the thirteenth post

When I was about fourteen, I had a kind of fight with this guy. Nothing unusual in that. Kids do fight. But what happened afterwards was a bit weird.

It started one lunchtime in the summer. I was in the fourth year at Arthur Harrington. Because it was hot and dry we were allowed to go on to the playing fields behind the school. You could do whatever you liked up the field, so long as you didn’t smoke, drink, take drugs, shag, fight or go beyond the thirteenth concrete post on the perimeter fence. The post was painted bright red for those who couldn’t count, or were tempted to ignore the threats of Mr Morgan the deputy head. He was Welsh and enjoyed caning boys. He used to hit them as hard as he could. So we took him seriously when he said, “any boy or girl foolish enough to go beyond the red post will find out just how unlucky the number thirteen can be.”

Despite us being confined to the bottom half of the playing fields, there were still half-a-dozen different games of football going on. For some reason I wasn’t playing that day. I was with my friend Michael. And I guess we were high on the brightness of the sunshine and the shortness of the skirts the girls were wearing, with their blouses untucked, unbuttoned and knotted to reveal bellies and bras.

As we wandered across the playing fields, futilely flirting with two girls, we occasionally crossed the impromptu football pitches. It was no big deal as long as you didn’t deliberately tackle the guy with the ball. Indeed, dodging passing pedestrians was seen as an integral part of the game. However, there was this one pitch that every one kept clear of - the pitch where the hard kids played - the kids who smoked and had fights and got sent out of lessons, who, on the way home, shoplifted and sprayed absurdly misspelled graffiti on walls, and who in the evenings took joyrides, swigged methadone and got twelve-year-olds pregnant.

It was by far the biggest pitch with the fewest players (as most of their number were skiving or had been excluded), and I was buggered if I was going to bypass it. Fuelled by teenage testosterone - and in an attempt to impress the two girls me and Michael were with - I decided to walk right across the middle of the game. It was no respectful scurry either, but a languid, and rather provocative stroll. It was met with a predictable response.

“Oi Driftwood you wanker. Get off our fucking pitch.”

I stopped and paused to see who was shouting at me. It was a third year called Gary Tigg. He was actually slightly smaller than me, but he carried a six inch commando knife, so people tended to avoid upsetting him. However on this particular day, I just didn’t care. It was like being up in the cage. I felt surrounded by my bubble.

“Oh I do apologise,” I said. “I wasn’t aware that you owned this area of grass. I must have overlooked that last time I was checking the land registry.”

We’d just been learning about property in economics, but I could see my sarcasm was a mistake. If there’s one thing these morons hate, it’s a willowy middle class swot, who starts coming over all superior.

“What the fuck you on about, you cunt.” Gary strode over in his khaki bomber jacket and shoved my shoulder.

“Don’t push me,” I said.

Kids nearby started to gather round us. Gary looked deep into my eyes and punched me as hard as he could in the face. I stumbled slightly but continued to stand there, my arms by my side. Suddenly, I felt totally calm. I could feel the sunshine on my skin, smell the mown grass and hear the shouts and shrieks of the other kids playing. The memory is incredibly vivid, and I can still see myself reflected in Gary’s eyes.

“No,” I said, calmly. “I don’t want to fight you, I just want to walk where I want to.”

Gary punched me in the face a second time. My nose started to bleed. I kept my hands by my side. I felt no pain, no fear, no sadness. Just pure serenity. I let the blood run down onto my shirt.

“”I don’t want to fight you,” I repeated. “I just want to walk where I want to walk.”

“You’re a fucking weird cunt,” said Gary. He punched me a third time and then walked away.

The crowd dispersed disappointed. The two girls we’d been chatting stood a short distance away, all blushing and awkward. Michael, put his arm around my shoulder and led me away.

“Don’t cry mate,” he said. “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Really, I feel fine. He’ll get what’s coming to him,” I said.

“Just stay clear of them,” said Michael. He looked over his shoulder, frightened. “They’re fucking nutters, that lot. You know what happened to Vincey.”

Vincent was a black kid, who’d been stabbed the previous term. It wasn’t a racist attack, just a status thing.

“It’s OK,” I said. “Everything will be OK.”

I never crossed paths with Gary again. But everytime I saw him, I had this chilling feeling; the kind you get in a horror film when you know something’s about to happen.

Two weeks after Gary had thumped me, his ten-year-old brother blew him away with a pump action shot gun, which his dad kept locked in the boot of an old BMW in his garage. No one knew how he got the gun out or why he did it, but it caused quite a stir locally. It even made some of the national papers. I remember old Morgan getting up on stage in assembly and telling everyone the news. All the other kids were shocked and upset. His mates went pale, and a few girls started crying. But not me. I just stood there and smiled.

escaping the cage

My ankle has healed and I have been training almost every day for a month. I am amazed how good I feel. People are always saying you should do more exercise and eat more healthily. But you don’t realise how true it is until you try.

