He surged off in his wonderful chair, taking my assent entirely for granted. Just before he reached the corridor, he span his chair gracefully round and called out, ‘Don’t forget your Deutsches Leben, old man!’
I wondered what would happen if I didn’t turn up. I could say that the teacher wouldn’t let me go to the loo, or just tell Luke flat out that I wasn’t interested. It’s true that Luke was prone to wild rages, but I wasn’t actually afraid of him.
Up to a certain point Luke would be quiet and soft-spoken, but if he lost his self-control then there was no going back. His face became so contorted he could hardly be recognised. He would clear the room. People didn’t stick around — the sense of danger was palpable. Mr Nevin had sometimes been able to handle him, speaking gently and taking him by the arm. Biggie could also sometimes get through to him. Each of them had riddled him with bullets of pure love. After they had left the school his rages were much more intractable.
If Luke decided to thrash out, it wasn’t the legs you had to watch out for but his strong arms. Charged up with energy from the heat source in his groin, Luke’s fists could pack quite a punch. Sometimes two or three members of staff were needed to subdue him. Judy Brisby had boasted once that she could calm him single-handed with her nerve-punching technique, but she was thrown off like a straw doll, and ended up bruised herself. Threats had no effect on him.
Impressive but not contagious
If I wasn’t actually afraid of Luke, then there’s no denying that I was tense when the appointed day arrived. I made my excuse to the teacher at the agreed (actually the dictated) time. It was only as I approached the sliding door that I realised that I had forgotten to bring my copy of Deutsches Leben. I was stymied. I couldn’t go back and collect it, or the English teacher would certainly wonder why I needed a German text-book in the loo. There was no turning back.
‘Kann ich dick helfen?’ Luke said in greeting, with that slow drawling smile. I was so flustered that I failed to consider the possibility that he was playing with me. It’s well-known that the English have a real problem with the soft German ‘ch’, but I had Gisela Schmidt’s example to follow. In that school I was accounted sharp, but it didn’t occur to me that Luke was pronouncing the second word of his sentence exactly as he intended.
‘It’s not “dick”, it’s “dir”,’ I corrected him. ‘“Helfen” takes the dative because you’re giving help to someone.’ I was relieved to see that he had his copy of Deutsches Leben with him, pressed lightly against his groin. At least one of us had an alibi.
I had assumed that he had thought of a discreet place for our explorations, but he seemed to think the toilet block was a discreet enough venue. It was a newly built facility but already seemed neglected. There was a constant hissing and spluttering from some sort of maladjusted cistern, and water lay in pools on the floor.
The door to the block slid and could not be locked. There were urinals for the ABs, and I suppose for some pupils like Julian whose callipers meant that any unnecessary sitting down was a chore. There were also cubicles, which had locks and could accommodate a wheelchair. One wheelchair, not two. Luke’s solution was to lever himself out of his chair and install himself inside, supporting himself on the door. From there he called out, ‘Come on, John! What are you waiting for?’
Doubtfully I approached the toilet in the Wrigley. There was room for me to get past Luke’s distinctive machine, but I still wasn’t keen. Luke’s sense of invulnerability was impressive but not contagious. Anyone coming into the toilet block would guess how matters stood from the silent testimony of that chair.
In even the most benign scenario of discovery, there would be no sherry. Raeburn was still on the staff, pending the vote on the Berkshire take-over, but the reins were held in Marion’s sole hand. I was aware as Luke got down onto his knees before me — and how would he explain the damp patches on his smart trousers? — that St John was only two classrooms away savagely tweaking some poor kid’s ear, and if that’s what you got for making a mistake, Heaven knows what he would do if he knew that boys were being indecently gross and grossly indecent right now in the school’s new toilet block.
It was probably true that anyone asking permission to go to the toilet this late in a lesson would be told to wait for break, but I knew that ABs like Roger Stott who helped serve elevenses sometimes jumped the gun, leaving before the bell was actually rung. So I felt absolutely unsafe while Luke got busy with the symbolic transfer of fluids. On the level of sensation I probably enjoyed it more than I had at Woodlarks, when I had hardly been able to take in what was happening, but this was not a peak experience. Luke’s excitement made the Wrigley rattle, but I didn’t even get a glimpse of what he had hauled out of his trousers, while he tested to the limit the manufacturers’ claims about their permanent crease. I tried to project more congenial images onto the cubicle walls, jungles, mountains and clouds, or even the tent at Woodlarks, impregnated with the erotic scent of marshmallows. Nothing worked. The ambience of sanitary porcelain and leaky water-works could not be blotted out.
Luke gasped and shuddered. He had got what he wanted before the bell rang or the first AB was sighted, but he was too smart an operator to delude himself. He knew that I would want no repetition of our session of private study. Those few minutes in the toilet block were the first and last seminar that we had, and his performance in German O-level, good or bad, owed nothing to me.
Departure of fantasy
Though my carnal rendezvous with Luke Squires was hardly a high point of my life at Vulcan, I reconciled myself to the venue, at least. Julian Robinson and I had several encounters there in my last year at the school. Julian had the great advantage over Luke that he didn’t use a wheelchair. There was no evidence left outside the cubicle to betray us, and the level of risk became acceptable to me.
Julian had shed his secret-agent fantasies by now. There was no disguising of our objective any more, yet our explorations had very little flair. All that would happen in that cubicle was that Julian would unzip himself and present me with his cock, almost thwacking it down on the side bar of my wheelchair. Here at last was another penis for me to examine. I played little arpeggios on it, marvelling at the texture, so hard and so soft at the same time. This was all very satisfactory — my penis was clearly standard issue, give or take. After prodding and poking at Julian’s for a while, though, I’d learned all I could from it. Its academic interest out-weighed its potential for pleasure. Any actual sexual act would have been very hard to stage-manage, with Julian’s callipers locking his knees in place and my wheelchair getting in the way, and so little room to manœuvre.
By mutual consent, Julian’s parts were tucked back in his jeans. Then we would debate how best to leave the toilet block without arousing suspicion. The departure of fantasy didn’t announce the advent of realism. We agreed that the best alibi for our risky intimacy would be to stage a fight in the corridor. So once we were out in the open I would steer the Wrigley so as to graze him, and he would cannon into the wall and shake his fist at me while I cruised at high speed back into innocent company. This routine became slick with much practice — you go that way and I’ll go this — but I don’t see how it can ever have fooled anyone. Nothing in fact could be fishier than these shows of hostility.