The Treatment and the Cure by Peter Kocan Read Free Book Online Page B

Electric Ned too, so that means the doctor must think you’re all right. The important thing now is to make a good job of it. After a couple of days you begin to understand about the bricks and how much mortar to use and how to keep testing with the spirit-level and how to adjust your line to the taut string across the top. You get a lot of kidding from the screws and the other men because of being down the hole so much. Jokes about you digging a tunnel under the main wall and stuff like that. Sometimes Arthur comes down from the ward to see how you’re doing.
    “How’s it going?” he asks, checking the line and level with his eye.
    “Going like steam,” you answer.
    “And how’s your offsider working?”
    “Bob’s doing well,” you say, but really Bob Fleet is a nuisance. He’s getting on your nerves. His talk about fucking boys is getting more and more personal. He wants to know whether you’ve ever done it yourself and tells you it’s wonderful and that you’re missing out on something if you don’t do it. Then he starts telling you how nice your own bum looks and how he’d love to get into you.
    “How’d you like me to make love to you?” he asks.
    “I’d rather you didn’t thanks.”
    “You’d like it.”
    After a while you see that being polite isn’t getting you anywhere with Bob Fleet.
    “Let me have your sweet bum,” he says.
    “You can have my sweet fist in your fucking snout if you like!”
    “Don’t be like that, darling.”
    “I’m not your darling, you fucking decrepit old mongrel!”
    “Yes, you’re my darling. I just wish you wouldn’t tease me.”
    “I’ll tease you into a mangled blood heap if you’re not careful!”
    Nothing you say makes any difference to him. You just ignore him and let him talk. Anyway, you can’t think of any more insults. At the back of your mind you even feel a little flattered that he’s so keen to fuck you. The thought of making love with some beautiful, gentle boy gives you a tiny shiver of excitement, but you push the thought away. Bob Fleet is neither beautiful nor gentle, and you’d rather die than have him touch you. You tell him so.
    “I’d rather die than have you touch me!”
    He hoots with laughter. “What a pure little virgin! Death before dishonour, eh?”
    You realise it did sound funny, like Mary Pickford or someone in the old movies when the villain is tying her on the railway track. You laugh too. After that you begin to like Bob Fleet in a horrible sort of way. His old father was a tram conductor in the ’twenties and ’thirties and Bob talks a lot about his dad’s adventures with women passengers. The father liked women, not boys.
    “Dad used to feel them up on the tram, specially when it was crowded. Sometimes, if a pretty girl didn’t have the fare, he’d offer to let her ride free for a feel of tit. Lots of ’em didn’t have the fare during the Depression. Another lurk was to pretend he was gonna hand them over to the cops for avoiding the fare, then offer to let them go for a good feel. Sometimes they were so frightened of the police they’d let him have a proper root. He’d keep them on the tram till he finished his shift, then take them back and root them behind the depot shed. He came unstuck though. A freak coincidence. He tried it on with a passenger who happened to be the wife of the bloke driving the tram. A big fella. He was gonna murder dad. Dad threw his ticket bag in the bloke’s face and leapt off the tram and down an alley. He never went back on the trams.”
    Bob Fleet has a favourite limerick:
    “There was a young lady from France
    Who fell from the tram in a trance,
    The gallant conductor
    Leapt down and plucked her
    Away from the traffic’s advance.”
    But he always pauses before “plucked her”.
    Away to the left from where you’re working in the hole is the swimming pool and you can see Ray Hoad vacuuming the bottom with a long pole that has a suction nozzle on the end. Being the