Chicken

Chicken

I almost became a chicken. That's the name paedophile men give young
boys who fall into their grooming and abuse trap. The perfect age,
apparently, is ten. Young enough to be sweet meat, hence the chicken
tag, but old enough to be on the streets a lot of the time.

I was twelve, but scrawny, small enough at that time to be taken for
younger. In addition, I was always alone, the several foster homes I
had been in had left me rootless, an outsider, never a part of regular
community life.

I lived in a town with a gaudy five hundred yards referred to as "
Margate's Golden Mile ". It was a festering, loud and grimy collection
of arcades, pubs and greasy cafes. The arcades were simply the hive of
every stupid thought that ever took flight. The endless cacophony of
the machines, the howling screeching clanging harangue of the senses;
the lights just an abomination. But not to bored, small-town eyes, this
was distraction from the shabby flats and the smell of your parents
beered up again. This was a haven even if it was a kind of
purgatory.

The smell of these places was chips, coin and corruption, in equal
amounts. Here it was possible to see just about every kind of scam,
sham and sleaze going. And those were just the kids. Everybody knew to
hang out with the visitors who arrived there shell-shocked and with a
bagfull of pennies. Help them out with winning money or prizes, wait
hopefully for a resentfully given gobbet of appreciation. Or offer to
get change for fevered gamblers, who wouldn't want to lose their place
at the one-armed bandit. The locals hated us for our persistent third
world behaviour, our obvious and desperate pushiness, they would push
us away. You soon learnt to spot who was game and who wasn't.

But sometimes we were game. There weren't many of us kids who didn't
know to run like shit when Malcolm the Talcum sidled up, or when a
player started a conversation about what football team you liked, or
worse, asked if you were hungry. To the initiated these were the
clarion calls for nonce avoidance.

The point of this story is, I once nearly went there, even though I
knew the stakes, not in gory detail, but I knew these men were
dangerous grotesques, even in my detached distance from everything, I
still knew.

But having survived nine years of children's homes and foster care, to
end up living in this town with my mother and her new husband, to end
up so neglected, so alone. Sometimes everything switches off except the
will to change the feeling that this is all there is, forever. I lived
in a state of utter desolate loneliness, not the weeping wailing
gnashing of teeth loneliness, not the loneliness of not seeing people,
not those lonelinesses. The loneliness of finding yourself at twelve,
adrift and out of dreams.

I wouldn't call what I had at home abuse, certainly not child abuse. At
twelve I had been living away from my natural family for nine years,
and this had left me travelled, experienced and independent. I was not
so much the child in terms of needing people. I just wasn't fulfilled
by being totally ignored, unless it was to either be interrogated, or
implicated in yet another violent row between my mother and stepfather.
The physical harm that came to me in the squalor they accepted as home,
that left me cold. I wasn't bothered except when my glasses were
broken. It was the psychological that got me every time. Being pulled
from bed and made to stand to attention. The lingering questions, that
took twenty minutes to be asked, as my stepfather dined on the suspense
he was creating.

The spoon on the floor questions took an hour to ask.

" Did you think I would choose to live in this fucken mizzen bringing
up your mares brood for the chance to live like a fucken pig? "

The stepfather was from Glasgow, and had suffered brain damage in a car
accident. When he was sweet he was very very sweet, but when he was
screwed up he was still in the army.

I would have to stand to attention. Only allowed to respond once the
order to speak was issued. It was this hopeless psychodrama that hurt.
To this day I cannot bear a question that is asked in manipulation. My
mother would occasionally walk past, to get tea or something.

" Oh John, leave the boy alone "

Said with all the conviction and concern of an elderly nun enquiring if
you would like another macaroon. The questioning would continue.
Sometimes the stepfather would get so angry he would have a fit and I
would prop up his burly ex-boxers frame using my six stones of
passivity.

If I sound self-pitying at this point, forget it. I emerged and never
took any of it personally. It was their screwed-up life, not
mine.

So the arcades were my escape, and perhaps it doesn't seem so hellish a
place to be after reading the above. But it was here that I came close
to compensating for the vacuum of myself. Here that one day I explored
the first step in becoming a chicken for the paedophiles of Margate
seafront.

Saturdays on the sea front were especially loud, especially senseless.
The pubs would be heavy with the stench of Old Spice, and aggression.
The arcades would be full of the bingo ladies all chirpily throwing the
money they saved in Tesco's that week, into the machines. The kids
would be walking sneakily between all this, checking the known machines
that let pennies fall from the teetering edges of pushers and
cascaders.

I was there when I should have been home. On discovering that I was an
hour late, and recalling the argument I had left behind when I ran out
this morning, I knew that there was a big weird session of unspeakable
humiliation waiting for me. The stepfather would greet me
mock-cheerily, in delight that I was once again the focus for all of
his life's loss, all of his frustration.

