Ultra Violence Second Edition is out!!

The second Green Wizard book, Ultra Violence, is now in its second edition, a version created to complement the release of Violent Disorder.

Ultra Violence - Cover

It has a much improved cover, designed by GW interior designers and created by Dawn at Dark Dawn Creations.  

There is a symmetrical Yin/Yang to the cover of the sequel which unifies the whole. There won't be another book in this series so this process symbolises the completion in another fashion.

New UV cover.

BBVD cover

Ultra Violence - Interior

The interior font - a simple Times New Roman 10.5 - has been reduced in size from the unwieldy original. Like the seventies books on which the entire Green Wizard idea is based, rather than the hefty sized first edition, it's now fashionably slimmer than a heroin addicted skinhead in skinny jeans. It is also printed on sumptuous cream paper.

Ultra Violence - Text

There have been minor alterations to the text - nothing major - just the erasure of repetitions, spelling mistakes and grammatical clunkiness. Some words have been replaced and some sentences (bad ones) have been completely removed. The book has had a general polish. 

Ultra Violence - Versions and Sales

On advice from my editor, the Kindle version of UV remains at around one pound/one dollar on Amazon, but you know as well as I do that the paperback is a souvenir/birthday/Christmas gift/keepsake opportunity. 

If you are one of those trendy people and like your e-books, you can also download this onto your phone or onto a virtual PC based Kindle for a quid.

Buy here at the Green Wizard Magic Blog Shop.

Paperback: £7.99/$8.99

Ultra Violence Second Edition UK Paperback

Ultra Violence Second Edition US Paperback

E-book £1.02/$1.58

Ultra Violence Second Edition Kindle UK

Ultra Violence Second Edition Kindle US


Ultra Violence - Extract

Here's an extract in case you haven't bought the book yet in either edition. 

*Warning: Contains Adult Language. Please do not read if offended by this.

Here, Beanie, the unemployed and drunken gambler who is trying to set up the major fight on which the book is based, drunkenly attempts to explain to the skeptical narrator why he should join in after years of abstinence. 

Incidentally, for the benefit of Nottingham residents, the gang is drinking outside the Cross Keys one Saturday night after the football in early April 2011.
___________________________

You ever had a look at this place?

What, the tram?

No, Nottingham. Tahn. Ey a look.

You don’t need to look. 

You know these streets intimately. You see the regenerated Lace Market. The Contemporary Art Museum, which had so recently displayed Hockney and a retrospective of the Pre-Raphaelites. The Pitcher and Piano pub-in-a-church. 

You see the tram and the rejuvenated bars with trendy names like Ha Ha on the other side of the tramlines, which stretch all the way up to Hockley, full of happy revellers.

I work here, you say.

I know you do, wankstain. Have you ever had a look, I mean. A real good gander at the state we live in. Look behind the money, youth. Look behind the obvious.

Sometimes, you reply. Not often.

He’s starting to slur his words. Beanie was never like this when we were younger. 

Something is definitely getting under his skin. You’ve noticed in the pub, lately. Maybe it’s being out of work. 

You’ve always been a good listener. You carry on listening, even though you’d rather be talking about something else, and listening to the Snow Patrol track coming from inside the Keys. 

Beanie points in the general direction of the Nottingham Arena. He drains his bottle of WKD and walks to the window, taps on it. Little Dave nods and goes to the bar for another.

All these fellas in Keys. I love em. I do. They live for Notts, and so do I, but what’s the point? What’s the difference between us and someone who goes Ice Skating down there? Nowt. There IS no fucking difference. Planting bulbs. Mowing lawn. Skating a pirouette. Going to flicks. Watching Notts. None of it means fuck all. At least with scrapping, there was a point to it.

Was there? You say, not convinced. A point?

