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Kiss My Name Page 9


  A couple of weeks after Colin’s funeral, as Mum, Dad and I were leaving Fredericks and heading back to the car, there were about half a dozen lads outside on BMXs eating their 99s. I recognised most of them from school. They were all straddling their BMXs with their colourful frames and licking happily on their ice cream. No matter how cool your bike is, licking an ice cream cannot be done in a cool way.

  BMXing had never been my thing. I wasn’t the sportiest of kids, cricket was about the only sport I could manage and my tubby, big boned frame, did not aid my riding skills. I remember trying to do a bunny hop once and I couldn’t find the strength to lift the bike off the ground. It wasn’t the bike that was heavy. It was trying to lift my own body weight. Anyway, Phil Moss was amongst the ice cream lickers and as Mum and Dad headed towards the car, I noticed Phil Moss gesturing me towards him.

  “Can I have a word, mate?” he mumbled in a deep tone which was barely audible and at first, I was unsure whether it was aimed at me.

  “Pardon.”

  “Can I have a word, Simon?”

  I let Mum and Dad continue walking towards the car and I went to see what Phil wanted. I didn’t dislike Phil Moss, I always thought his choice of friends was poor, but I think he was short of company and gravitated towards them rather than live a life of loneliness. He was tall, spotty and had a lot of yellow heads that always looked ripe for squeezing. His hair was untidy, brown, wavy and wiry. If a judging panel of girls had been given a task to judge us both on looks, I think it would have been a no score draw.

  “I just wanted to say I was sorry to hear about your brother, Simon,” Phil said with a voice full of genuine grief.

  “Thanks.”

  “He was a good kid, I liked him a lot. He used to make us laugh.”

  “Me too.”

  “He called for me that afternoon, the afternoon he died, to see if I was coming out. I couldn’t go though, mate, my Dad had a decorating job over in Brinscall and he wanted me to strip the wallpaper with him.”

  My immediate thought was, ‘why could he not have asked Colin to go too?’ Colin would have loved that, pulling dirty great big chunks of wallpaper off someone’s lounge walls. If Colin had gone with them, he’d not have ended up going to the canal, not ended up dead.

  “Did he tell you who he was calling for next?” I asked.

  “No, mate, but when Dad and I went out, we saw him walking up Euxton Lane with Boffin. They were pissing about, pushing each other and kicking water from puddles at each other. I remember laughing at the pair of them pissing about in the rain! That will be how I remember Colin, always up for a laugh.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was massive. For the very first time, we had a sighting of Boffin and Colin together. This was proper evidence. Loads of witnesses had mentioned Colin was with someone, but no-one had ever identified him. Phil Moss just had.

  “Simon!” my Mum called after me as her and Dad opened the doors of the car.

  “Mum, just give me two minutes,” I shouted back. I wasn’t leaving now.

  “Phil,” I said, probably a little too excitedly, “no-one’s told the police who Colin was with. They knew he was with someone, but they weren’t sure who, just another boy. Have you told the police this, Phil? It could be vital evidence.”

  A look of panic swept across Phil’s face, like a sweat filled Tsunami.

  “Well, the thing is mate...”

  Phil Moss said ‘mate’ nearly every sentence, it was annoying. He wasn’t my mate.

  “The thing is...,” he continued, “I can’t be 100% sure it was Boffin. I mean it definitely looked a lot like him, but it might not have been. My Dad drives really fast. Thinking about it, it could have been anyone. Any kid our age anyway. It was definitely your Colin though, mate, I’m sure of that. Just maybe not Boffin. In fact, it probably wasn’t.”

  “You just said it was a minute ago!”

  “I think I’m getting muddled up, mate. Your Colin did use to hang around with Boffin a lot. Maybe I’m thinking of another time.”

  “Phil, my brother’s dead. For all we know, Boffin may have killed him. You need to speak to the police, Phil. Tell them you saw Colin and Boffin together.”

  “I can’t say I saw Boffin to the coppers.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’d kill me....no offense, mate.”

