Head Injuries (6 page)

    

    

    I got back to the guest house without consciously following any route. I went straight up to my room and looked in the mirror where she'd touched me. The flesh was tender and scored. In places, the skin had broken. I licked a finger and wiped away the pinheads of blood that had dried there.

    Downstairs I fell back on a comfort food from youth to help me relax: peanut butter and apricot jam on toast; a glass of Ribena to follow. Just the ticket. There wasn't that long to go before Seamus picked me up. I did some stretching before lingering over the football reports in a hot bath with Radio 5 Live. I reached up and opened the window. I thought about the girl-her long throat, the smooth swells at the V of her sweater-and felt my penis stir. I thought about masturbating but then a breeze whipped into the bathroom, tightening my skin, and I smelled something sweet and hot; cakes baking. Though it vanished as swiftly as it had arisen, it was enough to put me in mind of the dread I'd known, seeing the man on the beach and, more specifically, the image from my childhood he evoked. It bothered me that I'd never really thought of this episode before. Certainly not in any detailed way. But here it was, developing before me in swift flashes, like a palette knife scraping magic on a canvas, but all of the colours were grim.

    

    

    I see Seamus and Dando on the bowling green. It's autumn and leaves have stolen the colour from half of the square. Seamus is hacking divots out of the grass with the heel of his DMs. Dando is slicing his name into the centre with a piece of broken glass. I'm sitting with Helen and Kerry on the concrete floor of the pavilion, watching them through the rotting staves of a fence which surrounds the green, designed to protect it. Kerry's my girlfriend. If s October 13th, 1980.

    'Stop snogging, Dave. Come and play footy.' Seamus' voice cracks half way through and Helen laughs, something Dando is quick to seize upon.

    'Oh yay-hay, Shay! Helen likes you, Seamus. She wants to have your rabies.'

    'Fuck off, Dando. At least I've got a snog if I want it. What are you gonna do? Go home and get your mother to toss you off again?'

    Dando toe-pokes the ball at Seamus. It cannons off his backside, rolls into the block of shade beneath the trees.

    I've been seeing Kerry for three weeks. She bought me a 7-inch single for my 14th birthday by a band called The Beat. The song is 'Mirror in the Bathroom'. I'm worried this is some kind of subtle message that she thinks I'm vain. She lets me hold her hand when we go out at night. When I see her in the school library at lunchtimes I sit so close to her that my shin rubs the soft swell of her calf. We pretend to read books at these times. I read the same line over and over again, hoping nobody can see my heart bashing away under my shirt. Once, when we had to crowd round a table during a biology practical, I stroked a gap of flesh on her back between her skirt and blouse until I felt dizzy. I've not kissed her yet. I get the feeling she's becoming fed up. She's more sophisticated than me. When I asked her, casual as you like, how many boys she'd kissed before, she replied: 'Hundreds.' She's been around. She lived in Crewe before coming to Warrington. She's the only Kerry in the school.

    'I
said,
bogbrains, stop snogging the bint and come and have a kick about!' I can see Seamus' eyes, little curls of silver from the sodium lights.

    'Seamus, he's not snogged her yet. He's got virgin lips. Or he's a puff.'

    I feel Kerry bristling beside me.

    'Is that true, Kerry?' asks Helen.

    'Course it's fucking true.' Dando saunters over, bored of the football now that there's something more interesting to do. I hate them for this but tomorrow we'll be laughing in the playground, taking the piss out of Alan Bebington's half-mast trousers.

    Helen's eyes and mouth make a triangle of Os. 'But you told me-'

    'Kerry… you didn't tell everyone that Mr Munro here is a stud, did you? He's only ever done it with Pam.'

    Kerry's head snaps up. There's thunder in her brow. I wish I was with the football, deep in the thrashing dark of rhododendron bushes. 'Pam?' she says, her voice thin with shock. If this lot weren't here I could hug her for hours. 'Pam who?'

    'Pam of his hand!' Seamus shrieks, pleased the joke worked.

    'Ha, ha,' I say, slowly, 'I'm bereft of ribs.'

    '
Bereft?
What the fuck's
bereft?'