Yes, there was,bollocks. Hooliganism, that wasn’t just a hobby, a pastime, it was a way of life! Men need a hobby to take their minds of the mundanimity* of existence, I’m not telling you owt you don’t know there, being an intelligent man and a bloke to boot, but it takes a rare bird to follow something as a way of life, a culture. It takes bottle to pack it all in to enrol at a Shaolin temple, or sail to Africa to help starving Somalis in camps a hundred thousand strong. It takes real moxeh to stop the Japs butchering every whale in the Antarctic by getting in the road of the whaling ships on a Greenpeace boat. Handing over all your worldly goods to chariteh and go wandering the world, throwing yourself in front of some rain forest destroying bulldozer in Brazil. Helping resurrect the North American Bison that we wiped out in first place. That’s bottle. God, I wish I ed the bottle to do sumut like that.

He winks at you and leans closer, switches topic. 

Watching football without fighting is like window shopping at Harrods, matey.

Little Dave appears with a luminous bottle of blue WKD. Beanie hugs him. He looks embarrassed.

We’re off up The Approach in a bit, Beanie, he says.

That’s a proper Forest shithole, that is, Beanie replies, swaying, nearly spilling the drink as he collects it.

I don’t make the choices, Little Dave says. See him if you have any complaints - Dave gestures over his shoulder at Haxford, holding court inside. 

Beanie laughs and takes a big guzzle. He’s skipping from one topic to another incoherently, expecting you to put the pieces together if there is an end product to this. His rant is sobering you up, and you’re glad about that.

At least, we go to games. Not like them plastic shagnasties who watch Sky Sports and buy Man Utd replica shirts. I watched this documentareh the other day. They were interviewing some Malaysian Manure fans. Out there. In Kuala Lumpur. One of them was complaining about a loss to Norwich, or some muppet Prem team like that, I forget which. He says, ‘it’ll be different when we get them back to our patch!’ I pissed myself laughing. Then I realised there are people in this countreh who have never seen Old Trafford, and yet they support Man Utd! ‘Our patch’. Unbelievable. Un-fuckingbelievable.

I think you’re rambling a bit now, Beanie.

It all makes perfect sense to me, mate.

What’s your point, then?

My point, dear sir, he says drunkenly as he airily gestures to the night sky, is that YOU need to turn up next month.

I thought we’d changed the subject, you say.

We ALL need to turn up next month because life has no point otherwise, youth. Look at that lot. Look at you. Look at little moi. Look at these posh wankstains with the puff’s cocktails here, he says loudly, gesturing at the trendy students and call centre executives on the Galleria enjoying intelligent conversation in mostly mixed racial and gender-based groups. 

A young man with a casual just out of bed haircut that probably took him an hour under a hairdryer to achieve turns round and gives Beanie a quizzical look. Then he looks at his drink, which is indeed, a brightly-coloured cocktail full of crushed ice and crimson syrup. The girl he’s with stares at Beanie coldly.

Look at them all, he continues. They go to work. Them that ey jobs, that is. Fuck me, it’s a living hell for those that ain’t. They come home. Eat tea and fall asleep on their favourite armchair. Watch soaps or Strictly Come Dancing. Cooking shows with Jamie Oliver, or Cash in the Attic, or Homes under the Hammer, or Bargain Hunt, or reality shows about American housewives. They lose the inheritance on Internet Poker. Go out and play five-a-side with their fat mates at the Leisure Centre. Chat up old girlfriends on Facebook. Surf the net for photos of insecure teenage birds taking photos of themsens naked in bedroom mirrors. Snack on cupcakes at a quid a pop, or four packs of blueberry muffins until they become a health statistic for the NHS five-a-day fascists. The lucky ones get to shag their wives, those that have em: The really lucky ones might even enjoy it. Every day is the same shit. Every Saturday, they have a lie in. Get hammered round here at night. Hungover, they go for a pint and a game of brag Sunday dinner in the Rose and Crown, and they fall asleep on the sofa while the missus cooks the roast. They sit round with the kids on Sunday night seeing which talent-starved nobodeh is kicked off X-Factor, and they lie in bed weeping like little girls because it’s work tomorrow, and they fucking hate it. Absolutely hate every second of it. The eternal traffic jams, the dull people they have to wok wi, the managers who make them beg for treats like abused dogs in an RSPCA sanctuary, the ever-present threat of redundancy hanging over them like fucking mustard gas. It all kicks off, day in, day out, day in, day out, with the exception of that traumatic fortnight in Benidorm, and even more traumatic week off at Christmas, with kids who once loved you, and now couldn’t give a fuck whether you lived or died.

