Losing It

by Ross Gilfillan

  ‘Brian?’ someone interrupts. ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘We were just saying that young people seem to lack a purpose these days,’ Father Patrick tells me.

  ‘They need a taste of what we got when we were naughty,’ Minnie says.

  ‘We were spanked,’ Iris Alsop says. ‘Soundly.’

  ‘My father used to take his belt to me,’ Minnie says.

  ‘And teachers weren’t afraid to use the cane.’

  ‘Six of the best,’ Father Patrick says. ‘Never hurt anyone.’

  ‘What do you think, Brian?’ Mum says.

  It’s time for my expert witness look. If I wore glasses, now is the time I would take them off and polish them. ‘I think we have to be aware of the widely varying socio-economic backgrounds these young people spring from,’ I say. ‘And of how certain environments will inevitably produce an underclass who feel very much alienated from mainstream society and who can make their plight known to the rest of us only by resorting to what we mistakenly interpret as meaningless acts of violence and destruction.’

  Well, this is the sort of thing I would have said if they’d given me a little more time to prepare.

  As it is, I have to make do with, ‘I dunno, it’s all so random.’

  This earns me a round of uncertain looks and maybe the flicker of a smile from Mum, who goes off to the kitchen, saying something about a Viennetta in the freezer. Thinking I’ve offered a solid contribution here, I try to rise, but Aggie sinks her bony fingers into my thigh and says, ‘You stay where you are, young man.’ And so I sit there, bored out of my tree as they rattle on about young people today, how it was in their day, what cats won’t eat and whatever’s become of someone called Paul Daniels. Fuck all about the church roof, you notice. And my mind begins to wander, as it will always do under such circumstances.

  Once my neighbour’s claws have released my thigh in favour of another cup of tea, I’m looking around the table at these envoys from another time and I’m trying to imagine what each of them might have been like at my age. Hard to unwrinkle that skin, re-colour the hair, add a few more marbles in Doris’s case and a couple of inches in stature in Minnie’s, and reinvent them as real people who must once have been objects of desire and about whom the blokes of their generation must actually have fantasised. It is an appalling thought, but no matter, I’ve had worse. I wonder which of them would have been the fit one? If I had to say, and I’m bored enough to accept my own challenge, I’d say it was Iris. I bet she was a fox back in the day, in her nylons and suspenders, the naughty little minx.

  And what about Aggie? I steal a glance at Aggie’s craggy profile. She does have a little sparkle left in her eye – actually, now I look closely, it’s only the left one, which looks like it’s glass anyway – but her legs aren’t too bad, from a non-medical perspective, anyway, and of course she wouldn’t always have had the zimmer. Doris is three parts bonkers and her cheeks look like they’ve been rouged by a drunken mortician but even she must once have had something to trouble the trousers of whoever used to slip her the sausage. Thinking of that, I have a funny, familiar feeling which seems somehow wrong and which I can’t quite identify.

  I dismiss the thought that there might be trouble in my own trousers – impossible under the circs – and try to pay attention to the conversation, which now seems to be cribbed entirely from naughty postcards. I’ve not had any for years. My Dick was big. You need something wet and warm inside you. My pussy hates getting wet. And in my mind, I’m putting each of these volatile phrases into the scarlet-lipsticked mouths of the past lives I’ve created for each of the girls at the table: Aggie the slim, haughty babe who fucked more Spitfire pilots than the Luftwaffe; Doris the busty blonde with the big arse who gave knee tremblers in the black-out; Iris the voluptuous brunette who went like a train after a couple of port and lemons; and Minnie, the hot little redhead who was always being slipped a little extra meat by the butcher. I stop suddenly, a cold, clammy horror creeping through me: I’m not mistaken, there is something going on in my pants. Against every natural law, I am getting a hard-on, and a big one at that. This is so wrong. I try desperately to divert my train of thought into the sidings. ‘I see they are getting on with the new church roof,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ says Iris. ‘But it’s costing a huge packet.’