I don’t want to come over all evangelical, but it really is a revelation. I feel like I am reborn, baptised into the church of jogging and broccoli. Miraculously, I’ve managed to stay vegan for long enough to win back my fiver from Paul. I admit, I’ve been tempted by pizzas and omelettes, but I don’t at all miss being a carnivore, and it makes life much easier. Sophie is a veggie and we’ve been spending a lot of time together (another reason why I’m feeling so good). The diet does seem to help with the training as well - all that pasta, rice and pure soya protein. But it’s more than that. I’ve changed.

I know we don’t have a soul. There is no physical entity inside of us, that stays trapped until we die, and then flutters away into the hereafter like some moth through an open cupboard door. But, while we’re alive, there is something in our heads – call it humanity, if you like – that acts like a virtual soul. I don’t know if we’re born with it – some survival instanct to care for each other – or whether it is conditioned in us at infant school by all those assemblies about the Good Samaritan and repentent tax collectors. But when we are six, we accept the basics of right and wrong, the same way we accept counting and alphabets.

Gradually, as we move into adulthood, our ‘virtual soul’ gets bound up by all the filth and horror in the world around us, which crushes and distorts our sense of morality, the way rubber bands wrapped around hands pucker the flesh and turn fingertips pale. And like constricted limbs, part of our morality withers and dies. But because we can’t see our minds, or the invisible bands cutting into them, we just let it happen.

I think we realise this in hindsight. Even when we know it is too late to change ourselves, we still try to change others.

When we were sixteen, one day, without warning, we were all shephered out of our classrooms to the school hall and were shown a film about the Holocaust.

The whole film has always haunted me (as intended). But the piece I remember most vividly is about the Jewish families who fled to France at the beginning of the war thinking they would be safe. One night, a couple of years into the conflict, the French police came and rounded them all up.

They told all the Jews to pack an overnight bag and enough provisions for two or three days and then took them to a holding camp, kids and all. Thing was, the Nazis didn’t want kids at the concentration camps to start with. So they separated them from the parents and put them in some half-built housing complex, where they were looked after by these women.

I’m not sure who the women were (the film didn’t make that clear), but it did include an interview with one of them - a wrinkled old thing with tightly clutched hands and rolling eyes. She said that the abandoned children all got dysentry, so you had to watch your footing on the steps as they became slippery with shit. A couple of kids in the assembly hall sniggered at that. But others shushed them. And a few girls started to quietly sob, as the film’s narrator explained how the children were all taken to the concentration camp to be killed.

They know what happened to the kids from evidence given by guards who worked at Auschwitz at the time. They spoke to one of them in the film. You could tell he wasn’t sorry in the least for what he’d done. But he was only a teenager himself at the time. I guess that’s why he was still alive and speaking to documentary makers in the 1990s.

He said that when the kids arrived at the camp they were told to leave their bags behind and were led away (presumably straight into the gas chambers). His job was to help throw the luggage into a truck. Among the discarded cases were children too weak to walk. He watched, so he said, as the other guards picked them up and just threw them into a big pile. If the kids started whimpering and wailing, they would bash their heads against the side of the truck until they stopped.

The film then went on to show the now familiar images of ovens with charred limbs poking out, and mountains of hair and shoes and tattooed skin. You can imagine, when the film ended we all sat there in silence, competely stunned.

I was sat next to this kid called Christopher Willis. He was the only vegetarian in our class. And his mother was German. As we’d walked out of the curtained hall, blinking into the sunshine, I felt slightly awkward and said something trite about it being beyond belief, but at least it was all in the past now.

I remember, Christopher turned to me. His face was full of anger, and he started going on about part of the film that had described the concentration camp, in its final days, as being ‘like an abbatoir – it’s only purpose to kill as efficiently and quickly as possible.’

I nodded.

And then he said, "What they should have shown us is a film of an abbatoir, because that’s just a concentration camp for animals."

At the time I thought he was just deflecting his feelings away from the focus of the film, his mum being German and everything. But I can see now exactly what he meant. Abbatoirs are, like the Nazi death camps, a mechanised method of slaughtering and processing huge numbers of living things as quickly as possible.

Of course, the aim of the meat industry is not to achieve a Final Solution. Those industrial butchers have no perverse dream of an ethnically pure utopia. All they want is more competitive pork prices and greater profit margins on lamb.

But they treat animals in the same way that those German guards treated the gypsies and the Jews. And no-one gives it a second thought, because animals are different from us. They have four legs instead of two, and funny shaped heads. Therefore their pain, their fear, their suffering is of no concern.

But when we are six years old, it does concern us. We love to go and look at the cows and pigs and in the field. We are concerned if there is a foal or a calf that looks sick. And our older siblings get scolded for telling us ‘that’s where burgers come from’.

There was a time, of course, when many in Britain got rich from treating Africans like animals – packing the slaves in the ships so tightly that half of them suffocated before they even reached the Carribean plantations. And when they arrived, our colonial compatriots raped them and degraded them and worked them to death, creating the Empire-building blueprint that was Hitler’s inspiration.

