W
e didn’t have long to wait before we heard heavy footsteps walking along the corridor. There was the murmur of a deep male voice and another chuckling in reply, and then they were in the dormitory. The bulky Blake, with the smile that chilled me, was with his friend Parker, a wiry, sandy-haired warden who I would guess was somewhere in his thirties, maybe slightly younger than Blake.
‘Good boys!’ Blake said heartily, continuing with the charade that we were willing participants in his game. ‘I can see you’re all looking forward to some fun.’
Both men rubbed their hands together as though they were cold and we were all being so quiet that the papery sound their palms made seemed loud. Our senses were on high alert.
Parker said nothing, just stood a little behind Blake eyeing us each up and down. I felt the heat of his gaze and felt defiled by it. He cracked his hairy knuckles, a popping sound that sliced into the silence.
Blake moved closer to me, put his hand under my chin and raised it so that his eyes met mine. His breath was tainted with the odour of stale cigarettes, beer and feral expectation. It soured the air that I inhaled and for a few seconds I tried to hold my breath. My nose twitched with distaste and I felt completely trapped by his closeness, for my locker was behind me and my bed was to my side. I could see his eyes were glistening brightly with anticipation.
‘Come on, boys,’ both Parker and Blake said in unison. ‘The party’s about to start!’ added Blake.
Heavy arms were thrown over skinny shoulders, encouraging smiles given by moist lips; just the force of their presence propelled us out of the security of our dormitory. Not one of us boys came higher than their broad chests and we were all so slight that had we been placed behind them no one would have been able to see us. Down the corridor we went. Trying to think of anything but what was to come, I reflected that over my short life I must have walked many miles along narrow passages and dark corridors. All those miles that had so often led me to places I didn’t want to go to.
That night it was my footsteps I could hear ringing in my ears. We didn’t pass anyone else on that walk to the cellar door. It was as though some sort of common consent cleared the corridors for us to walk through unobserved. I wondered if there were other boys hidden behind doors, grateful it wasn’t them who were being taken.
Broad stairs led to the hallway, then a door was opened and we had to climb in single file down a steep flight of stairs, the ones that led to the cellars. A single lightbulb illuminated the part of the underground room we came into and candles threw shadows into nooks and alcoves. In contrast to the freshly painted rooms in the rest of the building, the basement had a musty, dank smell. There were large dark patches where plaster had flaked off the walls, and under our feet was rough cement and brick.
We could hear laughter echoing along the passages and it sounded as though it came from far away. I felt the heaviness of Blake’s arm and heard his voice in my ear: ‘We’re here, Robbie.’
A dim light was glowing under a door. The faint hope that I was just having a bad dream, and that at any moment I would open my eyes and find myself in the common room with my friends or even getting ready for bed, disappeared. That door was where the laughter was coming from and that room was where the party was being held.
Another door was opened and we were pushed inside. Blake struck a match and lit a candle. We were in a small, dark room that was unfurnished apart from a thin mattress. I blinked, my eyes trying to see in the gloom, and I saw Blake bend to pick something up off the floor and push it into my arms. I looked down. It seemed to me like pieces of clothing.
‘I forgot to tell you it’s a fancy-dress do,’ he laughed, and that laugh added to my already-high anxiety levels.
‘This is your changing room, boys. I want you out of those clothes and into the ones we’ve given you; something that will suit you. You’ve got five minutes. I want every piece of your clothing off before you put on your costumes.’
He handed the others their costumes for the evening and then his gaze shifted back to me.
‘Robbie, you’re new. I don’t want you making any mistakes because we don’t want the other guests getting angry, do we? So I’ll repeat myself for your benefit. I said “every” piece of clothing. Do you understand me?’ My face burned with shame. I knew he was waiting for an answer.
‘Yes, I understand,’ I replied.
I heard his mocking voice again: ‘That means your glasses as well. You’ll be able to see all you need to see without them.’ He laughed as though he had cracked a very funny joke, but it was one that only he could understand.
