Bullies

At the height of summer in the Nineties, Otterspool Park was a cruising ground where cars passed each other languorously, endlessly along the promenade lanes, flanked by functional, waist-high shrubs.
That day was a warm, nothing kind of day. Family groups were dotted around the grass. The air was shiftless. Three lads, schoolboys, shambled across the freshly-mown swathes of grass and dog-dirt, Nike sweat-shirts wrapped around their waists. Conversations built, then broke up in the heat. Dog tongues lapped drily. The world, and its sounds were above me.They seemed abstract, miraculous as I lay on my back. Topsy-turvy figures passed by, deprived of right-way-up menace. Their forms were absurd.
Soon, however the sky with its silver floaters mired in azure began to be pervaded by a faint uneasiness. I left the book I was reading where it lay and began walking towards a shoreline hyphenated by broken-down concrete and brick shelters.Under one of them, three schoolboys were screaming at each other. Two of them, Al and Simmo were lithe, of average build.The third,Warren was short, thickset, with the vestiges and rosy bloom of childhood.

"Go'ed Al screamed "let's see yer climb tha'"
"S'easy" came Simmo's reflex."
"Yer jus'put yer'and on that brick."

"Go'ed then." Simmo pushed the other violently, sending him into the ground.There was a flurry of pushes and stumbles between the two lads before the two began scaling opposite ends of the shelter.
Warren lurched disconsolately from side to side, his embarrassment and frustration made more obvious by the posturing of the two boys. Al waved a red sweatshirt with grandiose, sweeping movements, as if at a bull.Warren felt, large, gelatinous. He did not feel like a bull. Something like fear was turning him inside out.

"Seen 'is arse" Simmo chanted in a nasal whining tone. Al joined in the goading exercise.
"Try it Warren baybee"
"'E can't Al, 'es too fat" taunted Simmo.
Warren's "fuch off" was too squashy, too camp.
The voices were rapid-firing at each other now, echoing from the walls of the shelter.
"Eh blob" Simmo continued, and he spat. The fleck of spittle had been forced, summoned up by hatred. It flew with spear-like accuracy but then fell to earth uselessly. Al added a demeaning dribble to the pursuit. The two boys erupted into cracked, adolescent laughter. Inwardly, Warren crumpled under their ruthless swagger, their double-act.
"Yer twats" he hissed. The phrase sounded odd, quizzical, like the sound of an Irish compere telling jokes about Paddy and Micky. Un-dented by Warren's tiny outburst, the lads turned up the volume, chanting in unison "I'm walkin' on the Chi-neseWa-all."
Suddenly, the elder of the two boys picked up a half-brick from somewhere inside the deep shadow of the shelter.
"Catch." The hurled half-brick struck Warren on the left shoulder.The pain should have been sharp but instead it was numbed by a greater pain inside.Warren searched for some consolation, blinded by an old, new anger but his frightened rabbit's eyes had never settled on anyone for too long.
He couldn't afford to look at the couples on the grass, whose intimacy seemed all the greater as his plight worsened. At this moment he was quite alone. He could neither protect



his soft underbelly nor his bruised mind. Fumbling for insults, he hit upon an outlandish one.Hoping to knife the heart of their prejudices, he brought out his trump card.
"Eh, Simmo-yer've gone all brown like a Paki."
The words dragged themselves thinly through the air. For an instant, the weight of prejudice had shifted to Simmo,but he shrugged it off like water off an oiled back.His brown shoulder-blades indeed seemed to mock Warren so that the insult slumped before him, corpse-like.
The lads began to circle him, their rogue-dog faces jutting out provocatively.
The desperate ploy had turned in upon itself.
Al's pugnacious features sharpened. His nut-brown, freckly face was too cheeky for words, leaving a permanent after-image across the screen of Warren's memory. It was a gargoyle, weathered by bad history. All the hidings he had ever had, all his campaigns of vengeance were etched in the curl of his lip, the rude set of his cheeks, most of all his muddied eyes.
Warren sometimes thought of his face as that of a bull-terrier, with blackcurrant eyes, whose whites showed as mean sickles.
I stood in the blotched-out sunlight. Thick hatred marred the view, marred everything.
Quite by chance, the trio lurched towards me. The elder boy had kicked Warren somewhere around waist-height, so he crumpled. The younger boy darted flick-knife glances between their victim and me. I felt suddenly stripped of all apparency and guise. Blood and anger rushed through my veins like sugar.The younger lad shot a rifle report at me, bellowed "Who-err-you lookin'at?-Eh?" His hand squirmed into a back pocket. His partner quickly caught up with him. Suddenly the two were standing before me, so close that I could feel their breath curdling on my face. They were thick as thieves.
"I'll smash yer fuckin' face in for yer" one shouted. Flecks of saliva hit me as he spoke.It felt like he already had. The indignity of just one tiny speck was too much, yet somehow I had been immobilised by it. Reeling with anger, yet paralysed by my own cowardice, I stood fixed like a bayonet. I had merely deflected interest from Warren.
"Ah sed who-er-you lookin at, -eh? EH?"
"Nobody" I replied like a dumb machine. The limping answer stoked up the fire and I was being transformed in nanoseconds into a doughy web of fear.

"Yer berrer not be." Simmo hissed between clenched teeth.
The threat further entrenched my humiliation and raised my blood to boiling point I felt sick with loathing, yet a strange force held my hands clamped uselessly by my sides.It was crushing my lungs and there was suddenly no space in which to breathe, to think.
It was as if I were being bounced between two narrow walls. "Just leave him alone, alright" I began , my voice trailing away to silence. My attempt to defend Warren sounded flat, one-dimensional..My voice was the voice of a ham-actor. "Yer wha'!?" barked the terrier Al.
"Gerrim Al " said Simmo in a lowered voice.
A strange, sickening pain shot up my spine, spreading across my shoulder-blades and filling my head with black-and-white nausea.
My nose felt wet and stung sharply. A lumpy blackness filled my chest and my ears were numbed, two cabbages on either side of my head. The twisted face of Simmo had come up to mine. My overriding urge was to push the face away. As I raised my fist, , I felt another spreading blow, this time in my belly. More than anything, I longed for the poisonous face to disappear, to evaporate.


Warren remained in my field of vision like a stigmata, a St.Sebastian, shot full of arrows, his eyes raised to the sky.His weakness clung to me. The world, in any case had turned upside-down, and I knew at that instant that I could never hunt with the hounds, no matter how many times my face had been blooded.
I was lying face down on the path. Pieces of gravel looked gigantic. Some had lodged themselves in my forehead and hands, pinpricking.The grass looked a nauseous shade, pinky-green .I heard the voices of children, distant yet with an unfamiliar harshness.They were the voices of children who had grown up too fast, neo-adults.
Over to my right, a teenaged mum yanked a clockwork toddler by the arm. The child began stumbling towards the path where I had managed a sitting position.
Her mother yelled after her "Ger'eere, Carla!"
The child's focal point was the broken torso of a doll lying near me.
The little girl shrieked, her hysterical cries succeeded by bursts of tears that died away like those of a crying doll whose intermittent jets of water stream from the eyes at the touch of a chubby finger.
The blowsI had taken had fled to the margins of my body. Mechanically, I walked, instinctively weighed up the figures who were drifting towards the edges of the park, returned to the place where I had been reading. The book was lying where I had left it, only its spine was broken and its leaves were splayed out like the wings of a crimpled, flightless bird.