Toast (16 page)

The school bus drops me at the bottom of the hill and I walk up, rain or shine. Sometimes I stop to pick primroses or to piss in the woods. Sometimes I scuff my shoes kicking the great piles of horse chestnut leaves that are pushed to the side of the road by the speeding cars, other times I just trudge up to the top.

I often dawdle, making up a story about how the coach broke down if Joan says anything about my being late. Today I walk parallel with the road but quite deep into the woods. There are a few last bluebells and the odd catkin, there are bright green leaves on the cobnuts and there are ramsons – wild garlic – underfoot. Even with all this new young growth, there is something slightly sinister about the woods. It's like someone is always watching you.

There are often crackles as you walk. Rabbits usually and sometimes squirrels. My father tells me it's probably a yeti or a one-armed man like the Fugitive. The crackling twigs
are heavier than usual today, but they've gone quiet now. I don't normally come this deep into the woods. Suddenly I catch a glimpse of a man, a tall man with long hair, about twenty or twenty-five, with tight faded jeans and a tweed jacket with elbow patches. He's just standing there by the trunk of a tree, partly covered by the thin branches of a young cobnut bush, looking down at the ground. He's got his dick out, like he is having a pee.

But he's not peeing. He's wanking, slowly sliding his hand back and forth, his jacket pulled right back with his other hand, allowing me a perfect view. I am not sure whether I should run or stay. I want to watch what he's doing but my breathing is so loud and I'm starting to tremble. He seems oblivious to me, though I must be only ten feet away. There are prickles on the back of my neck, just under my hairline.

He carries on, a little faster now. Then suddenly he glances my way, for a second, maybe even less, then carries on. I think he's seen me. I'm not sure. I want to cough, my mouth is so dry. I wet my lips with my tongue. My mouth tastes furry. Slowly, the man turns his head towards me and looks straight at me. Then he turns his whole body to face me, still wanking. He motions to me, impatiently with his head, his eyebrows furrowed. His face is young, like the guy in the Small Faces, but his skin is darker, like he spends more time out of doors. I give a tiny smile, a quivering smile, and start to walk away. I'm shaking properly now and my tummy's turning over and over and there's
a bitter taste in my mouth. I take big steps over the mossy logs and into the brambles, clutching my satchel to my side to stop it catching on the twigs. The man is about six feet behind me and taking huge strides towards me. The twigs snap loudly. I'm almost at the road but there's a wide wet patch, like a shallow pool, in the way and the ground is getting boggy. I'm trying to walk on tiptoe. Suddenly my left foot comes out of its shoe. I sort of hop-leap the last bit of water and slip, but only slightly, on the dry bank, then right myself. I'm on the road now and there's the sound of a lorry whining weakly in the distance. My foot touches the tarmac and I suddenly feel safe. I glance behind me without stopping. The man has gone. I walk on, hot and red and itchy, wondering how I am going to explain to Joan about the shoe.

Some chocolate bars were considered adult territory. They were not labelled as such and whether the chocolate was dark or light didn't really come into it. The distinction was more subliminal. After Eights, Terry's Chocolate Orange, Toblerone, Dark Chocolate Bounty (the one with the red wrapper), Bournville, Black Magic, Fry's Peppermint Cream, even Matchmakers were all considered as unsuitable for a young boy as watching an episode of ITV's raunchy
Armchair Theatre.

Even kids' stuff had its limitations. Mars Bars and Topics were shrouded in some mysterious etiquette. My father used to cut his into slices, put them on a plate in a neat line and eat each piece like it was an expensive chocolate. That way, he could make a bar last through a whole episode of
The Avengers.
Putting any chocolate bar straight into my mouth was forbidden. Except, for some mysterious reason, a Milky Way. Obviously it was a size thing. I had to break off each piece of Mars with my fingers and pop it into my mouth. Biting it straight from the bar was probably enough to get me sent to my room. I am not quite sure what he would have done if I had sucked the chocolate off a Mars the way Joan did – wiggling the bar from side to side as she came to the end of each long, deeply explicit suck. There was something fascinating about watching the way the milky chocolate dissolved on her tongue and left little brown stains in the corner of her mouth.

