The lights change and I scurry across the road, tucking in my scarf where the wind is getting through. It’s chilly for April, and I hunker against the cold as I walk. Looking up, I can see a group of four youths by the bus stop, two boys and two girls. I don’t like the term ‘youths’, it sounds like the words should be dripping from the scowling face of an aged, middle England Daily Mail reader. It has the same cringe-worthy cadence as ‘oik’ and ‘rapscallion’ and, at the relatively spritely age of thirty-four, it pains me to use it. But that they were, around sixteen years of age, loud, obnoxious and loitering. ‘Loitering’; there’s another one.
One of the youths, a disdainful looking boy leaning against the bus stop, laughs unnecessarily loudly and throws his empty coke can onto the floor. Right in the centre of the pavement. Directly in front of him. And on the other side of the bus stop is a bin.
Internally I am incandescent with rage at this needless and disrespectful act of minor vulgarity. Why not just turn and place it in the correct receptacle, especially one that is so readily accessible? Every outraged iota of my being wants to berate him, force him to retrieve the can and deal with it correctly, appropriately. I want to shout “Oi, pick that up, you horrible little ratbag shit-weasel!” and watch, as he drops his head in regret and shame, and complies with common decency, while passers-by stop to slow-clap my forthright defence of societal etiquette.
But I already know that I won’t. I know that what I will almost certainly do is make no eye contact as I approach, then just step over the can, perhaps curling my lip disdainfully to express my disapproval, and walk on.
Why won’t I step up and tell the boy off? I want to, I’m furious, so it’s not apathy. Is it fear? Not physically, but of confrontation itself? For whatever reason, I have deferred to an ingrained response, a learned, reactive internal assessment of ‘leave it, it’s not worth it’. And I would be right, as well. I could easily have just strode by, barking out “Oi, pick up that can” in my most authoritative alpha male voice, showing my higher sensibilities whilst not giving the satisfaction of losing my cool over some mild, if disdainful, littering. But I know that this would be futile, serving no purpose other than to satiate some progressively dwindling feeling that I should do something. But I also fear that it’s just too late to even try.
Where did this depressing reflex originate? At school, where I was often a kicking-boy, albeit one of many, for our comprehensive’s resident, and impressively organised, bullies. When I refer to them as organised, I mean that, although they were far from Horndean Community School’s best and brightest, they were somewhat progressive in their methods, being, to all extents and purposes, syndicated. Whereas in my parent’s days, the advice that “all bullies are cowards, if you stand up to them, they’ll respect you” was perfectly valid, by the time I was at school this advice was, unfortunately, as dated as my parents themselves. At some point, bullies had figured out that there were ways to ensure that people understood that if they take on any one of their members, they took on all of their members. Perhaps it was due to the proliferation of gangster movies during the 80’s and 90’s, but they had sussed out that, if they made the consequences dire enough, they didn’t need to be smart to rule. Resistance, as Start Trek’s Borg collective would say, is futile.
By the summer of nineteen-ninety-four I knew this and, at the princely age of fifteen, had already learned not to talk back to certain people within our school, whatever they said or did. Well, I should say that I knew the rules but as, unfortunately, a somewhat headstrong boy (at that age perhaps ‘mouthy little prick’ would be a more accurate descriptor) so did I struggle at times to not poke my head up above the herd. However, I knew the danger signs, and was generally quite cautious.
As such, I was most surprised, one afternoon on the way home from school, to find myself in a standoff with the most universally feared bully in our school, Mark Gulliver. He preferred to be called Gulliver. In hindsight, my lingering memory of the event is one of embarrassment, but at the time I must have been quite terrified as I stood facing him. I had walked straight from my Home Economics class, and was therefore clutching two bags of assorted cooking materials, utensils, and freshly baked caramel shortbreads. It was not my most macho moment. I called it a ‘standoff’ before, but that’s probably the wrong word. He wasn’t completely interested in beating me up, and it’s just that I hadn’t completely backed down. Perhaps standstill would be more accurate? Let me explain.
Leaving school late that day, I had turned left at the school approach road and trudged absent-mindedly along Catherington Lane. I passed the usual ambush point my friends and I would abuse, number eighty-three, where we would often push the unwary of our group over its handily collapsing hedge, then turned right onto the ironically-named Victory Avenue. I could see the group of bullies ahead of me at this point, half-way down the road, shoving and jostling with each other as they made their way along the row of suburban residential housing in their usual, aggressive cluster.
