Down the Figure 7

by Trevor Hoyle

  When in class, facing Mr Short, who taught French, or Mr Bulmar-Todd who took them for Physics, it seemed to Terry that Denby was a land he had read about in a storybook, as a small child a long time ago. There was nothing to link this world of grim-faced masters and schedules and homework and detention periods, where everyone was a curt surname, to the unpaved streets and flickering gaslamps, or to the Common where the Gang played cricket and football, or the pens and allotments, the Ginnel, the Figure 7. Sometimes he felt so cold – right to the core – that it seemed all the joy and warmth had been drained out of him. What had Trigonometry to do with swaling on the railway embankment? Or Mr Short’s ‘Preceding Direct Object’ or Mr Bulmar-Todd’s ‘Coefficient of Friction’ to do with anything? These were abstract concepts that chilled the blood because they were the meaningless language of a new doctrine he couldn’t grasp. And looking back on it now, class 4A at Heybrook and patient, kindly Mrs Butterworth existed only as figments of his imagination; he might have dreamt them, and Denby too.

  Yet in a curious way, his present existence also had a dreamy quality about it. As he sat listening to the master’s drone, a section of his mind became detached and floated away, flitted along the bleak corridors and over the draughty open stairwell. It was as if his spirit was searching, hopelessly and randomly, for a meaningful sign, a familiar landmark. He felt abandoned and forsaken. As though he had been dressed in uncomfortably stiff, ill-fitting clothes, then dumped here and forgotten, expected to cram his head with gibberish, with nowhere to turn to for help, not a friendly or sympathetic face to be seen.

  But he did make one close friend in 1C, John Tidmarsh, whose father owned a large hardware store in the centre of town. John was a neat, tidy boy who wore a clean white shirt every day of the week, whose tie was always pressed, shoes polished, fingernails trimmed. It was obvious, without John having to say so or boast about it, that his family was well-off: his appearance, his expensive leather satchel, his polite manner told you that he lived in a house with a bathroom, somewhere posh probably, near Falinge Park or up Bamford.

  They became friends by the accident of sitting next to one another and through their shared hatred of Leach and his toadying henchmen – in particular a boy with frizzy yellow hair called Martin Jackson. By a quirk of the system, Jackson was nearly a year older than anyone else in 1C, which gave him an unassailable advantage. He had passed the eleven-plus at the second attempt during his first year in Brimrod Seniors, in an exam designed to catch potential High School material that had slipped through the net. He and Leach were natural allies in the domination of those such as Hilton, John Tidmarsh, Terry Webb and a dozen or so others, taking real relish in making their lives a misery; and the trouble was, there was nothing to be done about it.

  Apart from the bullying, there was something else that scared Terry witless; if anything it was even worse, sinking his mind into a stupor. Whereas at Heybrook he had accepted his quickness at learning as natural, an innate gift, here he had to sweat and struggle just to keep up. It was a new and terrifying experience, and this, he reminded himself, was the lowly C form. He could barely imagine the impossible standards demanded by the A and B forms above him. They seemed so far out of his reach that he began to think of himself as actually thick. Latin and French were impenetrable; Mathematics and Physics (the latter taught by the Bull, as Bulmar-Todd was universally known) just plain baffling, a million random facts rattling aimlessly around Terry’s numbed brain. It was pointless to look to the masters for sympathy or understanding. Their attitude implied that the privilege of being selected to receive this superior education carried with it the responsibility of behaving as an adult and possessing sufficient intelligence to cope with the work they were asked to do. But! Terry wanted to protest, it’s too soon, I’m not ready, I’m not good enough! He never said any of this to anyone, of course, and they wouldn’t have listened if he had.

  On his morning walks to town he was tempted once or twice to ask Roy Pickup for the secret. There had to be a secret, no question about it. Because looking up at Roy as they walked along, trotting to keep up, Terry saw nothing that marked Roy Pickup out as in any way special or more brainy or cleverer than himself. He was quite ordinary, in fact, perfectly unexceptional. Yet Roy had survived two years of High School and was now in the B form of the Third Year. So there had to be (Terry reasoned) a magic key, a secret code, a password, that would enable him to survive in this strange, hostile environment. But he never raised the subject or sought advice; it would have been an admission of failure and defeat.