But like all those mums showing fields of sheep to their kids – we never mention the slaughter of the slaves, we just dumbly join the queue to marvel at the stately homes and palaces built on the proceeds of the ‘black holocaust’ and talk nostalgically of our lost Empire and the days when our Island was truly great.

Of course, one angst ridden young loner going without meat for a couple of weeks doesn’t change history. It makes fuck all difference to anything. But the change of diet, the change of direction, does make me feel as if some small part of my ‘moral mind’ that died at age eight has suddenly revived like a leaf budding stubbornly on a dying tree. And that’s something.

Along with the cycling and an occasional swim, I’ve been running to the park and back most days, taking alternative streets and paths to make the course seem more of a loop. I’ve actually discovered six different ways to cover the four mile route, but I am pretty bored with them all.

So, seeing as I’ve got a day off and Sophie is working, I decide to cycle up to Hallowsmere Common and have a jog there. I’m a bit worried about leaving the bike on the common. But I find a young beech tree, in a dip behind some brambles, and I manage to fasten my chain around the trunk. I guess the chances of bike thieves stumbling upon it (and having wire cutters or a chain saw with them) are fairly remote.

It is half-past-ten and the common is deserted. It hasn’t rained for a week, and the paths are pale and dry, more like June than April. There is a light breeze and the only sounds are the chirping of birds and the rustling of rabbits in the bracken. It is like running on another planet, a planet of butterflies, small cream ones and bigger red patterned ones - Reggie would know their names.

As I run, I feel as if I’m melting into the trees like some kind of wood sprite, at one with the wild apple, birch and pine - high on chlorophyll, immersed in a thousand shades of green. I feel similar to the way I do when I am hanging in the cage, only more so. Out here, not only am I detached from people, I’m also free from all that other shit - the golf ball soaps and china clowns, pizza wheels and triple-blade shaver refills.

I know, even on a Thursday morning, Bakers and Macey will be crawling with wallet and purse rats gagging for all that crap - waterproof shower CDs and chrome bottle openers, backless dresses and glittery, green eyeshadow they know they’ll never use.

Yet, a short bike ride away, here I am in paradise, padding across a carpet of soft heather, watching a family of roe deer graze among a foaming sea of blue bells and wild daisies, the gentle warmth of the sun on my face, my nostrils filling with the scent of fresh pine sap. Why is no one else here?

Of course, if everyone did suddenly evacuate the shopping mall and descend on the common, it would no longer be this oasis of tranquillity. But you would think at least one other person in a population of eighty thousand might choose to spend their morning here wandering through the trees.

Perhaps there are other people about. Maybe I just haven’t met them. Maybe they are avoiding me. Perhaps that’s why people don’t come up here. They are afraid of bumping into some stranger, afraid of the lonely open spaces, free from civilisation. I guess they feel more comfortable in the choking streets of town, surrounded by ‘normal’ people, safe from weirdos like me who prefer the company of trees.

Actually, there are a few people like that, people who are more at home with nature than civilisation. There’s that leopard guy, for instance. You’ve probably heard of him. He’s famous for having his whole body covered in tattoos. He’s even had his irises done to make them look more like a cat’s, and has vampirish caps on his canines. I believe the leopard guy lives in a hut on some remote Scottish island, and spends all day reading books. It sounds quite a lonely existence, but I’ve heard he gets a lot of letters - from weirdos mostly. Maybe I should write him one, ask him if tattoos really hurt, as I am seriously thinking of getting one done.

river of life

Each day, cycling home from the warehouse, I take a short cut through the precinct. It has grimy paving slabs, graffitied walls, a bench covered in pigeon shit and an array of small shops that are the retail antithesis of Bakers and Macey.

The first shop in the precinct is full of third-hand hi-fis, CDs and musical instruments. For years it’s had the same black bass guitar in the window, surrounded by an array of hash pipes, weighing scales and stolen car radios.

Round the corner is a place that sells old furniture and reconditioned fridges and ovens, all plastered with neon cardboard stars, scrawled with marker pen prices. It is very popular with the unemployed, refugees and students, but not quite so favoured by the Health and Safety officers at Westing District Council.

Opposite the dodgy furniture store is the charred carcass of the Strawberry Fair bookshop. It used to sell books and pamphlets about alternative cultures and lifestyles. But it is all blackened and boarded up now. It kept getting attacked by the BNP, and was raided by about a hundred policemen, who confiscated loads of pamphlets that allegedly told you how to grow drugs and start your own revolution. Strange though, with all that manpower the coppers never did manage to find the firebombers.

Beside the burnt out bookshop is a stairwell of piss and needles that leads up to a deserted corner of the old multi-storey, where junkie pros give head (which sounds like a phrase from an early Lou Reed song, but is nonetheless an apt description). On the far side of the stairwell is the Pleasure Zone, which sells imported adult videos and ten inch lengths of sculptured plastic for people to shove inside each other. Finally, around the corner, in the darkest depths of the precinct, is Dave’s Tattoos. On a couple of occasions I’ve taken a quick detour on the way home, and pulled my bike up by the window to peer in at the dolphins, hearts, bulldogs and Celtic bands. And I have taken to lying in bed thinking about which one I might get.

