'Reading Material'

‘READING MATERIAL’

A SHORT STORY

BY TIM ROBERTS

“Ssssh!” Crazy Stokesie the school librarian drenched us all in phlegm as a warning to be quiet as we lined up to stamp out our ‘Meg and Mog’ and ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’. It took more than the spit of a stern eccentric to stop Tizzy when he was in full bullying flow, though, so I ducked out of the queue and went back to the ‘D’ shelf to swap my book for ‘Danny the Champion of the World’.

“It’s true.” I should have guessed Tizzy would follow me to the Dahls. He was nothing if not a persistent bully. “Just take a look in your Dad’s garage or his bedroom cupboard and I’ll bet you any money you’ll find his secret stash.”

“Can you go away please? I’m trying to find a book.”

Being ten, I’d already read ‘Danny the Champion of the World’ loads of times, but the truth is I hoped that reading Dahl’s tale of faultless fatherhood might get rid of the horrid image Tizzy had just put into my head about my Dad with his filthy comments.

“Take a look when you get home tonight and you’ll soon see I’m right. And if you can’t find ‘em in his bedroom or garage try a few hiding places - the attic; cellar. Does your Dad have a greenhouse? I found a copy of ‘Big and Bouncy’ in my old man’s pigeon coop once.”

“My Dad’s not like that!” I exploded at him.

“Don’t kid yourself.” said Tizzy, grinning. A bully loves it when you bite. “All Dads are like that. All blokes are like that. You are such a baby!” he scoffed. “I bet you still believe in Santa Claus too, don’t you?”

When he saw the look on my face he knew he’d notched one up for the bullies. I was too old by now to put my fingers in my ears and start going “La la la!” like I always used to do when worldly kids said such things about Santa. It would do no good this time, anyway, as this time I knew Tizzy could well be right. About Santa and about Dads and porn.

“Ssssh!” Crazy Stokesie spittled again from across the primary school library. ‘Too late for that’, I thought. ‘The cat is well and truly out of the bag now!’

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I couldn’t bring myself to go looking straight in their bedroom wardrobe. It felt like too much of an intrusion. Too naughty straight off the bat. So I hunted in reverse order - starting with the least obvious and building my way up to a full-scale bedroom burglary.

I waited until Mum and Dad were both out - leaving my geeky older brother Greg in charge who never left his bedroom anyway - before I skulked my way out to Dad’s greenhouse. After mooching about his mulch for a minute or two, sure enough there it was : a Page Three Stunner in his tomato box. She was curly haired with big bare breasts and incongruously dressed in football shorts and socks. Nothing too obscene. In fact, I remember thinking, perhaps this was nothing more than an accident. Just a coincidence that he happened to line his tomato box with an old newspaper that happened to be a sexist tabloid. So I went looking in his garage.

I felt bad rummaging and ransacking Dad’s old red screw pots - all neatly labelled and categorised on his self-made shelving unit - especially when the fruits of my search resulted in the same outcome as my greenhouse quest : Sam Fox’s bristols lining his tool box beneath Dad’s Black and Decker.

By the time I rolled out the ladder up to the loft I was getting desperate - and didn’t even care if my big brother heard the racket. He’d be too busy “bopping the baloney”, as Tizzy put it, himself to notice anyway. It didn’t take long before I found it, though : the Unholy Grail I was questing for - a man doing things to a lady on glossy paper, stuffed in stinging asbestos. And when I flicked through - a centrefold spreading her legs, right there between my brother’s broken Scalextric and the Christmas decorations.

Christmas decorations! I stuffed the jazz mag back where I found it and scaled back through the attic hatch and down the rickety ladders to the landing where I creaked through my parents’ bedroom door and tiptoed across their shagpile towards the Out of Bounds area that was their shared wardrobe. But there was no pornography here.

Instead, I found a treasure trove of Christmas presents to be. My Castle Greyskull. A Big Trak for Greg. And Baby Albie’s Glow Worm nestled next to something for Mum which at the time I thought must have been a hair dryer because it buzzed at me when I switched it on.

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I waited a whole week until our next Library Lesson before I plucked up the courage to confront Teasing Tizzy. I knew this would be the best time and place in which to do so as that was prime bullying time for him - covert whispering taunts in the quiet reading area and games of hide and seek amongst the bookshelves when the teacher’s on to him.

If my Innocence hadn’t been tested enough by now, what I saw next made it gone for good. I found Tizzy standing in front of the Mr Men display forcing Sarah Burgoyne to touch his mucky willy.

I wish I could tell you I confronted him that day. That I gathered up armfuls of C.S.Lewis and chucked them at his filthy dick, rupturing his future with ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’; or better still slamming his horrible penis in a big print copy of ‘The Magician’s Nephew’. But I didn’t. I just stood. And gawped. Like a bystander. A ghoul. Like the kind of kid who goes hunting for things he shouldn’t and winds up having to feign surprise on Christmas morning when he unwraps his ‘Skeletor’.

I read in The Shropshire Star recently that Kai Teasdale - the ‘Tizzy’ of my tawdry tale - has been put on a register - a longer one than he and I used to answer to as a teacher zeroed and obliqued; a register that comes with a suspended sentence chaser : "Images of children". It’s a phrase that chills parental souls, making vigilantes of us all. (Who needs a Batman lazer show when you've got righteous anger from a mind working overtime at what such people wish to see?)

His were a "serious category" too, according to the Star - ‘Top of the Paedo Pops.’

The mind reels - but not in shock.

You see, this depraved deviant caked my Innocence in his foulness in the school library back when Wars were Cold by telling me all about Santa and my Dad's pornography in the same bad breath.

As you’ve heard, as it turns out, the paedophile was right.

But sometimes people sacrifice all that is right to be right.

THE END.