Corporate Clarke's Fiction

Photo by: @anniespratt

[~2,500 words | 8 – 12 min read]

The black, polyester school trousers that end too high above my ankles are sticking to my legs. It’s two weeks before the six week summer holiday  – but the sun is here. 

The sun is a drug for the boys. We collide during breaktimes, smashing into tackles harder, slapping when we ‘tig’, suplexes during ‘touch’ rugby games. Someone sets off the fire alarm every other day. Someone flooded the toilets by stuffing paper towels into the plug hole and leaving the tap on. One of the older kids brought water bombs and hit the runt in our form with a looping artillery strike from the other  side of the playground. It hit him on the temple. It didn’t burst and almost knocked him out. 

I hate the heat. I don’t own any shorts except my obligatory PE kit. All summer I wear trousers. My calves are stick thin. I heard my classmates talking about it in the changing room under their breath. So I don’t own any shorts and I try to forget my PE shorts as much as possible. 

Every summer I boil my chicken legs under the thinnest trousers I can find. Every summer I invent excuses for why I’m not wearing shorts. I thought it was going to be colder. They’re in the wash. I thought it was going to rain.

Russel wears skin tight shorts and they take the piss out of the size of his arse. Fletcher wears long sleeves because he’s grunge now and they take the piss out of that too. They just laugh. They don’t seem bothered. They don’t have an existential crisis and change their wardrobe.

I’m in the convenience store counting the change out of my pocket, figuring out if I can afford a pack of POGs or just sweets. 

A couple of my friends have paper rounds. They have a couple of notes in their pocket. I’m not allowed a paper round. My parents say they will buy me anything I need. What I need isn’t what I need. What I need is some money so I can buy the things I want. 

Harry, the shop owner, is on the till. I put the single box of Runts down next to an advert for a shop assistant. The hourly wage seems impossibly high compared to a paper round. He engages me in conversation, asks about school. He makes the kids feel welcome in his shop. Many don’t. 

The boys are waiting on a stone wall across from Harry’s. They’re giggling about something – I assume about me.

“What?” I ask.

“Do you want a Chewit?” Fletcher offers me one of the individually wrapped sweets. One of my favourites but there must be a catch so I turn him down, showing him my own sweets. Everyone giggles. I’ve missed the joke.

“I thought you didn’t have any money left,” I say.  

“I don’t,” he says. 

“How did you get the sweets?” 

“Nicked them,” he says. Everyone giggles again. 

“Nicked them?”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. Everyone shuffles off the wall and starts walking home. I look at the shop and back to Fletcher, who is brazenly eating the sweets as he strolls away.

“Doesn’t your mum work at the shop on Saturdays?” I ask. 

“Yeah. So what?”

“Doesn’t feel right,” I say, under my breath. 

As I follow them I stop feeling the sun and start to feel the prickle of guilt and paranoia. I’m expecting a police car to swing into view, officers to jump out and pin us onto the ground. Smell the shoplifting on us. We’ll be interrogated separately. I’ll feign ignorance but their story will be consistent – they’ll blame me. 

We get to Fletcher’s house and he peels off. A couple more of the group leave as we pass their houses until only Russel, Greyson and me remain. 

“Did you guys steal anything?” I ask. 

“Nope.”

“Nor me.”

“But might do next time,” shrugs Russel.

“I’ve got the paper round, I don’t really need to,” says Greyson.

“Good point,” says Russel. “I’ve got the work at my uncle’s.”

“That’s not really the point,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“We just shouldn’t be stealing.” 

“You’re such a swot. It’s just some sweets. The shop is not going to miss one pack.”

“If you all nick something every day Harry’s gonna notice,” I say. “It’s not worth getting arrested for.”

They both laugh. Russel says, “We’re not gonna get arrested for nicking some sweets.”

“People get arrested for shoplifting,” I mumble. 

“You worry too much about everything,” he says. “You’re never going to have any experiences in life.”

“What, because I’m not stealing?”

