The World Out There - 3. Three

Again Liam looked around himself. His room was quiet. He couldn’t hear any of the other residents in the B&B hostel, not even an occasional raised voice or music playing loudly somewhere. But this room was barely furnished. It had that old single bed pushed up against one wall with its mattress that his body sank into every night. Pushed against the opposite wall was a wooden table. Next to that was the tatty old armchair he was sat on. It had a high and curved back and high solid arms: somehow it reminded him of an armchair an old grandmother would use in a Nursing Home, but he didn’t know where that image came from. The chair must have had a pattern to the fabric covering it, but it was so old and tatty now that it seemed just a dull green colour.

Rhys Clarke had made his childhood a nightmare, certainly the year he’d spent in Secondary School. He’d been twelve but Rhys Clarke had been thirteen: Clarke’s birthday was in September and Liam’s was in the following June. But due to the strange way they channelled school admissions, the two of them ended up in the same year, in the same form class. Clarke seemed to take an instant dislike to him, but he didn’t know why. He wasn’t important or even liked at school. He was the quiet boy in any classroom, the one everyone ignored, including the teachers. He didn’t have friends: his mother had driven away what few friends he’d had with her erratic and even confrontational behaviour. He knew he was the weird outsider, but his mother’s forcing him to wear second-hand clothes and refusing to buy him any of the latest, must-have childhood accessories didn’t help either. He was nothing, and yet Clarke and his two mates, Keith Jones and Boris Flint, singled him out as the subject of their hate.

Rhys Clarke was one of the boys who stood out in their year at school. He played football in the winter and ran athletics in the summer. People repeatedly talked about him being the captain of the school’s football team when his turn came. At their secondary school, sport was one of the most valued of all activities - it topped academic and creative work. Liam was useless at sports, uncoordinated and always left behind. When he ran, he was always last to be picked for any team sport.

Rhys Clarke was also good looking. He had a tall muscular frame. His fair skin seemed blemish free, and his blonde hair always swept over his head in an almost perfect quiff. He made Liam feel short, podgy and plain, with his unrulily brown hair and skin that was always scarred with some rash or outbreak of blackheads.

For some reason, unknown to Liam, at the beginning of year eight, Rhys Clarke and his two mates turned their attentions onto him. At first it had been name calling: they would shout “Freak” and “Bastard” at him. He just ignored them. Their name calling wasn’t imaginative. It was his main defence mechanism when anyone attacked him, to ignore the attack until it stopped. It was his only defence mechanism.

The bullying rapidly ramped up. Clarke and his sidekicks were soon shouting at Liam that his mother was a whore and a prostitute, and with his mother’s reputation, he had no defence, even if he’d responded. His father left them when he was so young that he barely remembered the man and his mother had always had one boyfriend or other since then. Though her boyfriends changed regularly, his mother never seemed to stay with the same man for long. At the same time, the physical violence started. Whenever Rhys Clarke or his two sidekicks saw him around school, they would punch him or kick him. He would pass them in a corridor or entering a classroom and one of them would lash out and punch him on the arm or back or kick him in the shin or thigh. Then, they’d walk away laughing.

Breaktimes were the worst. Some days Clarke and his sidekicks would seek him out and attack him, call him names and kick or punch him, only stopping when they seemed to be bored of it. Whether he cried out or stayed silent, the bullying would just continue until they grew tired of it and moved on. Other days, he wouldn’t see any of them at breaktimes or even throughout the whole day. There seemed no pattern to this - he couldn’t predict the days when they would leave him alone. This made every day at school a trial.

He always reacted the same way to their bullying, the same way he reacted to everything negative: he remained silent and waited for it to end. As their bullying increased, without any reason, Liam only sunk further into himself, trying to build on the only defence he knew to do, ignore what was happening to him and remain silent and unnoticed. It had worked at home, especially when his mother was angry over something or someone, or one of her boyfriends was shouting at him how stupid and unwanted he was. But in the jungle of his school life, it only seemed to make things worse. The more he remained silent and tried to make himself unnoticed, the more Clarke and his sidekicks sort him out, it felt like.

At the beginning of that term, the beatings started to happen outside of the school’s grounds. At least he’d felt safe once school finished, but now that was gone. Clarke and his two sidekicks would follow him out of school and attack him on one of the streets on his way home. They always seemed to catch up with him and, with their crude insults, would punch and kick him to the ground. They only stopped - always walking away laughing - when he’d curled up into a ball there on the ground and started to silently cry.

They always seemed to catch him, whether he left school as soon as he could or else waited for everyone else to leave ahead of him. Clarke and his sidekicks always caught him and attacked him. The only day he could leave school in peace was a Monday when Clarke was attending football practice, and Jones and Flint would hang around behind the science block, waiting for Clarke. But that was only one afternoon a week. The rest of his time at school was spent hoping to avoid Clarke and his sidekicks.

He didn’t have anyone he could turn to. The first time Clarke and his two mates had attacked him outside of school, he’d tried to struggle and break free of them which only made their physical blows more severe, leaving him bruised and the sleeve of his school blazer ripped. That evening, when his mother returned home from work and saw the rip, her anger snapped and she’d smacked him across the back of the head, shouting, “I’m not made of money! Treat your things right!”

School offered him no safety either. One Tuesday, he’d been walking along a corridor when again Clarke passed him and punched him hard in the shoulder, but this time they were seen by the school’s Deputy Head. Mr Stein shouted sharply at both of them to stop fighting. Liam just looked back at Mr Stein as he marched away. The man had ignored the reality of what had happened. Liam had done nothing and yet Mr Stein had shouted at him too.

He tried fighting back but he’d only been punished for doing that. During an English lesson, Rhys Clarke was sat behind him and was repeatedly punching and kicking him in the back, hissing “Queer” at him. Each blow and taunt tightened Liam’s nerves and pushed up his fear and anger. Suddenly, halfway through the lesson, his emotions snapped, he turned around and lashed out at Clarke, punching him hard in the face and giving the bully a black eye. Clarke had screamed like a stung little child, which finally grabbed the teacher’s attention. Miss James turned her attention on Liam, having been ignoring Rhys Clarke’s behaviour during the lesson. Liam found himself receiving a week’s detention as his “punishment”. He knew now there was no point protesting.

When Rhys Clarke started calling him “queer”, usually followed by a punch or kick, it hurt more than those blows. He was slowly beginning to realise that he could be gay. It was handsome men on television he looked at, the handsome men who took their shirts off on the soap operas and reality shows his mother liked watching, not the pretty women in their underwear. It was blonde, handsome boys, like Rhys Clarke, that he liked to look at. Deep inside he’d wanted Rhys Clarke to like him, but all the other boy did was hate him.

Soon, he was terrified of going to school, terrified that he’d run into Rhys Clarke and his sidekicks. Soon the fear was so bad that he was vomiting each morning before leaving home, the fear physically shaking his body. His mother wouldn’t listen to him when he begged her to let him stay off school, saying he had to go to school and that was it. No matter how much he tried to avoid him, Rhys Clarke would always find him. He’d put so much thought and effort into avoiding Rhys Clarke, and yet Clarke always found him. He’d even tried absconding from school.