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The Call of the Wild

IN THE MIDST of so many potential threats, it’s not easy to express yourself – unless you are being aggressive. Most other forms of emotional expression are kept in check, either by mockery or the threat of violence. This makes growing up in a so-called deprived community an oppressive experience. This sense that you are being repressed extends to nearly every means that you have to express your individuality. Which is why nearly everybody dressed and spoke the same. If you didn’t conform to the prevailing norm of the day then life became a daily run of the gauntlet.

Just as you’d attract attention for having the gall to wear a pair of trousers with more than two pockets, it became very apparent to other people if you started dropping fancy words into conversation. I recall a summer afternoon, stewing on the school bus as rowdy classmates were being dragged aboard by teachers for the weekly trip to the football pitches. Two minutes on the bus and it was clear the boys were in no mood to behave unpredictably; snarling through their nostrils and homoerotically play-fighting while using the word ‘gay’ as an adjective for anything that fell outside their frame of reference. By these measures, I was already well out of the closet and that day I made a passing comment about one of the girls in our class, who was sporting an attractive new hairstyle.

‘Here, did you see Nicola’s new hair? It’s fuckin beautiful.’

That sentence might seem uncontroversial, but in this environment, there is a preferred way of speaking. When you are bold enough to speak up amongst a potentially aggressive peer group, it’s wise to screen your impending statement in your head beforehand, or you risk inviting a confrontation. Luckily, my sense of what I should and shouldn’t say was, by this point, instinctive and I could think on my feet depending on the demands of the situation. If I found myself in a staff room, in the presence of adults with authority, it was natural to take things up a notch and perhaps drop in a reference to politics or current affairs – if there weren’t any boys around. For some reason, it always felt natural to alter the way I spoke when conversing with teachers. It was important to me that they knew I was smart. In a school like this, where the threat of mockery and violence hangs in the air, intelligence is an attribute you learn to conceal for reasons of personal safety. Therefore, if the opportunity to flex my intellectual muscle did present itself, it was difficult to pass up.

Not all adults in the school warranted this approach. Topical references to politics or current affairs were less appropriate if you found yourself shooting the breeze with a janitor or a dinner lady. Not because they weren’t interested in politics (maybe they were) but simply because they were not the type of people who discussed things of an intellectual nature – or so I gathered.

The janitor’s main area of expertise was janitoring. Unless you had a building-related query then there was little to discuss. In our school the janitor was a big man, or fat, as we called him behind his back, and he didn’t say very much. When he did it was usually to make you aware of something you were doing wrong. He leered over us and his presence was unpleasant because he seemed to be a deeply unhappy man. If he wasn’t scowling by the playground doors at interval, or moving through the school like a glacier, to board up a smashed window or bleed a radiator, he was sitting in his janitorial quarters at the front door, sipping a mug of tea, his long face buried in a tabloid newspaper. Who knows, maybe he was interested in politics? Perhaps he had a burning desire to run in the local council elections? Perhaps the newspaper was concealing a copy of National Geographic, to which he devotedly subscribed every month? But there was something about his demeanour, or at least my interpretation of it, that suggested he wasn’t up for talking to me about anything. Sometimes he wouldn’t even put the paper down to respond to you, he’d just grunt and gesture towards the keys to the toilet.

The dinner ladies were much more welcoming and good-humoured. They gave lunchtime a personal touch and as well as serving your food they would ask how you were getting on. But despite their social skills far exceeding those of the janitor, at no point did it seem appropriate to pick their brains on anything. I found it surreal to see them in some other capacity, like going to the shops or getting off a bus. In my head, they were just the dinner ladies. The idea you could learn anything from anyone but teachers, who possessed the only type of knowledge worth knowing, seemed absurd to me at that time.

If I was talking to a girl, which happened on many occasions, another realm of possibility would open because there would be less pressure to adopt a braggadocio persona. Girls, in most cases, were more mature than boys of a comparable age and I could sense that many of them were exhausted by the unending dither of the males. A conversation with a girl presented the chance to express another side of my personality, the opportunity to liberate myself briefly from the heavy social burdens of the male arena.

