come with me.
When I stand next to the brooding, mustached dentist and look over the edge, she’s standing at the bottom, trying to tell him to come down.
“What are you doing down there?” I call down to her.
“I’m not going up there!” she shouts back up. “I’m scared of heights!”
I accept her statement, because, quite frankly, I’m happy enough because I can see her legs and body, and my stomach tightens under my skin.
“Come on, Tom!” She tries to negotiate with the dentist. “Come back down. Please!”
“Say, what are you doin’ up here anyway?” I ask him. He turns to face me. Candid.
Then he says, “It’s because of you.” “Me! What the hell did I do?” “I overcharged you.”
“Geez, mate, that wasn’t very nice,” and suddenly, sadistically, I urge him on. “Go on, jump, then — you deserve it, you bloody cheat.”
Even the beautiful dental nurse wants him to jump now. She calls out, “Come on, Tom — I’ll catch you!” It happens. Down. Down.
He jumps and falls down, and the beautiful dental nurse catches him, kisses his mouth, and places him gently on the ground. She even holds him, touching bodies with him. Oh, that white uniform, rubbing on him. It drives me wild, and instantly, when she to jump as well, I do it and fall….
In bed, waking up, I’m lying there with the taste of blood in my mouth, and with the memory of footpath and impact in my head.
CHAPTER 2
Since the whole dentist incident drained my money situation, I pretty much went and begged for my old job back. The guy in the newsagent’s wasn’t impressed.
He said, “Sorry, Mr. Wolfe. You’re just too much of a risk. You’re dangerous.”
Have a listen to the bloke. You’d think I was walking around with a sawn-off shotgun or something. Bloody hell, I was just a paper boy.
“C’mon, Max,” I pleaded with him. “I’m older now. More responsible.”
“How old are y’ anyway?”
“Fifteen.”
“Well …” He thought hard. He stopped — drew the line. “No.” He shook his head. “No. No.” But I had him, surely. There was too much hesitation in him. He was thinking too hard. “Fifteen’s too old now, anyway.”
Too old!
Mate, it didn’t feel too good to be a washed-up, redundant paper boy, I can tell you.
“Please?” I drooled. It was sickening. All this for a lousy paper run, while other guys my age were raking it in at Maccas and Kentucky Fried bloody Chickens. It was a disgrace. “C’mon, Max.” I had an idea. “If y’ don’t employ me again I’ll come here wearin’ these clothes I’m wearin’ right now” (I was wearing crummy tracksuit pants, old shoes, and a dirty old spray jacket) “and I’ll bring my brother and his mates along and we’ll treat the place like a library. We won’t cause trouble, mind you. We’ll just hang round. A few of ‘em might steal, but I doubt it. Maybe just one or two …”
Max stepped closer.
“Are you threatenin’ me, y’ little grot?”
“Yes, sir, I am.” I smiled. I thought things were going along fine.
I was wrong.
I was wrong because my old boss Max took me by the collar of my jacket and removed me from his property.
“And don’t come back in here again,” he ordered me. I stood.
I shook my head. At myself. A grot. A grot! It was true.
My game plan for getting the job back had backfired miserably. The pulse in my neck felt really heavy, and I felt like I could taste last night’s blood in the bottom of my throat.
“Y’ grot,” I called myself. I looked at myself in the bakery shop window next door and imagined I was wearing a brand-new light blue suit with a black tie, black shoes, nice hair. The reality, though, was that I was wearing peasants’ clothes and my hair was sticking up worse than ever. I looked at myself in that window, oblivious to all the people around me, and I stared and smiled that particular smile. You know that smile that seems to knock you and tell you how pathetic you are? That’s the smile I was smiling.
“Yeah,” I said to myself. “Yeah.”
I looked in the local paper — I had to get Rube to go in the newsagent’s and buy it for me — for another job, but nothing was going. Things were skinny. Jobs. People. Values. No one was on the lookout for anyone or anything new. It got to the point where I considered doing the unthinkable — asking my