He gestures grandly and staggers a little.

This little scenario, with obvious variations, mate, is repeated a quarter of a million times in Nottingham. And do you know what it is?

What?

Do you know what it all is?

I don’t, Beanie. No, I don’t.

A suicide note in daily parts, youth.

He points a finger at your heart and taps it lightly with his fingertip. He leans toward you until you can smell his aftershave and see his heavily-lidded eyes up close.

You really need to front the Northerners, buddy. It’ll give your life some purpose.

_______

*Mundanimity is a word of my invention to symbolise the drunken state Beanie finds himself in at this point. It is not a spelling mistake. 

** The above video depicts two groups of older men from Wales, bitter rivals from Swansea and Cardiff City, accidentally bumping into each other one Saturday afternoon at Newbury Races, and subsequently having a disagreement.

Violent Disorder Launch

VIOLENT DISORDER, my first solo book for a year, and the sequel to Ultra Violence, is out on August 1st for e-book buyers and three weeks later for paperback customers.

Have a look at Dark Dawn Creation's Cover.

Back "Blurb" (in progress)

Let’s ‘av it…

The tall one advances toward me, grinning, all teeth, denim jacket and faded jeans.

He wants it, I can tell.

This knowledge makes me content. It fills me with calm, a balance. An equilibrium.

As he approaches, a sense of certainty descends that this upcoming scenario is somehow meant to be.

There is a mutual acceptance.

A tacit agreement that extreme violence is about to take place, that punches will be thrown, that blood will be spilled, and that one or both of us is going to be hurt, possibly quite badly.

Maybe very badly, indeed.

The Bully Brothers.

Forty-something football hooligans determined to go straight.  

A young Internet writer charts their progress to becoming productive citizens against the background of a disintegrating England.

Shortages of healthy food. Zero hour contracts. Moated communities. Disturbing gangs of homeless roaming the streets. Cancer victims forced to work for dole. Frightened offspring poisoning immortal parents to avoid impossible care bills. Twenty quid for the flicks, three fifty a pint, and eight quid a packet of fags.

You don’t know whether to wear a parka to go shopping or slap on sun block.

The writer takes their confession but stays at arm’s length. Old football war stories - myths and fables from the terraces of Meadow Lane. Sins of Ultra Violence two decades old carried out in service stations, back alleys and the high streets of dead towns like Hounslow, Rotherham, Swindon and Peterborough. 

Will they succeed in going straight?  Can they resist the carnage planned for the last match of the season against Coventry’s top boys?  

Or will they fail, dragging the writer into the bloody battle with them…

Violent Disorder is the much anticipated sequel to Green Wizard’s best-selling Ultra Violence.

______________________________________________________________

There will be an extract next week, and the following week, at least four interviews with me on various blogs, where I discuss the writing of the book.

Hope you enjoy it.

Wiz

Ninety Nine

All the Green Wizard e-books on KINDLE, IPAD  and your laptop KINDLE software, are now, for a limited time only...

!!!!!!!!!99p!!!!!!!!!

and

!!!!!!99c!!!!!!

Carla 

Kid Atomic

The Ritual

Hollywood Shakedown

Ultra Violence

The Illustrated Woman

UK Link

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mark-Barry/e/B008479RWI/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

US Link

http://www.amazon.com/Mark-Barry/e/B008479RWI/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1343569938&sr=8-1

Download the Mini-Green Wizard catalogue or the Independent Paperback Gift Shop Catalogue - to your right for more information. 

Sample chapters of each coming up in the next few days.

New mini Green Wizard Catalogue

Of course, this catalogue is downloadable to your right!!! 

or drop me a line and you can have 

a copy...

E-book sale

From tomorrow, all my books on Kindle will be slashed in price.

