness and shuffle their feet in the dirt whenever the silence became too oppressive.