Well, as you can imagine, that was the end of my career as a Junior Pimp. I didn't know what to say to my dad, so I didn't say anything. Instead I undid Fiona, and she got dressed. I had no excitement left in me, none at all.
Then my dad came over all apologetic and begged me not to tell Mum about him visiting a prostitute. I promised I wouldn't, just to get him to shut up, and to get him out of there. After he'd left, Fiona and I sat on the bed together, not saying hardly anything. My dad's money was lying on her bedside table, and she actually offered me my usual cut, can you believe that? Of course I told her what she could do with her money. Then I said goodbye to her.
When I got back home my mum was overjoyed to see me. It was like being smothered in kisses! Horrible. Of my dad, there was no sign. Mum didn't know where he was, and she didn't care, that's what she said. I wouldn't have told on him, I really wouldn't have, except that Dutch finally stuck his big foot in it by telling some stupid journalist about me..That caused a right stink, with questions in the papers and people going on about me as though I was the end of civilization or something. That's why I've decided to tell this true Confession of my time as a Junior Pimp.
Anyway, it's all finished now. I'm living at home again, with Mum and Tango. Mum and Dad are getting divorced. I'm back at school as well, doing my best to catch up with the lessons I missed. I want to be an artist. The authorities are still trying to decide if I've done anything wrong. What do you think - have I? I don't know, sometimes it seems like it never happened, that I never was a Junior Pimp. But then I remember what I've seen, and what I've done. Seen more and done more than any other boy in the school, even those that have actually had sex, or so they claim. They all look up to me now because I'm famous, especially the girls. Some psychiatrist expert type woman has said that it's going to affect me for the rest of my life, and I certainly hope so.
SHED WEAPONS
Just about the best thing about being a kid is that you get ' to have hobbies. Hobbies are not graded according to how educational they are, and not even by how interesting they are; no, a hobby is deemed good or bad by how many gadgets it involves. Stamp collecting for instance, although undeniably educational, has only the album, the tweezers, the hinges, the magnifying glass, and that's about it. According to the gadget quota, by far the best hobby of all time is angling.
Your average boyhood fishing trip involves hooks and weights, and floats and lines, and reels and rods, and landing nets and keepnets, and strange apparatus like the little tool that gets the hook out of the fish's mouth. And all this paraphernalia gets a carefully allotted place in the various plastic trays that slot neatly into the wicker basket, the basket that also doubles as a canalside seat.
But the best gadget of all, in fishing, is the bait. By this, I mean specifically, the maggots.
You could buy these little creatures by the ounce, usually from the local pet shop. As though a maggot could be a pet. They came in a rainbow of colours, which means that somewhere on Earth, some kid is being asked, 'What does your dad do?' and he can answer, quite proudly: 'He's a maggot-colourer.' You would give the shopkeeper your sixpence, or whatever it was, and he would open the big tub and there they all were, millions of them, wriggling like crazy. The man would scoop out your portion, plop them into a brown paper bag. The bag was warm in your hand, and pulsated slightly, and from there you transferred them to your baitbox, which was plastic, with a lid. Sometimes they would show a natural history film on television, a speeded-up film in which these very same creatures could be seen devouring a dead rabbit in seconds. It took a while to get over the fear.
But pretty soon you did, especially after piercing a few with the fishing hook, right through the belly. And there was so much you could do with them. For a start you could throw a bunch of maggots on to the water, around your luminous, bobbing float. This was supposed to tempt the fish towards your hook. Even better was to put a handful in a catapult, and use this to disperse your bait. Of course this led on to more exciting pursuits; like using the catapult to fire maggots at your friends. Then there were competitions to see who could eat the most maggots. And the best thing of all was to put maggots down the back of girls' dresses.
Of course, angling soon went the way of all hobbies, as you got older and moved on to more grown-up pursuits. And when that happened, all the gear - the rod and the basket, the reels and the nets and the baitbox and all the little gadgets, most of which, truth be known, you had never ever used - all of it went into the garden shed.
The garden shed was traditionally the repository of lost hobbies, and not just yours, but your father's too. It was stuffed to the roof with rusting tools and old bikes, and broken-down lawnmowers, moth-eaten overalls, a spade with no handle, a handle with no spade, unwanted presents, cricket bats and airless footballs, jam jars full of nails and screws, and piles of rotting magazines, and all the useless souvenirs from the holidays in Blackpool.
Discarded dreams.
My father kept his weapons in the shed. When I was growing up, it was still close enough to the war years for memories of the conflict to be constantly on -people's minds. The comic books we loved to read were filled with pictures of storm troopers shouting things like 'Gott in Himmel!' and 'Englisher Swinehunt!' Our favourite game was play acting the great battles, and I was secretly ashamed because my father had actually been on Germany's side in the war. I knew this because the weapons in the shed were marked with the dreaded symbol of the eagle, and any words on them were in the German language.
Of course, I know now that my dad must have stolen these off dead bodies.
There was a gun, a Luger I think. And a bayonet, a pair of binoculars and some bullets, about half a dozen bullets. Sometimes I would creep into the shed to play with these weighted, magical objects. The binoculars I lost on Blackpool beach one time, and for that I was severely punished. The pistol and the bayonet were handed in when the government called an amnesty on any old war weapons. But for some reason my dad didn't hand over the bullets, the six bullets, I still don't know why.
A few weeks after this, it was Guy Fawkes night, and long after the last stragglers had left the glowing embers of the communal bonfire, my father went up there alone. I don't know what he was thinking of, I really don't, because a few minutes later there were some terrifying explosions from the site of the fire, and my father comes sprinting down the street, waving his hands madly in the air.
He'd only thrown the bullets into the embers!
And in the morning, all along a wooden fence, we found the blackened punctures. I think this is when the people in the street really started talking about my father.
Infected as he was now with the cleaning-out mood, one day he attacked the shed with a vengeance, saying he was going to throw out all the rubbish once and for all. He was in there for hours, and the pile of junk grew in front of the door. Us kids soon grew bored with all this, until we heard a sudden cry of alarm from the shed. My father came running out, followed by a cloud, a black cloud of buzzing life.
He'd opened the baitbox. The baitbox that had slept in the shed for weeks, with the maggots turning first into hard-baked pupae, and then into the ravenous cloud that swarmed for a second around my father's startled face, before taking off at last. Scatters of ash, floating away into the sun.
HOMO KARAOKE