  The day the Latin master was late in arriving for the lesson Terry had already suffered the indignity of a mushy gob of paper, stewed in Leach’s warm spittle, splattering his right ear, which had to be cleaned out with a corner of his handkerchief. Being left unattended, there was pandemonium among the desks. Hilton got a paper dart topped by a sharpened pen-nib which drew blood from his calf, while Jackson and an associate set about little Jimmy Oldham with rulers, twanging them against the back of his head and rapping his knuckles when he sought to protect himself. Amidst all this noise and chaos Terry and John Tidmarsh were trying to have a quiet discussion, and it was only when silence fell with dramatic abruptness that they looked up to see the bulk of Mr Bulmar-Todd filling the doorway. He was taking 1B, the class next door, for RE, one of his alternative subjects.

  The Bull stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips, gown draping his broad shoulders, rocking backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet. Very slowly he straightened his arm and pointed his finger, squinting along it as through a gunsight. ‘You boy. Come here.’

  Terry climbed out of his desk and walked across the stone floor until he was standing in front of Mr Bulmar-Todd. The eyes of the Bull were flat, grey, and Terry had no option but to stare back, transfixed as a rabbit by a snake.

  The Bull spread his meaty hands on Terry’s shoulders, placing his thumbs on the collar-bones with the lightest of pressure. This by itself was an oddly threatening gesture, which the class observed in total glazed silence. A new form of torture learned in a Japanese POW camp? Unarmed combat, Commando-style?

  Very quietly, so that only Terry could hear, the Bull said:

  ‘When I tighten my fingers you will slowly rise on your toes. You will remain on your toes until I relax my fingers.’

  He looked into Terry’s eyes to make sure the boy understood, then increased the pressure of his thumbs, and Terry rose up on his toes as instructed and hung there, so it seemed, for a long time. To the watching class the Bull’s strength must have seemed prodigious – lifting a boy by the shoulders without, apparently, the slightest exertion. And Terry played his part well, teetering on tiptoe until the Bull released the pressure and he could sink back to the floor. The Bull said:

  ‘Return to your seat,’ and Terry turned and walked back to his desk under the full gaze of the class, his ears burning and his cheeks aflame. He couldn’t fathom what the incident meant, except perhaps that he had been the victim of an experiment: he had been used (as the Bull might have used a magnet and iron filings or an ebonite rod) to demonstrate an important physical law; moreover sitting at his desk he felt squashed to mere nothingness, an object of ridicule. From that moment on his respect for Mr Bulmar-Todd was diminished to zero.

  Another incident reinforced his hatred of the school. The class straggled up from the chemistry lab, situated in the basement, after a morning double period with Mr Haggerby, a large, ugly, pear-shaped man known with detestation throughout the school as the Hag, and who everyone agreed was the most boring teacher on the staff.

  The next period was PE with Mr ‘Monkey’ Baker. There were a couple of minutes to spare, just time enough to go for a pee. Terry and John Tidmarsh were amongst a group of other first-formers queuing for a place at the urinals when some sixth year boys charged in and muscled their way to the front. They stepped forward and took their places, leaving, Terry saw, the central urinal vacant. Feeling annoyed at the six
th formers pushing in, and before John could stop him, Terry defiantly moved forward and filled the vacant stall, a moment later to be crushed by four hulking bodies against the wet and steaming pot surface, his arms trapped at his sides, his blazer and short trousers soaked, his shoes wedged in the trough of urine.

  When they’d gone off, whooping and yelling, and Terry had trailed dismally to the washbasins, holding back his tears, John told him that it was an unspoken ritual of the school never to use the central urinal, and that green first formers were targets of the ceremony. Terry thought the whole thing stupid and childish. His uniform was wet and stinking, his shoes were flooded, and he didn’t know what to do.

  ‘You’ll have to get a move on,’ Hilton said from the door. ‘Monkey Baker’s waiting in the hall.’