When no one was looking I would take a Mars into the woods and suck off every last little bit of chocolate. Sometimes it would be a Fry's Crunchie instead, in which case I would bite off the end then worm away at the honeycomb centre with the tip of my tongue, seeing how much of the amber sugar filling I could get to dissolve before the chocolate around it collapsed. The sticky joy of the sugar and chocolate extended tenfold by the fact that I was eating in a manner quite acceptable to any normal parent.

One day my father brought home a handful of Walnut
Whips. I preferred the coffee flavour, Joan the plain chocolate one. While sucking a Flake was not permitted, sticking my tongue deep inside a Walnut Whip was. Not only was it allowed, it was considered a game for all the family. Each of us snapping off the walnut with our teeth, then breaking into the cone of chocolate and poking our tongues deep into the hollow. On a good day you could gouge out every scrap of sweet coffee-flavoured foam. You had to curl the edges of your tongue up to get it in, but you could happily get to the bottom. So thick was the chocolate shell on a Walnut Whip that there was no danger of it collapsing.

Friday night became Walnut Whip night. He would bring them out during the second commercial break in
The Persuaders.
So we'd all sit round watching Tony Curtis and Roger Moore, our tongues ferreting around inside our Walnut Whips. Quite why I was encouraged to practise this particular form of culinary cunnilingus, yet was barred from sucking a Mars bar, was something my father chose not to expand upon.

I learned to love the woods. Not ours with its neat rows of carefully pruned Christmas trees, but the woods further up the road, which were less dense and had chaotic mounds of brambles with more blackberries than you could eat. I would walk for hours at the weekends, coming back with Tupperware bowls of berries which Joan made into pies with Bramley apples from the old tree in the garden.

The woods were quiet; sometimes I would see no one all afternoon. It was here I would sit and read
Cordon Bleu
magazine or the cookery pages I tore out of Joan's
Woman's Journal,
and where I would masturbate, sometimes two or three times in an afternoon. Occasionally, I'd find pages torn from porn magazines that others had left there, pictures of big-breasted women with beehive hairdos and men with moustaches and medallions round their necks.

Dad continued buying us sweets to eat in the evenings. A Cadbury's Flake for Joan, a Toffee Crisp or Walnut Whip for me. He would usually just have an Aero and his pipe. My bedtime was at nine, even during the school holidays, and before that I had to take the dog out for his nightly walk. The road was narrow and the cars would come hurtling round the bends, often just missing me and the dog on his long lead. It seemed daft to take the dangerous route when it would be much safer to walk in the other direction, but I was forbidden from going up to the reservoir. ‘It's not safe up there, the cars come at a hell of a pelt' was the old man's stern warning. In truth, the cars had a much clearer view of any pedestrian and the chances of being run down were much slimmer than the way I had been told to take.

I had no idea about the lay-by near the reservoir. I knew it existed, of course, and that at night cars would line up to look at the twinkling lights scattered round the Malvern Hills like diamonds in a necklace. On a frosty night you could see even further, each light sparkling in the cold
night air that made your face feel like a peeled grapefruit. Tucked up watching the news, neither Dad nor Joan were likely to leave their chairs and no one would know if I took the reservoir route. And anyway, I could let the dog off his lead in the lay-by.

Once the lead was off I curled it up and stuffed it in my pocket, pulled apart the cellophane bag of Walnut Whip and bit off the walnut. I could see a row of cars all facing the glittering lights of the hamlets and villages below. The river shone like an abandoned silk scarf in the moonlight. People were sitting in their cars talking, some with their arms around each other. One car, a pale green-and-white Ford Capri, appeared to have no one in it, yet was swaying violently back and forth. A foot or two closer and I could see a pair of knees, wide apart, and then a slim, bare back. Within a foot of the car I got a view of a mechanically thrusting bottom.

I must have stayed there seven or eight minutes, heart pounding, mouth parched, licking the filling from my Walnut Whip, wishing it was an ice lolly and praying the dog would stay away. Then a car door opened on the other side of the lay-by and I ducked down by the driver's door of the Capri. A guy was standing with his back to me, peeing into the hedge. I couldn't believe how he couldn't hear my heart thumping. He got back into his car. The dog spotted me crouching and came scuttling towards me. I pushed him away then stopped when I could see he thought this was the start of some new game. The Capri
suddenly stopped moving, I twisted my head round and looked gingerly up. Slowly, the driver's window opened an inch or two and a hand pushed something wet and glistening out of the window. It landed on my back, then, a second or two afterwards, a tissue followed. I shook myself, grabbed the dog by his collar and half ran, half walked, back down the hill, my heart hitting my ribcage, dropping the last bite of chocolate, the bit with the second walnut in it, behind me.

