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simply didn’t see. My mother snapped at me when I tried to question her about these feelings. I suppose that at that time, seeing me perhaps as too frail—but not in the physical sense, you understand; but not quite mannish enough, somehow too sensitive—she had her own worries, although they were probably as ill-defined as my own. My father just hummed to himself and got on with his job and his garden and his spreading commonwealth of allotments around which he would trundle his wheelbarrow until he died of a heart attack on the little hill up Gaia Lane. A fall of flowerpots. The children sniggering at the funny man with the quivering legs until a travelling newspaper salesman happened along. He tossed out the rest of the pots and wheeled my father way all the way up to St John’s Hospital. But he could have saved his time and gone straight to the Maddox’s the Undertakers in Market Place. My father was already dead.
    Still, my mother and I had his pension and his life insurance; there again, we were ahead of our time. And we had the house. We were never that stretched, and those complicated holiday trips to grey corners of the English coastline had never been much fun. By this time—I was eleven—I’d already decided I wanted to be a teacher. Until I passed into Secondary School from Stowe Street Elementary, I was always one of the brightest in my class, and I fondly imagined that I’d continue to hold my own in this slightly more elevated company. Egged on by my insular sense of superiority, even a County Scholarship to Rugby seemed within reach. And from there, yes, I was already dreaming of the Magdalene Deer, sleek bodies bathing in the Cherwell at Parson’s Pleasure, Jack Marvel in Quiller-Couch’s The Splendid Spur, the bold laughter across Tom Quad of a thousand half-baked-and-headstrong Oxford heroes.
    My later years in school, though, were a slog. I sensed already that I was hitting a permanent ceiling—that, without my having had much say in it, my life was already determined. Partly from struggling to keep pace amongst cleverer lads (all prototype bank managers, chartered accountants, KSG high-ups and solicitors) who could easily outdistance me, I fell ill with something that may or may not have been scarlet fever. On my long stay away from school, a boy called Martin Dawes who I had little liking for but was supposedly a friend would call in each afternoon to deliver school books and sit with me. Whilst up in my room, he would slip his hands beneath the sheets and the waistband of my pyjamas and toss me off—as if that, too, was a message that needed to be delivered from school. Of course, I was deeply grateful.
    Later, towards the end of my school years as I grew fitter and more resigned to my fate, there were the usual abrasions and obsessions. I recall a schoolmaster named Mr. Lockwood once helping me—for a whole good and glorious hour, it seemed—to don my cricket box as I struggled to hide my growing erection. It only occurred to me later that his breathy attentions were slightly unusual. But Mr. Lockwood had gone by then; he’d dissolved into the scholarly mists, leaving only a faint odour of unspecified scandal in his wake. And so had Martin Dawes, whom I never really did get to like despite everything. Still, as I took and passed my Highers and then scraped my Second Class Teacher’s Certificate and left school and found a job as an Assistant Master at nearby Burntwood Charity, as I reached the tender age of seventeen and became what was then looked on as a man, these few moments remained almost the sole fuel of my masturbatory fantasies.
    Sometimes, locked in the upstairs toilet with its freezing seat and ever-open window as my mother shuffled about down in the kitchen, I would dutifully try to incorporate women into my pink imaginings in the vague hope that they would make me feel less guilty about the act that I was performing. But at some vital moment, their chests would always