Stromboli. I was the only boy in the class who had no desire to sit next to old Smelly Pants. She was very bold for a girl of eight. I’d heard all about her and didn’t want to go anywhere near her cotton tops.
Brother O’Hare had written a line from a psalm on the blackboard: ‘Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer.’ Our job was to copy it into our exercise books with as much precision as possible. Erasers were not allowed. The task was one of concentration. I’d done a brilliant job and was up to the ‘prayer’ bit when Paula grasped my knee and squeezed. My leg shot up and banged the bottom of the desk, causing my hand to leap forward with the pencil. I finished the word but it now read, ‘Hear my cry, O God, listen to my player.’ I looked at it for a while. There was no way to repair the damage without an eraser. The clock was ticking. I wedged a small V before ‘player’ and wrote the word ‘record’ above it. At least it now made sense.
‘You think you’re funny, don’t you, Corker.’ O’Hare had gripped my shoulder and was digging his fingers into the flesh.
The other children were looking at me.
‘It’s Corkle, sir. I was just trying to—’
‘—be the class clown. Corker, you’ll stay here during lunchtime and write out the entire psalm.’
Paula squeezed my knee again as Brother O’Hare turned back to the blackboard. I twisted in my seat, ready to drive a pencil into her thigh, but stopped with my hand in mid-air. She had lifted her dress and pulled down her knickers. I was staring at a bare pink mound. I looked up at Paula’s face. She was smiling, oblivious to the frightening non-event in her underpants. It was bad enough watching men and women kiss on television but to have the Stromboli mound at my elbow was more than I could stand. I turned to the front and put up my hand, waving it about until I got the brother’s attention.
‘Yes, Corker.’
The class laughed.
‘It’s Corkle, sir.’
‘Yes, Corker.’
The class laughed again.
‘Brother O’Hare, can I swap seats with Ralph Waters?’
‘No you cannot.’ He turned back to the blackboard and resumed writing.
‘Excuse me, Brother O’Hare.’
‘What now, Corker?’
The class laughed again.
‘Can I swap seats with Robbie Skint?’
‘No. Now be quiet!’
‘Could I just stand then?’
Brother O’Hare marched up to my desk and pulled me out of my chair. ‘You want to stand? Then stand still now.’
He yanked out my hand and hit the palm six times with his wooden ruler. I sat back down cradling what felt like a throbbing baseball mitt at the end of my left arm.
Ralph Waters approached me at playtime. I would’ve run off but I was scraping the hundreds and thousands off a fairy cake and didn’t see him coming. Ralph was one of the toughest kids of my year. He was skinny and sinewy. His blond hair was cut extremely short with barber’s clippers and his nails were chewed to crumbs. Ralph spent the breaks playing with plastic soldiers under the white-painted tyres that some genius had half buried in the playground as a stepping-stone game. No one ever stepped on them because they were placed too far apart for primary-school children. The older kids never went near them because they were in the primary section of the school.
‘I know what you were doing. Thanks for that, Corky.’
I didn’t bother correcting Ralph. He was one of the few people I’d allow to mispronounce my name.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Did you see her keyhole?’
Ralph was standing there smiling, waiting for me to confirm the sighting of Paula Stromboli’s thing. He’d never spoken to me before. I knew I had to prove something or I was going to be in trouble. Ralph was one of those who singled out boys and ridiculed them for being poofters. This was a regular sport at St Kevin’s. Gary Jings was a poofter and everyone knew it. He had a girl’s shiny pink pencil case and drew swirly things in art class. He even folded the hems of his shorts up like fancy trouser cuffs. Gary Jings paid for these crimes at lunchtime when he sat on his own near the caretaker’s shed pretending to read while kids circled and yelled things like ‘bum-kisser’.
I didn’t call Gary names. I watched others ridicule him and felt sick inside. It was fear and frustration. I felt drawn to and disgusted by Gary Jings. He should’ve known better than to display his poofterism. There were several boys who did it at St Kevin’s but we kept our activities to ourselves. There was a place for that sort of thing and that place was the nature reserve behind the bike sheds.
It wasn’t right the way Gary always bore the abuse. He sat passively with his knees pressed together, occasionally looking up with a dull smile and a faint spark of hope in his eyes. This only infuriated thugs like Ralph who would then administer a Chinese burn or half-Nelson. It was awful to watch the torture of Gary Jings. He never tried to run away. He just went limp and took it. He should’ve denied being a poofter and hidden his pencil case but he didn’t. The one thing I didn’t want to be in life was a Gary Jings.
Ralph narrowed his eyes. I had to prove I was as much a man as him. I looked down at the fairy cake and the hundreds and thousands that were stuck to my fingers. When I looked up, I met Ralph’s eyes with a piercing stare.
‘Yeah.’
Ralph smiled. It was a man-of-the-world smile. We understood each other. I was the sort of boy who regularly looked inside girls’ underpants. Ralph liked me and it felt good. I tightened the grip on my fairy cake.
‘Why did you ask old O’Hairs if you could stand up?’
The fairy cake collapsed in my hand, sending crumbs flying over the front of my shorts.
‘You know.’
‘Nah.’
‘I was just, ah, just trying to stir up old Hairsie.’
‘He was so mad. Did he hurt you?’
This was a stupid question. Ralph was only too familiar with O’Hare’s ruler. Being hit over the hand with a slab of wood was incredibly painful. It was a white pain that made your ears go silent with blood pressure.
‘Nah.’
‘Yeah, O’Hairs is too weak. He’s a big fairy. Brother O’Fairy. Ha, ha.’ Ralph bent his wrists like Kenneth Williams and paraded around in front of me. ‘You think he’s seen Stromboli’s keyhole?’
The idea of Brother O’Hare poking around inside Paula Stromboli’s underpants made me want to laugh out loud in Ralph’s face. I controlled myself. Ralph didn’t know a thing.
‘Yeah I bet he has.’
‘She’s a slut.’
I