$2.99 for US readers

£1.87 for UK readers

With the exception of one more promo, my books will NEVER be offered free again, but at the same time, they will ALWAYS be this price.

UK readers can get five books for  a tenner. I estimate that's a months worth of reading.

For five of my books, I have never had less than a 5* review. 

Just thought I'd let you know!!

Writers, writers everywhere.

post archived

Green Wizard Rainy Saturday News

The Illustrated Woman is out in paperback, ladies and gentlemen.

*drum roll*

US: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_21?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the+illustrated+woman+by+mark+barry&sprefix=The+Illustrated+Woman%2Cstripbooks%2C0

https://www.createspace.com/4026119

American readers - if you are interested in buying TIW in Paperback, please use Cspace! It's much better for my business and costs you nothing extra! Thank you.

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_21?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=the+illustrated+woman+by+mark+barry&sprefix=The+Illustrated+Woman%2Caps%2C330

So far, it has received mixed reviews. 

E

Though all the readers have found TIW to be a decent read and well written - and beautifully edited by my editor Mary Ann Bernal - the criticism has focused on the sex, which is probably a bit too hard.  

One of my biggest friends in this game couldn't finish it and, for a writer, that's the worst thing. 

My book Hollywood Shakedown was once slaughtered - I mean savaged, muntered, banjaxed and totally destroyed - by a friend of Kelly's and I didn't mind because she read every word. 

For a writer, the qualitative review doesn't matter in my opinion - its whether a piece is read or not, so when my friend wrote to me and said she couldn't finish it, I felt a failure. 

Then this happened again with another close female friend who felt the descriptions were just too hard.

Originally, I wrote this as an urban piece, like Carla, a dark romance-cum-love triangle and then decided to spice it up a bit due to dismal first quarter sales for Green Wizard. 

The spicing up, in retrospect, was probably a mistake, though I will challenge anyone who says the three chapters concerned are not well written. The collective erotica genre in Indielit is often - technically, at least - the skimpiest lode of decent writing and I know the three chapters concerned stand muster.

However, you CAN read The Illustrated Woman without reading the dirty chapters. It won't harm the experience.

___________________________________________________________________________
For a cleaner reading experience, Please avoid the two chapters named after Idomenus and the one named after Ajax
______________________________________

Cuckolding: The Idomenus chapter is a description of the art of Cuckolding and that has also annoyed a couple of readers.

In the US, there is a fascinating and quite scary subculture of older white men who pay well endowed black men to service their wives.

I had never heard of it until I bumped into the practice on Tumbler when I was writing Carla - the chapter with Kenny undergoing Group Therapy.

On many occasions, they film the act. I'm told its an extreme form of swinging. I read about it in a state of astonishment and the notes I made form the crux of the Idomenus chapters.

If you're not interested in that stuff - as two or three of the readers have already found out - it can be a bit of an, er, awkward read.

I do think the story overall passes muster. Its 164 pages long and can be read in a morning over two cups of coffee and a doughnut. If you live in a city, you will recognise much of what goes on and the book covers age old themes. Choices. Decisions. Good guys/Bad guys. Poverty. Hopelessness. Redemption.

And tattoos.

Better still, its £5.99 in the UK and $8.99 in the US in PAPERBACK. (half those prices and less on Kindle).

Ideal Christmas stocking filler material, if you ask me! Just watch the hot stuff.

_____________________________________________________________________

NaNoWriMo: I'm joining in with this, even unofficially. The US National Novel Writing Month. 50k in a month. Anyone who knows me will also know that is what is known as a piece of piss. Any of the great pulp writers of the forties and fifties could do that standing on their heads - with typewriters - if they could keep off the whisky.

My working title. "Love, Nat.": A story of an English teacher who falls in love with a fifteen year old pupil.

Nothing exists so far. I'm off to watch Newmarket and then I'll have 2k tonight. I won't give a blow by blow because its too hard, but I will record the numbers.

Anyway, much more interesting stuff on the Cauldron on Tuesday.

