by Tim Pears
Robert was dumbfounded. He’d never heard of any boy over seven years old skipping, still less a boxer. He didn’t know how to – he’d never done it at any age. He quickly summoned up an image of Laura skipping in the back yard, whom he’d watched many times, and imagined his own limbs going through the same contortions, and then by a miracle of willpower and co-ordination Robert set off skipping around the walls of the gym.
Twenty boys of different ages who were grimly pounding punch bags or lifting heavy medicine balls on and off their chests all stopped what they were doing in the same astonished moment, the sounds of leather on canvas and the boys’ grunting and panting subsided into silence, as they watched Robert skipping around the gym.
And then their laughter started: smirks and snorts and suppressed guffaws burst forth into the open, echoey space and became shrieks and howls of glorious derision that bounced off the ceiling and rattled the climbing frames.
But Robert didn’t hear any of them. He was locked into concentration on keeping his arms and legs coordinated: he was doing well, he thought with relief, keeping his eyes down, but he knew that if he relaxed a fraction then his steps would falter and the rope would get tangled up in his feet. So he didn’t hear the boys who were falling on the floor in delighted abandon, including Docker Boyle, the fifth-form heavyweight, who was wetting himself, or the others who were whistling and whooping in his direction with tears streaming down their faces.
Robert had completed three laps of the gym when he wondered whether Mr Bowman would tell him he could finish or whether he should stop of his own accord, and that was enough for him to come out of his trance, sufficiently to become aware of the cacophony around him. And when he came to a halt and looked around, he realized it was directed at him.
‘Don’t stop, nancy boy! Keep going!’
‘Yeh, go on, yer woofter, it’s brilliant!’
Robert felt shame surge through him, and then anger too. He scanned the grinning faces before him, working out which one to hit first. And then, in an action so inspired, and so against his nature, that even Robert knew he hadn’t thought of it himself – he didn’t know where it came from – Robert pursed his lips into a cute, kissy smile, held the handles of the skipping-rope out to the sides as if they were the hem of a skirt, and curtsied. And then he kicked up his heels and set off again, performing an imitation of a flapper girl he must have seen some time on TV. The boys in the gym fell about all over again, but this time with affection mixed in with their derision.
Docker Boyle lumbered over and ruffled Robert’s hair with a boxing-gloved hand. ‘You’re all right, nancy boy,’ he said. ‘You’re all right, son.’ Robert was established.
There was no one else from his form there, and it was the one place where Robert was actually popular. While he played truant from classes with impunity, he never missed a boxing session.
Fortunately for Robert, once Mr Bowman adjudged him to have proved his commitment in shadow-boxing and exercises and let him actually start sparring with the other boys, the ‘nancy’ didn’t stick, because Robert, despite his lack of height, could flatten almost every one of them (except for Docker, who merely absorbed the most fearful punches like a sponge, and Weasel Tanner, a flyweight who was so tall Robert couldn’t quite reach his chin). But the ‘boy’ did, and he started boxing against lads from other schools under the name of Rob ‘Boy’ Freeman.
Robert was born for combat, but the truth was he had the wrong shape for boxing: in the ring he came up against stringy boys the same weight but a foot taller, who kept his swings at bay with their long arms and wore him down; although when he did catch one of them they didn’t get up in a hurry. After one defeat he said to Mr Bowman: ‘Maybe I should find a wrestling club, sir. Maybe that’s what I should do.’
‘Wrestling?’ the teacher replied. ‘Wrestling’s for girls, Rob, boy. No, you stick at it. You’ve got character.’
Robert felt no apparent need to share his hobby with the family. He never told them when his bouts were coming up, still less invited anyone to come and support him. They only knew they’d taken place afterwards, when they would meet Robert in the house with puffed-up eyes and skin bruised to hideous, fascinating colours.
Laura, with a sensitivity that showed she hadn’t lost all her mother’s qualities, contrived to enter puberty that spring at the same time as Alice. At supper in the kitchen, on one of the rare evenings that Charles was present, Edna whispered to him that their girls were young women now.
