“You poor, poor darling!” she said, wrapping her arms around me and squeezing me tight. She gently stroked my bandaged head. “It looks dreadfully painful. Does it hurt, darling? I feel, so - so responsible!”
She was on her haunches, staring into my eyes. “It is Philip, isn’t it?”
I nodded lamely.
“I thought as much,” she said, smiling sweetly. “I didn’t expect too many of the family to be wearing bandages on the head. How many stitches was it? One? Two?”
“Three,” I said, captivated.
“Three! Oh my poor, poor darling!” she cried, and hugged me all over again, crushing me against her yielding bosom; a beautifully rounded and creamy-coloured bosom barely concealed by her low-cut top.
I didn’t mind. I’d fallen instantly in love with her. She was so pretty, with long black lashes and bouncing curly hair. Her lips were painted cherry-red, her eyes topped with blue eyeshadow, her cheeks bloomed by blusher; and her perfume spread from her in invisible tendrils, attaching itself to me and intoxicating me. And I had never seen such a wonderful pair of legs sprouting from such a short skirt before. Nobody in the town of Overthorpe wore such things. Headscarves and mules, yes, but never short skirts. Yes, I’d fallen madly in love with her. No matter what people would say about her in the future – and it would be plenty – from that moment on she held me under a special kind of potent spell that would never release me from its bondage.
She thrust a book into my hands. “Take this,” she insisted.
I looked down. It was a 1963 Dandy annual, scuffed at the edges, well thumbed. Korky the Cat was wearing a sailor suit and looking through a porthole. I never much cared for Korky the Cat or The Dandy, but I didn’t let her see that.
“To say sorry,” she explained. “It was Max’s favourite annual, but now it’s yours. He shouldn’t have done such a nasty thing.”
Just then my mother made her appearance. She stood there with a stone-cold expression, looking the visitor up and down with a clinical eye. The young woman rose and smiled disarmingly at mother; only it failed to disarm her. She remained armed to the teeth, those razor eyes resting on the skirt. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“My name’s Connie. Connie Stone. I’m Max’s mother.”
“Oh you are, are you?” my mother said, folding her arms defensively. I knew something was brewing as soon as she adopted that formidable stance. I’d seen it so many times before. “He could have been killed, you know that? Killed, I tell you. That bloody son of yours is a menace. Three stitches in his head the lad’s got. Three stitches! If your boy had been here I’d have taken a stick to him myself, the bloody stupid thing!”
Connie bowed her beautiful head in shame. Her face had something of the Madonna about it, like I’d seen in a book once, but without the halo. “Oh, Mrs Calder, how right you are. He’s a menace at times.”
“He deserves a beating.”
“He’s had one,” she returned. “I’m ever so sorry. And us being new to Overthorpe as well. Not a good way to start, is it?”
“Too right,” my mother said, but already her harshness was melting away. Her arms had dropped to her side and her voice had softened.
Connie smoothed down my matted hair and shook her head. “At least this lovely face hasn’t been damaged,” she cooed, her fingers stroking my cheek and then cupping my chin. She squeezed it gently and I sighed, staring into those large liquid eyes. “I gave him this, Mrs Calder,” she said, indicating the Dandy annual. “I know it isn’t much, but I don’t have a lot and this is the only way I could say sorry. It was Max’s, you see.”
“That’s OK, Mrs Stone…”
“Please call me by my first name. You can call me Connie. You’d be the first friend I made around here to call me Connie. That would be so nice.”
“Thank you - Connie,” my mother said uncertainly.
“Barely a week here and already causing trouble. I don’t know, the lad’s a bad ‘un, that’s for sure. But he’s also got a heart of gold.” Connie stood straight-backed and faced mother. “He won’t ever do it again, Mrs Calder. Not a cat in hell’s chance. The little bleeder’s learnt his lesson, that’s for sure. Like I said to him, his father was a bastard, but that’s no reason for him to be a bastard too.”