Thanks for listening. Wizx

_____________________________________________________________________
An absolutely fantastic review of The Illustrated Woman by K-Trina Meador, reviewer for the Cross Plains Examiner in Texas and a great friend of the Indielit community.

http://www.examiner.com/review/the-illustrated-woman-by-mark-barry-1

Bullying Sequence from Ultra Violence

Dear Mel,

Regarding your bullying appeal.

You might want to show your friends this. There is a supposition amongst young people that bullying is a modern thing, as if it only began, like a craze or something, in the the last month or so.

In autumn 1978, I was savagely attacked after a sustained three month campaign by the knuckle draggers in my class. My assailants included boys and girls who went on to become a concert violinist, a doctor, a stockbroker and...hehehehe...a teacher. 

Bitter irony there.

There was no particular reason for the attacks it was just my turn to be bullied. Hah! I would not be young again for all the tea in china, Mel.

I wrote about my experience in my book "Ultra Violence." I print it in full here. Chapter 2. It's not in first person, but it's in a style known as Second Person Omniescent, The writing style is very rare and judging by some of the book's readers - its sold about 300 copies, not bad for Indie - not one hundred percent popular.

And its completely true.

I wrote it in this style because it had never been done before in this genre. Pure and simple.

If you or any of your friends are being bullied you have only two choices.

One. Hit back. And hit back hard. Teachers in my country don't recognise this and get angry when it's advised by parents, but it was the first thing I told my son when he was old enough to listen.

Two. Tell a teacher or your anti-bullying co-ordinator. If your school doesn't have one then you are in a terrible school and you need to move. A kid needs protection from thugs, bitches, dribblers and knuckleheads. If all else fails, make sure the local constabulary have a record of any attacks.

You might also want to watch a film called "Kidulthood", a British film entirely starring young actors and actresses from London, which is quite the most horrific film I think I've ever seen. It will show that you're not alone, at least and will make you and your friends angry enough to fight back.

Take care, Mel and looking forward to AP.

PS: This is a DRAFT version of the Chapter. I appear to have lost my manuscript! :-)

________________________________________________________________________

You are thirteen and it is your turn today.

You don’t know why it’s your turn today but all you know is that it is.

The atmosphere has been building up for weeks.

Those little incidents.

Brief encounters.

Minor skirmishes.

You’ve never experienced anything like this anticipation before and you’re scared. Your stomach is turning over as if you’re staring down the side of a skyscraper. You are tense and dizzy and you wish you hadn’t had seconds in the dinner hall.

Manchester Tart. 

Two slices.

You’re thirteen, sitting at a large school desk, your satchel packed and blazer on.

Five boys are staring at you. You know it’s your turn.

You’re paralysed. Panic. You cannot move. You’ve never known a feeling like it. Trepidation courses through your veins. Your body is charged and you want to cry. But you don’t. Weeping will only make things worse.

You wish it isn’t your turn today but it is.

You pray.

That’s what they taught you to do at Primary School. Pray. When in trouble. Pray. God will provide. God will save. They taught you to pray before they taught you to read, those nuns. You really need him now but as you’ve long suspected, he isn’t there and somehow even if he is out there, you know he isn’t going to help.

You’re on your own.

You look at the faces of the five boys round your table.

You look at the girls sitting round the table behind you.

It’s planned. You don’t know when they planned it, but they did.

You shut your eyes.

Mrs Dixon has just given a lesson on punctuation and you cannot remember anything she has said about full stops and commas and semi-colons because the whole class is staring at you and they’ve been staring at you for three quarters of an hour because it is your turn.

Your turn.

Other people have had their turn.

They got to Paul Fisher last week. He still hasn’t come back to school.

They got to Clare Finch last month. She had to move classes. Then she moved schools.

They got to David Gunther two months ago. They say he’s in a special school now. One where they listen to quiet music in class and there are doctors in white coats instead of teachers in stinky jackets and polyveldts.

Its twenty-seven minutes past three the old clock above the blackboard tells you. You wonder whether the classes in the surrounding classrooms know it’s your turn.

(Please, God.)

They’re staring, your classmates.

