Sven Goes to War. Part 1. Warriors of the Wasteland

Sven Goes to War. 
 

Part 1. Warriors of the Wasteland  
 

While their parents watched War 73 (The war to end all… etc etc) spin out on Nightly News,  the boys played war games down on the mudflats. Setting themselves up into armies, Shirts vs. Skins, Terminators vs. Rambos, Circumcised vs. Hooded (Claws in common parlance, are you a Claw or No Claw?) the boys took up positions behind old abandoned shopping trolleys, in forts constructed from For Sale signs stolen from the overgrown gardens of long derelict houses, and in the abandoned crumbling concrete Martello stinking of tramps’ piss and filled with sad looking wrinkled used or half-used condoms. 

    They were Trojans all of them.

    And these, these poor innocent boys, they would go at each other with wild euphoric abandon.

    Happy days. 

    Because the country was never happier, more unified, then when it was at war. 

Except, just as in any war, there were dissenting voices.

    Those who were not happy. 

    Not exactly. 

    For Sven Tosier-Gumshoe, being the smallest and most cowardly of the boys, even in proportion to his diminutive size, when the war games were coming to their nightly close, ragged careworn parents having started to line up like gulls along the pier rail, shouting out that it was time for their respective charges to hurry home for tea or there would be tanned hides all round, was the one who was, most often, taken hostage. 

    A quick resolution being needed. 

    To finish the game. 

    “I’m Private Tosier-Gumshoe,” he would say. “15^th Seal Regiment. Identification Number 35654. I won’t tell you anything.”

    Usually then they would come at him with a used condom filled with sand, or a live crab with snapping claws, or the rusty speculum Aart Jansen had stolen from his dad, the doctor, eons ago, telling them with faked horror that a speculum was something you used to look up butt holes. 

    “Ok,” Sven would then say, “I give in. Our army is massed behind the seal fort… Plans are to advance at midnight…. The password is Valkensteeg 17. Just don’t hurt me. I’ll tell you anything. I eat my dad’s butt, I dance naked to Abba, I once beat off to the boys in Bucks Fizz’s Making Your Mind Up Eurovision performance. Who gives a fig for the ripped off skirts? It’s cheesy cock and smelly ass I like.”

    This sequence of events had happened so often that, when on this particular day, a group of the other boys, the Circumcised or Hooded, Claws or No Claws, (in the bloody aftermath Sven was not entirely clear on this point, I didn’t actually see their willies he would scream later, blood pouring from his mouth, to his distraught uncomprehending mother), captured him sitting under the boardwalk reading one of his favourite Removalman! comics he had gone with them without a fight. 

    As they dragged him by the armpits, one boy to each pit, two more in front, two behind, towards the Martello where he would be tied, he knew from past experience, to the special hostage chair he wasn’t overly scared, just put out.

    Like, here we go again. 

    But on this day the Bones Brothers, Billy and Bunty, (their father, Caged Bones, the wrestler, hoping the boys so-named would follow in the family line), had been experimenting with a new Minty Fresh fanny deodorant stolen from their mother’s purse. 

    Airtight plastic bags half-fixed firmly over their flinty heads they had been both sniffing and inhaling for the previous forty-five minutes in the bin-alley behind Ginny’s Palace. 

    And now they were bug-eyed. 

    High as kites. 

    And, what was worse for Sven, with boners to die for. 

    Is yours? said Billy, with a taut twang of his stiff member in his Bret Hart Wrestling Buddy silky shorts. 

    You bet you it is, said Bunty, with a mighty twang of his own; Hulk Hogan Breakout shorts filled to the brim. (Billy had his father’s nose and cheekbones, Bunty had his mighty endowment, always a bonus for any wrestler, to look bulging in a skintight leotard.) She’s ready to blow. Let’s see if old papa’s right.  

    Just the night before while backstage at Saltburn-by-the-Sea’s Wrestle-Madness Extravaganza and Showdown,held amid much uproar every Tuesday evening at the Civic Centre and never missed by the boys who both imagined their names up there on the advertorial posters one day, next to the whist drives and cake sales, bingo and aerobicise, Billy and Bunty had overhead their dad boasting in front Captain Cornstacks about how the best blowjob was one performed with no teeth. To cut a long story short, Charlene, kicked in the mouth by a donkey as a child, topless bar dancer at The Fishermen’s Friend’s Friday Night Free For All as a fully-fledged adult, on her knees in the disabled toilets with dear old da, two pound notes poking from her knickers, shouldn’t ‘o’ done it but what can you do?

    Then, their father, Caged Bones, had guffawed, almost rattling. 

    Between you me and the gatepost the best blowie I’ve ever had. 

    That explained why Billy and Bunty, diverting from Ginny Palace’s bin store before rejoining the war, had come equipped with pliers and their mum’s gardening gloves.

    To protect, said Bunty wisely, the brains of the brace, pre-extraction, against any biting. 

    Poor Sven didn’t stand a chance. 

    He had lost four of his best incisors, his teeth being one of the only parts of his body, along with his index fingers and a single toe, he wasn’t self-conscious about, before the other horrified boys, Clifford, Clarence and co., could get the two not-so-little, whacked-out-of-their-faces, wrestlers off. 

    Backbreaker. 

    Powerbomb. 

    Piledriver. 

    Stinkface. 

    The Bones boys utilised all of their best moves. Camera roll, action, if that had been the case their dad would’ve been proud. 

    It was their most magnificent performance ever. 

    And last. 

    For two weeks later, after another Minty Fresh outing, once again sequestered in Ginny Palace’s bin store, and this time pre-equipped with an industrial-sized jar of peanut butter and the Bones’ dog’s plastic hollow chicken, (a perfect sized hole exactly where its butt should be) jerked and sniffed to a zonked-out delirium, the Bones boys had been hit by Goran Alfson’s drayhorse outside The Jolly Fishermen. It wasn’t the horse that killed them but the wheels of the cart behind. Weighed down by six huge barrels of Evans Brewery’s best ale it had sliced their legs clean off. 

    PC Ivan Gorenski, two weeks into the job and just having a swift one, was first on the scene and, so the story went, it wasn’t the severed limbs that made him puke his guts out, at least two pints of God’s Own Country Pale Ale and a battered saveloy with cheesy chips, but how the steel-rimmed wheels had somehow circumcised both of the boys, to add insult to injury, but which fact answered Sven’s mother’s unasked for question about which side those boys were on, Claws or no Claws, and to which Sven hadn’t known the answer.