This wasn’t the first time I’d got into trouble with them. I’d recently had a mild altercation with another of them, Wes Dawson (merely the second-most feared purveyor of violence in our school) the previous week. Wes had a younger step-brother, oddly named Benedict, an eighth-year who I’d never seen before. Benedict, it turned out, came from a decidedly different genetic stock to Wes. Whereas Wes had received height, strength and a propensity for violence from his Neanderthal genes, Benedict appeared to have drawn his genetic building blocks from the hobbit-pot. Short, and almost spherically bulbous, he looked nothing like his step-brother.
So, on the day I angered Wes, my group had been passing number eighty-three and my ‘friend’ Robert Noye, with a Machiavellian grin strapped across his face, had pointed at Benedict as he walked past. Eyes flashing mischief, he dared me to push him over. So, dumbly, I did. Benedict had initially toppled halfway over the disappearing hedge, as if he was attempting to touch his toes, leaving his ample rump exposed as a target. I dutifully placed my clumpy Clarks’ on it and aided him the rest of the way of his journey.
Now, I am fully aware that this, in itself, was a form of bullying. Amongst our group, within which there was a tacit consent about the activity, the greatest pleasure was when one of us had failed to notice our location, and was totally unaware at the point where another would propel them towards and over the hedge. It was their surprise and outrage that amused, not a nice pleasure to indulge in, I admit, but it was not a cruel one, as such. It was generally merely a shock to the victim, and not a dangerous or frightening activity.
However, in this case I had ambushed a kid I didn’t know and it was with cackling, malicious glee that Robert informed me of my portly victim’s relationship with the school’s public enemy number two, and therefore my impending doom. It came quickly, actually, as I had found Wes outside my home before I got there, accompanied by a now smug-looking, and definitely recovered Benedict. Wes was, at that point, serving some suspension or other and was bare-chested, wearing just cut-off jean-shorts and trainers. On anyone else, or at another point, this might have been amusing, but, with my execution bearing down on me, this was not the case. Wes was not a man of many words so our conversation was swift and to the point.
“Oi Liam, did you chuck my bruvver over some ‘edge?” he managed.
“Yes” I replied.
“Why?”
“It’s just what we were doing, and he walked past, so I pushed him over.”
“Right.”
Interrogation over, he punched me in the head. I recoiled slightly, but the punch didn’t actually hurt. I straightened up again. He hit me a second time and, on still not receiving any pain, I was a little concerned that I had not conveyed the correct amount of suffering for the transaction, so let out a slight, and unfortunately sarcastic sounding “Urgh?”
Wes leaned right into my face and, spit flying, intoned “Don’t. Do it. Again!”
I remember wondering why I had gotten off so lightly until the next day, at school, when I found out. From hitting me, Wes had broken his arm. I took some small satisfaction at this, of course I did; we were the habitual underdogs against the gangs and would take whatever small victories we could. But I felt no reason to gloat, even at the sounds of my friends’ admiring guffaws. Although my enemy had fared worse from the encounter, I had still suffered another humiliation. And I expected more.
I was not to wait long before circumstance arranged this. A girl from Wes’s class, Natalie Brown, had marched over to me at first break, furious, and demanded “Did Wes ‘it you yesterday?”
“Er, yes.” I replied, uncertain of where this was going.
“’E’s such a prick! Did it ‘urt?”
I’d replied, honestly without any sense of pride or sensible forethought that it hadn’t. Then she’d left. I didn’t see her again until lunchtime when, as she was striding past me, she stopped and yelled “’Ere, Liam,” and, in tones of friendly loyalty and support, informed me that “I told Wes ‘e was a prick for ‘itting you. And I told ‘im it didn’t even ‘urt!” Thank you Natalie…
However, after that point I had not actually seen Wes again, but it should still have come as no shock to me, as I finally turned into my road, to hear his voice bellow out at me.
“Oi!” he shouted, “Na’alie tells me that it didn’t even ‘urt when I ‘it you?” Wes, with Gulliver and his grinning cronies surrounding him, held up his broken, casted arm, “When I get this off in a few weeks, I’m gonna put you in fucking ‘ospi’al!”
I didn’t really know how to correctly respond to this so I just nodded and said “Ok.” This must not have come across as acceptably fearful, so Gulliver ran over the road to reinforce the point by shoving me into a fence.