Charles loved to share things, and secrets were the best things of all to share. He thumped the table and got to his feet, declared to the assembled company that champagne was called for, and dragged Stanley off to the wine cellar.
Laura had a smug, pleased-with-herself grin on her face, Alice had her hand on Edna’s arm, as they waited for their fathers to return.
‘What’s going on?’ James whispered to Simon. Robert, his hearing attuned to the low level of James’ speech, overheard.
‘They’ve started bleeding, dumbo,’ he told James in his grating voice. ‘See, James,’ Robert continued, ‘our little girls here have grown up. Nice.’ He stuck his tongue out at Laura and swivelled it between his lips, and did the same at Alice before Edna could stop him. Laura stared straight ahead in a blank state of shock. Alice burst into tears. Robert jumped up from the table and walked towards the door. Simon rushed after him:
‘Come back here and apologize!’ he shouted.
When Charles reappeared a few moments later with his hand on Stanley’s shoulder, each holding a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne, returning to the kitchen they’d left moments before in a state of celebration, they found Alice bawling her eyes out, Edna trying to persuade Laura to open the locked door of her room, Simon and Robert wrestling on the floor by the back door, and James swaying towards the stairs and the refuge of his darkroom. They looked at each other in bemusement, neither the man-in-charge nor the do-it-all fixer having a clue what to do. So they opened the champagne in the vague hope that their mad offspring would be calmed down by the popping of the corks, and toasted each other.
It took James the whole of the winter and spring to satisfy himself that he’d photographed the garden in sufficient detail, and then he tackled the outside of the house, covering it from every angle and in every detail. And then he had a dream.
He was standing at the top of the stairs on the landing above the hall. On the floor below people sauntered and jostled. Too many people. One of them, a man whom he didn’t recognize, spotted him on the landing behind the banisters, and called up: ‘Ah, there you are!’
Others around the man looked up too and began to chant: ‘Speech! Speech!’ and clap their hands. James turned and rushed away.
He went to the darkroom – or rather, to be precise, he rushed from the landing and abruptly found himself inside the darkroom – pulled the light-string that with a click bathed the room in infrared light, and stepped over to the developing tray. A white sheet of photographic paper floated in the developing fluid. He stared at it, aware that that was what he had to do in order for the image to appear: just stare. And what gradually emerged was a photograph of what was going on outside, he knew, at a moment just passed.
His mother, Mary, was dancing with Simon inside a white marquee. He could barely tell that Mary was dancing, she was just standing straight with one foot lifted inches off the ground, her leg bent slightly at the knee. But Simon was dancing: he had hold of her hand with one outstretched arm and was leaning right away in an extrovert pose, his other arm reaching out on the other side, his whole chubby body face on to the camera, one leg kicking the air.
People, both familiar and unfamiliar, stood around them. They looked as if they’d just stopped dancing themselves in order to enjoy and applaud Simon’s exhibitionism. They were watching Simon and Mary, all except for one, who was Robert, and he was staring directly at the camera. The picture kept on developing, gradually, darkening. James wanted to take the print out a
nd wash the chemicals off, but he couldn’t move: he watched the image disappear into black.
When he woke up, after he’d got over the shock of seeing his mother so vividly, James realized that it was another wedding dream. He recalled the earlier one (in a hospital ward) and had a presentiment that they might become what Zoe, who knew about such things, called a recurring dream. And he would turn out to be right: it was his second wedding dream in a series that he would have at periodic intervals over ensuing years and which from then on would all end in the same way. And James, who had a pedantic streak in his nature and a fondness for puns, described them to himself not as a recurring but as a developing dream.
It was strange to dream a photograph of people: that was the last thing James wanted for a subject. He did, however, feel it was time to venture beyond the garden walls, and so he spent the next Saturday in town studying the shops and other buildings. It was a nightmare: he came back shaken up by children making faces for him, cyclists ringing their bells as they passed and shoppers cursing because he got in their way. He realized that, far from disappearing behind his camera, it only made him conspicuous.