  “Just say it looked like Boffin then.”

  “I can’t, mate.”

  “Why not? The police aren’t going to knock on his door and tell him that it was you who shopped him in.”

  “What if he finds out though?”

  “They aren’t going to. All they will do is ask him where he was that afternoon.”

  “They’ve probably already asked him. They’ve already been ‘round to mine.”

  “Look, Phil, if you don’t tell them what you saw, then I will. You owe it to Colin to tell them.”

  Phil was looking more ashen faced by the second. My Mum called out impatiently again, I don’t know why she did that, it wasn’t as if we had an emergency meeting to go to, we were going back home. I just think sometimes parents like to make it known that their time is more precious than yours.

  “I’m coming, Mum.....just tell the police, Phil,” I urged.

  “Alright, alright! I’ll tell them, mate. That doesn’t mean Boffin did anything though, Simon, so don’t be going around blaming him, until you know what really happened.”

  I moved towards the car.

  “Thanks, Phil. You’re doing the right thing, mate. Colin would be proud of you.”

  LUKE ‘BOFFIN’ BOOTH – September 1986

  Some people should never have made it on to this earth. The very fact that they made it through the filtering system proves conclusively that either God does not exist or if he does, then he must be one of these peace loving hippies who would annoy the shit out of me. The sort of bloke who thinks we need variety. If there is a God, he must be an idiot. I have no respect for the sort of God who creates weaklings and oddballs, why should I? He’s flawed.

  A decent God, the sort of God that would actually get my respect, would be one who recognised his own screw up before conception. A God who would abort any idea of creating weird looking creatures like Timmy Anderson. Timmy Anderson is in our year at school. He is a freak. A midget. He has stumpy little arms and legs and a huge head. Honestly, his forehead is so big the rest of our class could use it as a table rather than having to go into the canteen. Now why would a clever God create that?

  We do pottery at school. If I’m honest, I’d say the Art classes we do are probably our best lessons. In pottery, if I screw up making my pot, make it too big or too little or too thick at the sides, I just grab the clay, scrunch it all together and start again. Why did God not do that with Timmy Anderson? He should have realised that he had made some defective little midget, who’s only function is to antagonise the normal ones, gone back to the melting pot and tried again. Instead of doing that, God probably got to the end of a long day of making people and was probably running short of clay. In his infinite wisdom, he must have decided he just about had enough time to make one more human, so would make the best of what he had. He probably used all the clay on the head and body and didn’t have enough left for the arms and legs. Timmy Anderson is the runt of God’s litter.

  If Timmy had any redeeming features then I may have gone a bit easier on him, but he hasn’t, none at all. I expect all midgets are hopeless at sports and Timmy is no exception. He is absolutely shit at rugby and even worse at P.E, he can’t climb the rope and I pissed myself laughing when Mr.Brand made him try to vault the pommel. There was no chance he was ever going to get over. I reckon Mr. Brand just made him do it for a laugh. I reckon Mr.Brand is like me, thinks Timmy shouldn’t even be at our school, that he should be at some school for tiny people or sent out to some island where every one is tiny like in Wizard of Oz or Willy Wonka’s factory.

  Most of the kids who are crap at sports are nor
mally swots. God has made them un-co-ordinated but intellectual, I get that. Not our Timmy though. His brain capacity is proportionate to his limbs. Tiny. I’m no genius myself but Timmy is thick and I mean really thick. As thick as the oldest oak tree in the forest.

  So that’s why I bullied him. He was just asking to be bullied. What good is a brainless midget unless somebody decides to use him for their personal amusement? I think that’s why God put him on earth, for my amusement, to be my reluctant gimp.

  TIMMY ANDERSON – September 1986

  “Just grab the little twat by his tiny arms and legs!” commanded Luke “Boffin” Booth, to his three loyal, misguided troops.

  School toilets tend to be the focal point of school bullying as it is an area that teachers will only venture into as a last resort. I had done my utmost to train my bladder to relieve itself just before school and then just after, to try to avoid the toilets myself, but this day I had reached lunchtime and knew I was going to struggle, so tried to creep in unnoticed just before afternoon lessons. I had failed.