“Because you’re just… such a… swot… I don’t know.”  

My house is before theirs’. When I get into the house my mum asks me what’s wrong. I say, nothing. But she keeps asking all night until I have to retreat to my room. She says something under her breath about living with a stranger. Now I have to carry all of this too. I hate my friends. 

At dinner my mum asks me if I’ve cheered up. I ask her if I can get a paper round. She says, not with that attitude.  

*

By the following week I can’t even go into Harry’s with my friends. Half of them are nicking stuff almost every day. I’ll be surprised if they get away with it for another week. I feel sick thinking about how embarrassed Fletcher’s mum will be if he gets caught. 

They get cockier with the haul every day. One of them has nicked a Squeeze It drink, barely concealed in their jacket pocket. Another is chewing some stolen gum before he is out of the door. They’re not even getting a thrill from it anymore. 

I rejoin them as we walk to our homes. My non-participation aggravates them. I’m on the periphery of the conversation, just listening. They don’t tell me to go away, but they don’t tell me what we’re playing this evening. My biggest fear is losing all of my friends. I don’t know how to make new friends. I have no idea how I made these friends.

On Saturday I have to go clothes shopping with my mum for a family wedding that’s coming up in a couple of months. She has to guess how much I’ll grow by then and buys me a blazer with sleeves that end at my knuckles. By the time I get back it’s late afternoon and there is never anything on the TV at this time. All the cartoons are finished and the cooler evening programmes haven’t started yet. It’s just boring stuff like reading out the football scores or people looking at antiques. 

I walk around the village and try to find my friends by going to the six places we usually hang out. The sun is halfway down the sky, searing the back of my eyes.  

I can’t find my friends but a police car is parked outside Harry’s convenience store and the CLOSED sign is up. I watch from afar for a while until I can discern the silhouette of one adult in the back of the car. Not my friends.  But maybe this will put them off the shoplifting if I tell them. Maybe it can go back to normal.  

I can’t find anyone. If the group isn’t already out I don’t wanna knock for anyone, by the time I get everyone out it will be tea time. 

I still have time to kill before I have to be back. I walk the long way home through some of the fields that surround the village. The ground is hard and dry but the midges are out and getting into my hair. Hair that seems to always need cutting and makes my head look massive on my lanky frame. 

One of the paths through the field tracks close to a wooded area that slopes down towards a hidden beck. I can hear what sounds like squealing and splashing. I move into the trees and down the slope towards the beck, quietly, avoiding branches and placing my feet on the firmest bits of ground, stealth honed from years of hide-and-seek after school.

From halfway down the slope I can see a man in a dirty, oversized t-shirt and baggy jeans. He’s struggling to push a garbage bag into the shallow water. There is a dog inside the bag. I can hear it and see it kicking. He’s making a hash of it and it takes him twenty minutes to drown it. Then he sits there crying and I can’t stand to look at it. 

When I get home, my mum is waiting in the kitchen, pretending to dry up a plate that wasn’t wet. 

“Are any of your friends acting strangely?”

My skin prickles. “Strange how?”

“Were any of them… upset?” She is still massaging the dry plate with a tea-towel. 

“No one was out, Mum. But I saw a police car outside Harry’s”

“Was anyone in it?” she asks. The blood that normally flares her cheeks when she’s doing housework is gone.

“I couldn’t see who it was.”

“It was Mrs Fletcher,” she says. She is ashen but I have to turn away because I’m suppressing a smirk. “She has been taking money out of the till. Don’t say anything to your friends. He must be so embarrassed. These things happen. It’s not his fault.”

In the fortnight that follows I start to think my mum has made a huge mistake. As school finishes and we transition into a timeless summer, none of my friends mention it, even when Fletcher is not there. Fletcher doesn’t seem any different, but I notice the shoplifting has totally stopped. 

Then a week into the summer holidays, there is a story about it in the local newspaper. 