I was still panting when I pulled back the curtain that acted as the door to the cloakroom. ‘All done then?' asked Dad as he walked over and I hoicked my jacket up on to an empty peg. Then, as the light from the kitchen door flashed into the dark world of coats and wellington boots, he peered over the top of his bifocals and asked, ‘What's THAT on the back of your jacket?'

‘Oh, that ruddy dog,' I said, my stomach doing a sick-making somersault. ‘He's been slobbering everywhere again,' and I discreetly wiped a thick, shining line of semen off the back of my school blazer.

My aunt and uncle are coming for Christmas. Dad has decided to buy a hostess trolley so we can have Boxing Day tea in the sitting room. Not one of the dinky variety that is actually no more than three tin trays with wheels
and a pram handle, but the full bells and whistles number, about six feet long with a middle shelf that glides up on a spring to form a table with the top shelf. It weighs a ton. With its walnut veneer it is the sort of hostess trolley for which one needs an HGV licence.

After much debate, it is decided that the hostess trolley is to live for the rest of the year in the dining room. This will necessitate lifting it up the step from the dining room into the hall, down the step to the sitting room, down another step to the kitchen then, this time fully laden, back up to the sitting room. As labour-saving devices go this is not one of Dad's better ideas.

Auntie Elvie and Uncle Len have little time for Joan, but adore my father, who is my aunt's younger brother and whom she had, in effect, brought up.

Dad is worried that they think Joan is a ‘gold-digger' and is anxious that all will go well.

They are given Joan's room overlooking ‘the view' and she takes mine. Dad and I have to double up in his bed, which I hate because it smells of the cortisone cream he uses on his nettle rash.

Joan does us proud. Displayed on the top tier of the trolley, there's ham with tomato water lilies, tinned salmon with wafer-thin cucumber in vinegar, a dish of sliced beetroot, salad cream in a sauce boat and a veal and ham pie with an egg in the middle. There's a plate of radishes, a dish of cress and even a pickle fork for the pickled onions. ‘The tongue's for your father,' she pipes, as if anyone else
would touch the stuff. On the second tier is one of Dad's trifles with flaked almonds and tiny yellow balls on top, a plate of home-made mince pies and a jelly with mandarin orange segments in it. And, of course, there's The Cake. After thirty years of marriage Elvie can only cook chops and frozen beans so is understandably impressed by it all. ‘She does a wonderful spread,' says Elvie, her back getting straighter with every syllable.

Joan, Dad, Uncle Len and me all take a leg each and try to lift the trolley with its splendid array up the kitchen step. The trifle slides threateningly, one of the tomato water lilies falls off the ham. We decide it will be safer to unload the trolley and carry it up the step and into the sitting room, then bring all the food from the kitchen and place it on the shelves. Dad looks faintly embarrassed that the trolley has actually made more work rather than less. He pulls the toggle that allows the lower tier – trifle, cake, mince pies, jelly and, now, a Cadbury's chocolate cake too – to glide up and join the top tier to make a vast table. We all go ‘ooooo' at the appropriate moment.

Just as Dad is passing round the plates and I am handing round parcels of napkins containing the knives, forks and spoons, the toggle that supports the shelves pops out of its housing and the whole trolley collapses, throwing ham, salad cream, trifle and beetroot all over the carpet. Only the cake survives unscathed.

‘Oh, bugger, bugger and bugger again,' snaps Dad. We all rush to pick everything up, slapping it all back on plates
and into bowls, though we decide to give up on the salad cream for which Joan fetches a wet dishcloth.

‘No, no, don't fuss,' soothes Elvie, ‘it'll be fine,' as she wipes a dollop of whipped cream off the slice of boiled ham on her plate. Later, as we all silently play with our food, carefully inspecting it for dog hairs and carpet fluff, I watch my aunt wince as she politely swallows a spoonful of trifle I know very well has a pickled onion in it.