As for being trapped on a school bus full of hormonal boys on the way to football, well that was a different story.

Here I couldn’t be myself. Here I couldn’t be caught thinking about what being myself even meant. My simple desire to express appreciation of an attractive girl’s hairstyle was, in fact, not simple at all. Bizarrely, this matter required consideration of the most careful kind. It wouldn’t do to simply blurt out the word ‘beautiful’. Without some sort of linguistic diversion, or buffer, that would have been too jarring for these boys. New words and ideas filled them with alarm, provoking unpredictable reactions depending on your location and how many of them were present. I knew, intuitively, that using the word ‘beautiful’ was a risk. That’s why I deliberately foreshadowed it with a tougher, coarser word, to soften the blow.

‘Here, did you see Nicola’s new hair? It’s fuckin beautiful.’

Did I really expect my use of an unsanctioned term to go undetected? As soon as the word passed my lips, silence fell. The boys looked at one another baffled, like primates confronted, for the first time, by a flame. In situations like this no one knew how to respond. Everyone had a sense of how they should respond but no gumption to follow through in case they were rejected by the pack. Some likely agreed with my observation that Nicola’s hair was beautiful but were looking to the group for a sign that it was okay to feel this way. Others may have thought it a stupid thing to say, deserving of ridicule, but like the rest, needed reassurance before indicating their position. There may have been at least one who didn’t know what the word meant, either mishearing it or perhaps hadn’t heard it used by a male before. Despite their reactions being rooted in a desire to project a tough image, they were all terrified to reveal their true thoughts or feelings in that moment. They were anxious to be seen even pondering such things and this fear, which followed them everywhere, was the engine room of much of their behaviour in school – and out.

In absurd scenarios like these, which occurred at least once every day, you could be ‘accused’ of being gay – like it was a crime – for openly expressing an interest in the opposite sex. Not only that but you could become subject to such a spurious charge by a bunch of boys who weren’t happy unless they were writhing around a football field, a rugby scrum or whipping one another’s bare arses with towels in a communal shower. But this stupidity dominated the horizon of my every school day from 1996 until 2001. I cannot overstate how I’d dread and loathe those bus journeys, short as they were. Everything about them, much like school itself, was profoundly oppressive. Moment to moment, people were so inhibited by the social expectations of those around them that the simple act of acknowledging reality, in this case a girl’s pretty hair, became a radical political act.

‘Here, did you see Nicola’s new hair? It’s fuckin beautiful.’

‘Beautiful?’ one replied. ‘Ha, ha, ha. He just said “beautiful”. Ha, ha, ha, mate, you’re gay.’

Strangely, the chorus of laughter was, for me, a welcome relief. It’s never fun to be laughed at when you don’t intend to be funny but my pride was not the only ball in play here. The boys’ collective laughter, while humiliating, also signalled they were back to being as they had been before I disorientated them with a foreign idea. An idea which, while simple to me, seemed to threaten them in some way. Instances such as this would happen frequently and produce different results: sometimes you’d get kudos for appearing smart or witty or for dispatching an adversary’s attempt to belittle you by retorting with a devastating one-liner. Or you could end up in a heated confrontation simply because an unsanctioned word or reference sparked an escalating tit-for-tat from which nobody could back down from without inviting more aggression. In this kind of community people can turn extremely hostile – and dangerous – if they feel put down or threatened.

Was it the word ‘beautiful’ itself, or what the word ‘beautiful’ might have implied that created the tension? Perhaps it was the expectation they felt the word placed on them? An expectation to respond in some way and pressure at not knowing how to, or fear of giving a response which was socially unacceptable? An expectation to either disagree or concur and what either response may have revealed about them? What if an accidental smirk or involuntary nod betrayed some secret passion, goofy eccentricity or deep vulnerability they weren’t comfortable with other people knowing about? I can only speculate. All I remember is that Nicola’s hair was so beautiful I couldn’t stop myself saying as much, irrespective of the grief I’d receive. Then again, with a mother like mine, my emotional threshold for feelings of shock, offence and abuse was already painfully high.