I know loads of people have tattoos now - fifty-year-old female solicitors, with a Roedean education and a rose bud on their bum. However, body art does still remain a badge of the underground.

There’s this bloke Stuart down at the Albert who has ‘--- CUT HERE ---’ tattooed across his neck and the word CUNT across his knuckles. Even if I didn’t know that he’d done time for kidnapping the manager of the Westing Building Society, I’d probably still guess he didn’t work in public relations. However, Stuart’s knuckles are not the most reactionary body art I’ve seen.

Shortly after I started thinking about getting a tattoo, I am sat in the Albert with Paul one evening, when I notice this old woman at the other end of the bar. She is very thin with grey hair and the skin of an unwrapped Egyptian mummy. She has a huge Celtic cross tattooed on her forehead. It stretches from her hairline to the bridge of her nose, with three straight arms, west, south and east, and a little loop pointing north . She is busy scribbling in a notebook. I can’t help myself. I have to sidle up and ask her about it.

“I don’t mean to be intrusive. But I’m thinking of having a tattoo done,” I say. “And I was just admiring yours. Although I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to have one quite like that.”

She looks at me with these piercing eyes like little marbles.

“It represents the river of life. We are all part of the river,” she says, “all of us together, in an eternal circle.” She traces her finger over the loopy part of the cross. “We come from the river and we return to the river. We are the river and the river is us.”

I return her gaze, pondering what she’s just said.

“Don’t be afraid,” she says. “I’m not mad.”

I laugh.

“I don’t think your mad. I understand what you’re saying. Honestly, I know exactly what you mean...How long ago did you have that done?”

Her brow furrows. The cross wrinkles.

“Thirty seven years,” she says. Her voice is full of surprise, as if she has only just realised it.

“I guess you don’t work in a bank then.”

“I’m an artist,” she says.

“Oh yea,” I say. “That’s cool. What kind of stuff do you do. Is it painting or sculpture?”

“Mosaics,” she says.

“I did one at school once,” I say. “It was quite tricky.”

She sips red wine dismissively.

“Do you want another of those?” I point at her glass.

“No thank you,” she says indignantly. She looks at me as if I’ve just asked her for a shag, which is quite funny as she is about a hundred years old, and not even I’m that desperate.

“Do you exhibit your mosaics, anywhere?” I ask. “I wouldn’t mind seeing them.”

“No,” she says, flatly.

“Oh.”

She can see what I’m thinking.

“Art is pure,” she says thumping her mummified chest. “It comes from within. You create it for itself. For the river. Not to sell”

Here we go again.

“Are you a student?” she asks, almost accusingly.

“No, I work in a warehouse.”

She looks me up and down, and nods with a withering look.

Well, I think to myself, it’s better than being a failed tiler who looks like she’s just head-butted a bishop’s blotter. But I just smile politely and thank her for the chat. I reach out to shake her tiny wrinkled hand. It feels like it might snap off in my grip.

“I’m thinking of getting a tattoo,” I say to Sophie. We are sat in the lounge of the house she shares with two other girls from Bakers and Macey and a guy called Dominic who works in the Direct Marketing Department at Westing Building Society.

“Oh no. They’re disgusting,” she says, not looking up from her Homes and Gardens magazine.

“I’m not thinking of getting an eagle on my back,” I say, “just something small and artistic.”

She continues to read.

“There’s a really good place in the precinct, by the multi-storey,” I say. “It’s run by this guy Dave. He’s a really famous tattooist. Goes all around the world. I ‘ve been in for a look and they do some really nice designs.”

Sophie lowers her magazine.

“Are you serious? You went in there.”

“Yea what’s wrong with that?”

Sophie shudders and wrinkles her nose.

“Oh, it’s horrible around there.”

“It isn’t,” I say.

“Oh Newton. There’s that horrible sex place and strange people and those women.” She looks like she’s just swigged battery acid.

“I know what you mean,” I say. “But the tattoo place is really clean. It’s just like a dentist’s. Well, not quite. But, it isn’t like you imagine. Anyway, I thought I might pop in later this week, just to find out how much they are.”

“Oh Newty, please don’t.” She goes all dewy eyed. “I love you as you are. Your skin is perfect.”

“I’m not going to get anything horrible,” I say.

“Oh they’re so common,” she says.

“No they’re not. They’re individual.”

“Oh Newty, everyone has one. You’ll just look the same as everyone else.”

“I’ll look trendy then won’t I.”

“Not when you’re seventy-five.”

“Well, you ain’t going to see it then are you.”

For a split second, it’s like we’ve been struck with lightening, a blue arc of electricity fizzing between us, catapulting us forward fifty years to glimpse ourselves still sat there together. It’s what we both want. But neither of us can really believe it will ever happen. I don’t know...

