The Ordeal Of Porky Rind (Part One)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

As the school bus skirted a naked, conical hill that the locals called The Big Tit something hit the back of Mark Bladen's head. It was the soggy end of an overripe banana, and to the delight of the band of hooligans known as the Brightsea Mob sitting on the back seat the mess splattered in the boy's hair. “It's stylin' gel, you fat bastard, rub it in, you could do with a new 'air-do,” Paul Thomas, one of the ringleaders snickered as his victim tried to clean up the mess with a crumpled tissue that William Follows, aka Weed, his only close friend, handed him. “All you need now is a few squirts of 'Armony 'airspray an' you'll look like one of the Nancy boys from One Direction - the girls'll be falling over each other to get their 'ands on your microscopic cock. Oy, Porky Rind, I'm talking to you! At least 'ave the decency to answer.” Mark never replied to the jibes of the aspiring hoodlums because engaging them in conversation only made his burden heavier to carry.

Mark was one of a number of overweight teenagers that attended Bridlington Science Academy, formerly Bridlington Comprehensive, and as far as he was concerned he was the most bullied. The Brightsea mob were his main aggressors, a large group of boys from a rough council estate of the same name, but even some of the nicer kids joined in the piss-taking on occasion. His mother had complained no end of times to the headmaster about the maltreatment that her son was forced to endure, but her interference tended to make things worse so for the last several months Mark had tried to keep his misery to himself.

Perhaps the relentless bullying was a random thing, he reflected, perhaps fate had slipped on a blindfold and casually chosen his name out of a hat, or perhaps he deserved the hideous, apparently unfair treatment that school life constantly flung his way. The last few weeks he had been researching Buddhism and the notion of karma on the internet, which caused him to wonder if he had been a bit of a bastard (or a lot of a bastard) in a former life - maybe karma was paying him back for a series of long passed but not forgotten misdeeds.

“Can you imagine Pig-man on the job?” Alex Jones, another one of the Brightsea Mob said. “If 'e could find a bird ugly and stupid enough to shag 'im it'd make an interestin' spectacle. The girl'd 'ave to be a spacka to start with, an' she'd 'ave to be on top like when Weed rides 'im behind the bike shed, 'cos 'avin an enormous whale wrigglin' around on top of 'er would squash the life out of the poor mite. If Porky could get an 'ard-on with a girl, that is, an' I doubt that – I've seen the fat 'omo in the showers an' 'is knob's no bigger than a fag-end except when Weed sucks it for 'im. I bet even 'is sperm are fat and useless – they'd swim a short way up the girl's chuff an' shout 'fuck this, let's go back to fatty's balls for a kebab an' chips an' a massive slice of chocolate gateau.' 'Ow about you Scabbis?” he said to Glennys Dolphin, an ill-kept girl from a desperately poor family. “Would you let fatty shoot 'is load up your diseased, stinkin' fanny?”

“Go an' fuck yerself, Jonesy. Why don't you shag 'im?”

The bus exploded in laughter, and even the driver, who had seen it all before, struggled to suppress a chuckle. The boy sitting directly behind Mark, who was swigging from a bottle of milk, involuntarily spat out the mouthful all over Mark's head and shoulders, raising a fresh eruption of laughter. Sarah-Jane Fitzgerald, the sweet looking girl sitting in front of Mark, who sometimes summoned up the courage to stick up for the underdog when the going got tough, turned around and treated him to a petrifying glare. “What you playin' at, you dirty fat cunt?” she growled, rubbing the spatters of ejaculated of milk from her long, lovely hair.

That was it, Mark couldn't take any more. He stood up and slung his white Adidas bag over his shoulder, which still bore the ghost of 'Fat Twat' in red marker pen that had taken him a good half an hour to scrub off, and the bag still stank of white spirits. He gave an almost imperceptible farewell nod to Weed, who knew the crack, and waddled to the front of the bus, which was approaching the stop at Atherstone, a hamlet a couple of miles from his house. Mark often got off there and walked across the sprawling nature reserve known as The Bumbles to Farnwick. It put an extra three quarters of an hour on his journey, but he couldn't face the increasingly aggressive insults for a moment longer. “You fat fuckin' pussy!” Paul Thomas yelled through the window of the bus as the huge boy clumsily stepped down onto the grass verge. “Fancy chickenin' out an' spoilin' our fun just 'cos somebody gave you a free drop of titty milk to calm your nerves!”

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The Bumbles was a large tract of woodland, open heath, dark pools and low-lying marshland that had been donated to the local authority by a wealthy landowner on his deathbed during the nineteen fifties on the understanding that it would always be utilised as a nature reserve and public recreational area. The undulating hills surrounding the heavily wooded core were joined by a network of meandering paths and dotted with benches and picnic tables, though many of them had been vandalised and the only remnants of some were a few fire blackened timbers sticking out of the ground.

The path leading into the trees was churned into a sticky quagmire by youths on motorbikes, and a sodden double mattress that someone had dumped and some comedian had scrawled 'Fuck the slag on here' across in red spray paint partially blocked the way. When Mark walked home across the nature reserve his mother complained about the state of his shoes and the black, stinking muck that he walked into the house, but he could take that, at least his mother didn't call him names.

As he walked deeper into the woods he realised that he couldn't hear any birdsong, not a peep. The Bumbles was crawling with birds of a great variety of species all year round, and on a normal spring day it would have been impossible to enter the reserve without hearing thrushes and blackbirds courting and nest building and the chatter of marauding jays and magpies out to steal eggs and chicks. Today, though, it was unusually quiet and even the inland gulls that more or less constantly circled overhead like vultures, attracted by the landfill at the northern end of site, had chosen to spend the afternoon elsewhere. The sky was an ominous battleship grey, Mark noted, so maybe the heavens were about to open and the birds had sought shelter.....

After a couple of hundred yards he reached a fork in the path. Both routes ultimately led to the same place; the left hand path dipped down and around a stretch of willow choked marshland and after that dog's hind leg detour it crossed The Bumbles in a more or less straight line, while the other path took a higher, drier and much more scenic route - you could see for miles from the top of the old spoil heaps deposited when the area was honeycombed with coal mines in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but Mark found it an arduous climb in places and it took a while longer to reach the other side. After a moment's hesitation he chose the path on the left, he wanted to get out of the trees as quickly as possible because he had a creeping feeling that something wasn't quite right. Maybe the birds had somehow sensed danger, and that was why they had given The Bumbles a wide berth. “Naah,” he reassured himself, “there's a storm rolling in, that's all that's wrong.”

Some twenty minutes later as he was passing through the heart of the woods the uncanny silence was broken by the call of a Carrion crow. Harbingers of doom, his grandma called crows, and they were regarded as vermin by the gamekeeper in charge of the private wood adjoining the nature reserve, but to Mark's ears the low, raucous caw was as sweet as the music of the most cherished songbird – any bird call was a sigh of life, of normality.

The crow called again, this time from closer by, and while the youth was scanning the freshly leafed branches instead of looking where he was walking he stepped in a huge pile of dog muck. “Aaw!” he cried in disgust, doing his best to scrape the mess off his shoes on the grass at the edge of the path.

“You dirty bugger!” the crow said as it swooped down and settled on a mossy Goat willow branch some ten feet above Mark's head. “Tut, tut, tut - trust you to step in the foulest dollop of shit for miles around. It's not your lucky day, is it, Porky-fucking-Rind? But then most of your days are unlucky. Tell me, when was the last time you felt truly blessed?”