  ‘Put your kit on in here,’ John Tidmarsh said. ‘After PE you can wash your clothes in the sink.’

  ‘I’m not coming.’

  ‘You’ll have to, you’ll get done.’

  ‘I can’t do PE like this!’ Terry shouted, staring at the rows of taps, his throat tight and dry. But he wasn’t going to break down in front of them; he hadn’t cried openly at the High School yet, not even when Leach and his mob had scragged him.

  ‘Come on,’ said Hilton anxiously. ‘We’ll be late.’

  ‘What if Monkey Baker sees you’re not there?’ John said. He was concerned, bound by a sense of loyalty and comradeship.

  Terry said, ‘He won’t notice I’m not there if nobody splits on me. Go on, see you later.’

  But Monkey Baker did notice, or somebody told him, and he came to look for Terry in the lavatories. He poked his wizened inquisitive face round the door and then came in: he was wearing a red track-suit and proper running shoes with thick ribbed soles.

  ‘Webb, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘What are you doing here when you should be in the hall?’

  ‘I got shoved in the—’

  ‘Have you got your kit with you?’

  ‘Yes sir. But I got—’

  ‘Right. Get changed. I’ll give you a count to one hundred.’

  ‘But sir!’ Terry said, his eyes filling with tears.

  ‘Don’t argue with me, boy. You should have been changed and in the hall five minutes ago.’ He seemed oblivious to the state Terry was in. He turned to go. Terry stood mutely by the washbasins. When he showed no sign of moving, Monkey Baker said:

  ‘Report to C7 detention on Thursday. And if you’re not changed and in the hall inside two minutes you’ll be on your way to see the Head.’

  C7 was the more serious of the two detentions: unlike C5, which was for minor offences, it went on your end-of-term report. When school was over on Thursday Terry stood in the line of other offenders in the corridor outside Room C7, waiting for the prefect in charge to arrive. It turned out to be a hulking sixth-former with close-cropped red hair, known throughout the school as Trog, one of the boys who had pushed Terry into the urinal.

  At the Baths

  ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOONS MONKEY BAKER took 1C to the Municipal Baths. It was an enjoyable double period for Terry, because being a decent swimmer he was allowed into the deep end instead of being under constant supervision and having to practise the breast-stroke with the learners.

  On the afternoon he saved Jimmy Oldham from drowning he had been diving for the block with John Tidmarsh and Frank Taylor. They took it in turns to plop the weighted rubber block into the 8 Feet and pretend it was an underwater mine they were defusing. After a few dives Terry got fed-up and swam leisurely towards the shallow end. Somebody came swimming by, face down, as if searching the bottom, and kicked Terry in the stomach. It wasn’t much of a kick, more a feeble twitch, and Terry stood up to watch the swimmer wallow and lurch through the water. Whoever it was, he had remarkable lung power. When he carried on and on, circling aimlessly and not bothering to surface, Terry waded across and jerked him upright out of the water. He was a dead weight, arms like floppy rubber tubes, eyes wide open in a zombie’s stare with faint white haloes round the irises.

  Monkey Baker came in response to Terry’s shout and they laid Jimmy Oldham’s pallid figure, limp as a rag doll’s, on the tiles at the side of the pool. He puked up some warm green water and froth, Monkey Baker kneading his rib-cage with a firm even pressure and working his arms up and down like pumps.

  ‘Shouldn’t he be face down?’ Terry said.

  ‘Thank you for the advice, Captain Webb,’ said Monkey Baker, making a joke Terry didn’t understand. ‘This is the Swedish method; you’ll learn about it when you go in for your bronze medallion.’

  Jimmy Oldham returned to the world of the living, his eyes as big and blank as saucers. His lips were the same colour as the rest of his face and he had blue puckered fingertips. He didn’t say ‘Where am I?’ or anything else for that matter, but sat quietly in a canvas chair sipping milky tea brought by the pool attendant.

  ‘Would he have drowned, sir?’ John Tidmarsh asked Monkey Baker.