I was down at the Albert one Sunday and I saw this couple near the bar, having lunch. The bloke was just sat there tucking into his steak and roast spuds, and the woman was feeding this little kid in a pushchair. I watched as she got out this thermos flask of hot water and this bottle of milk and a plastic bowl of baby food and spoons and bibs, and went through this complicated preparation procedure. She hadn’t touched her food, and it was going cold, but she really didn’t care.

Half-way through sorting out all this stuff for the baby, she raised her head and smiled at this man and gave him such a look of love, I cannot describe it. You could tell she didn’t want him to write her poetry, or have the body of an adonis, or drive some flash car, or even help her with the baby food. She was simply happy that he was there, uncomplicated, constant, secure. And I wish (more than anything in the world) that I could be like that man, and just sit there without trying to do anything else, or be anyone else, because then someone would be able to love me, for sure. But I know, I can never be like that. And I think Sophie knows that too.

“You’ll catch something horrible,” says Sophie. “You can get AIDS off those needles.”

“Don’t be fucking daft,” I say. “They use a new one for each person. They come in sterilised packets, the same as hospitals. They’re probably cleaner than the instruments they use for most operations. They have to be these days. It’s all licensed and everything.”

Sophie looks slightly shocked. I didn’t normally swear in front of her, and I don’t think she is used to people arguing.

“Well,” I mutter, defensively. “it’s my body. I’d never dream of telling you what make-up to wear.”

“Make-up comes off,” she says primly. “You’ll be scarred for ever.”

She returns to reading her magazine. I get up with a scowl and go to make coffee, banging cupboard doors and hurling the teaspoon into the sink. She remains frosty for the rest of the evening, but the argument remains unmentioned.

The next day, when we meet up after work, Sophie is like the Cheshire Cat. “I’ve got you a present,” she says. “Close your eyes.”

I suspect it is going to be a packet of those kid’s water soluble tattoos, but I feel something much bulkier being placed into my hands. I open them in surprise. It is a big box with a picture of a mobile phone on the front. A really cool silver one. I presume there is something else inside the box.

“What is it I ask?”

“A washing machine,” she says.

I open the box, as Sophie looks on, grinning. It really is a mobile phone.

“Wow where did you get this from?”

“A washing machine shop.”

“This is for me?” I’m like a little kid with his first bike. I’m genuinely chuffed. “No one’s ever bought me anything like this before.”

“We can text each other,” says Sophie.

“It does text?” I’m not up on these things.

“Yesss. I’ll show you.”

I can’t work out how to switch the phone on. But within thirty seconds Sophie has activated it and sent a message from her own mobile.

HI YA NEWT.

I try to return the message, but I’m a bit like the cat in The Silent Miaow - a book by Paul Gallico, which my dad had. The book is supposed to have been written by the author’s cat, and includes an extract of the untranslated manuscript, which looks unintelligible, because even though the cat has learned to type, her paws tend to hit three keys at once.

My text reads: GI SNPIF IOX R V

“You’ll soon get the hang of it,” says Sophie breezily.

But I can tell she is trying to remember where she put the receipt.

Dave’s Tattoos

I am supposed to be taking Sophie out for a pizza - a kind of thank you for the phone. But, as I stroll past Dave’s Tattoos on the way to the bus station, some impish inner demon urges me to ‘pop in for another quick look’.

At the front of the tattoo parlour there is a waiting area with spider plants and yuccas and two brightly patterned whicker sofas. There are a couple of girls sitting on one of the sofas. They are clutching mobile phones and watching a TV mounted on the wall. It reminds me of the patient information system in the doctor’s surgery, except it is showing MTV2 with the sound turned down.

As I jingle through the door, the girls look up briefly. I avoid their eyes, and go to stand beside a young bloke with a shaved head, who is eyeing-up the designs on the wall. He looks about fifteen to me, but has tattoos up both forearms - bulldogs and union jacks. I try my hardest to look like I am after my eleventh tattoo and gaze intently (but casually) up and down the wall. However, it’s all naked women and Chinese dragons, cute hearts and dolphins, and I can’t see any image that particularly grabs me.

There is a sign on the wall saying More Designs this Way, and an arrow that points to a doorway hung with seventies style beads. Beyond the doorway I can hear the sounds of laughter, rockabilly music and a buzzing noise like a loud barber’s shaver. I take a deep breath and, feeling rather like Mr Benn, I walk through the wooden curtain.

There are three tattoo artists at work in the back room, and another guy talking to customers. They are all wearing tight black T-shirts and are all totally covered with coloured tattoos, which merge into continuous collages, stretching from their necks to the backs of their hands. The two younger tattooists are both short and wide with flat-tops. They are working behind a counter, in front of a wall plastered with photographs of heavily tattooed psychobillies and signed album covers. I recognise the song that is playing - Anything Goes by The Cramps.

One of the guys is piercing the tongue of a plump blonde girl. The other one is tattooing a serpent on the stomach of a skinny girl with a dark ponytail. She’s unzipped her trousers and pulled them down a couple of inches. I guess the design reaches down to the top of her pubic triangle. The second tattoo guy is knelt between her legs, working away at her skin with an implement that looks like a cross between a hand-held food mixer and a syringe. He looks up, and I shyly shift my gaze into an alcove where the third tattooist is working.