I saw mother glance out of the corner of her eye at me when Connie swore. ‘Bloody’ was permissible when you got really vexed; ‘little bleeder’ was an indication of lower class, and therefore never uttered; and ‘bastard’ – well, I was taken aback and amused all at once. ‘Pit language’ was for men. This woman had been cracked from a different mould. Mother tried to keep her shocked expression under control.
Connie bent to her haunches again. She kissed me on the forehead. I could smell the lipstick and feel its stickiness where it left its mark. “You poor, poor darling!” she said again with what appeared genuine probity.
“Well, thank you, Connie, for coming round to apologise. Let’s see that it doesn’t happen again, eh?”
“Mark my words, Mrs Calder, I’ll skin him alive, God help me, if he as much as lays a finger on this sweet little angel of yours.”
I loved her more by the minute!
“Thank you for the present,” I said, which I clutched solidly to my chest.
“Don’t you mention it, darling!” Connie squealed with pleasure. She rose to leave, but as she did she frowned and then faced mother. “Before I go, I couldn’t borrow a cup of washing powder, could I? Only I can’t get to the shops for ages yet, me being so busy and all, and the shops being so far away here. Back home they were close at hand, you see. I’ll let you have the cup and some powder back as soon as I get straight.”
As if somehow responsible for the awkward positioning of the shops, and completely forgetting this was the mother of the lad who’d almost had my brains on the floor, my mother scuttled away to find a suitable cup to fill with powder. But that was to be Connie all over. Needless to say we never saw the powder or cup ever again.
* * * *
That wasn’t the end of it. Mother being mother, she couldn’t bear the thought of me holding onto another person’s belongings, no matter how much of a bleedin’ little bastard he’d been. After guilt had eaten away at her for a day or so she took the Dandy annual from my shelf and handed it to me at arm’s length, insisting I take it straight back; and somehow implying in her manner, and tenor of voice, that the culpability for making her feel thus lay entirely with me.
I knew the street where Max lived – a long row of crowded-together terraced housing not far from where I lived – but I didn’t know the house number. I surmised that if I started at one end of the street and knocked on each door in succession, I would eventually reach my destination. So it was I found myself knocking on the door of the Stone house, having arrived at the correct one by knocking incorrectly at six others before it, the lady in the last house kindly directing me to number 62.
“The one with the badly painted red door and badly painted hussy,” she said sniffily.
I had no idea what a hussy was, but to me the door didn’t look too badly painted so I guessed the hussy couldn’t be all that bad either.
Connie answered my knocking. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Philip!” she cried. “And with no bandages either! I’m so glad to see you’re feeling better.”
The bandage was stuffed in my pocket. Mother had insisted I wear it, but no sooner had I left the house than it was consigned to my trousers; I had my pride, after all, and I had the idea that if I ran fast the germs wouldn’t be able to keep up with me and settle on my stitches.
“Mother says I have to return this,” I said, holding aloft The Dandy. I must admit, I didn’t want to send it back; I’d grown attached to it, as I did to any book. But it was the law, and the law had to be upheld.
“That’s nice of her,” smiled Connie, “but it is yours now. Still, if that’s the way she wants it then who am I to argue with your mother? Tell you what, Max is out back playing in
the garden. Why don’t you take it through to him? He’ll be pleased with the company.”
I hovered on the doorstep uncertainly as Connie stepped back to let me through. I didn’t quite know whether his company would please me. “I think…I have to…” I fumbled for words.
“I’ll bring you through a glass of dandelion and burdock pop and a bag of crisps. Do you like cheese and onion?”
I passed by her without another second’s hesitation, nodding in the affirmative. Pop and crisps were rare treats for me.
She pointed through the open back door. “There he is, on the grass.”
My own back garden was a small concrete yard with an outside toilet at the far end, a dustbin, and an old wheelbarrow cobbled together out of lengths of wood and two pram wheels. Max’s garden was a real garden, with grass, and lots of it, stretching the full length of an extensive yard. It was flanked on either side by flowers, the names of which I never knew but the colours remain with me to this day. That and the sweet smell. Against a wall at the far end was a ramshackle old wooden shed, and beside this a greenhouse. A real greenhouse! With glass!