On Friday nights, as a treat, your Mum lets you watch a regular ITV programme called Appointment With Fear.

Every week, they show an old horror film.

Taste The Blood of Dracula. Dracula, Prince of Darkness. Bride of Frankenstein. Curse of The Mummy’s Tomb.

You love horror films. All the old classics.

Plague of the Zombies. The Reptile. Vampire Lovers. Blood Beast Terror.

You and your mum watch them together and you drink Horlicks and eat digestive biscuits. Your dad is always in bed asleep, ready for a five o’ clock start. He’s always working. He always has done. You’ve learned that the function of men is to work and the function of a father is to work harder and to build a home. That’s what you’ve learned.

Scream and Scream Again. Dr Terror’s House of Horrors. Asylum. Trilogy of Terror.

You love your Mum. All your friends love your Mum because there are no rules in your house. It is open house and she’s a great cook and fond of giving out treats and cakes, but the people who come round your house are different friends from another school closer to where you live. 

Not the people staring at you now, all from other parts of Nottingham who come in on buses. Bestwood, mostly. Sherwood. Top Valley. You’re dad wasn’t happy for you to be schooled with all these lunatics, but he couldn’t afford to send you anywhere else. Times were hard. 

He blamed Ted Heath for it all.

Catholics.

Ultra Violent Catholics. 

You’re surrounded by them.

You don’t even understand religion and you don’t go to church. You don’t believe in God, thinking its all a bit silly. Your mum doesn’t go and your dad doesn’t go. Your mum is too busy keeping house and your dad is too busy working.

You want to go to a different school and maybe your classmates detect this. They choose their targets carefully. They choose them for a reason.

Sometimes your Mum lets your friends come to stay and watch Appointment With Fear. They don’t tell their mums.

Last month, The Midwich Cuckoos was on.

Sean and Shaun and Adrian and Barry and Dominic and Michael and Francis and James and Brendan and Peter and Tom and Fergal are staring at you like the kids from the Midwich Cuckoos.

They’re sniggering behind their hands. 

Their blazers on. 

Regulation white shirts. Oversized, loosely tied, brick tie knots.

Behind you, there is Sheila and Mary and Annie and Connie and Margaret and Elizabeth and Catherine and Jane. Blazers. White blouses. Oversized, loosely tied, brick tie knots. Lacquered hair and make up. Giggling behind their satchels.

You are paralysed with fear.

(Please God, make it not my turn. Please save me from this and I’ll go to church on Sunday and forever.)

It’s twenty-eight minutes past three and Mrs Dixon is a stickler for time. She’s sitting there putting pens and chalk into her Hessian bag. 

You like Mrs Dixon and you want to tell her what’s going to happen but doing that will only make things worse.

You can only hope that this will be the last time.

You’ve had warnings.

Francis punched you in the face before PE a week ago and then kicked you in the back. He walked off laughing as if he’d done something to be proud of.

Adrian stabbed you in the hand with a screwdriver.

Keelan approached you in the cloakroom outside the Biology labs while you were finishing off your homework. He gestured to an Adidas bag hanging on a coat hook on the other side of the cloakroom and asked you to come over and look inside. Curious and just a little bit naïve, you got up to see what he wanted you to see. Before you reached the bag, he hit you over the head with a rounders bat. It is the first time you’ve been hit on the head like that and you squeal. You will never forget the sound of the bat rattling on your skull as long as you live, the whiplash cracking, like a snapping plastic ruler. You fall to the floor and bang the back of your head on the tiles. It is agony, but it doesn’t hurt anywhere near as much as the sound of everyone in the cloakroom laughing at you while you lay on the floor.

Boys and girls.

All good fun at school, the best years of your life.

That was just Preamble.

The beginning.

You are scared this afternoon and you have never been so scared in your entire life.

You want to cry but you daren’t. It will only make things worse.

The bell for home time goes.

So does the first ten millilitres of the liquid in your bladder which stains the front of your underpants.

You make a run for the door but Keelan is already by the toilets outside. You don’t know how he got there, and he punches you, and you go down on your knees. He takes advantage of the freedom and space around him to kick you in the face.