“You ‘ear ‘im? ‘E’s gonna put you in ‘ospital.” I’ll say one thing for Gulliver, at least, unlike Wes, he could pronounce the end of the word, unfortunately complete with actual spittle.
“Yes.” I replied, looking at him directly. There was no point flinching or running. He stared at me for a few seconds and then punched me in the chest. I fell back into the fence, dropping my bags but again, was slightly worried that I wasn’t in, or at least wasn’t expressing, any pain. I held his gaze for a moment and then knelt down to pick up my bags, at which point he lunged his foot out to try to kick me in the balls. Considering the total lack of resistance I was putting up, this seemed pretty unsporting.
“Don’t bother.” I muttered, for some unknown reason. I have no idea why I replied. I’d made it that far with everything but my pride intact, why push it now? Maybe there was some kernel of bravery left in me somewhere? Maybe I really was just that stupid?
“What’d you fuckin’ say?” he’d shouted, reddening.
Fuck it, there was no sense in trying to pretend that I hadn’t said it by that point. I plunged haplessly on. “I just said ‘don’t bother’, about trying to kick me in the balls.”
He’d turned completely red but didn’t seem to quite know what to do with the situation, so settled for punching me into the fence again. I waited a few more seconds to see if I could expect any more, turned, and began to walk away.
“When ‘e gets ‘is cast off,” he yelled over my shoulder, “I’m gonna break your fuckin’ ‘and!” Well, at least that gave me something to look forward to, I bitterly thought to myself.
However, retribution never came, from Wes or from Gulliver. I don’t know why. Perhaps they forgot, or moved on to other, fresher prey. Maybe it was just chance, and I was fortunate not to stray into their paths during that period, or at least not when they were in a malevolent mood. Nevertheless, those experiences cast a shadow over me, and my development. The longer-term affects of the many emasculating experiences like these I suffered at school took years to iron out or come to terms with, and many are still in the process of being understood.
They shouldn’t, but have, debilitated me. The youths at the bus stop are right to look at me disdainfully, throw rubbish in my path, and watch me cowardly avoid their challenge. They can only be sixteen! They’re not much older than the kids who were making my life a misery at fifteen. I have nearly twenty years of successes and achievements, confidence and security in my opinions and actions, reason and understanding and education with which to draw on, to rebut, to argue, and… and I will still avoid the confrontation.
I play the situation out, as I did when I was a boy, and assess the value of responding. And there is none. The jeers of “Fuck off granddad!” and caterwauls that will inevitably be thrown at me as I walk away are just not worth the encounter. This is rational and understandable thinking, but no less of a capitulation than those of my youth. I should stand up, I need to but I hold no stock in bravery, not if it means being violent. And somewhere in the making of this mature, rational decision, there is a primal, bestial shame.
I go as far as to partially blame myself and my generation for this. When I was starting out at my senior school at the age of twelve I was often mouthy and obnoxious to older kids in the school. And, if we discount the moral issues surrounding it for a moment, these behaviours were often ‘corrected’ by those older kids, generally using fists. This lesson may, perhaps, have been instilled through unsavoury methods, but I understood something (although don’t ask me to clarify exactly what) about respect. By the time I became the older kid at school though, my parents’ lifelong value lessons on “it’s braver to walk away from a fight” and not causing harm to those smaller or weaker than you, meant that I was impotent to bestow a violent re-education on those kids joining my school. Perhaps I failed society with my peevish morality, and those uncorrected brats that I gave a free pass to begat these horrible brats I now approach.
I have other victories. Other than the limp celebration of maintaining the moral high ground, it has informed the way I introspect, and write. Without these formative defeats and sufferings I would not have the fuel to analyse and rail against the concepts behind those experiences. I would not have the means, through words, to attempt to eviscerate those bullies via my memories, to belittle them with words, take revenge through literature. If I am unable to stand up, physically, to change these systems then surely through debate and…
…I stop as I realise I’m approaching the bus stop. Settling my face from whatever it was expressing during my internal rant, I try to exude apathy, staring resolutely forward and ignoring the youths. As I step over the can, I curl my lip a little with disdain to show my disapproval, and walk on.
The shame bites but I dismiss it, bury it in another argument, reason it away into a dark corner of my mind with all the rest. But the shame bites.
The Bland Corporation 