LITMIR.BIZ

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Sunset Strip, he grooms it constantly with a comb, which he tracks with his other hand to smooth down or push up where necessary. And he stares ahead so intently that you’d think he was looking in a mirror.

      ‘Don’t you Madge me, you cheeky bugger. Mrs Smith to you.’ She puts her hands on her hips. ‘Billy Driscoll, what are you doing hanging around with the likes of him?’

      ‘Nothing much, Mrs Smith, is Jojo around?’ Like mentioning football scores, asking your own questions can help to change the subject.

      ‘Over East Lane Market with his dad.’

      ‘Can I give you a hand Ma— isis Smith?’ says Rooksy.

      ‘Give me a hand, you dirty bleeder? You’ll get my hand around your ear if you come it with me. Go on, out of it. Why can’t you play football like other kids?’

      Football? Rooksy? On the rare occasions he joins in our street matches, his short-lived efforts range between bored wandering about and surprisingly aggressive tackling. We play ‘first-to-ten’ and when one side reaches five, we change ends. This is when Rooksy sods off.

      ‘Sorry Madge, I mean Mrs …’

      Blasted by her fierce look, we turn and squat down behind the wall. Rooksy cowers, ready for her to lean over and aim a clout at him. When she doesn’t, he sits back, closes his eyes and starts rubbing his crotch, whispering, ‘Oh Madge, fa-abulous flesh.’

      I want to run away but sit tight rather than let him know I’m a bottler, especially as I’m now looking into the grinning face of the one person who does know this. I’ve forgotten that John is with us. My younger brother is crouched by the kerb and smiling, not so much at Rooksy’s antics as at my ‘scared face’. His eyes widen as he opens and closes his mouth like a goldfish. He claims this is how I look when I’m frightened. I haven’t seen this face myself but I suspect that it’s a fair description. John has his faults but he rarely tells lies. I’d like to show him what his scared face looks like but he hasn’t been frightened often enough to develop one. As far as I know, he has no interest in Madge or the differences between bosoms and tits. This should make me feel more grown up than he is, but it doesn’t.

      He turns away and, with his fingers, starts killing the winged ants that are filing suicidally in columns along the gutter. We all kill crawlies but John uses bare hands to squash large spiders and beetles that we would only tread on. As he presses down on the ants, his back broadens into a smaller version of our dad’s, and the sight of John’s flat shoulder blades moving under muscle has me straightening up.

      On our sideboard there’s a photo of me, taken a couple of years ago by a beach photographer at Brighton. I hate it but Mum keeps it because, she claims, she likes my smile – not because it’s a big print and the only one that fits her favourite silver frame. I’m standing on Olive Oyl legs and wearing woollen swimming trunks that sag from non-existent hips. My arm is raised in an embarrassed wave that accentuates the white hoops of my ribs.

      Skinny arms may have given me a whip-like throw but they’re no good for the important skills, like fighting or looking good in short-sleeved shirts. However, things are getting better at last and there are clear signs that I am going to have biceps after all. Others have noticed too, not least Aunt Winnie, who has stopped putting her arms around me and John to present us as Charles Atlas before and Charles Atlas after.

      Rooksy, eyes closed, is chanting softly while pretending that he’s wanking ‘… ninety-nine, a hundred, change hands, don’t care if I do die.’

      I shuffle away from him and settle for just thinking about girls and what nestles under bras and knickers. I often ache, really ache, to see breasts close up on women like Madge – or girls like Christine Cassidy, who sticks hers out in case you don’t notice them. Some chance, she’s built like a young Aunt Winnie. I’d still love to know what they feel like. I’ve seen naked women on a pack of Rooksy’s playing cards but the pictures were disappointingly indistinct in areas where I’d have welcomed more detail. When you flicked through them, the women cavorted about, arching back or bending over, while always managing to look as if they were about to give you a kiss. Of course, I made the appreciative noises that Rooksy expected but closer examination revealed that there weren’t fifty-two different women but a hard-working half-dozen. Viewed one at a time, there was nothing happy or sexy about their smiles and, although I didn’t mention it to Rooksy, their flesh was far from fabulous.

      The best pictures are in my head. Lying in bed, eyes shut; I can picture girls I actually know, without their clothes. These images are hard to hang on to and my brain could do with a ‘vertical hold’ button to stop them sliding from view. But no matter how fleetingly they appear before me, at least their flesh is fabulous.

      ‘You still here?’

      Madge’s face looms over us like God’s on the church ceiling.

      Rooksy rolls to one side, pulling his hand from inside the top of his trousers. Madge notices but she focuses on me. ‘Get out of here, Billy Driscoll, now, and don’t think that what he’s doing is clever, ’cos it’s not!’

      ‘No, Mrs Smith’.

      Rooksy catches my eye. His smile disappears and I wince at having betrayed the shameful truth that I agree with Madge.

      As he scrambles to his feet, he makes the mistake of pushing down on John’s shoulders. John spins around, fists clenched. ‘Get off me.’

      ‘John!’ Madge screams. John freezes. Rooksy’s smile returns as he holds up his hands. Madge points a finger at him. ‘And you, Peter Rooker, next time you’ll be sorry.’

      ‘Sorry … Cheerio then Madge.’

      ‘What?’ She scoots after him as far as she can along her side of the wall.

      He jogs away laughing.

      Before she goes indoors, she flashes me an angry glance. When I look at John, he gives me the gasping-fish face.

      Fish, Fags and Devil Cat

      I’m sitting, feet up, on the bench in the shady corner of our backyard. Lord of the Flies is face down on my knees while I picture the dead parachutist swinging in the trees.

      I’ve just come to the uncomfortable conclusion that if I were one of the boys on the island, I’d soon be exposed as less than heroic. For relief I ponder the easier subject of how quickly the dead parachutist’s face would rot in heat like this.

      ‘Billy, ducks, run and get us a packet of Weights and a bit of fish for Chris will you?’ Ada Holt is leaning out of her kitchen window above me. What could be her last fag is hanging from the corner of her mouth.

      ‘Up in a minute Mrs Holt.’

      Ada lives on the ground floor. Getting to her flat involves going up to the street and in through the main front door. It’s never locked because no one in the flats upstairs wants to answer knocks that might not be for them. Our street is made up of large terraced houses that were once Victorian family homes but have now been carved into flats and single-room lets. The houses are fronted by iron railings at street level from where stone steps dogleg down to the ‘areas’ belonging to basement homes like ours. In another era, our front door would have been opened only to tradesmen.

      On the wall at the top of our steps, the cheap cream paint fails to cover the words AIR RAID SHELTER and an arrow pointing down to our two coal cellars. During the War, they were damp, distempered refuges from German bombs. Ada cowered in one of them the night her house next door was firebombed. Today she lives on the same floor in our house with only a party wall between her and the charred shell of her old home. Twenty years on, it remains open to the weather and when it rains, damp seeps down through to our flat and glistens on the passage wall. In winter, John and I can play noughts and crosses in the condensation.

      Only one cellar is used for coal. The other is used as a storeroom, where all the things that Mum won’t

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