Bored with tormenting me, Blake turned to one of the other two, a ten-year-old boy called Christopher, who I recognised as being one of the boys who was ‘taken’ regularly. He usually hung out with the sad little group of pretty boys. Even within that group his ethereal beauty made him stand out. With his pale creamy skin, deep pink lips, wide brown eyes and his mass of dark brown curls shot through with gold, he reminded me of a picture of an angel that I had seen at the orphanage. Amidst the horrors of the crucifixion that hung on most of the walls there, it was one of the very few images that I had liked. Sister Claire had explained, when I remarked on it, that the original painting had been done a very long time ago and that the artist’s name was Botticelli.
Blake leant closer to the pretty boy, ran his index finger up and down the slender neck, drew it across the boy’s cheeks in a mockery of a caress and brushed his lips, which trembled in response. He leant even closer and whispered something that I couldn’t hear. The slim shoulders flinched and even in the dim candlelight I could see a deep blush staining the boy’s cheeks.
Blake said to him, ‘I hope you’re going to like your costume. I chose it especially for you, Chrissie boy.’ Christopher just hung his head; his lips moved in reply but his mouthed words were totally indistinguishable.
The candlelight flickered over our pale bodies as we changed. Skinny legs stepped out of trousers, jumpers were pulled up and over drooping heads, shoes were tugged off and socks slowly rolled down and removed until there were six little piles of reluctantly discarded clothing. I glanced at my companions as we changed. No one spoke. I wanted to ask the other boys what happened next, but I couldn’t summon up the words.
I later discovered that all the other boys, apart from the youngest, had been to the cellars before and they already knew what would happen. We were the toys; toys that came in different sizes, toys for grown men to play with.
I heard Christopher give a gasp that was almost a groan as he unrolled his costume. I couldn’t see what it was, only that it looked white and very sparkly.
I picked mine up from the floor where I had placed it when I undressed. At first glance it didn’t appear too bad, like a long cloak with a hood. There was something hard concealed in the folds and when I unwrapped it I saw what at first looked like an innocent lump of plastic that was such a pale pink it seemed almost white. I looked at it curiously. I saw it had straps attached to it and it was then I realized it was part of my costume.
Suddenly there was something repellent about that lump of plastic. I knew I didn’t want to touch it. I certainly knew I didn’t want to wear it, even if I had understood where it was to go. It was only a thing, I told myself as I tried to calm my racing mind; only a thing.
The boy nearest to me was pulling on a Tarzan costume, an imitation fur cloth that fastened over one shoulder and barely fell to crutch level. He had his back to me and I noticed he kept pulling it down as far as it would go in an attempt to cover his bottom. His name was Matt and I knew that he hadn’t been in the home long. I’d heard that his mother couldn’t control him and that he got into frequent fights. Up until that night, I had tried to avoid him. He was a boy who scowled more than he smiled and whose clenched fists held stiffly at his side always made him look as though he was spoiling for a fight. But that night he didn’t look ready for an altercation; he looked like the miserable, scared nine-year-old he was. Without his trousers and jumper I could see the yellow marks of old bruises covering most of his ribs, and some circular brown scars that I guessed must have been caused by burns from a lit cigarette.
‘Matt,’ I whispered. ‘What’s this?’ I pointed to the plastic lump.
‘It’s your hump, Robbie. These bastards like that one all right,’ he replied, as though I should know what it meant. Seeing that I still hadn’t caught on, he gave me a pitying look. ‘It’s the hunchback’s costume; you know – the one they made a film about.’
I winced, for I knew that story; it was a vivid memory from my time in the orphanage, where it was one of the few films the nuns had let us watch. For some reason, maybe because it was set in Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral and Quasimodo, the hideously deformed hunchback, had been a bellringer, they had decided it was educational. Victor Hugo’s book, which the film was based on, was considered a literary classic, and they admired education.
I had only been six when the nuns sat us down in front of an old black-and-white television and told us all to be very quiet. It was an event so rare that in all the years I was at Sacre Coeur I only watched that television twice. On the screen I had seen a beautiful gypsy girl with long, thick, curly hair and a man so hideously ugly and deformed that he made me shiver with horror.