I’m not going back there again, he decided.
One hot summer Saturday after James’ O-levels they all jumped into Simon’s VW Beetle – Alice nabbing the passenger seat and Laura squeezed between James and Robert in the back – to go swimming in the baths next to the school in Northtown, on a rare excursion together.
By the time they arrived James already regretted being persuaded to leave the darkroom and come along. He was self-conscious about his body: he wore Bermuda shorts rather than swimming trunks in order to cover up his scars, but he couldn’t cover up his sunken chest or his skinny legs. So he trotted from the changing-room into the echoey, shimmering chamber and jumped straight into the shallow end. Then he remembered that he didn’t even like swimming: he’d never been very good at it, for one thing. He wasn’t comfortable in the medium of water the way some people, especially girls, seemed to be – which was a shame because it would have been a good exercise, one from which his wonky hips didn’t exclude him. As it was, the limited articulation of his joints made swimming simply more frustrating than it already had been. Neither had he ever got to grips with how you were supposed to breathe while swimming: he was always out of breath after a few strokes of the crawl and had to flip over to complete a length of the pool floating on his back, gasping for air.
Robert, though not a fast swimmer, had at least mastered the ability to breathe properly. He walked slowly towards the edge of the pool – looking even more anthropoidal in his trunks than when fully clothed, with the compact body of a weight lifter – glanced around the pool with hooded eyes, and dived in over the heads of two surprised small children. He then proceeded to plough a steady furrow up and down the length of the pool, brushing aside anyone unfortunate enough to get in his way; he progressed on even strokes with his head submerged and odd ones with his mouth emerging to one side gulping air; powerful, slow and rhythmic. James watched and tried to copy his younger brother. It looked easy enough, but he couldn’t manage more than a few yards before losing the rhythm or else getting a mouthful of chlorinated water from some passing swimmer.
Simon couldn’t swim very well either but it didn’t bother him in the least: he was a lunging, clumsy porpoise in the water. In normal life he wore tailored suits and jackets – bought on Saturday shopping expeditions with the typing-pool girls, among the rare occasions he actually took other people’s advice – clothes of expensive fabric and elegant cut designed to disguise the underlying shape of his body. In the swimming pool, though, in a pair of outrageously skimpy trunks meant for someone half his size, Simon’s true dimensions were revealed and he looked more than ever like an overgrown baby with his barrel chest, floppy stomach and dimply thighs. He rolled around in the water rather than swimming lengths, or even widths, laughing at himself, pausing only to advise mothers on how to encourage their children to doggy-paddle or teenage boys on how to displace the maximum amount of water with bomb-jumps even as the attendant stalked around the side of the pool to reprimand them.
By the time Alice and Laura emerged from the women’s changing-room James was already thinking he’d been in long enough. He saw them make their way to the edge of the pool and was struck by how quite extraordinarily different they were – or, perhaps, had become. Laura had broken her unspoken pact with Alice of simultaneous physical and emotional growth, their sisterly partnership: first of all, she’d suddenly grown taller. Overnight she spurted upwards, higher than Alice, Edna, Robert. She was already almost the same height as her father, and still growing. She’d lost the last of her maternal legacy of fat, her almond eyes the only constant as her adult countenance emerged from her childish, puppy-fat face.
The ‘twins’ looked like different species: Laura, with short brown hair, a full head taller than Alice, her tanned, slim body in a black bathing costume, talking to Alice, touching her arm at the edge of the water, shoulders slightly hunched, aware of boys’ eyes upon her. And Alice, looking as if shorn with her pre-Raphaelite head of auburn hair hidden under a white swimming-cap, her body already settled in her hips and white thighs, a woman’s bosom contained in her blue swimsuit, not really looking at anything, aloof from the echoing shrieks and intent, scampering bodies around her.
Neither of them, though, jumped or dived into the water, but dipped their toes in gingerly and climbed in slowly, as if it might be too hot or too cold, too chlorinated or too dirty, or just too wet, thought James, as they shared a small display of feminine fragility. He flopped onto his back and kicked away.
