Out of Bounds

by Mike Seabrook

  There was a sound of footsteps approaching the door. Feeling the delicate outer edges of his earlobes burning red-hot, Stephen fled.

  * * *

  The short drive to Stephen’s home was a silent affair. When he pulled up outside the house Graham looked sidelong at Stephen for some moments in the gathering gloom, wondering whether to risk hearing something he would rather not hear. He decided to chance it. He switched off the engine and half turned to be able to watch Stephen more comfortably. “Tell me, Stephen”, he said, taking care not to allow the apprehension he was feeling to betray itself in his voice. “Is there…has anyone done anything, or said anything today to…upset you in any way? In particular, have I said something wrong? If I have, I’d like to know.”

  He could see Stephen’s eyes in the darkness as the boy looked steadily at him. There was a long pause, during which Graham suddenly became conscious that he was holding his breath. When Stephen spoke it came as a bigger relief than he had expected. “No!” he said, so emphatically that it sounded like a protest. “No, Graham, you haven’t said anything. You’re the last person who’d upset me.” There was a silence. Then, “I’ve been a bit quiet, haven’t I?”

  “Well, yes, you have, and it seemed to start when we were batting together. I wondered what I must have done. I couldn’t see who else could have caused it…”

  “No, no”, Stephen repeated, and there was something almost desperate in his anxiety to reassure. “Please don’t think you did anything — nothing to…to upset or offend me. No, it was just something I wanted to ask, something I wasn’t sure about. I was thinking about it, that’s all. That’s why I went a bit quiet. Honestly”, he added, after another pause. For a moment he sounded like a little boy.

  “Something you wanted to ask me?” said Graham softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Ask away”, he said. “You know you can come to me with anything that’s worrying you. I hope you know that, anyway.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, sir — I mean, Graham”, the boy said, sounding a little more like his normal confident self once more. Graham noticed the unconscious reversion to their old master-pupil form of address. “Would you mind if I — er — if I left it for a little bit?” Stephen said quietly, after a time.

  “Of course not. You’re not bound to ask me anything. But if there is something and you think I might be able to offer anything sensible, or helpful, well you know you can talk to me any time you like. But you want to leave it for the moment?”

  “Yes, I think so, please, Graham.”

  “Well there’s an end of it, then. You’re playing tomorrow, aren’t you? Want picking up? We’re away tomorrow. Eleven-thirty start. I’ll pick you up here at ten o’clock. Okay?”

  He could just see Stephen’s grateful smile. “Right, Graham. And… thanks. Maybe I’ll be ready to talk about it tomorrow”, he said, opening the car door.

  “Any time.” With the release from the worry that had gripped him since he had surmised what he might have done to upset the boy, Graham felt buoyant again, and answered easily. “If so, fine, if not, well, still fine, by me. See you at ten”, he repeated as Stephen got out and opened the back door to take his kit. “Good night.”

  “Night, Graham”, said Stephen. His head appeared in the open window of the passenger door. “Thanks”, he murmured quickly, and was gone. He left Graham feeling glad that he hadn’t offended the boy, but also more sure than ever that his assessment of the boy as he had explained it to Reginald Westwood had been accurate. He drove home, aching with the first pains of a fast-blossoming love that he was sure would never be requited. That night they both slept badly.

  * * *

  “Who’s got the club comb?” asked Bill in the dressing room the following Saturday. He glanced about hopefully, and Stephen shyly offered his comb.

  “Thanks, Steve. You played well again”, Bill said, busily raking it through his wiry red curls. Stephen had been promoted in the order to no. 5, and scored a bright thirty-nine in even time. “I think we’ll be wanting you regularly for the rest of the season”, Bill added, almost as if it was an afterthought. Stephen flushed with pleasure. “Another thing”, went on his captain. “How’re you placed for the tour?”

  “Tour?” queried Stephen. “I didn’t know about a tour.”

  “Oh, yeah”, said several players at once. “You must come on tour if you can make it”, said Alan, taking it up. “We go to Yorkshire every year.”