  ‘Doubt it. I’d have spotted him in time,’ which Terry knew was a bloody pigging lie. True, he himself had never personally seen anyone drown but he guessed that Jimmy Oldham hadn’t had long to go when by pure chance he had kicked Terry in the stomach. Terry wasn’t seeking to be made a hero, but all the same a ‘Well done, Webb’ wouldn’t have been out of place.

  In the cubicles afterwards, as Terry sat drying his feet, Frank Taylor’s gap-toothed grin appeared over the dividing wall. Taylor always slavered when he spoke, his tongue lolling about as though too big to be tucked tidily away inside his mouth. Still grinning, he said in a low voice, ‘How about this then?’ and straddled the wall, naked, a thunderous erection straining upwards at forty-five degrees. He hunched his shoulders, gripped himself, and grunted in a parody of an ape playing with itself.

  ‘Urg, urg, urg,’ Taylor grunted, working himself. He dropped down into Terry’s cubicle, large and white, body hard, and it almost seemed as if there were three of them in the confined space.

  ‘Let’s have a look at yours,’ Taylor said in a spirit of good-natured interest.

  There wasn’t much to see, except for a slight unbending.

  Taylor flipped it with his finger, his own upright and magnificent, standing apart in a superior fashion, and said, ‘You haven’t got much, have you?’

  Terry didn’t say anything. He was fascinated because Taylor was circumcised, the smooth polished purple crown curiously naked and vulnerable. He wondered, not for the first time, whether there was something wrong with him. His was covered by a layer of skin that was painful to pull back. Now looking at Taylor he was envious and unhappy: perhaps without the flap of loose skin his would be as large and proud.

  When it became apparent that he wasn’t fully responding, Taylor said, ‘Watch me,’ and masturbated himself fiercely, leaning back from the hips and aiming at the wall. The stuff came out – an incredible amount of it – spitting from the blunt end and dribbling over his fingers.

  ‘Bloody Nora,’ Terry said involuntarily.

  Taylor shook his hand towards the floor to get rid of the excess and wiped the rest on Terry’s towel. He looked down and lifted the now flaccid protuberance with his forefinger with an air of modest satisfaction …

  ‘Bet you wish you had a dick like that,’ he said, and went off swinging his arms, going, ‘Urg, urg, urg.’

  As Terry was combing his hair in front of the mirror Monkey Baker came up in his red track-suit and put a penny in the Brylcreem dispenser. He stood behind Terry briskly lacing his fingers through his hair and humming a tune; he caught Terry’s eye, smiled and winked at him in the mirror. That was all – he went away – and Terry was left feeling wonderful, thinking Monkey Baker the best master in the school. It had never occurred to him before that masters were actual human beings.

  When he went up to the cafe he found that John Tidmarsh had ordered Oxo and toast for him and brought it to the table, which Terry thought was a nice gesture. The
y sat on tubular metal chairs with Tom Sorenson, three pale and unnaturally clean-looking boys with damp hair stuck to their heads.

  ‘Chemistry test tomorrow,’ said Tom.

  ‘Yeh,’ Terry said, unconcerned for once.

  ‘The Hag hates your guts,’ John said.

  ‘He’s a prick,’ Terry said succinctly.

  ‘It’s a wonder you didn’t get C7.’

  For once Terry had been accused of and punished for a crime he had actually committed: he had been passing laxative chewing gum round the class and trying to persuade Tony Hilton that it was Spearmint, and Haggerby’s square grey-jowled face (like a badly preserved Easter Island statue) had revolved ponderously from the formulae on the blackboard and caught him in the act.

  Oddly, this incident raised Terry’s prestige in the class, for he was one of a small select group of boys who had received both C5 and the more serious C7 detentions in their first month at High School. Leach and Jackson stopped picking on him, and amongst his classmates he came to be regarded as somebody prepared to accept a dare.

  ‘It is nowt anyway,’ Terry said, dipping a finger of toast into the Oxo. ‘You just have to sit there for an hour, that’s all.’

  ‘If you get three in a term you have to see the Head,’ John said.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You get the cane and it goes on your report.’