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Endless Detentions
by Neil Grimmett
In a small place like this, things turn out pretty much as you’d guess they would, mostly. Even the strange and shocking could get stretched back and back—more sinew than elastic—until it was plainly obvious that one day there had to be a release.
"You heard that Dunny shot Pilling in the head? Right through the temple with a .22? He claimed they were just fooling about in his mother's bedroom. But, of course, Pilling was done up in a tutu and stockings and tied to a chair as well."
Dunny got manslaughter for his ‘fooling’, and there wouldn’t be a single person from our year at school who’d be surprised it ended up so; or anyone who believed his lawyer’s claim that it was the result of whatever form of abuse was in fashion that month. It was always there to see. The destinies of the now fat and bald written then in crisps and dandruff flecking their blazers for all to read. Or the flirty cheating wives: why, they were doing it back then, balanced on the benches in the cloakroom while their girlfriends held out coats like bullfighters daring the passing teachers or prefects to risk a charge.
The bullies and the bullied, still without a payback in sight, even though little Timmy is now six foot four, but lonely, stuttering and twitching, while his tormentors are ‘professionals’ with beautiful wives and children of porcelain perfection. Teacher's pets and victims, caught in the gravitation of a dying star, clinging to the past and shuffling together for one more class reunion. With the genuine old boys and girls, still loyal (or brainwashed) enough to post out pretty invitation cards to those few who left them behind, then wait—hoping one of us might show up—in an endless detention with backs turned to the darkness outside while staring at the blackboard. Their same unanswerable questions chalked in letters no eraser can clear.
‘How is it that the boy who thought he was John Lennon and never sat a test, or played any sport, and only ever visits the area to buy drinks for the biggest loser in the roughest pub, is now a star? And why should that queen of tarts earn more strutting her stuff in a week than most decent folk earn in a year? Or the one who insulted dear, silver-haired Mr. Hawkins before storming out of his English literature class, become a best-selling writer who won't even sign a book for the school library? Not right; not fair.’
Then last and best of all.
‘What of Colin? The man of mystery and source of so many rumours. How can anyone vanish without a trace? Especially him of all people!’
No one knows. Not the good or bad, the content or malcontent. Though everyone would love to hear and confirm their suspicions over his disappearance; or quash the dread of any triumphant news or return.
And I was his closest friend, they gossip—or did, according to my ex-wife: an erstwhile prefect, deputy head girl, and class reunion specialist. Surely, I must know the secret and could tell? Or do I have something to hide?
*
My final year at school and I’d ended up sitting at the only empty double desk in my new class, after being demoted from the top group in maths for refusing to get my hair cut. The teacher, a squat, hysterical, little toad of a man, claimed it was because of my poor marks. Everybody, I hoped, knew that it was a lie and conspiracy. Even as the deputy headmaster, who, during the break-up of my parents’ marriage had claimed to be a friend, escorted me from the classroom and called out to students: ‘Witness what happens if you do not listen to your masters and work hard: this falling from grace to what lies below.’ He stood talking to my new teacher as I got settled, whispering his lies, I guessed, so I wouldn’t get elevated again by anything as false as high grades.
I spotted Colin on the desk behind mine before I sat down. It was impossible not to: he was over six feet tall with cruel, slit eyes like some ancient Mongolian warrior. Also, his clothes were immaculate and made the rest of the students appear shabby. School uniform was still the rule, but his looked as if it had been tailor-made for him—the white shirt glowed and his necktie was pinned with a gold stud. Sat next to him, as his perfect foil, was a scruffy little youth I’d seen but did not know. Colin I did, as he was notorious for his fighting and bullying. I’d managed until now to avoid him as the caste system in school was absolute, 'A' group not mixing with 'B' and so on, down to our own version of the untouchables: the remedials.
I began to breathe in an unclean smell, and sense a threat of violence and anger in the classroom; I wished I was back with my own kind and had not been led into this by my act of defiance. ‘Shave my head,’ I nearly cried out as one of the boys farted and another burped loudly, ‘do anything you want, only get me out of here’.
