(4) Pulling Faces - How to start an end

'Do you ever swear, Gavin?'

 

'Yeh Gav, how come you don’t ever say f*ck?'

 

'Or sh*t. Eh? How come you dinnae swear'

 

'Are you too gay?'

 

'Yeh! Are you a poof Gavin?'

 

'You look like a poof to me, ya poof'

 

And that was how that particular end started. Another day, another verbal kicking from the grotty and the great of class 3b, St Andrews Academy, Paisley. The words you have read above were the proud voices of your future. Scary isn't it? Every single day those creeps would whip themselves up into a clammer about something or other. From the moment you stepped onto the steamy early morning bus, to that blissful escape into the school yard at 3.30 in the afternoon you had to be tense, small and, if you could achieve the feat, invisible. If not, you were het, and if you were het, well nobody was going to step up and help you.

 

To begin with they would settle around you like flies on the proverbial. Sometimes they would acknowledge you; sometimes they would talk around, over and through you without ever addressing you. They were all too aware of the fact that you were there, you were scared and you were going nowhere. Their aim was to identify something that was different about you, with different being defined as bad. It could be anything from the make of your shoes to the place that you lived. All was game to them; it just never seemed that fair.

 

The thing I remember was that they were always bigger in some way. Particularly if you were me and you stood at a statuesque 5'2 long into your teenage years. The ones whose growth spurt had started in earnest used their jangling height and awkward limbs to nudge and judder you. Their uncoordinated new limbs bruising and grazing even when little harm was meant. Those who still had to look you in the eye would swell themselves with threats and demands. The smaller they were, the bigger the mouth seemed to be the rule. Either way, they were bigger, stronger and were always prepared to take things a step further than you ever could. As long as they had friends around.

 

Today was my turn. Today Christopher Burns, Derek Ferguson, Gary Kerr had chosen me as their wee plaything. I was a popular toy. I came from Edinburgh, different, I was polite, different, I worked hard, different, I hadn't kissed a girl, different, I had admitted I didn't know what a condom was, idiot.

 

On that day it was my lack of an appropriate 'street' vocabulary that was to lead to my latest bout of ignominy and opprobrium. The fact that I knew what those words meant but had little concept of what the c word was played a significant part in my downfall. On reflection, the earlier development of some sort of impression of their language might have been useful, but when you're running scared, thoughts tend to scatter rather than coalesce.

 

Anyway, as I was saying, the three turgid amigos were going to have their fun with me, and today there was nothing I could do about it. At the time my chosen protective stance was that of the meek tortoise. Close in the head, pull in the limbs, shut up the mouth and hope they get bored. It worked quite well in the corridors and the playgrounds and I swear there were times I came close to achieving the invisible benchmark noted previously.

 

The success of the tortoise came lay in the fact that if you remained static while all around you the world continued to move, there was usually too much stimulation for the never evolving minds of the bullies to cope with. Their thoughts would quickly scatter onto the next subject of their antagonising larks and they would flit away from your shell forgetting you were ever there.

 

This day was different though. Today I was trapped in a defined space that traps us all for the next 2 hours. Today was the day that Mrs Graham, the once admired French teacher, took my trust in her lovely, maternal hands, and snapped it across her knee. For no reason that I could discern then or now, she moved me. Shifted my seat from the nice warm table across from her desk. The table where my quiet friends sat and quietly learnt some of the quiet French she was teaching us.

 

My relocation was to the far corner of the room, to a 4-desk set up that now housed me, and the three aforementioned bullies. A small deed you may think? Well you think very wrong. This was feeding time at the zoo and I was the raw steak being hurled into the Tiger pen.

 

Why she did this I shall never know. Did I do her wrong? Were my 'Silvous Plait's and Je Voudrais not good enough for her? I mean, I could have expressed my emotions regarding the move in pigeon French, 'Je' m'apelle Gavin, j'ai peur'. Was that not reason enough to leave meek boys well alone? Apparently not. What was worse, those grubby cretins might not know have understood my French cry of despair, but they could clearly smell the sentiment a mile off.

 

It had already been a bad week, I was riding high in the bullying charts for whatever reason. Maybe because my Mum gave me Dunlop trainers rather than the much lobbied for LA Gear Regulators. Maybe it was because I had the temerity to ask the English teacher if I could be pardoned and go to the loo, or maybe I was getting shoddy at the whole tortoise thing.

 

Already I had suffered the perfect crack of a wet towel across my thighs in the sub medieval torture chamber that was the PE changing room. In Home Economics, where we learned how to achieve domestic tranquility, I turned around on my seat just in time to see a folder containing scone recipes swinging with a swingeing swipe at my face. As for Craft and Design, well lordy, I don't know if I can even go into that! I don't know what it was about Tech department teachers but they always seemed in an unseemly rush to leave those angry bags of hormones alone with us quivering sacks of nerves in rooms laden with an armies worth of potential instruments. I can't count the number of times my hand was forcibly held in a vice or a soldering iron was waved in front of my dilating eyes.