    'It's a type of hat, isn't it? Speak English, Dave, you daft twat.'

    Helen's still gawping. 'You not kissed her yet, Dave? What's up? You frigid or what?'

    'So are you gonna kiss her then, Dave?' Seamus asks. 'Go on. Show us you're not chicken.'

    
'You
kiss her.' I regret the words even as I speak them. Seamus doesn't need another invitation. He straddles Kerry's knees and cups her face with his hands. Kerry fights him off but not as effectively as she might. She lets him kiss her and for one awful moment I see their tongues squirm together, like slugs mating. I push Seamus away and he wipes his mouth, his eyes blazing with triumph. I grab Kerry's hand and pull her up, leading her round to the back of the pavilion where the cinder five-a-side football pitches glimmer. The dark bulk of Sankey Valley Park sweeps away from us. You can see the black holes of Seven Arches from here. The burned sugar smell of baking cakes from the factory on Delamere Road is there and then gone, swift as breath.

    I press Kerry up against the wall. I'm glad they haven't followed us. Somebody wolf-whistles. She's looking at me from beneath her fringe, her eyes both tender and goading. A Mona Lisa smile. I kiss her and she doesn't even seem to mind when our teeth clack against each other. It's good, nowhere near as messy as I expected. When we surface, I try not to let her see how breathless I am.

    'At last,' she says, and hugs me.

    'There was nothing to stop you from kissing me.'

    'I know. But I've been there. It was important you made the move, David. First-timer.' She smiles and I blush. I want to ask her if I was good; if the kiss turned her on. She ducks her head and kisses me this time and she's controlling what happens. Her tongue dabs against mine, her hands crawl up my back and nestle in my hair. When she pulls away, purple spots are swimming behind my eyes.

    'It's not against the law to breathe.'

    It gets better. Soon, I'm able to think of other things while my mouth works on auto-pilot. I'm thinking of how I should touch her breasts when the shouting starts.

    'Why do you hang round with Seamus and Dando? They're a bit rough. Not like you,' We're walking towards the bushes. They slope down to the canal, where the noises are coming from. I can't make out who it is, or what's being said.

    'They're okay. Lot of hot air. And it's not like I'm spoilt for choice is it? Our year is full of geeks.' I want to ask her if I kiss better than Seamus. Now I've finally done it, I resent her for letting him get away with what he did.

    A couple of feet into the bushes there's a fence. Kerry climbs over first and I follow, realising that my heart is troubled with more than this business of kissing. The shouts, still vague, possess an urgency. Kerry's nails dig into my palm-she senses it too.

    'Careful,' I say. 'The bank gets steep here.'

    We meet the leading edge of bushes beyond which lies a narrow path forged by fishermen and kids playing truant. Something's going on under the footbridge; four or five figures painted white by the lights are a blur of movement. I'm having to squint to make a sense of it all: it seems like a human knot constantly re-configuring itself.

    'Kerry?'

    'Oh God,' she says, and lets go of my hand. I run after her.

    'What's happening?' I can hear Seamus shouting in that reedy voice of his. And Helen sobbing. Dando I can just see, holding something out in his hands before the knot finds another loop and everything's lost again.

    
'Stop it.'
And I'm rattled by the sheer urgency of Kerry's voice. She comes to a sudden halt and I try to look past her. I manage to squeeze by on the path by clinging on to some of the thin branches which overhang. From here I see everything.

    I see Seamus circling Dando. I see Kerry with her hands to her face, crouching by the canal. I see Dando. Dando's holding a dog by its hind legs and plunging it into the soft mud on the bank. He's keeping its head submerged until it begins to convulse before pulling it back out again. There's a wet sucking noise as it comes free. The dog is shivering and making odd, weak yelps. Its head is misshapen with mud. Back it goes. Seamus is cheering. Dando's face is half-hidden by shade. The other half blazes. He's got his dick out; a jutting, moonstruck twig.

    
'Stop it!'
Kerry screams.

    As if only now becoming aware of the people around him, Dando grins and kicks the dog in the stomach. Any noise it might have made is muffled.

    'The fucker bit me. No dog gets away with that.' He covers his dick with his hand, giving it a little tweak as he pushes it back into his jeans.

