My clumsiness as a child could not be underestimated. It
has haunted me all of my life, in fact. So to say I have grown out of it would
be not be much short of a lie, though I have to say, clumsiness has turned from
a physical thing, a verb for Jason’s current activity (‘Oh Ja’s just doing a
bit of clumsiness at the moment, he’ll be finished shortly,’ I’m sure my mother
would say) into something of a series of events that just seem to happen. When
most kids would be out on their bikes, skateboards, and the like, I would be
content with standing at the sides and watching, or running alongside. It was
much safer. You may not believe me when I say that, but take for example, my
first attempt at riding a skateboard. I can’t quite recall how old I was,
probably around aged ten I presume, and I had always been intrigued with how,
not only can you manage to make the thing move, but also, direct it. I stood
with the strangely new apparatus in front of me, a grey and plain, slightly
worn platform, with the four luminous green wheels, all belonging to a friend.
I put one foot onto the platform, then slowly, the other. Unsure of what to do
next my friend prompted, ‘you’ve gotta kick off the floor with your foot, and
then just stand on it.’
‘And that’s it?’ I asked, unsurely. Of course, when it
was confirmed all that I had to do was push off the floor, I commenced to give
this a try. Not only did I fail to move; of course, only I could manage the
events that followed. I took my left foot off the platform, and, as I put it to
the floor and pushed, I brought the foot back up, catching the underneath of
the board on the way. I fell horribly, slowly, in a kind of freeze-frame
motion, backwards, hands wailing at the side of me like I was floating in
mid-air. The board, flipped up; my left foot underneath it still, my right leg
was currently flipping out to a side. I straddled hitting the floor, coccyx
first, then my elbows braking the fall of my back. It was too late for me to
move, it all happened so fast. The skateboard, had of course, travelled with
me, flipping in a kind of acrobatic state. I, to this day, am still unsure how
something so regularly shaped, so long and heavy could have managed to float
the way that it did. The skateboard travelled in-between my right and left leg,
and, as I hit the deck, flailing down on my back to rest, the skateboard landed
with a thud, and hit me, directly in the dick.
I must have had a real curse on hurting myself in this
way. I remember being about aged nine or ten (this was, as you can tell, prime
age for my clumsiness – the age of where my utter clumsiness knew no bounds)
and I was playing football in the front garden of the three-bed semi I lived
upon my council estate. It was before school, and I was, it must be said, never
at one with the foot and the ball. I could run, yet in a space where three
strides would lead you from one end of the front garden to the other, this was
not possible. I was often nicknamed ‘spoon foot’ in my local area, for when I
kicked a ball, children would stand with hands making a visor in front of their
eyes, and watch as the ball would disappear out of the Earth’s atmosphere which
gave me just enough time to run inside and avoid the heckling of curses and
obscenities that would follow. I often practised whenever I had chance at
perfecting my spoonish feet, and so this was one such morning. There was a
fence at either side of the garden setting the barrier of the neighbouring
houses. It was a fairly small fence (still is, of course) and I was kicking the
ball against it, running from one side to the other, never often looking up for
fear of twisting my ankle in the guttering edges which my dad created for no
apparent reason other than to increase the possibility of this happening. It
wasn’t long until the ball ended up over in the next door neighbour’s front
garden. As the effort at this age was too great to go out of the gate of my
front garden, walk the four steps to the neighbouring front gate, open it, walk
inside, and collect my ball, and return the same way, I would often just jump
over the fence. It is, at adult height, an average of waist height. As a small
child however, it was probably up-to my middle chest or thereabouts. So to get
over the fence, I would have to raise one leg up, place a foot onto the one inch
width of the black iron fence, push up with this leg, and with the leg that
would be on the floor, and with that, put both feet on the fence and jump down,
or if I was feeling really acrobatic, just jump straight over with a twist.
This morning however, I did neither. As I raised my leg up, the fence was still
wet from the previous night’s rain, and I was eager to continue playing ball,
and so rushed the manoeuvre. I pushed up with the left leg, my foot unsteady
and slippery on the black rubber soles of my school shoes, and as my ground leg
came up, my supporting foot slipped. Mid air, again, my hands supporting my
balance, I fell, vertically, and with great force down onto the black iron
fence, landing on my right testicle, then with elegant grace, sliding down the
fence, my left leg in the neighbours garden, my right leg hanging over into my
garden, I fell, and cracked my head and shoulder on the concrete ground below.
Crying in what must be described as the worst pain known on this earth, I
rolled around on the floor, comforting my slug of a dick and his round friends
with an academy award winning performance. Only, I wasn’t acting. The pain
still haunts me now, as I write this, you must know, I am squirming inside, my
right testicle (which I was sure I had lost at that point) is twitching in
pain, telling me off for reciting such a horrific moment in its life. Of
course, I grabbed my ball, and climbed back over the fence properly, then went
inside to scream to my mother who examined me with conscious empathy ‘oh you’ll
be fine it’s just a bit red. Come on, you’re late for school.’ Telling the
teacher in front of all the class when I arrived to school late that the reason
for this was that I had just had an accident where I slipped and shagged my
bollocks on a fence at 8:25 a.m. was most wonderful.
