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I mean you could say that his mum did tricks for a quid and he would still just let it go. He was just one of them peaceful type of guys. But that was the problem. You let someone take the piss a bit then you may as well let him take a piss all over you.

Anyway these are just the lessons. It’s kind of like being in prison I guess. If you show even a bit of weakness, you will get taken apart. So you can imagine the shit Curt had to deal with.

To me it looked like bad luck was going to follow Curt round for life. He wasn’t just over-sized and over-friendly, he was also a bit mixed up. His mum was a drug addict or an alcoholic or something and although we didn’t know it at the time, she probably was hooking on the quiet. There were days when Curt would come into school with bruises on his face. You couldn’t really see them that easy on him because he was so dark. But I could see them. I could always see them. On them days he wouldn’t smile as much. He would just have this look like he was guilty of something. He wouldn’t want to talk so much. He got a look on his face that even if you were a bit of an idiot you wouldn’t want to take the piss out of him too much on them days – it was too harsh to dark him like that.

But those boys at our school didn’t care about a kid’s home life. I’m not saying they didn’t have their own shit to deal with. No doubt they did. But that somehow didn’t exactly make them go any easier on him. I used to watch them when they went for him. Some little stick-boy half his size would walk up to him and call him a nigger and Curt would just put his head down. Then the kid might jump up and slap him across the face. Still Curt would do nothing. There’d be all these kids laughing at him and jeering at him and I would be standing there thinking, ‘C’mon man, you’re twice the size of these fools. Fuck them up proper.’ But he never did. He just let it slide.

It seemed like to me they were just trying to get him to react. Like they knew deep down that he could kill them in a second if he was pushed hard enough but it was like they just couldn’t help themselves. They wanted to see the Hulk breaking out of him. Anyway, they tried everything. They swore at him. They threw shit at him. They robbed him. Fucking whatever you could think of to do to a boy they did to him. Once they even chucked him into the Spit and tore all his clothes off him. Then when he was there crying in his pants, a hundred boys stood at the top of the well and spat fat green gobs down all over him. Some kid even tried pissing on him but couldn’t get much on him. Eventually when the teachers came, Curt just wiped himself down, put his clothes back on and carried on like nothing had happened. Yeah, he was crying a bit and whatever but he basically did nothing.

I kind of liked Curt, man. In fact, he later became my best friend. You could even say my only real friend. But back then I didn’t know him all that well. He didn’t even stay in that school long because one day his mum was moved up to someplace out in North London and he had to go with her. But what I remembered of him from those days was how calm he tried to be and how no matter how much he tried to find peace, war just followed him. The boy was a magnet for trouble.

Yeah. I know this sounds like I’m on a bus route diversion. But I am getting there I swear down. So, Curt. One of these days he was just sitting by himself as he usually did on the step waiting for break to be over so he could get back to the safety of lessons. I went over and decided to just chill with him for a while. Because I was so feisty, usually when people would see me and him together they left him alone. So as far as I saw it I was doing him a favour. I can’t remember what we were chatting about. We weren’t exactly tight and he weren’t exactly my boy then but we did have some shit in common.

At first I didn’t notice that anything was wrong. I don’t think anyone did really. There was noise, sure, but there was always people shouting at break like they was in a prison. What I do remember though is seeing Mark Warner. You know those thirteen-year-old boys who were thirteen in years but had faces like twenty-year-old men? He was one of them guys. He had a face that looked like it had never seen one happy day. Thing about him, though, was that he was one evil fighter. Yeah he was thin as a rope, but he was so fast that when he was fighting you didn’t see the hands even move. They just blurred right in front of the other boy’s face until that boy’s face was on the ground. It was a weird thing to watch because you hated him up for it but at the same time there was something about it that had you glued to it. You couldn’t take your eyes off him.