The dramatic contrast with her daintiness made the bellringer even more revolting and I was far too young to realise how much of that ugliness was down to make-up and stage props. At that age I just found him sickeningly repulsive.
I wondered why they would want me to wear something that made me look deformed.
Matt looked almost sorry for me then. ‘I’ll give you a hand. Buggers put it on me first time they dragged me down here; it’s the initiation one,’ he said.
He helped me fasten it so that the dreadful pink hump was in the centre of my back.
He noticed me looking at his burn marks and said, ‘My stepdad did these. And you know what? My bleeding mum, she just watched him do it. Said I had to be taught a lesson because I was always being bad. He knocked me about too. I don’t know who told, but someone from the welfare came and they put me here. They don’t know this place is even worse.’ He didn’t say who had given him the recent bruises but I got the impression that he’d been down in the cellar several times before.
‘When you get in that room with them, don’t kick up a fuss,’ he advised. ‘They give you something to drink, makes everything easier. There’s nothing you can do. Let’s just hope they’re in a good mood. They give us cigarettes as well then.’
He tried to give me an encouraging grin and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘What can you do?’ then he tried to pull his costume down a little lower.
I noticed two of the boys were almost naked. They had tiny pieces of gold cloth tied around their waists that hardly covered their groins and more gold fabric made into collars was fastened around their necks.
The youngest boy, a stocky child aged no more than seven, was dressed as a cowboy. He looked sleepy, his face was flushed, his eyes drooped and he reminded me of Davie at that age. I wanted to take him from the room, take him somewhere safe, take us all somewhere safe, but there was nowhere to go.
‘Come on, Robbie, there’s nothing for it. Get the rest of that costume on,’ Matt’s voice broke into my thoughts. ‘They’ll be back in a minute and you don’t want to be the one who makes them mad ’cos you’re not ready.’
I wrapped the long dark cloak round me. It smelled of sweat. I could see that it was stained and just the feel of it made my bare skin crawl with disgust. When I pulled up the hood, a cold rubbery thing fell down and flapped against my face and I gave a startled little squeal.
‘It’s only a mask,’ Matt said. ‘Don’t be scared of that.’ He bent down, groped on the floor behind me and came up with a pair of old-fashioned, black, lace-up boots.
‘I knew they would have left these for you,’ he said. ‘You have to put them on too.’ Just looking at them I could tell that they were at least a couple of sizes too big and shook my head in disbelief.
‘You must, they’re part of your costume. They know I’ll have told you to wear them, so we’ll both be in trouble if you don’t.’
I pulled them onto my bare feet. I was right – they were so loose that I could only shuffle in them.
The silvery-white garment that Christopher had been holding turned out to be a ballerina’s dress. Its short skirt flared out over his tiny hips, his slender legs were bare and on his feet he wore dirty white satin ballet slippers. An imitation diamond necklace hung around his neck and sparkled in the candlelight, as did the tears that trickled down his smooth cheeks. He knew what was going to happen to him.
It always happened to him in the cellars.
I clutched the edges of the robe with one hand and looked down at the floor. Everything was blurred without my glasses so I picked them up instinctively and put them back on, but still I felt sick, dizzy and pathetic in the stupid costume. I waited for someone to laugh at me; not one boy did.
‘Robbie, your glasses,’ hissed Matt. ‘Come on, quickly, take them off.’
I reluctantly placed them on top of my pile of clothes.
‘Anyhow,’ said Matt with a sad attempt at ironic bravado, ‘you’re better off not seeing those buggers, they’re so bleeding ugly. And you certainly don’t want to watch what goes on too closely.’
Just as he finished talking, the wardens were back. Blake caught hold of my head, inspecting my get-up. ‘Good, Robbie,’ he said, breathing more stale breath into my face. Parker had gone over to the boys in gold who were huddled in a corner, their hands trying to cover their lower bodies. He brought out two chain-link dog leads, clipped them onto the gold collars and held them in one black-gloved hand while in his other he carried a whip made out of a short piece of cane with thin pieces of cloth stuck to it. Although it was not designed to inflict much damage, it still clearly stung when he gave a test flick of it on the boys’ bare skin.