He is an older guy - who I guess must be Dave. He has a long grey perm (like a geriatric David Coverdale) and leather trousers. His client is lying face down on a table in a pair of orange underpants, as Dave adds a parrot to a vast jungle scene on his back. I look away and find myself face to face with the guy serving. He looks enquiringly from beneath a crown of spiky bleached blonde hair.

“What can I do you for, guv?”

“I’m still looking,” I mumble nervously.

I know he can sense I’m a tattoo virgin. I feel like a young girl in a nightclub, who’s decided this is the night she’s going to lose it and goes in search of a nice young man, but, instead, finds herself surrounded by salivating hyenas.

The man grins. “Right ho, mate. Let us know when you’re ready. It’ll be about an hour either way. OK?”

I nod, and turn to look at the designs on the wall. Unfortunately, my view is blocked by three huge Hell’s Angels. It’s like a scene from a film, where a frail office clerk walks into a bar full of bikers. But the music doesn’t stop playing and no one gives me a filthy look. Instead, when one of the Hell’s Angels steps back and bumps into me, he says quite politely, “Sorry mate, didn’t see you there.” Then he moves to one side and gestures for me to occupy the space he’s vacated by the wall.

“Cheers,” I say nervously, and edge forward to look more closely at the designs. The Hell’s Angel peers over my head.

“What are you getting?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “Something to do with the sea…My grandad and his dad were both in the navy, so I thought...”

“How about that one?” A huge hairy hand travels past my right ear. I try my hardest not to flinch as it points to a picture of a vividly coloured sea serpent with a mouthful of skulls exploding out of the sea. It is about six inches by six inches and costs one hundred and seventy five pounds.

“Yea, cool,” I say. “It’s for my arm though so I’ll probably go for something a bit narrower.”

“I was thinking of one of these,” says the Hell’s Angel. He is stood beside me now and points to a series of elaborate Celtic bands.

“Oh yea, cool,” I say. “I was thinking about one of them.”

“Shame they haven’t got one with waves on,” he looks down at me. I look up and see he is wearing rather academic spectacles, which makes him look slightly less threatening. However, I still feel slightly nervous, hemmed in by him and his two huge mates.

“Which one do you like best?” he asks.

“I’m not sure.” I don’t want to be responsible for any bad decision that he (or I) might live to regret. I point to the widest spikiest band, not wishing to cast any aspersions on his manhood. The biker reaches up to pull his specs slightly further down his nose. He puts his hands on his thighs and bends down to squint at the design.

“Yea, I thought about that,” he says. “It’s my first one, though.” He looks slightly sheepish. “I’m the only one who hasn’t got one. Thought it was about time.”

I smile understandingly and nod.

“Well, that is a cool design,” I say.

“Yea,” he raises his hand to his chin, still unsure.

One of his biker mates taps me on the shoulder.

“Oi,” he beckons me over. He has oil stained skin and Charles Manson eyes. I feel my bowels spasm.

“I’ve found one for you mate.” He points to a skull and cross bones. “Where are you having it?”

I gingerly rub my left shoulder.

“Well that is the fucking business. Don’t you reckon?”

His mate nods. “Can’t go wrong with that.”

I look unsure.

The Charles Manson look alike raises his finger.

“You’re going to tell me you’ve got one like that already.”

I shake my head.

“Well, there you go, sorted.”

The customer service guy with the spiky blonde hair comes over.

“You going for that band Clive?”

The bespectacled biker looks at me for reassurance.

I give him the thumbs up, and he nods gratefully. “Yea, I’ll have that one.” He points to the biggest of the Celtic bands. His skin turns slightly green beneath his beard. The blonde guy scribbles the number down on a piece of paper.

“They ain’t straight forward these, Clive. That’s why they’re a bit more expensive. Might take a couple of hours. He looks at his watch. You’ll probably have to come next week to get it finished.”

The biker with the glasses looks at me for support.

I shrug. “It’ll look really cool.”

The blonde guy shouts across the room.

“Oi, Dave! The big Celtic band. It’s a two visit job, yea.”

Dave looks up from the parrot feathers he is colouring on the old guy’s back. He brushes his grey perm behind his ears.

“Who’s it for, that young lad there?” he nods at me.

“No Clive, here.” He gestures with his thumb towards the biker with the specs.

“Oh we’ll probably manage it. I’ll do it after I’ve finished this,” he shouts down at the guy lying beneath him. “You had enough, yet Tony?”

The old guy says nothing.

“Give us ten, OK?” shouts Dave. The bleached guy gives him the thumbs up.

“All right Clive? You OK to hang around for a bit?”

Clive looks at his two companions. They both nod.

Mr Blonde winks. “I’ll get the kettle on.” He turns to me. “All right mate, you made up your mind yet?”

I pause and Charles Manson points to a huge multicoloured Skull and Cross Bones. The blonde guy starts to write the number down.