  It hears huge packet and immediately puts on another couple of inches. I look down and I can see the bulge in my jeans growing and twitching violently. If you’ve ever seen a snake struggling in a muslin bag, you’ll have an idea of what I’m dealing with here. I sit at the table trying to summon as many cock-shrivelling thoughts as I can but not even the image of a naked Margaret Thatcher pole dancing or Mum and Dad shagging in my bed has the slightest effect. The monster keeps on growing. It’s bigger than it was this morning, it’s bigger than it’s been all day. When I woke and discovered my new, improved length, I thought that was it: I’d no idea it was just my starter for ten. And now it’s not only bigger and thicker, it’s fully erect and about as flexible as an iron bollard. Unless I ease down my zipper, it’s going to burst out of my jeans like the Incredible Hulk from his shirt.

  I decide to get up and clear out the room as fast as I can. As I stand, I try to cover my embarrassment with my hands, but they just aren’t big enough for the job and now it looks like I’m trying to hold it. And anyway, the minute I rise, they’ve all seen it. Minnie’s glasses fall off her nose but she rams them back in an instant while Doris licks her lips like a famished wolverine and I can feel Aggie’s claw again, though this time it’s not on my thigh. ‘Oh, my dear God,’ Father Patrick says, as Iris mounts her zimmer and starts to shuffle around the table towards me. There’s nothing for me to do now but to run for the door and the safety of the hall. They’re like Daleks – they can’t follow me up stairs. I prise Aggie’s claws from my voluminous bulge and push past Minnie and Doris and make for open floor. But now it’s like the room has suddenly expanded and the door is hundreds of metres away and behind me are the zimmer frames, rattling like Triffids on the attack and a glance over my shoulder confirms that the women are closing in fast. It looks like a scene they cut from Day of the Dead because it was way too scary and now the cry goes up, ‘Get him, girls!’

  I don’t stand a chance. I hadn’t noticed my bed had been brought downstairs but there it is, in the middle of the room and Aggie is throwing me down upon it, a slice of Battenberg doing for her what a can of spinach does for Popeye. Like sex-starved succubi, they rip off my clothes until I lie there naked and vulnerable, with that awful thing sticking straight up between my legs like a fleshy belisha beacon, flashing pink and purple as she works the foreskin up and down. Then I hear ominous splashes, the sounds of a succession of objects being dropped into water. Straining to look up, I see a row of wine glasses sitting on the sideboard, each containing a set of false teeth. Father Patrick is removing his own now, as Minnie, Doris, Aggie and Iris, dressed only in bright red bloomers, their withered tits pointing south, stand at each corner of the bed, grasping an arm or a leg so tightly that it hurts. Father Patrick is taking off his shabby jacket and undoing his dog collar. Doris, dribbling from a corner of her puckered mouth, makes a sudden grab for my cock but Father Patrick shoves her back, much too roughly. ‘Not so fast, lady,’ he growls. ‘Wait your fucking turn.’

  He turns to give me a sickly smile. Then he looks up and down my helpless, prostrate body and his eyes, fixing upon my cock, light up, they really do: bright pink and blood red. For what I am about to receive, he says, as he cranes over my helpless body, his cracked, thin lips opening wider, and then wider still…

  I open my eyes suddenly to find that Mum has hold of one of my arms and Dad has the other. ‘He’s awake!’ Mum says, as she and Dad let go of my limbs, which she says were flailing about all over the place. My eyes are sticky, I feel like I’m floating on a leaky waterbed and my mouth tastes like I’ve been chewing on sandpaper.

  ‘Looked like you were f-f-fi
ghting with a monster, old son,’ Dad says, as he pours something cold into a glass.

  I take a sip of chilled lemonade while Mum shakes a thermometer before popping it under my tongue.

  ‘A monster!’ Dad says again and reflexively I jerk up my knees, hoping to disguise that monstrous erection.

  Oddly, there’s no sign on their faces that they’ve just discovered that their son has suddenly grown the biggest, thickest and most ungovernable penis known to man. With my knees up, Mum can’t see the movement of my hand which is making exploratory moves beneath the sheets. I’m expecting to find it coiled up on its two big pink cushions, sleeping like a well-fed anaconda, but my fingers find no sign of it at first. I wonder if it has taken itself off hunting somewhere. Then I do find it, well, not it as such, but the cock I had known and worried about for so long, the cock I had thought was so abnormal but now feels reassuringly normal, if still very much on the small side. Dad wipes my forehead with a cold, wet flannel. ‘We were worried about you, old son,’ he says. ‘That was a high old f-f-fever you were running.’

