Ozzie Rozzie #6

[CAUTION: THIS STORY CONTAINS NAMES]

This is a fiction series. It will make more sense if you read: Part one. Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five.

Rosbotham fixed Clint with a steel eye as he fished in his pocket for the backdoor key. He put the key in the lock, turned, and said quietly, but with obvious threat,

"Now listen to me. Yew are going to clean up. I will give you one of my shirts. Then we are going to say hello to my Mum. OK?"

It was quite the longest sentence he had ever heard from Rosbotham, but Clint simply nodded, as his pale blank face said nothing. Rosbotham grabbed his arm again, and spoke directly into Clint's ear:

"If you fuck about in there, I will kill yew. OK?"

"OK," whispered Clint.

Ozzie pushed Clint firmly through the door, and the boys abruptly found themselves in a corridor lined with bookshelves and boxes. A single bulb failed to light the place after the bright sunlight. Clint blinked rapidly, his breath shallow. He couldn't see much as his eyes adjusted, just that the front room must be away to the sunnier front of the house, as a distant glow of daylight came from his left. A doorway leading to a small modern kitchen was in front of him. The place smelled, inside as outside, of cats.

"Bathroom," spat Rosbotham, shoving him carefully right past the kitchen and into the utility room. There was laundry, a mop and bucket, a butler sink surrounded by cracked white tiles, and a thin brown sliver of Wright's Coal Tar soap. The window onto the garden was small, high and barred.

"Wait here. Do yer face, go on!" ordered Rosbotham, but he showed no sense of enjoying his role as captor, and Clint could sense this. Frowning, licking his thick lips as if he were thirsty, the country boy closed the bathroom door and jammed it from the other side with a chair.

For a moment, Clint could not believe that he was alone, and he rapidly scanned the room. He could feel his bruises now, they were dull and heavy and he felt deadly tired. His ear hurt less than his shins, which had taken a real hammering, and he knew one of his ankles was too damaged to stand on. He staggered over to the mirror and looked through a layer of soap splashes at himself. For a moment he struggled to focus. At the awful sight, his morale dropped once again.

He crossed the room and pushed the door which moved, but would not open. Ozzie would be back in a minute. Clint turned on the cold tap and it ran loudly splashing into the sink, then grabbed the mop, and winced as he found another bruise on his ribcage. Shit, he couldn't even defend himself with a weapon. Still he could lock the door from the inside if he used the mop to bar it. Physics not being his strong subject was not going to stop him working out an effective block. The door opened outwards, so he jammed the mop up behind doorhandle and up against the top of the doorframe. Looking at the thin metal lever held by a piece of wooden handle as thick as one of Ozzie's thumbs, Clint despaired. Ozzie would break that down in about three seconds and be narked at the attempt. He hastily removed the mop, mistimed the move and it clattered loudly onto the tiled floor.

Clint froze. Hearing a noise above him, he realised this was possibly Ozzie on the hunt for a clean shirt. He returned to the sink, and drank thirstily from the still-running tap, thinking as he did so whether trying to buy time was a good idea. Ozzie seemed to have calmed down at least. Maybe he just wants me to meet his mum, thought Clint wearily. He splashed cold water on his face, and started to remove his ragged shirt.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Thompson had a secret, aside from his sorties to a squalid stripper bar in the Walworth Road, which was that he had been writing for the past twelve months, a novel of sorts, something so dark that it surprised him. It was neither comic nor tragic, but it was deeply warped, and much influenced by his Holy Trinity, Bataille, Burroughs, and Ballard.

He supposed it would never be published, and this gave him the freedom to write, finally, from within, from deep inside his sexually frustrated, snobbish, cynical, depressed mind; and to his surprise, his discipline was decent. He knew it was compelling in some way, although he had not shown it to anyone, or even worked out quite why he was writing it. He would have liked to have shown it to Ms Butcher, whose intellect he respected as much as he admired her breasts, but he feared that should she scorn it, or worse, react blasé, this precious lifeline would slip from his grasp, and he would drown in a sea of assemblies, registers and detentions.

Thompson had not set out to be a teacher. He had worked hard to get to Cambridge with every intention of joining Footlights, becoming a comic actor, and eventually a television stalwart; but once there, and particularly onstage, he was completely outshone by dozens of better, cleverer, funnier talents, whose words raised howls of laughter as his fell like damp gardening gloves onto an old wooden bench.

"A word to the wise," said one old lag, seeing his post-gig suffering. "Everyone wants a good straight man." Pride however would not let Thompson accept that his role in this celebrated, illuminated crowd would always be support, and he turned his back on them, announcing drunkenly to his comedy comrades in the bar that he had heard the calling of 'serious drama' and would no longer be wasting his time attempting to elicit chuckles from a bunch of uptight upper-class fanny-wipes such as they. Fuck them and the fucking BBC.

Thereafter followed what Thompson's scathing ex had termed, "The Checkov Years", during which time Thompson ceased smiling, as much an existential act as a ruse to increase gravitas, and he discovered that, even if he sometimes detested the works he was now performing and occasionally directing, he was at least getting regular sex, since "tormented, intense, deep" played far better than the "world's best comedian" in his attempts to interest the women whose idea of a good night out was Krapp's Last Tape.

He even went so far as to invent various tragic family occurrences which pain still troubled him, and it worked well, so long as nobody cared enough about him to make further enquiries into the terrible accident in the hotel room which had destroyed his parents and all five sisters. Not so well that he was ever going to get any serious work, however, and three penniless years later, he was back in school, his Cambridge 2.2 degree beating a South London Polytechnic 1st to the post of Head of English at this not-too-appalling south London comprehensive.

As he smoked his cigarette, he reflected that without the job he hated so much, the failure of his relationship, and the sexual tension of his friendship with the tantalising but elusive Ms Butcher, he probably wouldn't have been moved to write anything. Fucking human condition. He grimaced, and spat into the gutter, and glanced at his wristwatch. Where were those two boys? Had they returned to school? Was he out here on some wild goose chase? He coloured, suddenly feeling violently frustrated, threw the cigarette after the phlegm, and strode up the road to his car. There was a telephone box he had passed two streets away. He would call and check. Bastards. Jumping into the MG, he started the warm engine, turned a tight 180 degrees.

Right you little wankers, he thought as he accelerated, we'll soon see about that.

[End Part Six]