Sven Goes to War. Part 3. I Want to Break Free

Sven was at breakfast the following morning when his mother, at work in the shop downstairs serving the fishermen their worms and copies of Nude Women in Combat, Fishermen’s Wives, Boating Beauties, shouted up the stairwell, ‘Have you told him yet Eddie?’ in the shrill voice she used for shoplifters and school sports days when Sven was always bringing up the pack. 

    Then his father had slid the brochure across the table towards him. 

    Across the top of it in large letters was The Swiss Card Sharp Summer School, and below this in smaller letters, Making Boys into Men, and Card Sharps^tm since 1975. 

    Then there was a glossy picture of a pack of cards. 

    “We’re sending you there,” said his father. “It’s only for six weeks. If you look at the small print it’s not all about being a card sharp. They do rough physical games under close supervision and you can learn to play the recorder or another musical instrument and make lifelong friends in one of the tightly packed but well organised dorm rooms.”

    Sven traced the outline of the cards on the front of the brochure. 

    He imagined a sweaty dorm room in the early hours of the morning, a recorder shoved up his ass in an unsupervised physical game, many other boys, fearsome ambidextrous card sharps, laughing and braying at his tighty-white butt, taking bets about who was going to blow into the stuck-up instrument. 

    He opened the first page of the brochure. 

    “It says it’s in a prison,” he said. 

    “It’s in a former prison,” said his father. “Faithfully converted to a modern home away from home giving your most-loved-one / ones the best chance in life. What’s more!, the facility being in a former prison all you parents can sleep safe in the knowledge that your little varmint isn’t going get out anytime soon and indulge in the many nightlife temptations Saltburn-by-the-Sea has to offer.”

    Eddie Tosier-Gumshoe rose up from the table and adjusted the picture of Dead Sister fixed to the wall there. Every family meal she peered down at them.  

    A constant reminder. 

    “Who knows,” said Sven’s father, “you might even like it there. Just embrace the experience.” He wiped away a tear that had formed under his eye. “And don’t you forget. Not everyone has the opportunity to snatch at the chance we’re giving you.”

    That night Sven dreamt of a daring escape. He scaled a wall. He dug a tunnel. He evaded armed guards. 

    Running along the mudflats to the seal colony he was invincible. 

    The seals would raise him as one of their own. 

    He would evolve to have seal powers. 

    Sealman! His bark is as powerful as his bite! Over-water, underwater, you name it, he can do it!

    He felt spectacular. 

    He would be spectacular. 

    Then he woke up. 

    Somehow in the night his big toe had got stuck in the bed post. 

    Again. 

    He tried to get it out. 

    He couldn’t. 

    He called for his dad to come and save him. 

    At last his dad appeared, bleary-eyed, in his Crockett and Tubbs pyjamas, (1000 lots of them bought just as the last season of Miami Vice got canned), having just got out of bed. 

    “Toe stuck again, son,” he said, “leave it to Gumshoe Eddie Tosier. No job too small. Last week I dealt with Aleks Aleksovich Andreyev’s dick stuck in the postman’s wife but don’t tell your mother.”

    Then, while his father was pulling at the toe, quite roughly Sven thought, the bed covers had fallen off. 

    Sven always slept in the nude. 

    His father, catching sight of him, had appeared to think carefully about it for a while, rubbing at Crockett’s head on his chest, and then he had said, “Have you been shaving your crack sac and back again son? What did your mother and I tell you about that?”

    Then he had noticed Dead Sister’s panties on the floor.

    He shook his head sadly. 

    “And you’ve been wearing your sister’s clothes?”

    Sven shrugged. 

    What was the point in denying it? 

    And how could he explain that he still remembered the days when Dead Sister used to dress him up and they had run on the spot in their room, this room!, pretending that the sun was shining, a hearty slap-up dinner was waiting for them, they were moving swiftly through a field of corn etc etc etc?

    How he had felt breathless and safe?

    Etc. Etc. Etc.  

    And how since she had gone he had felt a hole open up in his life. 

    Etc. Etc. Etc. 

    “A shaved crack, sac and back will probably not set you in good stead with the other boys at The Swiss Card Sharp Summer School,” said Eddie, his father. “And nor will wearing your Dead Sister’s panties. That’s the last I’m saying on the matter. Now get yourself up and dressed. Your mother and I have got a little surprise for you.”

    Then he had hopped from foot to foot. 

    “Oh dang it, you might as well have it now.”

    He went out and returned seconds later with the thing Sven had always most coveted from the shop but which had always been strictly out of bounds. 

    It was a man’s head roughly the size of a golf ball. The man had a shocked expression on his face. Fixed to the back of the man’s head was a plug. 

    The plug went up your butt, fixing it in place, so it looked like the man was trying to escape from your ass. 

    “You’ll be the belle of the ball with that,” said his father. “But use it wisely. It’s all too easy to overdo a joke.”