  A fever?

  ‘But he’s all right now,’ Mum says after she’s read the thermometer. ‘The doctor says you can get up in a day or two, but St Saviour’s won’t want you back just yet. Not if you’ve just had a nasty strain of the flu.’

  Flu?

  Thank God.

  I have a long cold drink and I go straight back to sleep and this time, there are no more dreams.

  CHAPTER 9

  Stuck in the Middle With You

  ‘It’s fucked.’

  Some sheep have ambled across the meadow to see us.

  ‘How do you know it’s fucked?’

  They huddle in the corner of the dry stone wall and watch us.

  ‘I can see it’s fucked.’

  On the ridge high above, ramblers in bright jackets are looking at us through binoculars.

  ‘How’s it fucked?’

  The sheep start bleating, possibly offering advice.

  ‘What sort of fucked is it this time?’

  ‘Is it carburettor fucked?’

  A distant rambler wearing red is pointing, just possibly at a loose spark plug lead.

  ‘Or alternator fucked?’

  More bleating, which may translate as fuel line fucked?

  ‘Or out of petrol fucked?’

  Faruk stares at lumps of metal, plastic bottles of liquid, some wires, tubes and what is clearly the battery. ‘I can’t say, exactly,’ he says. ‘Not at this stage.’

  ‘Then how do you know it’s fucked?’

  Faruk ducks out from under the bonnet and slams it shut. Peevishly, I think.

  ‘It won’t go,’ he says.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Diesel says.

  Seventeen years of living in a flat above a garage owned by his family and now operated by his brother have yet to equip Faruk with a mechanical mind. He’s tried to mend the car before, when it broke down on the Chatsworth estate, where its two-tone grungy paint job and flying fin made an exciting contrast for anyone photographing the big house behind it. He couldn’t do anything with it then, though he did manage to dismantle a few parts. Now, like last time, we’ll be at the mercy of the AA, who can take anything up to five hours to arrive, depending on how far we got before we broke down and what more-urgent jobs he’s got on that day. The AA is Abdullah Aslan, Faruk’s brother. The brother who was really good about helping us out with the car, completing Diesel’s bonkers custom job and getting it on the road but who, since we’ve been driving it and breaking it, is revealing a much darker side to his character.

  ‘I can’t call the AA,’ Faruk says. ‘Not again. He’ll fucking kill me.’

  ‘You have to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is your duty.’

  And so we wait, while Faruk decides whether he will risk the wrath of Abdullah.

  We are not alone. For a narrow lane in the wilds of Derbyshire, a surprising number of cars have passed by, many slowing down to show a friendly interest in what we are doing. It’s almost worth pausing to enjoy Faruk cursing and hitting his head on the bonnet, while the rest of us mill around looking not quite as clued up as the sheep. It’s quite possible that some drivers have been sufficiently interested to raise the subject of our predicament with other travellers, at a petrol station a few miles down the road, and these curious motorists have driven up here to take a look for themselves.

  Whatever the reason, cars have been passing us this last hour or more and though no one has actually offered to help, a great many drivers have at least wound down their window to ask what was the trouble. I suppose we might have interested them more if any of us had half a clue as to why the car had just stopped. And now, we need help. Black clouds are piling up across the distant valley tops, it only stopped raining half an hour ago and it looks like we’re in for more. It’s late afternoon now, so if Faruk doesn’t call the AA soon, we may, like the car, be a little bit fucked.

  At least I know where we are. I used to ride my BMX at astonishing speed down these steep hills until it clicked that one fast ride downwards equalled one long and tiring push back to the top. That was when I was staying with GD and Nana, at Narnia, which isn’t that far from where we’re stranded now. As it was supposed to be a day out in aid of my recuperation from the flu, I got to choose our direction and we’re here because this place for me, is one with the best memories. Or it had been before this happened.