  “The nice part”, put in someone else. “North Yorkshire, in the Dales. We stay at a very decent boozer in Malton, where they never close before five in the morning. Cricket’s good as well — course, you’d expect that in Yorkshire. Reckon you can make it?”

  “I… well, I’d love to come if I can”, said Stephen, gazing into space as he thought about the idea.

  “Ever been on a tour before?” asked one of the others.

  “I’ve been on school tours”, he said diffidently. “With the Under Fifteens. Twice. Playing Winchester, Marlborough and Clifton.”

  “Got some high-grade cricket, I should think?” commented Alan, and Stephen nodded. “Not quite the same sort of thing, I’d suspect”, said Bill, with what to Stephen’s eye looked like a meaning glance round the others. “Early to bed with a cold shower and a run in the morning under Graham Curtis’s watchful eye, eh?” He glanced round, and Stephen was sure this time that he saw him glare fleetingly but fiercely at someone behind him.

  “Graham wasn’t there, actually”, he said. A strange, queasy, sickish feeling had lodged suddenly in his stomach, and he had to fight off a moment of panic when he thought he was going to be sick. “The head of games runs the school tours. Anyway, I’d really like to come. When is it?”

  “Twenty-third of July”, said someone. “We leave on the Friday evening — get into the hotel about midnight in time for a drink, play through the week, and come back the following Sunday.”

  “Eight games, back to back”, said Alan happily. “We… oh! So that’s where my towel got to. What do you think you’re doing with it?” he demanded, advancing on Bill with his eyes fixed on the bath towel wrapped like a loincloth round his captain’s lower body. “I’ve hunted everywhere for that. What’s the game?”

  Bill unwound the towel from his hips and threw it over his deputy’s head, grinning without any of the contrition that was clearly expected. Stephen suspended his dressing operations to see what his captain could possibly have wished to wrap a stolen towel round his loins for. Bill saw his expression and laughed, meanwhile capturing Alan’s head in its suffocating coils of towelling and massaging his hair vigorously. Muffled howls issued from within. “I always use a towel to bat in”, he told Stephen. “Far better than a thigh pad — much more cushioning effect.”

  “Helps to soak up the shit when the fast bowlers are on, too”, cried someone from across the room, and there was a general cackle.

  “Gah! Ach! You shitbag, Bill!” cried Alan, finally managing to escape from the voluminous towel. “Do you expect me to use this after it’s been round your dirty arse? I gotta dry my face on this, you bastard!”

  “Well of course, why not?” grinned Bill. “Your face, my arse — cricket’s a team game, as I shouldn’t have to remind you.”

  “Fuck it”, moaned Alan. “I’ll bath when I get home. Deodorant can do the job of soap for now.”

  “No it bloody well can’t”, cried Bill. “It’s June, remember? Bath month. In with him, lads!”

  Stephen looked on, grinning shyly as the team hurled themselves on the vice-captain and manhandled him, yelling and struggling, towards the showers. “Turn it on, Steve”, panted Bill, roaring as one of Alan’s flailing hands caught a generous fistful of his hair and yanked it fiercely. “No, no, the other one!” he yelled, freeing his mop with a wrench. Stephen obediently turned the shower full on cold, and leapt out of the path of a tidal wave that washed over the dressing room floor as the hapless Alan was forcibly bathed.

  “Al a
lways has a bath in June, whether he needs one or not”, explained Bill, sticking the comb in the breast pocket of Stephen’s shirt. “Have to have him nice and clean for the tour, see.” He grinned at Stephen’s uncertain expression, and ruffled his hair briefly. “Don’t get worried, kid. He doesn’t mind, really. Now, then. Tour”, he said, with an abrupt change of tone. “If you’d like to come, there’s plenty of space. It won’t cost you too much, either, in case you were worried about… hey, hey, HEY, careful, you buggers. I felt water on my neck. I’m getting moist.”

