Not smiling, wanking

The bricks were always cold underneath my bum. Cold and hard. I could feel their sharp edges. In the nights we sat and talked. The smells of sour smoke and saliva on one, body odour on another, and menace on the other. The fluorescent globes hummed from the station platform, and the street lights pooled at the corner.

Inside was out of bounds to these boys, so we met on our side stairs. The frosted glass door between us and our home. Outside; offside: the limits to friendships. These were the kids we didn’t trust, the boys from the wrong side of the tracks. Where were their parents? Absent fathers, unsighted mothers, these boys roamed the streets and set me on edge. The attraction to the dirt, to the smell of one’s mouth...I can still feel it now. It was an urge, but not an infatuation. 

The hearts of these boys remained hidden. It was as if they walked in costumes, played their parts, and kept their distance. We weren’t allowed to welcome them in.

One day, my mum greeted me at the side door with these words: “Someone has broken into the house, and they’ve ejaculated all over your pillow.” I was speechless, so she added “They drew a smiley face in it, and left a red pubic hair.”

All these years later, it still seems unthinkable that these boys, who shared stories and music with us on our side stairs, could have broken into our family home, and left a pile of cum where my head usually rested. The smiley face was still visible in the setting semen. There was one tell-tale pube, the red one. My favourite jeans had also been stolen, along with my striped rugby jumper. 

My room now seemed dangerous, so I slept on a mattress on the floor of my parents’ dressing room for weeks. The police said they would test my linen. We never heard anything back from the detectives. I doubt they really investigated it. When I saw the red-headed boy wearing my clothes, he told me his sister had given them to him, but I was pretty sure he didn't have a sister. 

Some days after the robbery, one of the boys asked about the silver that was stolen-but we hadn’t realised any was missing. It turned out the silver tea set was gone. We hadn’t even known, but the wankers had. Confessions set in precious metal. 

The smiley face they had newly spray painted on the train station wall sneered back at me each day. At night it looked ghostly under the fluorescence.