Waiting for Kate Bush by John Mendelssohn

working-class dads, heretofore silent, suggested. “You get the respect you bloody well demand.” I, who’d never dared demand any, and received exactly as much as I’d demanded, was surprised to find myself agreeing.
    A few of the working-class kids were brought out, blinking in confusion at the audience’s applause. If anything, their accents were even rougher than their parents’. The first to whom Trina tried to speak would hardly let her begin. “Who said I done anything to anybody?” he demanded pre-emptively, smirking defiantly. “If somebody at my school has a problem with me, let ’em tell me about it to my face, innit?”
    “Since when,” one of the working-class dads wondered enthusiastically, “does somebody what’s meant to have committed a crime not get to face his what’s-it, his accuser?”
    Trina sighed in that world-weary way she has. “In some cases, we have CCTV footage of your kids – not yours specifically, Dave, but yours in general – taking classmates’ money, or intimidating them physically.”
    “Bloody Big Brother we’re turning into, innit?” Dave snarled. “How about a person’s right to privacy?” All of his fellow parents, all of the kids, and about a third of the studio audience erupted in applause. I wanted to cry.
    I went to the toilet. It was still occupied. I’d got breathless walking all the way from my room, and didn’t want to have to walk all the way back. I sat down on the stairs to the third floor and tried to be as quiet as I could. I can’t bear to have anyone within hearing distance when I’m using the toilet. I learned from my mother that one should be deeply ashamed of the need to eliminate. I kept as still as possible in case whoever was in there had been similarly poisoned.
    When the door finally opened, I was surprised to see Cathy, the youngest of Mrs. Cavanaugh’s three children, emerge. I’d met her briefly months before, when I first moved in, and found her very hard work, as who isn’t at 15? She seemed to have lost a great deal of weight. She’d been slim to start with.
    “All right, Cathy?”
    “Yeah. OK.” Had I found it that much of an imposition to make eye contact when I was her age? I could hardly believe she didn’t remember me. It wasn’t as though her mum was boarding others of my proportions. Get two of us on the same side of the house and it was apt to tip over! I reminded her of my name and asked what she was doing home in October. My understanding was that she was away at school.
    “Having a bit of a break,” she said, not quite managing a smile, clearly wishing I’d let her go. I obliged.
    I returned to my room, found a couple of gifts in the Littlewood catalogue for Kate, thought about bullying, and was ashamed to remember that I hadn’t always been the bullied. For a long stretch there between 11 and 13, I’d done more than my own share of bullying.
    There was something just a bit off about a girl in my elementary school class called Mary Priscilla Enser. She had sharp features and frizzy hair and, at least where her classmates were concerned, a weird middle name. (Girls were meant to be called Susan or Nancy or Cathy or Patty or Bonnie or even Melody. It wasn’t as though her parents hadn’t had miles of leeway.) There was one and only one workable response to taunting at my school, and probably at every other school in human history – to punch the taunter in the nose hard enough to make it bleed, or, if you were a girl, to ridicule the taunter far more hurtfully than he or she had taunted you. Mary Priscilla Enser only looked sort of confused. Her eyes asked, “When I’ve never so much as spoken to you, why are you trying to hurt me?”
    Naturally, the more she didn’t fight back, the more cruelly she got taunted, to the point at which she became the class scapegoat by a wide margin. (I never had to endure half of what she had to, though of course it didn’t seem so at the time.) As children of later