  Boffin and his three pals followed me in, the last in, Phil Moss, standing guard, to chase anyone else in there out, bar new entrants and keep watch for suspicious teachers. I was standing at one of the urinals, school urinals were very low so even I could reach, when I felt a boot in my back, pushing me sideways and making me spray urine over the floor and the bottom of my trousers. I didn’t need to turn to know who it was, I recognised Boffin’s voice and no-one else at school gave me a hard time other than Boffin’s rabble. With my back to them, I tucked my willy back in and then tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. I am guessing it would have looked like a slapstick comedy sketch as a urine soaked dwarf, zig zagged desperately under arms and between legs of his captors for a minute or two, before Luke ‘Boffin’ Booth took control, grabbed my school tie and pulled me towards him aggressively, not caring that the tie had tightened around my neck and had begun to choke me.

  Luke Booth looked perturbed. He was a little smaller than average, freckle faced and ginger. He must have done weights though, as he was packed with muscles. Perhaps Boffin’s parents had read to him from Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” from an early age and it had dawned on him that his external features were likely to lead to childhood taunts. So, “survival of the fittest” as far as he was concerned, meant he needed to be a psychotic bully who put the fear of God into every other child. Boffin also understood the concept of safety in numbers, so surrounded himself with other young thugs who tended to enjoy partaking in the chase and capture routine. Boffin meanwhile, preferred to look on and just implement the final stages of the torture. This particular lunchtime, he felt that his ground troops had let him down.

  “Fucking hell lads! What’s the matter with you?” he asked as he reeled me in by the tie, like a fish on a rod.

  “He’s a midget,” he continued, “he can’t weigh more than a feather! Why could you not have grabbed him, you knobheads?”

  “It’s hard to grab a midget,” explained Chris ‘Pegs’ Gregory, “he’s slippery!”

  “He’s not an eel, he’s just small,” was Luke Booth’s frustrated response.

  “Anyway,” he continued with his brain obviously concluding it had now created a more imaginative retort, “you could have just grabbed his fucking huge forehead!”

  Boffin prodded his finger against my forehead angrily.

  “Look at it,” he said, “it’s massive!”

  A dwarf. I was thirteen and a half and a dwarf. I hated being a dwarf, hated wearing clothing labelled aged 4-5, hated the mickey taking, the bullying, the constant feeling of being patronised, of being the freakshow and I particularly hated being called a midget. I am not a midget, I am a disproportionate dwarf.

  My medical condition is known as achondroplasia, a bone growth disorder that means that my limbs are proportionally shorter than my head and abdomen. To answer the most often asked question, my parents are not dwarves. My father is just under six feet tall, my mother around five feet three. Approximately four out of five people with achondroplasia have normal sized parents.

  Boffin was my nemesis. The ginger nut who snapped. He tortured me. Until this incident in the boys toilets, he had never physically laid a finger on me himself though, his henchmen had always done that. Whenever he grew bored of spitting phlegm on to the pristine jackets of the nerds or ordering the theft of their NHS glasses, so that they could be tossed, rugby ball like, amongst the physically strong, whilst they were chased by a squinting, helpless weakling, he would resort to Plan C. Plan C was humiliating Titchy Timmy, as I had been christened by my amoeba brained tormentors.

  During the period that I fell victim to Boffin and his boys, a childrens TV programme was highlighting school bullying. The programme was Grange Hill and the bully was Gripper Stebson. Gripper didn’t bully a dwarf though, metaphorically and literally speaking, even he would not stoop that low. Boffin did though. As I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t his only victim, he bullied everyone that failed to conform to what he deemed as normality. If you were ugly, bespectacled, Asian, black, overly intelligent, physically weak, uncoordinated at sports or had a combination of these attributes, Boffin and his shallow friends would, in all likelihood, come calling. Those of us who were physically weak saw him most. As the smallest and weakest, I was his most abused victim.