  But I had a feeling the day might go something like this when I got up and saw it was pissing down with rain. Raining hard enough to make staying indoors and watching Jeremy Kyle or even Bargain Search an attractive proposition. So how did I end up on a bleak hillside half-expecting to spend a cramped, cold night in the Green Dragon? Mainly, that was down to Clive. ‘What ole BJ needs is a breath of country air,’ he’d said to Diesel, as we finished a plastic bottle of strong cider in my room last evening. Clive more than anyone knows how closeted I’ve been this last week (because he’s my neighbour, not because he’s closeted himself).

  We’d take a trip into the country, never mind Faruk’s brother saying there were one or two minor adjustments to be made before we could take the car out. Everyone wanted a day in the country. Faruk and Clive had been talking about going somewhere new in the Green Dragon ever since it had became uncomfortably recognisable in town, following an embarrassing incident when the car broke down by some trendy cafe bars, where the city’s poseurs were sitting outside, preparing themselves for a night’s clubbing.

  I had been lucky enough to be recovering from the flu just then, but from what I hear, there had been some posing in the Green Dragon too. Diesel, Faruk and Clive – shades on, windows down, music pumping – had been cruising around, trying hard to impress the girls at some kerb-side tables, when the Dragon chose to have its latest breakdown. It hadn’t seemed too serious at first – all that was lost was a little cool as Diesel and Clive pushed it along the street before Faruk let out the clutch. The real injury came when a year 9 chode on a BMX decided it would be extremely funny to tip his McDonald’s super-sized cola through Faruk’s open window, managing to soak Faruk and Diesel and even to wet Clive in the back too, before he rode off, laughing like an evil puppet on a seaside pier.

  Watched closely by the crowd at the kerb-side tables, who all stood up at once to get a better view, the car lurched forward as Faruk attempted to give chase, but something had happened to the gearbox and he was unable to get the stick out of first. So now they chased the kid on the bike at no more than five miles an hour, with the kid having to hang back and pedal really slowly, still cackling manically while he stuck up his middle finger and shouted obscenities. Diesel reckons it took about half an hour for the car to kangaroo to the end of the street, where the kid got bored and pedalled off and where the three Horsemen could no longer hear the people standing outside the cafe laughing themselves stupid and applauding wildly.

  Diesel had called back, ‘Thank you, we’re here all week.�
� But it was no good, about a year’s worth of street cred had been squandered that night. So it was more than a selfless concern for my respiratory system which had prompted the idea of a jaunt up country. It wasn’t safe for that stupid car to be seen within three miles of the city centre, very probably a lot further.

  However, Clive had been dead right, I needed to get out. I needed to escape from the foetid atmosphere of my bedroom, where the air was even more noxious than usual. It has sometimes crossed my mind to keep a caged canary, for the same reason miners did, down the pits. You’d know that the gaseous mix of stale breath, seminal fluid and curried farts had reached dangerous levels when the canary fell off its perch, or turned green. I had spent way too much time in such conditions and I was ready for a lungful of God’s clean air. I felt like I had been banged up in that room for five years, not five days.

  But even five days is a fuck of a long time to be stuck in one place, and having kindly taken an interest in me so far, you’re probably wondering whether I spent this time profitably, or just wanking? Good question. Well, I’d spent the first post-fever days in bed, not feeling much, except for myself, of course. Then I had started reading some books that Nana had left for me before she and GD returned to Narnia, her treatment over for the moment at least.

  It was worth having some down time from the Xbox to know that I was making progress with my grand design to impress Rosalind Chandler, if that was still an attainable objective, of course. I read more than I have ever read before, which wasn’t hard and I read books which I would never have thought of reading myself, which I imagined would be hard, but wasn’t. I’m not saying I actually finished them, but I read enough to keep up my end if I ever had to talk about them. That said, I still found time to become a highly competent would-be contestant of Countdown, could estimate within £5,000 what a two bedroom maisonette in South Norwood would fetch at auction three years ago and became word pretty much perfect in Season Eight of The Simpsons.