“Actually, I might have that one.” I point to a smaller monochrome design.

“OK Chief,” says the blonde guy.

“No, you want the colour one,” interrupts Charles Manson

The blonde guy sighs and scribbles out the numbers on his pad, and looks enquiringly at me. I am determined to stand my ground, but I feel like I‘m on quick sand, and I just stare blankly at him, like I’ve had a serious head injury.

“Well make your fucking mind up!” He says it with a broad grin, but I can tell he just wants to get home and have his tea.

“Definitely that one,” I say, pointing to the smaller skull and cross bones.

The blonde guy scribbles on his pad again. “OK mate, I’ll give you a shout in two minutes.”

I look apologetically up at Charles Manson. But he just shakes his head, and gives me a disgusted look like I’ve just suggested he should trade in his Chopper for a second-hand Fiesta. I am mightily relieved when the blonde guy appears with three cups of tea for the bikers, and they disappear through to the waiting area at the front, taking their helmets and helpful suggestions with them.

The guy with the jungle on his back, walks past me in his underpants to a loo at the end of the corridor. He pisses with the door open, then stumbles back to the alcove with the bench. There is a damp patch on his y-fronts. The blonde buy returns with an empty tray.

“All right Tony. Had enough?” The guy in the pants mutters something about never getting his bloody parrot finished. The blonde guy chuckles, then turns to me. “It’s fifty notes for that one all right?”

I suddenly realise I have to pay for the skull and cross bones, and I only have about three quid on me. I don’t feel like asking if they take Switch (although I guess they probably do).

“I’ll just nip out to the cashpoint,” I say. “I’ll only be two minutes.”

The blonde guy looks at his watch. “I’ll time you,” he says, with mock solemnity. I hurry out of the shop. It is starting to get dark outside. The traffic is still thick, but the pavements are empty, except for the girl with the snake tattoo. She is knelt on the pavement, trousers still unzipped, vomiting and being alternately comforted and acclaimed by her two friends. “All right Shell? Fucking ace tat’!”

The only other person in the precinct is a guy with a sleeping bag. Normally he would be pestering me for cash. But when he sees me coming out of the tattoo parlour he thinks better of it.

I suppose this is my chance to escape - to walk on past the cash point to the bus stop and get home just in time to take Sophie for her pizza. No one would blame me. I only went in for a look around. It isn’t like I’ve got fifty quid to fritter away on a bit of ink. And tattoos aren’t the kind of thing you should rush. But in a weird kind of way, I feel, if I don’t go through with it now, I’ll be letting down that Hell’s Angel with the glasses. I know it sounds ridiculous. But that’s the way it feels. I suppose a small part of me does hope that the cash point machine will be out of order. But it isn’t. And I am gratified that Mr Blonde seems only mildly surprised to see me back again. He grins as I hand him two crisp twenties and a tattier ten.

“Two minutes and Slasher’ll sort you out.” One of the guys with the chunky flat tops looks up and nods at me without smiling.

“Don’t worry,” says the blonde guy. “He’s only called that because he pisses a lot.”

Slasher almost smiles and takes a swig from a bottle of beer. He puts on a pair of latex gloves and tears a fresh needle from a packet. He gestures for me to sit down on a stool in front of a mirror. As I sit down, the Hell’s Angel with the glasses sits on the stool next to me. I gave him a sideways glance, but he is deep in conversation with Dave.

Slasher finishes swabbing down his work surface, and has another swig of beer. I look up at a poster that says, Get Tattooed until you Puke Maggots, and another that says, Yes it Does F-ing Hurt! My heart starts to race as Slasher takes a piece of tracing paper from the blonde guy.

“Which shoulder?” asks Slasher.

“Left one,” I say.

He points to the middle of my arm. “About there?”

“A bit higher,” I say.

“Get your arm out of your sleeve and let it relax.” I do as I’m told.

He slaps the tracing paper on my arm, and rubs it down, until the outline of the Jolly Roger had been transferred onto my skin. I looked in the mirror. The tattoo seems larger and fiercer than it looks on the wall.

“OK?” asks Slasher.

I nod.

“Black on skin is it?”

I nod again.

He frowns. “I’ll add a bit of colour.”

“Naaa. It’s all right, do it black and skin.”

He tuts.

“Well if you want it in colour next week. It’s gonna cost you. See that’s what happens, people change their minds, come back in, and they don’t like it when I tell them it’s another fifty notes.”

He looks at me, determined that he is going to use every tone of ink at his disposal.

“I like it just black and white...black and skin.”

“OK. You’re the boss.”

He drinks more beer, and I suddenly wish I’d had a few bottles myself as he starts the tattoo machine buzzing and begins to cut into my arm. It feels a bit like it does when you cut yourself shaving with a razor, only continuous, rather than momentary. The sensation takes my breath away slightly. But I soon get used to it, and brace myself for each fresh cut.

“Relax,” says Slasher.