  “Oi, Mossy!” Boffin shouted over to Phil Moss, who continued to stand guard like the world’s least cuddly meerkat.

  “Anyone coming?”

  “No,” Phil replied before double checking.

  “Good!” Boffin replied , by now he had stopped choking me with my tie and had instead administered a headlock.

  “Pegs, go and have a crap in that end bog, but don’t flush it.”

  “What for?”

  I started to struggle, I was a step ahead of Chris Gregory, Boffin’s grip tightened.

  “Just do it!” Boffin commanded.

  “I don’t need a crap, Boffin, I had one before school.”

  “What about you, Flanners?” Boffin asked.

  Neil Flanagan was the final member of the gang. He was a year older than the rest of them, but had been ostracised by his own year group, largely for having a personality as attractive as a skunk’s anal scent glands.

  “I’ll have a go!”

  As befitting of his additional twelve month development, Neil Flanagan was the tallest and coolest gang member. His school tie was no thicker than the width of a shoelace and he moved like he had videoed Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever and constantly rewound and replayed Travolta’s cool walk. Flanners strutted into the cubicle and over the next two minutes, every plop and trump echoed around the old, damp room.

  “Remember not to flush,” Boffin reminded him.

  “I know. Can someone chuck some bog roll over from the next cubicle, there’s none left in here?”

  “Pegs, chuck him some bog roll,” Boffin instructed.

  Chris Gregory did as he was told before complaining he was too close to the stench and Flanners complained about the quality of school toilet paper.

  “It is just literally paper,” Flanners moaned, “it’s like wiping your bum with bark.”

  I persistently struggled, trying to kick my legs and to flail my arms, which was difficult when you were in the vice like grip of a physically stronger creature. It felt like the struggle of a dying onyx, when it had a tiger’s jaw attached to its neck and it was that thought that allowed me to develop a plan.

  “You’re not putting my head down that bog, Boffin!”

  I could feel Boffin’s body smile,

  “I’m afraid you’ve got that wrong ‘Titchy Timmy’, that’s exactly what I’m going to do!”

  “No, that’s where you are wrong, Boffin!”

  I may be small but sometimes that teaches you to develop your survival instinct. I dug my teeth deep into Boffin’s arm and clenched long enough for him to release his grip.

  “Owww! You little bastard
!”

  Boffin cried out, inspecting the teeth marks in his arm and the trickle of blood, long before looking to see where I had gone. As a dwarf, I was never going to win an Olympic sprint gold, but I still shifted quickly when faced with a shit shampoo. I ran towards the exit and Phil Moss, who had been alerted to my approach by Boffin’s cry, had crouched down in a set position, ready to catch me, but I put my weight on my left foot, then sidestepped right in a move that Jeremy Guscott would have been proud of. Phil Moss grabbed out but totally missed me and I shoulder barged the door to freedom. The corridor was bustling with children, so I mixed in and shuffled my way along, knowing it would be hard for Boffin and his mates to spot me, I don’t exactly stand out in a crowd.

  “Don’t you be thinking you’ve escaped me, Titchy Timmy,” was the familiar Boffin shout I heard trailing from behind me, “we’ll get you for this!”

  I smiled. I knew he would get me too, but I was savouring the moment, the David beats the four Goliaths moment and almost immediately began to plan how I would evade the next one.

  TIMMY ANDERSON – September 1986

  “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

  The all too familiar chorus of Secondary School boys rang out across the tarmac of Parklands High School. Normally, when this chorus rang out, I would stop what I was doing and run across to the fight scene as quickly as my little legs would carry me to see what was kicking off. Not this time though. This time I wasn’t a spectator, I was in the fight itself, or, to be more accurate, I was the kid being beaten up.

  Luke ‘Boffin’ Booth had tormented me for long enough. I wasn’t physically capable of fighting back, but I had a brain, a better brain than his, so I didn’t want to endure the bullying without fighting back in some way. I devised a plan, but knew ultimately it would lead to a beating, but as this was already happening, it didn’t act as a deterrent. My plan was to bully him back!