 

That week the teacher’s witless plan was to leave us alone with a video about suspension bridges. Fine you say, where lies the harm in that? Well, the harm emerges when the importance of adequate suspension was demonstrated by a slow motion video of a real girl in a real bra, with real breast jogging in really slow motion. I should admit that this was such a formative moment in my early sexual life, and when I say early sexual life, I mean the time when you try to figure out what bit goes where, and how. I also still remember everything about those breasts and have, since that day, found an odd sexual frisson run over my body whenever I approach a suitable engineered bridge.

 

Regardless, the short-term impact was barely worth all of that input. Every single girl, whether they had bloomed into the higher end of the bra cup scale or were still awaiting the onset of their curves, folded their arms in acute embarrassment while the likes of Derek, Gary, Christoper et al span around the room like agitated, spermed up gibbons. Rubbers were thrown, stools toppled, bags were emptied, girls ogled and the video paused, played, rewound, paused and played again. In a way the whole lesson was like a primitive S&M experience, newfound pleasure grazing up against untold pain and fear. Was it any wonder I had so many hard questions to ask of the R.E teacher. Life didn't seem to follow a path informed by the will of a kindly deity. The meek and good life I tried to lead was taking me into some pretty jagged dead ends and the thought that, even if us shy ones were to inherit the earth, we were going to get a hell of a kicking while we waited for ascension.

 

Well, this narrative has wandered has it not? Point is, it had been a bad week already and then I find myself am sat in this room, this one classroom where I used to feel safe, and those fools were sitting all around me. It's probably worth explaining why I was so fond of this class? Why of all the places that this brutal decanting of my youthful self could have taken place in, this would have been the last one I would have picked. One of the main things was that the room stood in opposition to the dilapidation that marred the rest of the building. There were times when it felt like that awful old school was demolishing itself before our very eyes. The toilets were permanently awash with youthful urine and second hand water that seeped out from the leaking pipes and up the trouser legs of all its patrons. The supporting walls moved so easily that if you leant against them with any force you found yourself reclining at awkward angles. As for the days it rained, well, you were as well standing outside as in. There was nothing about that shambles of a building that inspired pride or ownership the way a school should. The anonymous, tumbling old institution was an aesthetic nightmare that bogged down your thoughts the minute you trundled into it.

 

However, the French class was a world apart. It was clean, the walls and carpet (carpets for goodness sake, what luxury!) were a lovely light blue. The strip lighting never flickered and buzzed angrily like it did in every other class while the large north facing windows had a delightful, airy view of the fields and hills near the school. If one was inclined, you could take a break from your lesson and count the cows as they mowed the sloping drumlins in the distance. It had a freshness and security that felt right, that felt like an environment where you could focus on learning rather than survival.

 

What's more, in that class, I sat close to Mrs Graham. She was one of those teachers who was just the right age and of just the right attitude to remind me of my mother. This engendered some level of affection from me to her; she was like a safe chunk of home brought into my school life. I looked up to her, admired her gently firm stance on misbehaviour and misadventure and loved that she was not someone to fear, nor was she someone you would cross. The best thing about Mrs Graham though was that she never left her post. She was as faithful in her duties as the Royal Guards. Not once in our short time together did she walk out of this room, never once leaving us to the frenzy that always followed when a classroom was unsupervised. She knew what lay beneath, or at least I thought she did.

 

'Ho, d*ckhead! You gonnae answer us?' Derek’s nasal twangs buts into my godly wonderings. My inquest would not pass, I remember seeking some escape, some solution other than the endless escalation that was interaction. Mrs Graham was not far away, further than I would have liked, but still close. I could reach out for her, but deep down I knew that would be the end. I knew that she would react, I would be summoned to air my complaints and those boys would be punished. It would extricate me from my predicament for sure, but in relation to the ongoing battle between meek and wild it would have been the equivalent of throwing a water bomb at a teenage tank. The smallest, briefest win before those spotty tracks swung your way with deadly intent.

 

'Of course I swear' I said quietly. This was a lie. I didn't swear, I never swore. Well, once many years before I did call my Mum a b*stard but unless you entirely dismiss the concept of attribution and emotion, this one has to be chalked up as mere rote repetition by an ignorant 8 year old, no offence was intended nor understood as possible.

 

'Oh aye, and whit is it that you say?' says Christopher, grabbing the bone that was me and shaking it some more. I knew I was in trouble, but only then did I realise that I was locked into that most frustrating of traps, the logic loop of an idiot. Like a maze with only one corridor but no exit, it is inherently flawed yet devastatingly effective in its witless simplicity. You are in there; you know the limitations but are trapped by the very same thing. I hated them for it. I hated them for outsmarting me despite all their glaring flaws.

 

'I say lots, all the time. Just not very loudly' my defence was weak, porous and about to break. I was staring defeat in the face.

 

'Why don't you swear just now? Just one f*cking word and we'll leave you alone' says Gary. He always seemed the most sympathetic of them all, but here he had the scent and was more than happy to move on in. His final offer of release was a trap, but I promise that at that moment it looked like the kind of cloud lined sanctuary that all those priests and nutters had promised us for all those years.

