‘Oh my God,’ thought David, ‘now there’s hair growing around it too!’
He stood in his room, in front of the long mirror that hung on his closed door.
His hockey stick stood upright in the umbrella stand, which came from his grandmother's house.
It was decorated with a hunting scene.
Folded on the bed, under the window, lay a pair of snow-white shorts and his burgundy hockey shirt. ‘Gravesend’ was printed on it in large golden letters.
David hated hockey. He hated the boys on his team. He hated the girls too, for that matter. He hated his trainer, who addressed him by his surname and who understood the art or the speech impediment, of shouting with a potato in his throat.
The only thing David loved was the tock, which he tucked under his shorts and taped to his skin, tight, so that nothing could be seen and he didn't have to be reminded of that strange body part that had never belonged to him, that hung out like a bulge by mistake, that stuck to the skin and made you walk with your legs slightly splayed.
At primary school, David had been able to engage in play with the other children, thanks to his vivid imagination and open-hearted nature. He was good at skipping rope, doing cartwheels, and he made four- and five-strand braids in his own hair and soon, on request, in his girlfriends' hair, without ever getting himself tangled up.
One Tuesday during recreation, he had braided three strands of his own hair, together with two strands of Hilly's. They were attached to each other like Siamese twins, and had walked to Hilly's house at noon, to eat their sandwiches and – carefully – each drink their mug of milk. It had almost gone well, until Hilly choked on the last sip and spilled the rest of the milk on her T-shirt. Then the braid had to be undone, for Hilly to put on a dry T-shirt. It couldn't be done with the braid intact, they had tried to.
Really anything was possible in play. They had played Mammy and Mummy, in his room, and his teddy bear was the child, who wet its knickers and then was punished by having his bare plush bottom spanked.
But now he was in secondary school. A school the size of a city, home to two thousand insensitive children, and there were separate changing rooms for physical education.
David had always loved to sing in a high voice. He sang in two-part harmony with his gran, ‘Here amidst the shady woods,’ and his gran always sang the low part.
He thought his grandmother understood him.
‘That looks precious on you, Lovekin,’ she would say, when she wrapped the long, raspberry-red dressing gown around him, as she came to fetch him from the bath. ‘Lovekin,’ said his gran. She called him Lovekin.
Never David.
The last time, at Christmas, she had given him a rose-red bathrobe as a present, in his own size.
‘What on God’s earth is that bloody nonsense!’ his father had roared.
‘A strawberry dress? He’s not a sissy, is he?’
‘It's just a bathrobe, Laurent...’ his mother had tried to sooth.
But his father had snatched the bathrobe, wrapping paper and all, from his lap, and glared furiously at his grandmother, who silently returned his gaze, with her gentle face.
‘My SON is not a sissy,’ his father had growled at his gran, through clenched teeth, and David had seen tears in his eyes.
Then he had strode out into the garden, thrown the present into the rubbish bin, and he had kicked it to the bottom, with his shoe.