He grips hold of my arm and completes the outline. Then he changes needles to do the shading - the eye holes on the skull and the curved ends of the cross bones. It seems to hurt less. Maybe because the needle is smaller, or maybe because my arm has turned numb. Slasher stands back and wipes traces of blood from my skin.

“It needs something,” he says.

He is obviously still peeved about my insistence on monochrome. I envisage him adding eye balls to the skull, or maybe a rainbow striped snake crawling from it’s jaws.

“It’s OK,” I say, peering in the mirror at this scary image on my arm. “Very nice.”

“I’ll just do a bit of shadow,” says Slasher. “Hold still.” The tattoo machine whirs again. Fuckin’ hell, I mutter to myself, whose body is this? But I obediently let him add more shading.

“OK,” he says. He sellotapes a piece of folded Kleenex over my arm, then hands me a leaflet on tattoo aftercare and a 25 per cent off token for body piercing or another tattoo.

“Vaseline intensive care,” he says. “The yellow bottle, twice a day. You won’t have any trouble. And if you do have an adverse reaction, well...that’s your fucking problem.”

He smirks, but I’m really not sure if he’s joking.

“Cheers,” I say, and get to my feet, trying not to wobble too much. Dave looks up from the arm of the biker with the specs and nods at me. The blonde guy winks, and even Slasher emits a small grunt. It’s like I’ve passed some kind of test. Not with flying colours (not with any colour, in fact) but at least I’ve done it.

“See you again,” I say, just as the mobi’ starts to bleep away in my pocket.

an adverse reaction

“Where are you?” asks Sophie, as I answer my mobile. “I thought we were going at seven.”

I glance down at my watch. It’s ten to. Shit!

“Uhmm, I had to do something after work.”

“Like what?” she asks suspiciously, immediately sensing the awkwardness in my voice.

“I’ll show you when I get there.”

“Show me what?”

“Oh shit, sorry Soph’, the bus is just arriving. Better dash.”

“Where are you? I’ll come and...”

“Look, I’ll be back in a few minutes OK?”

“Newt!,”

“Look, I’ll miss it, if I don’t go. See you in a bit.”

I switch the mobile off, return it to my pocket and start to jog guiltily towards the bus station.

As I travel home on the bus, I feel like a different person. It’s as if I’ve reclaimed my body from the world around me, made it my own. I know, really, I’ve just had a tiny area of my arm permanently disfigured by a rather ugly cartoon. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like I’ve grown a whole new skin - fresh, smooth and shiny as a baby viper’s.

When I finally arrive back home, Sophie is relieved to see me.

“I was beginning to worry about you,” she says.

“I had something to sort out after work,” I say.

“What are you grinning about?”

“Well, you know I mentioned I might get a tattoo?”

“Yea, right.” She thinks I’m joking. Then she realises I’m not.

“Oh Newton,” she says, “You haven’t.”

“Take a look. It’s cool.” I unzip my jacket and pull my arm from the sleeve of my T-shirt. I am still bandaged up like a wounded soldier, and carefully peel back the sellotape and Kleenex.

“Oh my God,” says Sophie. Her face turns pale. The outline of the tattoo has started to scab over and the skull is all pink and swollen. The whole area is smeared with Vaseline and blood. “That is revolting,” she says.

“It’ll heal up in a couple of weeks,” I say, though I know that’s not what Sophie means.

Her face goes all sulky. Her shoulders stiffen. And I can sense her vaginal lips sealing shut like the air lock on a space ship. I reach out to give her a consolidatory hug. She flinches away from my flapping sleeve.

“Get off,” she says. “I don’t want to get AIDS thank you very much.”

“They used a new needle,” I say. “I saw the guy take it out of the packet. It’s all done very professionally these days. It has to be.”

I decide not to tell her about the bikers, the parrot guy in his damp underpants, the girl puking into the gutter, Slasher swigging from his beer bottle or the pounding Cramps soundtrack.

“Anyway, it’s my body.”

“Yea and you can keep it,” she says.

I’ve never seen her in such a mood before. She sits down on the sofa, flicks on the end of Eastenders, and folds her arms. I stand belligerently in front of the telly. She peers around my legs and scowls at me.

“Are you going to stay there all night?”

I suddenly feel really annoyed. I’d imagined she’d be amused, or impressed or even turned on by my tattoo. Instead, she’s totally burst my bubble, sending me from elated to dejected in just a few seconds.

“I don’t understand you,” I say.

She laughs sarcastically, and pulls this really catty face, as if to say, no you don’t do you.

“Well if you’re going to be like that...”

“Whatever,” she says, crossing her arms tighter.

“You don’t want to go for pizza then?”

“Not particularly, now, no.”

“See you sometime then.”

Sophie pulls another face, and I storm out, practically flattening her flat mate in the process. I hover for a while, unsure of what to do. I want to be back inside with Sophie, not lurking out here in the street.

I know I could just knock on her door, say I’m sorry and take her for that pizza. But people with tattoos don’t apologise. So, I decide to go and see Reggie, instead.

All fiction on this site is © Copyright Roger Frederick 2005 All Rights Reserved