bad experience in the underpass

The group of youths encircled me, their bizarre collective deformities creating this lumbering gait, edging heavily back and forth on in-turned feet. Their faces twisted and convulsed into hideous fleshy representations of the human image as they hulked further into my person, guttural groans echoing from cleft palates and around the
cold stone walls of the city underpass, under roads running like clogged arteries through the run-down 60s developments left rotting and empty and towering into the twilight with outdated aerials defunct and pointless rusting on their roof. I didn't know what they wanted, these primitive locals, still patiently waiting for an act of evolution to drag their hidden gills and webbed toes from their primordial residential steaming swamp, fetid subhuman stench, rooftops, windows dripping with
condensation and the colour of pain rich and alluring in the faded brickwork of factory exteriors.

One of them pointed at my pockets. I recoiled agape at the indignity, and grasped my heart as though it were broken by this merciless violation of personal space. A final rusted nail through the human condition. The bastards. Trembling of hand and clenched of teeth I delved into the pocket, its depths uncomfortable and inaccessible past the keys, my grasp locked rigid and ineffectual around the same few items, fingering tips of coins awkwardly, desperately. I tried to feel their shapes in my fingers and allocate them a distinct physical space built around their respective numerical values.

I couldn't bear to pull a pound out; issuing them with such significant fiscal value would demoralize the situation even further. I needed to plead poverty, to carefully select a low value of coinage, extract it fully from the pocket whilst secreting coins of any larger value in some dignified sleight of hand performance. The youths looked on, eyes widening involuntarily as I rummaged so methodically. They looked at each other and made sounds like animals. Eventually satisfied I pulled out six coins, one for each of the youths, which the deductive processes of my touch had identified as coppers of the two pence valuation. I held my hand out in front of me, between my body and those of the youths, and we all seven of us looked down at the palm expectantly. The coins looked tragic on my skin, their smell like blood filled my nose as I drew breath deeply and found my head nodding in encouragement.

"I think I have a little something you might be interested in," I said, rattling my hand slightly. "A little something for all of you." I rattled the coins again. "Take them," I said, to the confused youths. "One each. A two pence piece. Take them."

The youths peered hesitantly into my hand, their faces doubtful. They moved cautiously, as if they were nervous of the money, or in reverence of it like some strange arcane idol, the coins themselves possessed by the soul of a god, a spirit and a life, a being, of sorts, each with their own head and tail even, shackled to banks and treasuries and desecrated and blasphemed in pockets and purses and desired and manipulated by all who learn of them.

"We don't want none two pence," said a male with a thick, meaty neck. "We don't want none two pennies from you log."

My pride battered I poured the six two pence pieces into my back pocket.

"But I have nothing else," I said amongst swallows. I tapped my hand onto my pockets. "Keys, here, keys alone." I tried to speak firmly, a tone commanding and authoritative, but instead sounded as though I were conducting a caricatured impersonation of an abstract concept.

"Not gold for our wants mister," said another of the youths, his neck like dried steak, pierced with two metal eyelets through the coarse flesh from which he had hung lengths of thick security chain like braids. He pulled a sheet of plain white paper from the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms and scrunched it loudly into his mouth, chewing with concentration and commitment. "We none that interested in you fakkin pences or your leggish tappy tappin," he went on, past the A4.

"Then. What do you want? From me?"

The first youth leaned into me, the visor of his baseball cap jabbing the side of my head. "We wanting the whiteness," he whispered.

The second youth leaned in likewise, the visor of his baseball cap jabbing the side of my head. "The white juice," he said. He was licking his lips as he said the words. They were all licking their lips.

"Mister got the white fluids, got them for us eh mister."

“My God,” I gasped, my anus clenching like a fist. “Surely you don’t mean?” I tried to step backwards, but could only move as far as the youths to my rear. “Oh Jesus no,” I went on.

They were nodding, nodding and licking their dirty lips. “White mate,” they said, as though unanimously be-struck by a debilitating speech impediment.

I grabbed my balls like a knee-jerk reaction, some desperate clinging to self-preservation, shreds of dignity, something.

