Читать книгу This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You - Jon McGregor - Страница 11

Looking Up Vagina

Welton

He was the first boy in his class to get pubic hair. He’d vaguely assumed that this might be something the other boys would be envious of. Perhaps even awestruck by. Something which would make them see him in a new light. But it turned out to be just one more thing they could use in their campaign of vilification against him.

Vilification was a word he’d come across recently. It was a word he’d found easy to understand.

Virile was another word. It was something to do with sex. He knew pubic hairs were the first step on the way to getting sex, so he thought this might mean he was virile and the other boys would be impressed or maybe even intimidated or at the very least would reconsider their apparently venal opinions of him.

He’d had the pubic hairs for over a year now. He was used to them, and had almost forgotten that they might be an issue. The subject had never come up. But this was the last year of primary school, and they were starting weekly swimming lessons, and at the swimming pool there was a communal changing room. One of the boys saw, and pointed it out to the other boys, and soon enough all of them were looking and asking him questions about it.

And for a moment everything seemed to hang in the balance, like when a bus hangs off the edge of a cliff and everything depends on whether the passengers rush to the front or the back. It would only have taken one boy to say something like, ‘cool,’ or, ‘nice one, Smithy,’ and everything would have been different. There might even have been some quiet veneration, before everyone put on their trunks and got into the pool. Word would have spread around the school, and he would no longer have been vulnerable to being tripped in the corridors. People would have talked to him on the bus, or between lessons. But instead, someone pushed the balance the other way. Robin was in the vanguard. He shouted something, pointing at the pubic hairs and turning to the other boys for support. They all joined in, and the shouting continued for the rest of the day, and for some days after that. Weeks.

‘Bush’ was the word that got shouted. Bush, and its many variations, with everyone trying to think of a new version: bush, bushy, bushwhacker, bushmonkey, bushman, bushy bushman, busharama, bushface, bushmuppet, bushalicious, bushbum, bushbunny, busher, bushayre, busherara, busheba, lord bush, president bush, sir bushwhacker of bushingdon, bushmonster, bushbilly, bushwilly, bushknocker, bushiel-san, bushelman, bushalackalonglong, bushy-bushy-bush-bush.

It wasn’t even as if his pubic hair was unusually verdant.

Someone told the girls, and so then all the girls knew that he was the first boy in the class to get pubic hair. One of them came up at lunch-time and asked him if it was true. She looked like she was on the verge of being impressed, but her friends were laughing so he said it wasn’t. He said he vigorously disputed it. Robin and another boy heard this, and pulled his trousers down in order to publicly verify the facts. There was a certain amount of vicarious laughter from just about everyone in the vicinity.

He stayed home from school for a few days after that. Mostly he lay in bed, looking up vagina and vulva in the dictionary.

He understood, already, that in a few years’ time these same boys would get, or claim to be getting, sex, and that he would be mocked and called a virgin. Virginal. Someone would realise that virginal sounded like vaginal, and he would be called a vagina; a vagina-head. He could visualise it precisely. There was no logic to it. It was vindictive. There was no way he could win. There wasn’t really any hope of winning. It made him feel vexated.

But he also understood that one day he would leave. Eventually, he would leave. And when he was gone they would still be here. He would move to a big city, and go to university, and be friends with people who didn’t feel the need to mock and belittle him, people who were interested in reading and art and philosophy and those varieties of things. And Robin and everyone else would all still be here, with their limited vocabularies, working in the chicken-processing factories and vegetable packing-houses, looking for someone else to victimise.

Victorious would be a word he could use then. Vindicated.