overheard

The sound is sharp, an icicle in the air.

‘YEAH, WELL. I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE’.

A face-off, squaring up to each other. Think headlines, knives. But these boys are dressed in neat uniforms with football rucksacks crammed with files and socks. Children trying on their teenage selves for size. But there’s no pushing, no tightened fists. Confusion, mostly.

‘But we always walk home together’

‘Well not any more’

‘I thought you were my friend’ (now where have I heard that before)

There are three on each side. One of the three larger boys has, for some reason, disowned one of the smaller. He wants to hurt him, cut him. Win. The other boy wants to walk away but senses somehow that bravado is what is expected of him in some bigger picture he can’t see. At the moment the situation resembles the type of falling-out he will come to believe that only girls have: men are say things to each other’s faces rather than behind closed doors; fight it out rather than mysteriously ditch a mate. For now, he has no context to put it in, just feels an unfamiliar hurt and sense of public humiliation, he has realised he is naked.

Obviously, I am trying not to watch, for social and moral reasons and also for self-preservation; but I am also trying to watch, because it is an unfamiliar situation for me to witness. I wonder what it must be like to be a twelve-year-old boy, utterly confusing I imagine (just like being a twelve-year-old girl) but really, what is it actually like? To go to a boys’ school and be boys amongst boys. You can imagine the stereotype of pressure against girliness (perhaps more so at that age than later when you realise girls like a bit of sensitivity?), ‘gay’ as a euphemism for anything outside of certain parameters (sport, computer games), but that can’t be the whole picture. There must be enough poets and painters and scientists among them to create a balance. Or maybe the poets and painters have to take it until they find their own ways out, maybe they even need it as an impetus. How would you feel if you were gay, or thought you might be, and had to defend yourself against it as an accusation for totally unrelated behaviour several times a day?

The boys are still clumsily battling it out, the two other small ones have an air of ‘leave it, mate, he’s not worth it’. The rejected friend is trying to think of something clever to say, something that will make him seem clever and uncaring and that will hurt the other’s feelings. He can’t, though.

‘I never wanted to be friends with you anyway’

The factions separate, the bigger child with his big new friends. Is he feeling victorious or just as confused and hurt as his ex-bff seemed? The smaller boys go a different way, the two bystanders more confident and less self-conscious as they head up the road and kick a few leaves. The third looks dazed, he wants to look back but he doesn’t and runs ahead to catch up the others.

I wonder if he’ll remember it in days or weeks or years to come, or if it will melt into an awful or happy childhood, depending on how his counsellor encourages him to recall it. I reach the top of the road a minute later (still walking slowly) and they are gone.