Part 3

There was even fleeting attention from some of the prettier girls in his year, a few sticky-fingered love notes passed his way, all exclamation marks and love hearts. But Pinky had been shunned and ignored for so long, he simply didn’t know how to act around other children. He felt awkward and out of place if someone paid him a compliment or wanted to walk home with him after school. He always expected it to be a ruse, a trick, a way to make a fool out of him or mock him in some way. Thus, he invariably turned down the offer and returned home to his beloved mother.

“You shouldn’t be afraid to make a friend, Pinky,” she counselled one evening when he confessed to this newfound phobia.

“But if they didn’t like me before, why do they like me now, just because I can catch and hit a ball well?”

A question to which she could find no reasonable answer.

Regardless, high, if short-lived, hopes remained of Pinky finding social and personal acceptance through sport, but he simply didn’t enjoy any aspect of any game he played, be it team or individual. He wasn’t possessed of a competitive streak, hated the forced, phony blokiness of changing room camaraderie, banter, and strongly resented the financial aspect, how he (or, more correctly, his struggling mother) was expected to pay match fees. But perhaps most of all he detested the way people liked him for an attribute rather than what he had inside.

“Well, if you simply don’t like playing,” said his mother, during another late-night confessional, perched on the edge of his bed, “you should give up and find another interest.”

* * *

Having long since decided that education wasn’t for him, Pinky entered the employment field at sixteen years of age very much at the bottom of the pile. While far from stupid, the teachers’ dismissal of him as some kind of imbecile on account of his unlikely wingspan had discouraged him from applying himself to even the barest degree all the way through his schooling. If he was asked to stand up and read from a book or answer a mathematical equation set out on the blackboard, he stammered and squirmed as whispered heckles circulated from the other children and the teachers themselves inevitably lost both patience and temper.

“My God, Goose, you’re a muttering imbecile. Sit back down immediately.”

Yet Pinky found great enjoyment and satisfaction in the only jobs he was qualified to undertake, far more enjoyment and satisfaction than he ever found on the cricket pitch, tennis court, or between a set of goalposts. In his first full-time position on a food factory production line, standing and removing rotten potatoes, stones, and the odd decomposed rodent from a rattling industrial conveyor belt, he felt a lively sense of competitiveness for the very first time. He liked nothing more than using his longer than long arms to fine effect and removing far more field detritus from the belt than two, three, even four of his colleagues combined.

“Bloody wars!” cried one of the foremen. “Look at that boy go!”

In the staff canteen during lunch breaks, he loved listening in on their conversation, talk of replacing car engines, bouncing Page Three tits, and how many pints of strong, gut-rot cider they’d sunk at the local pub over the weekend. And while he barely participated in these exchanges himself, he nevertheless felt accepted by these low-paid, social misfits who lived from one pay slip to another, did backbreaking work, and had very little to look forward to in life.

When the food factory shut down, Pinky was genuinely devastated. On more than one occasion, a line manager told him his productivity rates were through the roof, and he had a job there for life if he wanted.

“It’s not the end of the world, love,” said Ms. Goose. “Something always turns up. You’ll see.”

And she was right.

The very next day, a neighbour told Pinky and his mother about a vacancy as a pot boy at the local pub The Kingston Arms.