I decided to daydream. This was how I was able to continue with such
stoic regard of it all. In my untutored head I conjured up a horrific
accident for myself, so that my mother and the stepfather would be
beside themselves with anguish at my sorry state, begging for me to
just be alright. Another hour passed with my awareness fluctuating
between finding coins, and finding the obliteration of my fate.

When it was ten, a hitherto unheard of time for me to be out, I knew
that this meant desperate action. I left the arcades, crossed the road,
and started to walk along the promenade. I hate the beach at night when
you are lonely, it's such an echo of the endless confused darkness
which lingers inside your head.

As I stopped to stare out at the pier lights I noticed the man stop
too. I stuck my scuffed shoe through a hole in the railing, he took a
drag on a cigarette. When I next stopped he was the same distance, I
looked at him, couldn't see him clearly under the dazzle of the sodium
street lights. I decided to play a game.

My game involved, firstly, stopping every twenty seconds and catching
sight of whether he was following. Secondly, I pushed my hands into the
pockets of my jeans and pulled them tight against my bum. Thirdly, I
didn't think.

What I now see of my actions, with hindsight never so alarming, was
that I was taunting a paedophile late at night, out on my own; That I
was trying to shear my life from its foul connections using pure chaos.
I was not scared of anything that night, except going home. I was so
lucky. I breathe the precious air of my life today and count every
filigree victory in it as glorious. Forgive me, I am just overwhelmed
by my own stories, a terribly amateur trait.

He followed, this paedophile, and I led him. When I reached a square in
the town that had many darker streets leading off, I decided I had had
enough. I doubled my pace and took the street homewards. He followed
until I waited to cross the road again. He caught up with me.

I can't recall what transpired between us at that moment, I genuinely
can't. And I won't maufacture the kind of ping-pong dialogue of a
twelve year old tramp with a paedophile; some conversations just don't
deserve that. He offered to walk me through the park, using it's scary
expanses to pressure me. I accepted mutely, surrendered again to this
sense of powerlessness. He led me through the park, making nervous
small talk, which worked in the way that a steady noise does see off
the claustrophia of trees in the night. He led me to an exit of the
park that wasn't the one I needed to get home.

It didn't take him long to get me back to his house. A large-ish
terraced house, I recall the chess board patterned tiles on his front
path. At the door he told me he would get his car keys and give me a
lift home, it sounded plausible, friendly.

We entered to a hallway that spoke of bills paid regularly and
furniture polish that came in tins. He asked me if I would like a drink
of squash. and I nodded. In the kitchen I noticed photographs of ships
on most of the walls. The paedophile told me he worked on ships like
these, travelling, seeing all kinds of things, all kinds of things.
After squash he asked me if I would help him find his car keys,
upstairs. At this point I was a blank. I didn't care. I mumbled about
getting home and he promised to get me home in the car very soon.

Upstairs in his tiny bedroom he made me sit on a high backed chair. The
room was cluttered in a clean way, full of objects, books, clothes. He
sat on the floor in front of the chair and passed me some magazines.
They were full of black and white photographs of incredibly muscular
teenage men. I call them teenage men because that's what they looked
like. The sullen disdain on their faces in combination with their huge
cocks was behind this description. The paedophile asked me if I liked
looking at these pictures. In shock I just replied no. He then produced
magazines that showed sexual acts between similar teenage men and I was
worried but couldn't move.

He picked out a picture of fellatio and asked me if he could do that to
me. To me. I started to cry. I got up to leave and he was flustered by
this. He told me that he would never hurt me, and that I had to watch
out for men who might just force you to do things and put their cocks
up your arse and as he tried to placate me the front door downstairs
opened and closed.

He left instantly. I heard a woman's voice exchanged with his, his
now-calmed voice that just a second ago had been so breathless with
fervour. I looked around the room, on the mantlepiece of the fire I saw
a crucifix, silver, huge and thick. I put it in my pocket and fingered
its shape obsessively as I waited.

He returned, and whispered that his sister had returned and that I had
to be quiet. I whispered back in a plea that was only seperated from
tears by utter fear, that I want to go. He went out to check the house
for the whereabouts of his sister, and returned. The paedophile grabbed
my arm hard and dragged me down the stairs, and through the front door.
He marched me to a green car parked fifty yards down the road, where he
fumbled with his keys, panting.

Then I ran. I remember the weight of the first step in that running, it
felt like I was running through treacle. I ran so far before I realised
he had not followed, I was lost.

Twenty minutes later I was picked up by the police. I didn't tell them
about the paedophile. They wanted to know where the silver crucifix had
come from, so I told them I had found it on the beach. They took it as
lost property. They took me home. The public performance of mother and
stepfather was up to their usual impeccable standards. I went in and
was sent to bed. The lesson being. That to make a tiny interference in
their lives was unforgiveable. To disappear into the night and all its
attendant dangers, was perfectly alright.

I passed his house on the bus every day, going to my grammar school. I
used to look down at the chess board pattern tiles and dream up
revenges, exposing the perversion and the manipulation that he was
capable of. It never came about.

And that's how I almost became a chicken.