“It ain’t goina hurt you like log,” garbled a youth’s voice. It came from behind me, and I was glad I couldn’t see the mouth from which it came, for fear of punching it. I thought about the two pence pieces, idly wasting in my back jeans pocket. Such a meticulous plan. The little shits.

“Nah mistah an we is in appreciate.”

“Yeah mistah.”

“Yeah.”

“You is an urban hero of the east anglan skies me mate.”

“Bona fide.”

“Pistachio!” they chimed harmoniously like some two-bit MC outfit out of the Norfolk flatlands.

Even as my horror rose in the form of bilious expulsion to the very tip of my throat, I knew that I became fragile in confrontation with flattery, even incomprehensible flattery such as this. I could feel a sweat breaking across the breadth of my white forehead, my pupils dilating at the very tones of their slurred voices.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s do this. You need what I’ve got. Let’s play some ball, motherfuckers, play it up.”

They started clapping, not as applause, but unpredictable, arrhythmic, spontaneous, piercing claps, perhaps a further extension of their building excitable frenzy.

“You getting the gazebo!” whooped he of thick neck, more boy than man with his eyes electric like a Christmas morning.

I unbuttoned my fly, rubbing the frontage of my jeans with an open hand to stimulate the hardening of the shaft within. Recoiling the youths hit me once in the face.

“You terribly fucken faggut queer bastard!”

“Of all me fucked plops!”

“What in fuckin you doing and on, you crazy gay nonce?”

“Fuck I puked inside of my head!”

I gasped desperately, apologetically, my tone begging for quiet in case anybody heard this exchange and thought to come and investigate. “But you asked for the whiteness!” I said. “As in the molten white love juice. As in…”

“You fucken people is all the same,” said meat neck. “Perverts and animals.”

“Don’t yo see bull this is the white juicea life we wanna feel in the side of us?”

Juice of life? I reached again for my genitals, pale with concern but sweating heavily. The youth’s hand struck my face again, and again and again, and I fell into a taut heap on the floor, approaching foetal but without space, quivering in the cold tiled indignity of the urban underpass, smelling well of urine and disaster, of family breakdown and wet blankets. I felt a little like all of them.

“But please but!” I urged. “You tell me the white juice of life, you tell me the white fluids, and yet here you strike me when I proffer said globes of goodness from the nurturing warmth of my sac!”

“Shat your snakes cunt you don’t listening, observamation? We ain’t for your cock or you bollick or even your wordsearch.”

“Contrarywise an sunder, we come here for milk, sir, and you goin get us some.”

These calcium crazed hoodlums running amok in the city centre! In my head I shook my fist to the heavens of the twenty-first century and its terrifying regimes of antisocial maniacs, by-products of commercial development one and all!

“Milk?” I said. “You just want milk?”

Like Catholics they crossed themselves as I said the word.

“Fuck mistah shhhh your flaps up!”

I didn’t want to question this ritual, and I imagined milk-drenched sexual rites, milk intersecting through vaginas and anuses and a milky hip-hop undercurrent.

“Fine,” I said, getting to my feet. None of them helped me up. They had a look of milk in their eyes. “Follow me, we’ll go to that shop just down the way.”

And off we walked together, back out of the underpass and towards the shop. The youth’s kept a distance of a few feet behind me, making heavy disorientating tribal beats with their mouths and screeching unintelligible words over the top. They sounded like pack animals and spoke the language of the future.

In the shop they knew exactly where to go, pushing past me and running to the aisle housing the dairy refrigeration units. They each grabbed a four pint plastic jug of milk, full fat, unscrewed the blue cap and peeled off the plastic stopper, and drank, heavily and with such determination into a blissful silence. A shopworker looked on, face frowning and gruesome under strip lights, a bitter face, hard like a frozen turkey that would never thaw.

“Hey shoppy,” I said, throwing my wallet at his feet. “They’re with me.”

And they drank and drank, pint after pint, neatly piling the plastic jugs at their feet, thick white moustaches left on all of their lips. A wholesome drink for strong bones and teeth. They sure loved milk.

They weren’t mugging old ladies or taking drugs or doing unprotected sex with each other. They were drinking milk.

Struck like a car accident with a sudden feeling of clarity I cracked open a four pint jug of my own, so cold and creamy. It was a school night after all.