Max looked like a bundle of rags in the centre of the neat lawn. He was stretched out on his stomach, his head facing away from me, his legs stretched out, every now and again his foot beating out a rhythm. I approached cautiously, the Dandy across my chest as a shield. I paused a yard or so away from him. He turned his head to stare up at me, his eyes fixing on mine, unemotional and calculating. They shifted to The Dandy.
“What do you want?” he said sullenly, turning away.
“Mother says you’re to have this back.”
“Don’t want it.”
“I can’t keep it.”
“I don’t want it. You’ve probably contaminated it.”
“That’s stupid,” I said.
He rose, stepped towards me (and I admit I flinched), yanked the book off me, opened it up so that it had the appearance of a dead bird in his hands, and tore it straight down the spine. Pages fluttered to the grass. He strolled to the dustbin, removed the lid, dropped the book in and tossed the lid back on with a strident clatter of metal against metal. I gasped. “You can’t do that! It’s a book!” I said, horrified, my heart going out to the pages left scattered on the ground, as if this was the book’s blood he’d so callously spilled.
“You don’t want it, I don’t want it, so who cares?
Speechless, I turned to leave. Connie met me at the door, putting a cup of fizzy drink in my hand and filling the other with a bag of crisps. She delivered the same to Max. “You boys enjoy yourselves!” she called as she ducked back inside the house.
We stared at each other, Max sipping his drink, me sipping mine. I sat on the grass, placing my cup on the ground and opening my bag of crisps. Max did the same, and we sat cross-legged, silently mirroring each other’s actions, crunching and slurping and watching. I read in his eyes, even then, a depth that was to prove unfathomable. I didn’t like him; and yet I was drawn irresistibly to him all the same. He possessed an inexplicable allure. It never left him. When he spoke, people listened; when he moved, people watched; when he laughed, others laughed with him. All the time I was to know him he had that same effect on most of the people who met him. Especially women. Most definitely women. It was that same allure that drew me to him all these years later, following decades of absence, when I thought he’d been sponged by time from my life. I am almost ashamed to admit that he had only to invite, and I was as eager to run to him as if we had been parted for only a few days. It was that accursed fascination that tipped me into Hell.
But I’m afraid I digress again.
“Do you like James Bond?” I remember Max remarking enthusiastically through a mouthful of crisps. He tossed the empty bag into the air and we watched as it drifted circuitously on a frail breeze across the garden.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied hesitantly.
He made a dash for the house and returned minutes later with a toy car painted in metallic bronze.
“It’s his Aston Martin!” I exclaimed.
Max beamed as he went through the various actions of the Corgi toy: the machineguns at the front, the ejector seat, the bullet-proof shield that came up at the back. We sat for quite some time discussing the various merits of this gadget and that, and he even allowed me to handle it, albeit briefly.
“He’s got a license to kill,” Max said, staring into the plastic windshield at the car’s red interior.
“Everyone knows that!” I returned.
“I’m going to have one, some day.”
“What? A license to kill?” I scoffed. “Such things aren’t real.”
“They are. And one day I’m gonna get one. If they won’t give me one, then I’m going to get very rich and buy one. You can buy anything with money – mum says so.”
“But what do you want one of them for?”
He sneered. “That’s obvious! I’ll be able to kill someone and they won’t be able to do anything about it. I’ll take my gun, I’ll aim it, and then blam!” He imitated the shooting of a pistol; it was aimed at a point between my eyes. “And when they come up to me and say, ‘What you done that for?’ I reach into my pocket and take out my license. All I have to do is show it to them and it’s all sorted. That’s what James Bond must do. He shoots people all the time.”
“But who would you kill?” I asked, horrified and intrigued by his coldness.
