The Incident

I think I was eight years old when it happened. I was down in the fields exploring with my two neighbours and one of the older boys. They were in awe of him. Having one of the older boys hanging out with you was a big deal, especially one who had recently graduated to the bigger school. He was about six years older than us. I didn’t like the older boys because they bullied me. I don’t know why. I was the only one in school wearing glasses so I suspected it was that.

He suggested we split up and then, when it was just the two of us, he threw me to the ground and pulled down my pants. I tried to stop him but he was much stronger than me. He quickly pulled down his pants too and got on top of me. The thought that was going through my head was ‘well, this is my comeuppance I guess. I thought I’d gotten away with it’.

A few months prior to this, we were in school playing a game that the older boys had come up with. It didn’t have a name. The aim of this game was for the younger boys, or the squirts as we were called, to line up at the wall at the back of the school. Our goal was to run to the safety of the shed before the older boys caught us. They were armed with damp jumpers and tracksuit bottoms that had been left in the shed. They’d soaked them again in the tank in the pumphouse. They gave us a five second headstart and then gave chase. If they caught up to you then you would be flogged with the wet gear. I didn’t enjoy this game.

I was on the way to the toilet when I got drafted to the front line. I tried to get past them but they pushed me back and gave me a kick up the arse to send me on my way. I didn’t protest even though I badly needed to relieve myself. Sitting against the wall, waiting for the game to begin, I knew that I was going to wet myself. I was sitting down in the hope that when it happened, it would be less obvious.

The countdown was under way and all my fellow squirts took off running. I sat still hoping that they wouldn’t notice. As luck would have it, they didn’t. They were already picking out their victims and hadn’t considered that anybody would be rebellious enough not to run. Nobody paid any attention to the piss soaked mutineer sat as small as he could make himself against the wall.

I breathed a momentary sigh of relief as I watched them run off down towards the shed. None of the brave squirts had fallen to the ground, which played in my favour. A faller was usually surrounded by the floggers and given a thorough seeing to. They would surely have spotted me if that was the case. My luck was set to continue. The principal came out to call for the end of lunch. Everybody headed back into the school. Except me.

I don’t really know what my plan was. I think it was to wait it out until everybody had left at the end of the day and then hope that my parents eventually got worried and came looking for me. This didn’t happen as my absence from the classroom was soon noticed. The principal had been alerted and he had gone outside to look for me. He found me almost straight away. The floggers had missed me because they were looking for squirts. The principal had the advantage of only looking for one particular squirt.

I could see he was angry as he walked towards me and then he voiced his annoyance to confirm it for me. I stood up so he could assess my situation. He saw the wet patch and mumbled something about bringing me home. He took me to his car and dropped me at my house. I was hoping that nobody would look out the window and see me or my wet trousers on the way to the car. I was confident that nobody had.

Now, months later, pinned down to the ground with the older boy over me, I wasn’t as confident. Somebody must have seen me and decided that I had gotten away with the shame of having pissed my pants. Word had spread to the higher authorities. That was what he was there for, to bring balance to the universe. He was obviously going to piss on me and my destiny would be complete. I’d be the big baby who couldn’t control his little dick.

I wasn’t sure why he need my pants to be down. It made more sense to me to have them up so they would gather all the piss. I suspected he was being thorough. If my pants were wet but my skin was dry then no court of law would convict me! He’d probably done this before. He knew what he was doing. Still, it didn’t seem like it. He was struggling with his own dick, pulling at it and breathing heavily. He looked annoyed. Maybe he didn’t have to go. I kept struggling to make things difficult for him. I had no chance of breaking free but maybe I could put him off of his game. It had happened to me before when I had to piss in a hurry. You need full concentration to go sometimes.

Eventually he gave up and got to his feet. He pulled his pants up and walked away. I quickly did the same. I was waiting for some kind of threat or insult that might offer up some explanation. He said nothing. I suppose I had been right about him trying to piss on me. Nothing else made sense to this eight year old. I ran past him and headed for the gate. My two neighbours asked where I was going. I shouted that I was going home. The older boy didn’t give chase. Another lucky escape I thought.

That incident didn’t really stay on my mind for some reason. I was still generally scared of the older boys. I never had the luxury of concentrating on a specific incident, there were a lot to pick from. The one that stayed with me the longest was when they kicked open the door to the toilet when I was taking a shit and laughed at me. I never took a shit in a school again, primary or secondary, even when it hurt to hold it in. I forgot about the incident with the older boy pretty quickly.

It was only years later when I remembered it. He was in college now and I was halfway through secondary school. I had heard about him coming out as gay to his father and getting the shit beat out of him. It ‘worked’ too as he is now married with kids. I remembered what had happened in the field that day and for the first time I was able to figure out why he had done what he had done. I felt sorry for him. I didn’t feel any anger, maybe a little bit of shame. I was used to shame as a fifteen year old Irish Catholic. Ya, I could handle shame by then.

I didn’t think of it for very long after that realisation. I buried it again. Effortlessly. Every so often something would remind me of it but I never felt traumatised by it. As I’ve gotten older, I’m annoyed about how little it has affected me. Surely I should be screwed up in some way after something like that happened to me. Maybe I am and I just don’t see it? Still, I’ve convinced myself that my innocence saved me.

I often saw my cats fucking when I was younger. I assumed they were fighting at first as it looked quite aggressive. I would go over and ‘break it up’ but inevitably it would start again somewhere else. The male cat was always the aggressor. When I was older I realised that they were mating. It didn’t set my mind at ease a huge amount, it still seemed quite aggressive.

In essence, it looked like the female cat did not want to partake. If I had to put a name on it, I would have said it was rape. Once it was over, the female cat would dust herself off and go back to whatever she had been doing prior to that. She didn’t seem to be affected by it. In my mind, something awful had happened but to her, it was just nature. I started to wonder if that’s why I wasn’t fucked up from what had happened to me when I was eight. I didn’t know that I was almost molested so it didn’t traumatise me. Ignorance is bliss.