  “Well, this is an exciting bath”, came a breathless shout from the scrum in the shower.

  “That’s not in the script”, returned Bill, retreating towards the door. There he turned back to Stephen. “Come on, son, I’ll let you buy me a drink while I give you the rest of the griff.” He propelled Stephen through into the bar, laughing at the boy’s bewildered expression as he looked back at the continuing horseplay in the shower. Half the side now appeared to be taking additional baths, some still in whites, some stark naked and others in various stages in between.

  “As I was saying”, he resumed, refusing to allow Stephen to buy a drink and sticking a pint into his hand instead, “it won’t cost you too much, because we run a subsidy scheme here. Not many clubs do, but we think the youngsters are important, so the club pays for their hotel and coach. All you’ve got to find is your beer money — and you won’t find you buy much of your own beer, come to that. We get a lot of innocent fun out of watching you kids getting mildly pissed, so we pay for a good deal of it. It’s in your school holidays, so provided your folks haven’t got anything fixed up in Bognor Regis for you, you’re laughin sandbags.

  “We play eight fixtures, as I said, and we normally take a party of about twenty-five. That means everybody’s guaranteed at least three games — probably more if you want ’em, because a lot of ’em like to have a day or so off to do other things. You might like to pop into York — that’s about twenty-five miles, and there’s the Jorvik Centre — sorta smellerama museum affair; and there’s a steam engine museum. Then there’s Scarborough — sort of up-market Blackpool, or Torremolinos but cold, and there’s some lovely countryside round there too.” He stopped his catalogue and drank half his pint in a draught. “Fancy it?” he ended, wiping his moustache.

  Stephen fancied it immensely, and said as much. “How much d’you think I ought to bring?” he asked.

  “Oh, I dunno”, said Bill. “Long time since I was your age. Can’t really remember how much I used to drink in those days. But certainly fifty quid oughta be far more than enough.”

  “Oh”, said Stephen, his face brightening. “Good. I’ve got more than that. I was thinking it’d be…well, more than I’ve got, anyway. Yes, I’ll come”, he concluded. He grinned as he thought of the horror his parents would presumably feel at the idea of his spending ten days at a pub with a cricket team of whom they disapproved in principle already.

  “Good”, said Bill, pleased. “I’ll bung you down. One other thing: most of us share rooms at the hotel. A few have rooms of their own — Alan, because he’s a world class snorer, and I do, because I’m captain — though the others’ll tell you a lot a lies about me farting when I drink beer. Start thinking about who you’d like to share with. List’s on the notice board.” And he started towards it himself, taking a ballpoint from his pocket.

  “Will Graham be coming?” asked Stephen, trotting after him to investigate the notice board. “I imagine I’d share with him, if he comes on tour.”

  Bill glanced down over his shoulder at him, with, he thought, a slightly quizzical expression. “Oh, yes, Graham never misses the tour”, he said, nodding. “Hasn’t got anyone nagging him not to go, for a start, bein a bachelor. And he loves his cricket, too. He’ll be glad to have you.” He hesitated, and Stephen thought he was going to say something more; but in the end he only looked at Stephen for a second more, with a curious expression, then shut his mouth without saying any more, and turned to add Stephen’s name to the list on the board, and then to another copy of it in his own wallet. “Come on, son”, he said, slipping pen and wallet back into his pocket. “I’ll get you a pint.” Ignoring Stephen’s protests that he had bought him one already, he barged up to the bar and began buying an enormous and complicated round of drinks for himself and Stephen, the rest of the team and the opposition, who were now coming into the bar in ones and twos from the dressing rooms, rubbing their hands in anticipation of the first drink of the evening.