After a bit though, I began to enjoy myself. The questions were easy and basic; the answers given, beyond my wildest imagination. This one small step down the academic ladder and there was a different world to explore. "Please, Julia," the teacher pleaded, "you can do better than that, please try again." The girl, who looked about ten years older than any of the girls I’d just left behind, stretched her shapely, long legs even further into the aisle, shook a mass of red hair and looked at the teacher as if she might swallow him whole. "Fucking no way," a boy called out. This did get a response. "All you little boys go 'fuck fuck fuck' but none of you ever do; not one of you ever really goes for it."
"Okay, Julia," the teacher said without looking surprised at her outburst. "Now, if it takes two men two hours…"
I heard Colin speak to the boy seated next to him: "Give me the answer, Jackson, quickly." Jackson whispered it to him. He was wrong, but only just. For some reason, I turned halfway round and gave Colin the correct one. His almost-black, deep eyes flashed between the two of us. He stretched his hand up, ruler straight to the ceiling, and I noticed a couple of hands go down immediately. "Yes, Colin?" the teacher asked, looking relieved to escape Julia who had kept staring at him while crossing and uncrossing her legs, as if counting on the only abacus she knew she’d ever need. Colin gave him my answer. "Well done," the teacher said, "Very good. Carry on like this, and you will be moving up to take our new friend’s vacated place."
A second later I heard a blow land and Jackson grunt. It was followed by another and another, and carried on until the end of the lesson with each hit sounding harder and more vindictive than the previous. As we left the class I saw Colin walk away and leave Jackson slumped over the desk with his shoulders rising and falling as he sobbed. Before I reached the playground Colin was by my side and hardly strayed from then on.
*
Girls did not like Colin. The reasons, at first, lay beyond my understanding. He was tall, good looking in an exotic way, and always wore expensive and very fashionable clothes. He was also more mature than the rest of the guys in the same year and had even started shaving. Yet each time we’d managed to entice any girls into one of the many ornamental shelters that lay along the seafront or inside the scenic gardens, they made it obvious he stood no chance with them. Then he gave me a practical demonstration of what their more highly-developed instincts must have warned them about.
I was walking through our small town with Colin when I spotted Lil. She was a dark-haired, very pretty, second-year student that I’d taken to the cinema twice and I wanted to become my 'steady'. Walking with her was a charity case called Mo. If you’d wanted to find a female opposite to Colin then she was it. Mo was short and dumpy with clothes that had been cut and assembled by some mad grandmother who followed her in and out of school on a bike. I’d have judged that this girl would be grateful of attention from any boy, and put Colin down as the most unlikely choice.
However, we all ended up in a shelter that evening with Lil and me squeezed together and deciding between a spy film or spaghetti western for our next date. I put my arm around Lil and could not believe how soft and alluring she felt. Colin was sat in the corner. He was wearing a double-breasted, mustard-coloured suit and high, carved boots. His legs stretched out from the seat and rested on the small wall at the front of the shelter where Mo was sitting. I saw one of his feet move and rest against her leg. She looked petrified. Then he sprang. He started tossing her around as if trying to shake her out of her clothes. It was so comical that I could not stop myself from laughing out loud; Lil was staring wide-eyed, but smiling. When Colin stood Mo rigid and white directly in front of him, her little tits exposed, and began tugging her baggy trousers and pants down, it stopped being funny. He suddenly shoved one of his large, muscular fingers inside her so hard that both her feet came off the ground and she dangled there without making a sound. Lil leapt up and dragged her cataleptic friend away. She stood Mo outside and started to get her rearranged while Colin sat back down and stared at his finger.
"Nicely done," I said, watching the two girls rush their way through the maze of small geometrical flowerbeds and moonlit patches of sea-washed lawn.
"I know what the other guys say about her," Colin said, "but I like Mo anyway. Maybe we could go on a double date to the cinema one night."
And I knew he was being serious.