Then they’re on you.

Mrs Dixon can’t stop them, how can she, and she walks past into the bright sunlight outside the New Learning Block, into the banks of freshly planted trees and the rolling carpet of the newly turfed school fields. It is a beautiful, sunny spring day in nineteen seventy eight.

You are thirteen.

You are down, your nose smarting from the impact of Keelan’s punch.

You’d think you would be able to hear the shouting and the screaming with all those people around you, but all you can hear is silence, a faint crackling of white noise. You can still see them though, God hasn’t helped you, in fact, perhaps to punish you for your lack of faith, he’s made your perceptions that much keener, and you can see them forming a queue to stick the boot in. You can hear their laughter and smell their excitement.

You notice their shoes.

The boys are wearing one of three types of shoes.

Shoe type one: Platform soles popularised by glam bands such as The Bay City Rollers, Slade and T-Rex.

Shoe type two: Cork soled brogues rounded at the front, known colloquially as Spoons.

Shoe type three: Ordinary leather soled brogues, also with rounded fronts. Most people in your class follow Northern Soul and these shoes are made for dancing, sliding across polished floors.

Sturdy shoes. Built in Northampton and built to last. Shoes which built the British Empire.

Their relentless impact in your face and body is wedging you underneath the cloakroom benches, keeping you tight in the confined space, making it difficult to breathe and impossible to move. You can’t even protect your face any more.

The girls in your class are wearing just the one type of shoe.

Shoe type one: Leather stitched moccasins with plastic corn coloured soles. Mocs, they call them. You notice the mucky sole of one as it crashes onto your face and you cannot believe that you’re being stamped on by a girl.

All of the girls in your class are kicking you.

They hate you too.

Boys and girls.

In the first thirty seconds of the attack, you have been kicked thirty times and then you lose count.

There is a break from the kicking. Adrian kneels down, picks his spot and punches you. His punch connects with your left eye socket and shuts your eyelid. You have never experienced a jab of pain like it and it soon turns into a thudding in your forehead.

You can see his face and it is etched with something.

Hatred.

That’s what hurts most.

You wonder when it was that he started to hate you. You went to primary school with him. Your mum knows his mum. You thought he was a fun friend. You used to play marbles with him. You used to swap Green Lantern comics. You competed with him in spelling tests.

I got nine.

I got ten.

I got seven today.

I got eight.

I win!

As each class emerges from the classrooms in the Learning Block, a coagulated, blazered mass of third year school children, some break away from the flow to join in the ritual putting in of the boot.

And as you’re being kicked, the blood pouring from your nose, the pain dulling by the second as you start to lose consciousness, your bladder gone, trails of poop releasing itself under the weight of the beating, something weird happens, something strange.

You don’t know why or how.

Maybe God is saving you after all because you can feel your fear dissipate.

You feel it rise like a lifting cloud and you feel it leave your body behind, leaving a warm glow and before long, you are no longer afraid.

The worst they can do is beat you.

You aren’t going to die.

You are going to hurt for a month. Your education is ruined. You will never have confidence in anything the teachers and nuns at the school tell you about life again. You are going to hate all the teachers who failed to protect you. You are going to hate Catholics, all the mad, frustrated, ultra-violent Irish who are beating you now, unmercifully and without pity, remorseless.

You know that you are going to hate every single person in your class forever, but you aren’t going to die.

And this is now over.

Your turn is over.

The beating is so bad, you know, it can never be repeated.

They’ve gone well over the top, the naughty Catholic boys and girls of Corpus Christi school, they’ve gone laughably over the top, the worst session of Feel The Pain imaginable.

Ho hum.

A teacher emerges from inside the learning block to see what the fuss is about. In your reverie, you can’t quite place the concerned voice shouting and though his voice is distant, as if you are hearing it through a glass bottle, you see the consequence of his appearance.

You know that everyone is running for it, squeezing through the door three at a time, escaping into the sun, leaving you wedged and bleeding under the cloakroom bench.