  Stephen sat sipping his pint and exchanging the occasional word here and there with other players and hoping Graham would get back soon. Graham had scored a rapid twenty at his customary no. 3 before holing out at long-off trying to hit a six, and had changed and left immediately to attend a meeting at the school. Stephen had got to know a good many people at the club in his few weeks there, but Graham was still his staple conversation partner; and he realized how much so as he sat there, glancing at the door every time it opened. After a while he took his pint across to join a group conducting the usual annotated rerun of the game; and at half-past ten he collected his bag from the dressing room and, feeling a little forsaken, said his farewells and went out under the last lemon-and-indigo remnants of the sunset, and set off on the short walk home. He walked more or less on automatic pilot, enjoying a series of pleasant mental pictures of what a real cricket tour might be like. He was hardly aware of feeling vaguely that his evening had been somehow incomplete.

  * * *

  In different ways they both led double lives over the few weeks that remained of the school term. It was less of a strain for Stephen, and he was much the less unhappy of the two. Having grown up a largely solitary only child, he had found joining the cricket club and suddenly throwing off the shackles of his increasingly uneasy relationship with his parents enormously liberating experiences. He had become very close to Graham in the process, and he was aware that they were forming a friendship of a kind that he had never previously known. But he was also making other friends among the cricketers, each of them with something to teach or show him about an outside life that he had previously only dimly suspected.

  Thus Stephen found it far less irksome than Graham to have to go through the formality of conventional forms of address in classes, and correspondingly easier to slip into the intimacy of friendship when they were at leisure. He was becoming strongly aware that there was a further dimension of their relationship that lay as yet unexplored, and that it would have to be confronted sometime soon; but he hadn’t yet identified it clearly, so he wasn’t vulnerable to it. He knew he was very fond of Graham, and becoming fonder as the days passed. But he had in full measure a boy’s ability to take things as they came on a day-to-day basis, to accept things without undue questioning, which had been wholly lost in the man.

  Graham, by contrast, had had no difficulty in identifying the increasingly powerful feeling for the boy that moved him. His problem was to keep his feelings within bounds. He knew only too clearly that he had a passionate nature, and that if his feelings for the boy once broke free from his iron self-control they were more than likely to become an obsession, with disastrous results in prospect. The form his control took was to make him more severe with Stephen, rather than less, in classes; then, as soon as they were released and able to stroll round the cricket field, or left free to enjoy their weekends together, he would offer unnecessary explanations for his new, brittle manner in class. When they were together thus he yearned to touch him, and faced every day the sickening necessity to keep his hands to himself, his words of passion unspoken and his affection masked beneath a cloak of cricket-club joviality. Often as they strolled together the conversation would turn to more serious matters, and then, just occasionally, he rested his hand lightly on Stephen’s arm. Stephen smiled, accepting the small gesture as unremarkable, and apparently thought nothing of it, while Graham boiled and churned with an agonizing cocktail of physical lust and spiritual yearning for possession.r />
  Meanwhile Stephen too had a problem. Because it was wholly unfamiliar to him, he had nothing to compare it with, and this lightened the burden; and because the whole habit of his family life up to then had been to suppress emotion, he had grown up without the expectation of being able to confide in anyone when he was troubled. This had left him with self-control as the pattern of normality, and he bore it lightly. Somewhere beneath the surface he knew that he would confide in Graham soon, but he was content — as Graham would not have been — to let the moment pick itself. Besides, although he was only a boy, and although his growing up had been a smothered affair, thanks to his parents’ inhibited vision of life, there was nothing wrong with his eyes or ears, or with his wits; he had a fair idea how things were between them, and he was beginning to realize that the relationship was in his, rather than Graham’s command. So Graham lay in bed at nights and tormented himself with speculations about what the boy had come to the brink of confiding, while Stephen himself thought about it little.

  Not surprisingly, it was a relief to both of them when term ended. They met every Saturday and Sunday, and on Tuesday and Thursday evenings for nets. In addition Graham was much in demand as a guest player for other clubs in the area, and played a fair amount of midweek cricket. Whenever possible he got Stephen a place in one of the teams, and occasionally he rang the boy and asked him along to score, or simply to watch. He had to be careful in this, to avoid arousing Stephen’s parents suspicions; but they managed to see a lot of each other over the first month of the holidays.