*
It wasn’t just the girls who were being driven off by Colin, it was also my friends. I’d been hanging around with him (in and out of school) for about three months now and none of them could see what I had in common with him. The funny thing was, if I stopped and thought about it, neither could I. And yet, though I understood their loathing and fear of him, there was some inexplicable need that kept us together.
One time we were strolling along the seafront past the amusement arcades and open-fronted cafes. Outside the pier entrance there was a heavy old leather punch ball hanging from a wire. Behind it there was a pressure plate with a dial and a brass pointer that spun round and, for a coin, recorded the weight of the punch. A group were gathered in front of it; two men were showing off to their families. It was what we had come to regard as a typical holidaymaker scene: tarty-looking women in skimpy swimsuits, pale and rippling with cellulite, and brutish, dirt-ingrained factory workers, with their brats, tar-stained from another oil spill, sunburnt like crab shells. One of the men was huge and matted with black bristling hair. His friend was in ecstasy at the power of the punch the gorilla-like man had just landed, sending the needle about three quarters of the way round. "The same as Sonny Liston and Joe Louis," he read out in a loud voice. Colin was dressed in a lime-green suit with a button down collar shirt. I saw one of the women look him over and start smiling. The man who was doing the bragging saw it too. He pointed up at the dial, "What do you think of that, boy?" he grunted to Colin.
The woman stopped trying to push her cleavage into the sky and looked down at the floor. The man who’d landed the punch was still swaggering. Colin took his jacket off, folded it neatly and handed it to me. He undid the top button of his shirt, slipped a coin into the machine, and hit the punch ball with a short, chopping right. The needle reached the end of the dial and made a heavy clunk as it thumped against the stop. He took his coat back and walked off with me skipping along to catch up. I could hear angry voices coming from behind claiming that the machine must be broken.
"That was nothing like my full power," Colin stated, "not even close. You could have beaten that fat ape’s punch if you’d wanted."
I smirked, knowing in truth that one of those women could probably have slapped the bag harder with a boney, painted hand than I could manage. I was, I felt in my heart, a weak coward who had always been too smart to get caught or ever put to the test.
I’d never been bullied though; and never been a bully. In fact, to see anyone hurt, physically or mentally, by a stronger person would haunt me long after the event until I loathed myself for not having tried to rescue them. As I said, a coward, but not without, I’d always believed, some saving grace. But now I was with someone who was the ultimate bully. And I was, through my association, becoming his victim as much as any of the others.
*
Christian Wills was one of Colin's main targets. He liked to catch him in town and head him off to some place of imprisonment. And I’d helped this last time, walking along by his other side, as if the three of us were inseparable, until we got him into a bus shelter. Colin had practised different martial arts blows on him. Ones that were supposed to have injured and others meant to cure. Each one, though, had done nothing but add more pain. Christian had tried to bolt out of the door and I’d blocked his way. He was taller and heavier than me and I read in his eyes the knowledge that he could probably pass; then what the cost of that would be.
"I haven’t done anything to you," he said, turning to face the kick that could collapse a leg. He fell to the floor, crying out in pain, and clung to the low wooden bench. I looked at the names carved through the layers of paint into the clean dry wood below: messages of who loved whom, and felt as cold as most of those seaside holiday romances were by now.
Later that day, I was walking alone along the high street, trying to justify why I’d allowed myself to become involved in such an event and what I was going to do about it, when a car pulled over. A fat little woman and an old man rushed out. "How dare you bully our son," the woman cried. The two of them had me trapped against the glass front of a shoe shop. "You are a mean little coward," the man said. Christian looked out from the back of the car. I’d heard that his parents belonged to some small religious group and that Christian was their only child; a gift from God late in their lives. People were stopping and watching us. I looked at the shoes in the window display and envisaged myself stepping from baby's first into light, teenage fashions, before ending up as some thug in steel-capped heavy work boots.
"I’m sorry," I said. “I will never let it happen again. I swear it to you.” I meant it, but could see that they did not believe me. They got in and drove away. It was Friday. I did not go to school on Monday and Colin used the occasion to knock my long-time best friend, Eric, into oblivion.
