Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Afterwards, when what happened had changed everything, just like the accident, I had no one to blame except myself.  You could even say it was all my fault.  I had thought of the name - The Mars Boys - and without this we never would have become a gang.

     Jake, Dan and I had been hanging around the Langley bus stop  and the park for months before that.  We’d known each other since primary school - they’d dragged me out of the car just before it went up.  Now we spent hours crouching on the floor of Dan’s shed, painstakingly copying tattoos from a magazine he’d nicked, on to the backs of our denim jackets. Mine was a dagger, with a red and green snake coiled around, its forked tongue dripping bloody raindrops. Slough High had spewed out kids like us that didn’t fit their stats, quicker than the pigbuckets filled up at lunchtime, but the months I spent in traction, able only to read and use my hands, taught me more than I’d ever learned there, and the design, despite the shooting familiar pains, was the best I’d ever drawn.

     Suddenly, what with the tattoos and THE MARS BOYS in thick black marker, we had become visible again, and people stepped off the pavement to walk round us. They crossed the road.

     Mum went crazy.  ‘Haven’t you lot caused enough trouble’,  she
yelled at me as she splashed hot fat over yellow egg yolks and rolled her iron-grey eyes, ‘when will you ever learn?’  Then she scooped up my brother, crawling at her feet, hugging him to her hip as if he could only be safe if she popped him back inside.

     For Bill we were easy pickings on the bleak, icy day when  he deliberately parked his bike next to the bus stop, making the ladies-in-waiting twitch and twitter like a chorus of caged         budgerigars.  It was a Bonaville 1000, with all the bits.  ‘My old lady’s fucking a coon’,  he told us, pointing his thumb over his shoulder, ‘that’s to keep me quiet’.
    
His shaved head was completely square at the back, as if it had been deliberately shaped that way.  It was too big for his wiry body, and he leant heavily forwards like one of those nodding dogs. Taking a razor blade out of a matchbox, he pulled back the sleeve of his black leather jacket and deftly made several neat slashes, just to the right of the veins on his wrist. Four thin crimson lines immediately appeared.  ‘Here you go, timmer leg’, he said, the lights in his eyes dancing as he handed me the blade.

     From then on The Mars Boys were Bill, and Bill The Mars Boys.
Spending time at home was naff. So was the previous routine of cashing our giros and immediately getting wrecked.  As far as Bill was concerned, it was The Mars Boys versus the world. And the world owed us. Instead of going to the pub, we bought whisky from Asda, swigging it from the bottle. Doused in a few inches, we began to saunter and demand our share of the world’s attention.  Intimidating younger kids with something as simple as a broken bottle was easy, so was beating the hell out of a phone box.

     A few weeks went by, then Jake went out and bought a Suzuki 550 on HP without even mentioning it.  Shortly after, Dan acquired a secondhand Honda.  They spent all their time racing each other down our street.

     There wasn’t a hope in hell of me getting a bike.  My Mum, well, believe me, she may only be small, but she can pack a punch. Something to do with being left on her own with so many of us. Anyway, I was still paying off what I owed on the car, and needed to be helped just to ride pillion.  It isn’t a false leg, I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself retaliating to Bill, just a bit of one, but it would have only made matters worse if he had known how much I resented the new nickname.

     Bill had a luminous green swastika painted on his jacket, at night it was the first thing you saw. He also had a girlfriend who appeared sporadically, called Georgie, with thighs like pillars and waxy ears.  ‘You can fuck her if you let us watch’, he told us the first time she came along. Jake was the first to do it. Then Dan.  I didn’t want to watch, but moving away is sometimes tricky. Her face didn’t alter, it just grew slightly redder as she stared vacantly over their shoulders. They all teased me, but I don’t think they really expected me to do it.

     The night it happened was a Giro night and we were in  a bender, lolling over the bench by the Langley bus stop, laughing at things which weren’t even funny - it was just like it used to be. But Bill couldn’t bear to be squeezed out like that.  He was  irritated by the music drifting from a nearby club, whining, Irish stuff - it was St Patrick’s day.  ‘Someone turn off that crap’, he  kept muttering, one hand moving restlessly up and down Georgie’s thigh, the other clutching the neck of an almost empty bottle.

     Aggy, or baggy Aggy as we called her, asked for it, she        really did.  She was Indian.  Did washing at the laundrette and repaired the overalls for the Mars factory, so was always laden with several black plastic sacks, as well as stinking like a spice rack. Anyway, she must have fallen over or something, because flesh-coloured crepe bandages overlapped thickly in the gap between her sari and a pair of tarnished gold sandals. ‘Pigs’, she screeched as she swayed along the pavement, ‘filthy swine, the lot of you!’

     Letting go of Georgie, Bill inched closer, sticking his thumb deep into the neck of the bottle and then punching its base against his other palm. ‘Dirty, dark bitch’, he hissed.

     None of us saw the man.  He appeared from nowhere, headbutting Bill and sending him reeling.

     ‘Are you all right?’  he then asked Aggy in a sing-song voice, as if he were at a birthday party. Bill’s nose was pouring, his nostrils flaring like a bull’s, it was easy to see the way his mind was working.
      
     ‘I’ll be waiting for you’, he shouted after the man as he was about to enter the club.  The man turned.  Although he was         stockily built, it was more flab than muscle, and we all         instinctively realised that he would be no match for Bill,  his hair silvery like a Christmas tree sprayed with fake snow, a wilting shamrock,  tied with a green satin bow,  pinned to the lapel of his checked jacket.

     ‘Oh, you’re all bloody mouth’,  he replied,  gobbing on to the pavement.

     It was cold outside.  Georgie kept fussing over Bill.  Soon his nose stopped bleeding.  I could think only of going home.  Of being horizontal, able to follow the whisky down its long dark corridor. But if I left now it would have been the end.  So I stayed. ‘Bloody Micks’, Bill kept muttering, ‘brains like fucking potatoes’.

     I must have fallen asleep, because it was Georgie screaming which woke me. The poor bugger didn’t have a chance once Bill had jumped him, what with Jake and Dan behind. That was the worst bit. Me, they’d pulled from the car. Him, they kicked and kicked. 
    
     ‘Stop it’,  yelled Georgie, trying to catch one of Bill’s arms, ‘you’ll go back inside!’  He couldn’t stop.   It was him or the Irishman. Nothing in between. But I felt every kick as if it was the same dreadful nightmare my mother used to wake me from.  I  couldn’t ....  I would never again ....  I turned, and tried to run, using the ball of my useless foot.
      
     That was the end of The Mars Boys.  Bill got twenty, Jake and Dan nine.

     Georgie and I were witnesses -  ‘you’ve got to do it, Andy’, my mother said, ‘that poor woman and her son’. It drew us close for
a while, though I never could bring myself to touch her. We both knew. She, at least, had tried to intervene, I had done nothing. Jake and Dan were my only mates, and I should have saved them, like
they’d saved me. The internal scars, I learned, they are the really vicious ones. The external ones only prevent you from movement. It’s the others that will never heal.