I can hear you screaming ‘I want to hear more, I want to
hear more.’ Okay, just one more tale about my clumsiness. This, bear in mind in
light of the other two incidents, was probably the worst of them all. Luckily,
my penis wasn’t involved, which was great relief for him, as I think he may
have opted for impotency in retaliation. (Though convincing him to get a hard
on was quite difficult for many years ‘I promise; this won’t hurt.’) I was on
my bicycle with a friend down what in Hull is referred to as a ‘Ten Foot.’ This
is a little like an alleyway that usually surrounds the back of houses, as kind
of an extra long walkway, driveway, entrance point, to people’s back way. It is
called a Ten Foot, because they are ten feet wide (though there are a few
people in Hull who don’t know this fact, and I myself was afraid to ask this up
until my teenage years.) Hull is known as ‘The Ten Foot City,’ and is quite
famous for them. So, as I was down this Ten Foot, or ‘Tenny,’ as we call them
locally, I was en route to the friend’s house that I was with when I decided
that this would be a great time to try riding no-handed. I remember, I was
eight years old, and in Hull, if you couldn’t ride no-handed by this age you
were exiled to somewhere like Lincoln. I had to master it. I took my right hand
off the handlebar of the red bike, steadying my balance. I had mastered
one-handed earlier that year, and was fairly confident. My feet were pushing
the peddles at a good pace, my friend
was way behind me, as I had rode off in a confident splurge of energy that I
often had before doing something stupid. As I took my other hand off, I was
going along, no-handed, quite confidently. I could often manage about ten
seconds or so like this and often one hand would say hovering close to a handle
bar, just in case. I had often seen people riding with their hands behind their
backs, or eating food and drink (one kid I saw once hand both hands in a
Happy-Meal and wasn’t even looking at the road and managed to turn a corner.)
It took some skills to do such things. Skills that I, unfortunately, failed to
ever possess. After a few moments, I grew confident, and put my hands up in
front of me. This must have slightly off put my balance, particularly when I
tried to look behind me to see where my friend was, and then, in those split
seconds between doing those actions, my demise had begun. You must be aware,
this is awfully painful for me to recall. My bike, angry with my ineptitude,
decided it would turn the front wheel sharply, which caused the bike to skid. I
put my hands towards the brakes and pushed them both sharply. It was all too
late. I was thrown over the handlebars, and I kid you not, I flipped over,
somersaulting catching my handlebars with my feet as I went which threw my
cycle up into the air – unbeknown to me. I landed face first, sliding on my
chin, Klinsmann style, and then flipped one more time for good measure, rolling
in various directions. My bike came down hard, landing on top of me, the
handlebars precariously close to my nether-regions, landing directly in my
upper inner thigh. Eventually, I stopped, motionless. I bawled, my face
bleeding from various places, my bike crushing my lower half. I wouldn’t know
the extent of the damage yet, but as my friend rushed to the scene, he said
‘shit, shit, shit. Fuck me Jase, fuck me! I’ll go get my mum.’ I lay there,
unmoving, just crying. Then, I felt it. The sensation in my mouth, as the blood
trickled down my lips, and I put my tongue up to my top lip to lick it, as all
children do. I staggered up, pulling the bike off my leg slowly. I assessed my
groin, which had a lump the size of a golf ball emerging in a yellow and black
circle. I stood, dazed, as my friend’s mother came out with him, towards me,
and I put my arms out searching for no-one that was there. ‘Ohh, shit!’ she
said when she saw me. ‘Come on, let’s get you inside.’ It was a scorching hot
day in the summer. It was almost the end of school term, I remember. I felt
myself burning, but had just enough clarity to realise the sensation in my
mouth wasn’t normal. I put my tongue to my top front teeth. They were
unbelievably sensitive, not least because they were only half there; the nerve
endings hanging loosely in the strands out of the crooked and jagged things
that were left. My teeth had cracked in half. Both front top teeth had broken
in shards as I smashed my face against the concrete. My leg, in as much pain as
my face, throbbed, and I couldn’t walk properly, I realised. I had never known
pain like it (until I would fall on the fence a year later.) I went to school
for three weeks with half of my teeth missing because in the nineties, that’s
how long a dentist on the NHS would take to see you if you had just lost half
of your teeth and your nerve endings were sensitive to everything you ate and
drank. Just so you’re aware when I am writing this part, my teeth are throbbing
with a reminiscence of pain, however, I can feel my right testicle laughing in
his pouch.