*
Eric had tried, for the sake of our friendship, to accept Colin. He lived a long way off in the countryside and we rarely got together outside of school days. He understood that I wanted to go out and that Colin was at least near. The few weekends that we’d managed to spend in each other’s company, I deliberately excluded Colin, as he was determined to provoke Eric. Break time at school there was nothing I could do though, and it was becoming a major effort to keep them separated. The rest of my friends took no part in the struggle but seemed glad that Eric was always willing to stand up to him.
On this day, according to one of the others, Colin kept baiting Eric until he had no choice but to respond physically. Eric told me later that he’d not even seen the punch coming. One second after taking a step toward Colin, he’d mumbled to me, there was just pain and blackness. Then he had found himself in the school surgery, covered in blood, with a fractured jaw.
Eric was already a fine and sensitive musician and yet, as I sat visiting him in his sickbed, he had no song except one of revenge, which made him seem much more deeply injured than any bruised face and wired jaw could explain.
I went round to Colin's home, for the first time, to have it out with him. It was a tall old house on the esplanade, weathered and smooth, with streams of green stains weeping from fissures in the walls. He lived with his mother and a man who he said was an 'uncle'. His father, Colin claimed, had disappeared under ‘mysterious circumstances’ he was not allowed to divulge. A woman opened the door and I found myself looking at the mirror image of Colin. I knew, instantly, that it was she who picked all his clothes and made sure he was immaculately turned out everyday. His mother directed me to stand on a sheet of newspaper while she went to fetch Colin.
As soon as she was out of sight, the 'uncle', a short, waxy-skinned man, crept through the kitchen and up a little stairway. Colin and his mother walked back along the corridor arm in arm. I’d spoken to his mother every time I phoned him. She never once asked who I was or made any comment. Now she stood in the doorway, hands on hips, glaring down at me. "I will show you the basement," Colin said, "it’s going to be my own place." I tried to smile at his mother as we moved off but she was staring through me.
The basement was reached by a door at the bottom of some steps at the damp north side of the house. Colin had a key and a flashlight. The inside was derelict and smelled of decay mixed with an odour of something seeping in from the nearby sea. Old furniture and stacks of metal-framed beds that looked as if they’d come from an institute, filled room after room and lined the long corridor. At the end of it, Colin opened a double door into a large room and switched on an overhead light. "This," he said, "could be our den." A couple of old leather chairs had been placed either side of a gas fire. The rest of the room was hidden in shadows and felt empty. "We could do it up together and you could stay over, if you wanted. Though Uncle mustn't know as he’d be down here like a shot, drinking his hooch and going goggle-eyed over his dirty mags."
"What did you hit Eric for?" I asked. I made myself hear Eric, singing out his hatred over and over, as I took my stand. “He was trying to be your friend. He is mine. I don’t want you touching him again. Do you follow me?”
Colin looked up at the ceiling. A thin cord went through the bend of a large metal hook and hung down. The other end led away and was secured to the floor by another hook. Colin reached alongside one of the chair cushions and pulled out a bayonet. It was about two feet long and the blade gleamed like mirror glass. "It’s German," Colin said: "they made the best." He attached it to the cord, then placed a candle in a bottle under the other end of the string. He lit it and lay under the blade, quickly tying a woman's black silk scarf over his eyes as soon as he was in the right position. Then we waited. If the weapon did make any noise as it fell fast and heavily in that silence, it was out of the range of my hearing. Colin rolled instantly, and the bayonet sliced deeply into the wooden floor inches away from his throat.
"Tell ‘Eric the Bold’ this is the initiation test, if he still wants in with us that is. Once he passes, I’ll leave him alone."
*
School had started preparing us for work. The science teacher—with his presumed understanding of genetics —acted as the careers officer for the baddies and the likely ‘drop-outs’ (a new expression that I was beginning to associate with more and more). "Come in, sit down," he’d order. Then, after a couple of minutes of asking what seemed like interested questions, he’d announce either: "Factory" or "Farm." I got the factory along with just about every other boy he interviewed. The lower grades went agricultural. The girls all got sent to do extra domestic science. Colin refused to discuss what he’d been offered. Someone said that they’d seen his mother go in with him and he was in there for ages.