*

I hate Sundays and the last Sunday before the new school year is the worst of all. The choke of not just another Monday, but the whole academic year ahead, pressing its thumbs further into my throat as the day goes on. I feel a pressure to make the most of the time. 

We just finished a game of headers and vollies and I’m laying in the eighteen yard box wondering if that was what I really wanted to do. Why can’t I relax?

I can hear Fletcher telling the others that they should pile on me. I am tired and hot and my legs are so sweaty under my trousers. As I see him approaching in my peripheral vision. I wonder why I am friends with him. It’s just convenient I guess. I don’t like any of the same things as him anymore. I don’t really care what happens to him. I find his company annoying.

He tries to grab me around the waist but I spin with his weight, putting him into a headlock. He realises quickly I’m really fighting him. The rest of my friends stop and watch. We fall to the penalty spot. I’m growling. Fletcher is wrestling me, just trying to restrain me, telling me to chill. I’m too angry and I can’t stop. I manoeuvre myself on top of him and I strike him in the face. But it’s not full force. He says he won’t fight me. I strike him twice more. Less than half strength. He knows it. I’m crying because I won’t strike him harder. Friends split us up as soon as they realise it’s going nowhere. Half the group surrounds me, the others around him.

He says I’m psycho like my dad, that I can’t take a joke.

“At least I’m not a fucking shoplifter like you and your mum.” 

His eyes are immediately welling, everyone is silent, everything is radioactive. He calls me psycho again and turns away. I can’t see if I made him cry. 

Half my friends take him home, half take me home. I wonder if I’ll be shuffled out of the friendship group now. Who cares? I’ll start again. At least I won’t have to see Fletcher. 

Russel and Greyson are outside my house on Monday morning to walk to school as if nothing has happened. They ask if I’m alright without being specific. I say I am fine now, without being specific. 

Fletcher is already waiting on the pavement outside his house when we get there. He doesn’t look like he wants to fight. Instead, the first thing he does is apologise to me. I accept. Halfway to school I realise he is afraid I will tell everyone.  This is his skinny legs. 

Things go back to how they were in less than an hour. I never say sorry for using that against him. There is a line for fights with friends. He was horsing around just being a boy. I was tired, carrying all my invented baggage – being a bitch. By lunchtime too much time has passed and it’s impossible to apologise.

Later, his mum does some community service in the village. I don’t recall it ever being mentioned by anyone ever again. 

We stay friends into the 6th form. I go to university. Fletcher doesn’t, even though he could. We lose touch. 

*

Later in my life, I am pulled back to the village. I fall into living with my brother, both of us with twice as much dwelling as we need, after we each leave a disastrous relationship at roughly the same time.  I have lots of shorts in my wardrobe and I wear them like a normal person. 

It’s another hot summer in the village and I have a cold, a summer cold, the worst type of cold. Being ill in the summer looks disgusting and weak. I’m at the pharmacy, wet forehead and mouth breathing, looking for some nasal spray and the legal maximum number of paracetamol packs I can purchase.

I see Fletcher, walking away from the prescription desk with a tub of something in his hand. He sees me and comes to say hello. He is wearing a t-shirt and I notice the bandage on his left arm. We exchange some pleasantries and he tells me he has a family. He does fitted wardrobe stuff for work, there is so much work he has to turn it down. He tells me where he lives. It’s somewhere close by that I vaguely remember. 

He sees me looking at the pot of cream. “Scar cream,” he says, and shrugs. He raises the bandaged arm, “From all this when I was a dumb kid.” I don’t say anything. I didn’t know he was doing that. He fills the silence, “I’m not doing it anymore, obviously. But it cracks and bleeds without the cream.” There’s a dull brown stain on the bandage. 

He changes the subject. We talk about if we’ve seen other people from school. I tell him I see Greyson a few times a year. Russel when he’s in the country. We say we should meet up but we don’t exchange contact details. I think about the dog in the bag, how confused and betrayed it must’ve felt. I catch my reflection in the glass doors of the pharmacy –  chicken legs. 

END