    I'm striding over, even though Dando's bigger than me and-if it weren't for Jimmy Price-would be the cock of our year. I aim a punch at his face but he leans away and my fist finds his throat. He loses his footing and falls over, letting go of the dog. Kerry pulls it free of the mud and it runs, blind, straight into the canal. I watch it swim away, its head twitching left and right. At the opposite bank it sprints towards the housing estate. I'm wondering if it will die of shock when Dando wades over and grabs me by the neck.

    'I ought to kick your bastard teeth in for that.'

    And then… then…

    

    

    And then what? I sat up in the bath and stared at my hands, which were beginning to prune. My mind wouldn't allow me to drift with the true course of events: how I fell back against a rotten plank and felt the slow heat of a nail sink into my thigh. How I'd gone to casualty where a nurse who smelled of lavender swabbed my wound clean and gave me a tetanus injection. How we went for popcorn and a Coke at the cinema but couldn't get in to see
The Empire Strikes Back
after I'd gone back to the park to rejoin everyone, Dando teasing me that I'd had a prick up my arse. I could think all this, but I couldn't see it. Instead, I saw Dando grab me by my jumper. While he held me, Seamus bound my hands behind my back with a length of twine. Then they upended me and forced me into a hole just wide enough to accommodate my shoulders. My head touched the bottom and the weight of my body above me forced me on to my cheek. The mud, folding around me…

    I swallowed thickly. Hands shaking, I pulled out the plug and stood under the shower for a few minutes until the panic was washed clear. But those things hadn't happened. It was like a game in which secrets are passed on and distorted. Dando hadn't tried to kill me.

    Scrubbing myself dry, thoughts turned back to Kerry. We'd finished a month or two after that incident. The last time I saw her was a year or two after we'd left school. She was living in Taunton with an Alastair and practising midwifery. I remember thinking-what did I ever see in this girl? Her face was painfully thin, putting me in mind of a teddy bear I once owned whose head was crushed by a prolonged spell down the gap between my bed and the wall. We never talked about that night by the canal. I wonder if that was because of some teenage ability to reject the horrific, or because we consciously stopped it from surfacing? I know I'd blocked it, until tonight. And what of Dando? I gazed into the mirror, the towel around my shoulders; the scratch was a raised whitish worm. We'd spent so much time together it seemed criminal we should lose contact so quickly. How many friends could I boast of now, that meant as much to me as the ones with whom I used to play football until way past a time when the ball was visible in the dark? I found myself mourning Dando-I now realised he meant more to me than most people I'd met since. He'd been a brutal bastard, but he was genuine and honest-with me at least-and immune from any pretentiousness. I hadn't laughed as forcefully in the seven or eight years since our friendship dissolved.

    What did I have now? I still held on to Helen and Seamus but only then by the skin of my teeth. How easy it could have been to consign them to the back of my head, dusting them off now and then to massage my need for nostalgia. It would be better for them too, as I'd see them both in a honeyed light; that charitable bent the mind always seems to adopt in moments of reflection. How could I pretend, now they were back in my life? I didn't know the real Seamus any more though he must exist somewhere under all those layers of artifice. And Helen seemed almost self-satisfied with her lot, as if what were happening to her separated her from everyone else, marked her out for a special destiny, no matter how black it proved to be. I felt a prickle of anger when I realised she was exploiting a need for her that I thought (and hoped) I'd beaten over the years. She was probably gloating even now, that she could hold sway over my life after just a few months of tenderness that occurred years ago. But I was probably being unfair to them both. It would have been nice for them to contact me under different circumstances, but at least they'd done it. I hadn't lifted a finger. I should be turning some of this bile on myself, seeing what I was made of for a change, but it was either something I wasn't ready for or something of which I was incapable.

    It was just after seven. I was in no mood to continue with the parries and deflections of our first conversation and was in half a mind to contact Helen and call off the evening. There was too much to think about already; I didn't want another bout of ghost stories to keep me awake all night, waiting for something portentous to reveal itself. I wanted to see the girl again. I didn't for a moment believe that I would never see her again. It just wouldn't be up to me; she would reveal herself. She seemed that type of person.