The best years of your life, everyone kept telling us as the end got closer. I’d hated school and its repression from the day I’d entered it and could not wait to get free. Eric felt the same, and we made a promise never to hide the truth of this in any nostalgia as a sop to years of wearing uniforms, marching into religious assembly, getting beaten and called little failures 'Sir', as they tried to squeeze any beauty of knowledge and learning into two dimensional flatness.
Eric and I were together that weekend walking through town—Colin had said he was going to be away again—hinting that it was to do with his career which was snowballing into something deep and mysterious. "And the only reunion we will ever go to," Eric added to our agreement, "is the one where all the teachers come naked and we get to do the flogging."
Christian Wills stepped out of the bus shelter where I’d once helped imprison him. I wouldn’t have cared if it was to beat up on me for that day; in fact, the way it still affected me, it would have been a blessing.
"What is it, your Holiness," Eric said lightly, "out looking for converts?"
Christian was leaving school and going to a special college to train to be a priest.
"I took the test," he said looking directly at me. "The initiation test. Colin let me do it."
"What’s he banging on about now?" Eric stared at the two of us, as I’d not told him anything about Colin's den or offer.
"I know where he hides his key," Christian said. "And I have something to show you both. It’s a secret. Colin's greatest secret."
I could see in Christian's expression a look of joyous revenge.
“Ah, the blessed sanctity of the confessional,” Eric joked, which he always did if he felt he’d missed something or was being left out.
We followed Christian, creeping along the back streets with their bulging and leaning, seaside cottages; they looked like ships washed ashore but still undergoing some sea change. One of them even had a figurehead stretching her long neck out of the wall and turning the gray road below golden and flesh-hued as she crumbled in this graveyard of dryness.
"Colin has gone away for a while," Christian told us. "I went along with his bullshit and tricked him into letting me take the initiation test before he left. He went with his mother and they were carrying suitcases."
"Where?" I asked, wondering if Colin had needed Christian as my replacement since I’d deliberately been distancing myself from him recently; or if he’d been hoping for a more tragic outcome from his victim’s attempt at bravery.
"It’s supposed to be a big secret," Christian said, smirking. "But he told me that he was training for a special mission and one day we would all hear about it."
We reached the seafront and the tall esplanade houses. Christian made us stand outside the yard and wait as he went to collect the key from its hiding place. I looked at Colin's house, which appeared to have aged since I’d last seen it some weeks back.
"He is still there,” Christian stated: “Colin's uncle. On the bottle now his fancy woman has left him.” He stared at me waiting to gauge my reaction, which I kept to myself.
Finally, we edged our way round the base of the house. Christian opened the door. A few seconds later we stood in Colin's den. "Look," Christian said. In the middle of the room the bayonet was still sticking in the floorboards. Next to it there was a dark stain. "That's not it though," he said, rubbing his collar-bone,"that’s not what I brought you to see. It’s in here."
He moved to a small, low door that I’d not noticed during any of my visits to this room.
"This is Colin's real secret," he said, pushing the door open and ducking to enter. “I crept in and found this after he’d left.”
A row of dull bluish lights filled the butler's pantry with a pale, cold glow. The figures were everywhere: wall to wall shelves full of them and small raised stages on the floor with groups posed in different tableaux.
"Dolls!" Eric exclaimed. "Mr. Super Hero plays with dolls?"
"Action Man," Christian told us, as if we did not recognize them. "He has every version and uniform and piece of equipment ever made."
Eric stared at me as if he suspected I must have already known all about it. "Bloody hell," I said, "no wonder he wanted to keep this quiet. What a tit."
Eric had lost interest in anything I had to say; he was staring at the figures and beginning to understand what the scenes laid out on the floor really meant. I looked down with him and began to see. Christian already knew and was watching to see our reactions.
