The Squirt
I detested him. He was five years younger than me. When you’re twelve, all younger boys are squirts.
My parents and his were close friends and during the occasional visit by one family to the other I was expected to play with him. Actually play with him. A complete squirt. I could barely look at him.
It was our turn to visit them. On the half-hour Green Line bus journey to Streatham I would plan ways of avoiding him.
We arrived, and he began. He raced out to their garden yelling for me to follow him because he wanted to show me something. It turned out to be his new trike. He got on it and pedalled furiously round and round the lawn, making silly faces and sillier noises. He then jumped off and began being an aeroplane and when he tired of that he started doing his head-over-heels routine. I expect I just stood there, caught between the Scylla of boring adults and the Charybdis of this undersize monster. I followed my usual tactic of being as unpleasant as the situation permitted.
The invitation was for the usual high tea. During the meal his voice was practically continuous and his helpings of cake and jelly and blancmange were masticated loudly as he tried to tell jokes while eating.
After tea he begged me to go up to his room to play with his electric train set. I trailed after him and probably made uh-huh noises as he showed me what it would do. After this he said he knew a practical joke and would I help him. It turned out to be a case of me going downstairs again and waiting outside the front door while he lowered black thread for me to attach to the door-knocker and go upstairs again. From his window he then made the brass knocker do its thing. Eventually the door was opened, closed again and his father called wearily from the hallway not to do that again, please.
The time came to leave. They walked to the bus stop with us.
The boy danced all the way, running round and poking me. At the bus stop he did his aeroplane act until the bus arrived. As it drew up the adults made their farewells.
But the boy did something extraordinary. He leaped up at me, wrapped his legs round my waist, pushed his mouth very hard against mine until our teeth clashed and gave me one long, wet kiss.
On the bus I sat in a state of shock, revulsion, fury, bewilderment and disbelief. It lasted for weeks.
The next time we met was some forty years later over lunch in a Guildford restaurant. Cruelly, I reminded him of the event. He raised an eyebrow, smiled wanly and said he had no recollection of it.
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Text and illustration ©Paul Wigmore 2010