Two of your classmates, Andy and John, the only two people in your class not to hit you, help the teacher, Mr Davies – Physics – to prise you out, pick you up and take you into the boy’s toilets to clean up. The loos stink of cigarettes, you notice. All the toilets at Corpus Christi stink of cigarettes and the bowls are never clean.

They cannot understand why you are not crying. You’re in agony. Three of your teeth are loose. Your glasses – crappy National Health horse chestnut tortoise shells with springs on the arms – are wrecked, both lenses cracked and the frames twisted, but you don’t mind that; you spend most of your school life without glasses, you break them yourself. Your nose is broken; you can feel it shift when you touch it. Your ears hurt. Blood emerges from the canals of the right ear and you fear they’ve done some permanent damage. Both eyes are black and you’re lucky not to have broken a socket. Your school shirt is covered in blood.

In the mirror, the blood on your shirt looks curiously like the face of Jesus.

You lift up your ripped shirt and blazer. Your entire body is covered in yellow bruises inflicted upon you by Northern Soul brogues, Northern Soul moccasins and Glam Platforms. Your legs are stiff and you can hardly stand. There’s a recession on and your dad is not going to be pleased about having to buy a new blazer, but you’re no longer afraid and though you’re in some considerable pain and you find it difficult to move your face, you start to laugh.

And laugh.

That night, at home, after the school nurse tells you you’re miraculously okay, you spend the evening taking phone calls from your assailants.

Your phone has a lock on the dial to prevent you from calling anyone. At twenty pence a minute, the phone is for emergencies only, Dad says. Your mum has the key but you never ask her to remove the little cylindrical lock nestled on the number seven. You know times are hard and you’re a good lad. You don’t burden them.

Please don’t snitch, the disembodied voices say.

We’re sorry. It all got out of hand. Please don’t tell.

We’re sorry.

Please don’t tell.

It got out of hand.

Adrian calls you and though you cannot see his face, you know he is scared about what he’s done. His voice his trembling.

Please don’t tell on me.

None of the girls who kicked you call. Not even Helen O’Reilly, who stamped on your face. She didn’t call even though her brother, Nicholas, has your phone number.

She really bent her knee and put her heart and soul into the trample. You will never forget her face. Blank and merciless.

You learned something about girls you didn’t know, that afternoon.

I won’t tell, Adrian, you hear yourself say.

I won’t tell, Ben, you hear yourself say.

No, I won’t snitch, Kevin, you hear yourself confirm.

There is a concert violinist in your class. There is someone with ambitions to be a Doctor. Adrian wants to work in the City of London. You could do some serious damage to their career aspirations. How are they going to get a job knowing how psychopathic they are?

All three of the people with skills and ambitions laid the boot in.

Mercilessly.

A doctor? None of it made any sense to you and then, on the other hand, it all made perfect sense.

All of them laid the boot in but you won’t tell on them.

Your mum is crying and wants to go up to the school and get the teachers – even the Police – involved, but you won’t let her.

You won’t tell on them. You have nothing but contempt and each phone call hardens the contempt further.

You hate them and that hate burns deep into your soul.

Your dad takes you out into the garden when he gets home from work.

He proceeds to give you the most important piece of learning you have had up until that point and you know that the advice he gives you will last you for the rest of your life.

Son, if you can’t beat them, join them, he says.

You can see in his face that he’s tired after another twelve hour shift at the brewery.

He works six days a week, sometimes seven. The only time you see him for more than an hour or so is either at the match on Saturday afternoon, when Notts are at home, or on Sunday afternoon, asleep in his vest, snoring on the sofa, with Star Soccer on the telly and four cans of Double Diamond on the occasional table next to him, the smell of Sunday lunch in the ether.

They never show Notts on Star Soccer, he’s fond of saying.

They definitely never show Notts on Match of the Day.

And that was true.

You love your dad.

He would never lie to you.

If you can’t beat them, son. Join them.

You are surprised at the advice but deep inside, you can sense a door opening to a different world.

Thanks, Dad.

You’re welcome, son.