Though there were endless variations of features and uniform, one figure was identical and repeated many times: an immaculately dressed and clean shaven hero. Always this character was included in one of the sets. Christian pointed at the prison. A small cowering version of the model, dressed in rags, was kneeling on the rough wooden floor of a small cell or cage made from evenly-spaced metal bars. Towering above him was his captor and interrogator. He held a minute syringe in one hand and an electrical prod in the other with a coiled wire trailing back to an intricately-built, working generator. A little blood and a few burns coated the naked torso of the prisoner who had a discarded crucifix at his feet and was signing a sheet of paper in red ink.
“I guess I must have sold my soul pretty quickly,” Christian said without smiling.
Eric was looking at a fight. A crowd of soldiers from many different countries and regiments surrounded a boxing ring. In the centre the hero raised one of his arms in triumph. Stretched out on the canvas lay his opponent. The figure of Action Man had been altered into some caricature of a hippy; long hair and beads, a pair of cut-off denims and sandals. The whole of the body had been ingrained with dirt and scabs except for the hands which had been remade out of some white marble-like substance, long and delicate fingers spread out as if spanning the octaves, regardless of the body and surroundings.
Slowly, I began to recognize many other people from school, though not the images he was portraying. I looked around for one of me, and saw it. A firing squad in First World War uniforms. Of course, he was the handsome lieutenant with his sword raised, ready to fall. I was tied to the post, dressed as he must have imagined some poet would have appeared. I could remember telling him that I thought the only good thing to have come out of any war was the poetry of the Great War, and that my greatest hero was Wilfred Owen. Only this poet was not dying in the trenches alongside his doomed comrades, he was being executed, according to the sign around his neck, for cowardice and treason.
"I am going to bring every single person from school he’s ever bullied to see this," said Christian, interrupting my growing feeling of shame. "Then when he comes back everyone will be ready. Let him have his humiliation for the rest of his life around here. It will be good for his soul.”
Eric patted Christian on the back. “Father, you have been good for mine already,” he said, in a lighter voice than he’d used since Colin had flattened him.
We heard heavy footsteps moving above our heads and carefully began to move out. I was the last to leave and saw, tucked away so that it could only be properly viewed with the door closed, his final vision spread out on a large plinth. I took it in silently as I did not want Eric or Christian to see this. I kicked the whole thing to pieces dragging my foot quickly over the group of naked or bizarrely adorned figures that were all copulating in different positions with the reluctant-looking hero and, worst of all, the one genuine female doll, older and serene, who was watching the perversions with a huge painted grin still glistening and moist. I don’t know why I felt I owed Colin some small grace, but I did.
I knew as we moved towards the seawall, and Christian began to list the next visitors in his planned revenge, that Colin would never return. I saw his 'Uncle' watching us move away from the already dusty window and could see in his eyes that he knew the same and was glad, relieved to be free.
*
In a small place like this, things turn out pretty much as you’d guess they would, mostly.
Eric became the great musician, playing just about everywhere and with everyone. Collecting dolls of his own—blonde, leggy and always vacuous. I have not got shot yet for cowardice or poetry; though it sometimes feels like it gets pretty close. The rest keep on doing just about what that old Frankenstein laboratory put them together for. And Colin's name still comes up. With a different story for every need. For all anyone knows he may be back in disguise, watching every slip and fall.
Christian did not become a priest. Or if he did, somewhere along the way he lost his faith and began searching for another icon.
I was watching the regional news when a story came on about a local man who had been travelling the world searching for the body of Sir Francis Drake, who’d been placed in a lead casket and dropped in a warm sea too many miles from home. He’d given up everything to find the remains and had finally succeeded. Now he was trying to get permission and the interest from the naval hero's own nation to have the body brought back and given a proper burial. The piece ended with a clip showing Christian diving down to the lead casket with, of all things, a wreath of plastic flowers. Drifting down through the clear, still ocean like someone hanging from a thread, invisible but unbreakable.
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