 

Of course, I would have had to become a verbal martyr before I could lay my head down in that glorious condensation. Could I do this? Could I open my mouth and let fly a cuss, a curse, a naughty, a BAD word!?!? I didn't swear, I just don't, it was unthinkable. There seemed no need, no room, no point to the endless repetition of f's and c's and b's and w's and all the others that I didn’t even understand. Out there, away from the onetime harbour of peace that was French class, all you heard was the mindless blabbering of their grunting phrases. Sometimes they lay in some form of narrative context (I shall give them that) but other times were used to fill gaps while their sloppy synapses sluggishly formed some nonsensical sentence. I was not one of those people, I was not inclined, prone or even obliged to speak in such a careless, backwards way. There was no point to it and on this issue, I knew I was in the right, I knew virtue stood alongside me, hand gently placed upon my sloping, shaking shoulder.

 

But then, didn't he say they would leave me alone? Didn't my Edinburgh accent with it's smatterings of 'please' and 'may I' lie at the heart of so many of their aggressive deeds. Would it not be some grace on my part to bow down to their level, if only to reassure them that I too was just like them?

 

I looked around the table, their eyes were mocking and expectant, like football fans who see the ball bobbling in front of an open goal, they knew what the outcome was, they were just waiting for release. All around the room I could hear kind, gentle, homely 'Je'mappelle's' and 'J'ai 14 ans' and somewhere, a glorious 'J'ai deux souers'. Mrs Graham was firmly but generously admonishing someone for mixing up the etre verb, oh how I wished that was me. That glorious authoritative voice, if it was near me then I would have been in the clear. All of that was wishful thinking, this was my watershed. Was I to enter into a new world or stubbornly defend my own ways. Did I bow down to peer pressure and give up one more thing that makes me, me? Did I see enough worth in placing survival over pride? I considered all of this for a few seconds and then made my decision.

 

'F*ck' I said meekly.

 

'What's that!' said Christopher in a flash 'I didn't hear you' his voice rang with a mocking melody. Victory was his already, but he wanted to feel it some more.

 

'I said...' and my voice trailed off, but it was too late. I felt as if I had coughed up my heart and I knew there was no clawing it back in. I was more like them and that was that. With that one word I sank in my own estimation and yet still remained a joke to them.

 

'Go on, you've said it now' says Derek 'say another one'

 

'shhh...Shit' I say with enough firmness to ensure I am heard 'shit, bum, fuck, wank...' and with that my learned vocabulary was spent. My honour was slain and my life as an innocent was over. I gave it up with barely a fight. That motley, tawdry group sat back with a collective smugness that grates even now. I felt real anger then, not the normal fear and pensiveness, but genuine, burning anger. I wanted to stand on that desk and tell them to fuck off. I wanted to keep swearing right in their faces just, I wanted to tell them that just because I gave in, just because I spoke the way they did, that I was not one of them. I had never been one of them and had never been allowed to be me. From the day I moved to this stupid town with its stupid kids and their stupid ways I had been made to feel like I was wrong for wanting a little more, for learning the words and doing the sums and just being nice. I had done all that and been made to feel like a pariah and it was, not, fucking fair. It had never been fair.

 

The thing is though, they didn't care. They had a skinny wee pound of flesh to chew on. Someone had conformed, someone else had been beaten down and to them, and there were no repercussions. Just comforting conformity to ways they understood. A life changing moment to me was a moment’s diversion to them. Their conversation quickly span back to their usual mundane subjects. It was all football, drinking that and 'Kit-Kats' . A narrow band of interests that defined them for as long as I knew them, that from the things I here, still divert them now. With a few sniggers and a bored yawn, they slipped back into that world that lay parallel to mine. A world where aggression always wins, where affection is a joke, where to learn was frowned upon and where to just want to play your own way was tantamount to the gravest insult you could give.

 

I wanted to go home. I wanted out of that stupid classroom and out of that stupid school and this town and this world. I just wanted to be me and I could never understand why that was so wrong. I don't suppose they did either. Some things go beyond their range of thought.

 

'Fuck off' I muttered under my breath one more time. Derek looked up at me surprised. I looked back at him and for the first time did not lower my eyes.

 

That was how that particular end was started. That was the day I started to get angry rather than scared. That day I saw so many of those classmates for what they really were, dull eyed and frightened. Stuck in one way and one way only, unable to change and unwilling to learn. I lost my patience with the teachers too. Where were they when lives were being pulled away from a decent course by the low-lying weights of the school bullies? We needed to learn to fight our own fights for sure, but what price for a little help? A moment’s guidance when you had swung right off the rails and were heading to nowhere fast.

 

Nobody ever saw it that way though. They just thought I had crossed from good to bad, from white to black. They never stopped to think why, to ask any hard questions. Much of the fault lay with me for sure; my decisions were made out of anger and spite but also confusion and fear. But maybe with a quiet word, a moments understanding, more of the quiet crowd would make it through unscathed

 

 

Done