“I’m making a list.” Then he laughed out loud and began to sing. “I’m making a list, checking it twice, cos I’m gonna find out who’s been naughty or nice; Maxwell Stone is coming to town!”
He fell back on the grass, chuckling and kicking his legs, while I looked on with a forced smile on my lips. “Maxwell?” I questioned. “Is that your real name?”
He rose to a sitting position, his face immediately colouring red, his eyes narrowing, nose curling. The change had been almost instantaneous and I was taken aback. “Never call me that!” he screeched, his fist waving in front of my face. “Only mum calls me that!”
I backed away, and his severe expression was wiped away in an instant. He laughed again. “I’m gonna have an island as well.”
“Oh yeah?” I remarked warily.
“In Scotland. There are loads of islands for sale. I’ve seen them, just sitting around doing nothing, with nothing on them except sheep and birds. I’m going to have one of my very own. With a castle on it. Mum says we had ancestors who were royalty once. They lived in Scotland in castles and had battles and stuff, till the bastard English came and took it all away from us. So I’m going to buy a castle, a big one on an island.”
I could see by his expression that he was deadly serious, so I tactfully refrained from challenging him, except to say, “Where are you going to get the money from? You need tons of it to buy an island.”
He waved my question away. “Ah, that’s easy if you know how. There’s more than enough money out there. All you’ve got to do is take a little from everyone. I worked out that if everyone in the world gave me one shilling I’d be a zillionaire. I could buy Scotland with that sort of money.”
I nodded, Max’s fervour rendering the idea ludicrously feasible. “What’s wrong?” I then asked, aware that he was staring at my head.
“Let’s have a look at your stitches.”
I reluctantly bent forward, feeling his breath on my head. “I look like Frankenstein,” I said with a chuckle.
“Frankenstein’s monster,” he corrected.
“That’s what I said.”
“Frankenstein was the scientist,” Max murmured, and I moved quickly away when I felt his fingers probing near my cut. “The monster didn’t have a name. I read the book.” He shrugged. “I tried to read it. I read all sorts of stuff.”
“Is it scary, like Boris Karloff?” I quizzed.
“People scare me more than any monsters,” he returned, poking his finger into the open door of the Aston Martin.
I considered the idea ri
diculous, but didn’t give it another thought. We abandoned the conversation, as children are apt to do, in favour of the more important topic of his other toys. He brought them down one by one, onto the grass, and I realized where all the toys I’d ever asked Father Christmas for, on my countless letters to him, had been mistakenly delivered: Action Man, Meccano, train set – they were all here, misdirected to this other, more fortunate boy.
It was during that late summer afternoon as the long holidays drew to an end, living my idea of Heaven, that my relationship with Max was cemented, permanently and irrevocably. As the days passed we discovered we actually grew fond of each other, though for what reasons I cannot ever be sure. We were in essence poles apart and yet curiously like two different sides to the same coin. It was the unlikeliest of friendships – unstable, often volatile. But an imperceptible bond was there, its evidence in neither the way we talked to each other - which was to become increasingly scathing - or in the way we behaved towards each other physically – we might easily have been perceived to be fervent enemies by an outsider. We were dissimilar in intellect, the propensity to academia falling to me. I was passive; Max aggressive. I hated sport; Max revelled in competition. I was physically thin and the weaker of the two; Max was undeniably well-built and developed muscles and the appearance of manhood early. Increasingly I became aware that my fascination with the enigma that was Maxwell Stone was not one-way traffic; for some incomprehensible reason, he was drawn to me and to what I was, and to all I represented.
I have since wondered what it was that helped forge this unlikely union. It was as if some cosmic joke was being played out, and that I in particular was a puppet in a malicious comedy, like this entire tragedy was meant to be, inescapable, two disparate wanderers on a single track, leading to…
I feel I cannot write more tonight. Her face has been brought before me through my unfortunate choice of words. I will not sleep again if I cannot get those eyes out of my mind.
Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller Page 3