Once the girls were safely in the water Alice relaxed: the stronger swimmer, she separated from Laura and swam breast-stroke lengths parallel to Robert’s sturdy crawl. Laura paddled and dipped around the shallow end. James, bored, swam over. Laura was standing, leaning against the edge of the pool, elbows on the tiles, gazing at the watery reflections shimmering on the ceiling. James ducked underwater and despite the chlorine kept his eyes open, and kicked towards her legs, his stomach grazing the bottom of the pool. He grasped her calves, considered tugging them in an effort to upend her, and decided not to. He let go and came up for air, gasping.
‘Hi,’ he whispered when he’d got his breath back.
‘I thought that was Robert for a second,’ Laura said.
James stood facing her: it was strange how tall she’d looked beside Alice, when she was still inches shorter than he was. The water came up to their thighs.
‘Your fingers are all wrinkled,’ Laura said, smiling.
‘I’ve been in too long,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t even like swimming,’ he added.
‘It’s all right,’ Laura shrugged. ‘But it’s a bit boring. Unless you’re as friendly as he is.’ She nodded towards Simon, who a few yards away from them was wading backwards pulling a small girl with yellow armbands, who was kicking furiously. Laura watched Simon, smiling. James’ eyes, though, only glanced at Simon and returned to Laura: her strong shoulders, her small breasts, their nipples pressed by the black swimsuit, her stomach, belly button, the top of her thighs above the water, the mound of her sex. In the time it took to run his eyes down her body James realized he’d got a hard-on – above the water. He bent his knees and dropped his body below the surface. Laura turned back to him.
‘What are you doing, James?’ she asked. ‘You’re not going to attack me again,’ she exclaimed, lunging forward. James was crouching on the floor of the pool, only his head and shoulders showing above the surface.
‘No!’ he whispered, as Laura put both her hands on his head and ducked him.
‘No!’ he tried to say again, instead of closing his mouth as he should have done. He took a mouthful of chlorinated water and came back up spluttering and choking, with his eyes closed. He waddled forwards with his arms outstretched and found the edge of the pool. When he opened his eyes again Laura was, mercifully, paddling away towards Simon.
&nbs
p; James crouched underwater, waiting for his erection to subside. He kept his knees squeezed together to hide it from anyone drifting around underwater. He looked at the ceiling, and at the censorious attendant, and at a shifting spot of water some inches away, anywhere except at Laura, but his hard-on remained. It must be the water, James thought, the warm water: it would never go down until he got out of the pool. But he couldn’t get out of the pool until his erection had gone. He imagined scurrying to the changing-room, hunched over himself; then he imagined strutting proudly across the tiles, his stiff prick pushing out of his Bermuda shorts – and blushed just picturing it.
Eventually he felt the blood ebb, his hard-on begin to wilt. But then, absurdly, horrendously, he was unable to stop his eyes from scanning the pool, roving among the many bodies: seeking Laura. He couldn’t help himself. His eyes found her outside the water, half-way down the pool, bending over and saying something to Alice. Immediately his prick sprang up again. Then Laura jumped in beside Alice, and James looked away.
So James stayed there, trapped; twice he lost his lust but couldn’t stop himself from looking at Laura again, which was enough to revive it. At one point Alice swam over, her white swimming cap bobbing before her.
‘Are you all right, James?’ she asked.
‘Fine,’ he whispered.
‘You’ve been there for ages,’ she observed. ‘You haven’t got cramp or anything, have you?’ she asked.
‘No, nothing like that. I’m fine, Alice.’
‘You sure?’ she persisted.
‘Go away!’ he said. ‘Leave me alone!’
‘Well,’ Alice said, turning away, ‘sorry for being alive.’ And she swam off.
Robert left the pool first. He climbed out near James, saying, ‘Thirty lengths,’ in his gritty voice. Simon was down at the deep end, chatting with one or two of the bomb-jumping boys, and they all got out together and walked off towards the changing-rooms.
The girls soon followed.