Love Story 6

I vowed to God I’d work hard and turn myself around and no longer look at the stuck-together catalogue pages even if they were just sitting there doing nothing. I confided in Ali as we were walked and slid down the shortcut to get the bus to school.

She was sure footed and held onto my arm so I wouldn’t fall. But laughed more than she needed to at something that was no laughing matter.

I told her, ‘I really want to make a difference in people’s life’.

She shoved me. I skidded on the mud and fell into the jaggy nettles. I used the wire fence to pull myself upright. Clenching the palm of my hand and groaning, especially when I checked out the wet patch on the thigh and side of my cords. I’d need to go home and get changed which would make us both late for school. ‘What did you do that for?’

‘Whit?’ she smiled and acted friendly. ‘Yeh slipped and fell.’

I rubbed the heel of my shoe on the stones where mud met more mud. It was slippy. My tongue traced the chapped corner of my lips. ‘Sorry.’

‘Yer such a sucker,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You talk funny.’

We stood facing each other in the rain. She was higher up on the slope. I’d no clear sense what I sounded like, but I sensed her slipping away from me. Perhaps my voice was like Pastor Colin’s foul breath a secret nobody wanted to share.

But Val let me into their secret. She mimicked my voice in a high girly tone when I got overexcited but possibly more butch than mine.

‘I don’t sound like that.’

She snorted. ‘Yer worse than that. It’s a fucking embarrass-ment. Yer an embarrass-ment.’

I hung onto the stingy hurt in the palm of my hand to steady myself. Part of me recognised the voice as that of Wormwood the snake in the Garden of Eden. It had the same voice as me. It was me.

My forehead flushed, cheeks pinked and sweat ran down my neck. I shivered and felt dizzy. My throat felt dry. Rain splattered my face. I closed my eyes, jagged pink lights behind my eyelids. My belly heaved and the bolus of cornflakes for breakfast splattered the shiny black toes of my Weegins.

‘Sorry,’ I said in a deeper voice, and wiped at my mouth with the edge of my hand.

‘Yeh sound like a retard noo,’ she said. ‘Yeh don’t know the half of it. Alisdair said yeh always were anyway. Even before that yeh were a wee poof.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, in my less than normal high tone, apologising for being sorry.

I knew I’d need to work on being less Wormy. Perhaps tucking my chin into my chest to produce an acceptable form of guttural grunt like Alisdair. But it would be hard work. It would be easier going home and playing like I was struck down by something and was now deaf and dumb. There’d be something heroic in that kind of suffering. Even Pastor Colin would be impressed. He’d try and cure my not speaking by speaking in tongues and interpreting my silences as God’s way. Perhaps he’d cure me and get rid of Wormy and I’d be a new man.

I didn’t look at her face but her big boobs. ‘So, are you still seeing Alisdair?’

She stumbled but steadied herself as she hooted. ‘I never stopped seeing im. He said “there was nae point getting the train up the toon and getting aff at Yoker.”’

I glanced at her gloating face. ‘You go somewhere together on the train?’

She sniggered. ‘Yer fucking cuckoo.’

I licked the scabby part of the corner of my lips. Perhaps if I was to be deaf and dumb, I could take a razor and cut my lips off. That way my voice would be totally different. I’d cut off my ears too. Offer them to God as a gift. He doesn’t mind deaf and dumb people. As long as you’re not a poof.

But Wormy knew I couldn’t do it. I squealed even when boys at school kicked me in the bum or knuckled the back of my head with a knuckle sandwich. They’d mostly stopped since I’d got engaged. But maybe that was Alasdair’s doing.

‘I could change,’ I told her. ‘You like me tickling you? Don’t you?’

She shrugged, ‘It’s alright,’ she admitted.

I knew she was being kind. I tickled her like I would a three-year old. She tickled me back, which turned into wrestling and too many crinkles on my well-made bed, which she usually won and tried to grab my cock. She wanted me to poke her fanny. And sometimes I did. But then I had to nip away and wash my hands for ten or fifteen minutes. By that time she was bored stupid and wanted to go home. But she wasn’t going home. She was meeting Alasdair surreptitiously. Only she didn’t know what that meant. She was a fat ugly cow. Alasdair might have been right, I realised, about me and her. At least we’d something in common.   

The lesser evil was to become a Catholic monk. I’d have gone over to the other side. But if Pastor Colin phoned me in the monastery and asked to speak to me, the Abbot could answer for me and tell him honestly I’d taken a vow of silence.  

‘What do you want to do?’ I asked.

‘I’ll wait here and huv a fly fag while you get changed. We’ll jist go intae registration late and tell them we missed the bus.’