Mosquito
by Joshua Osto
My name is Jake and I’m a teacher although, I have enough reason to suspect, an uninspiring one. There was another boy, also called Jake, who I knew when I was young. After school, and on the weekends, he used to hang around a group of benches in my home town, near the centre, with a group of friends whose names are mostly forgotten and, I suppose, for the most part unimportant.
One of them was a girl called Tamsin. She used to shout at the old man who ran the laundrette facing out to the paved area where the benches were. I remember him as old anyway, but that changes.
“You fucked any kids today?”
I guess she thought, or wanted everyone else to think, that he was a paedophile. He started out friendly.
“Not today,” he said.
“Want to?” Tamsin said, blowing him a kiss and very quickly opening, then closing, her legs —cracking up and shouting “PEE-DO!” at the shuttered Laundromat . The owner, the old man, had carried on walking.
Tom, one of the other boys who used to hang around the benches, had once said, “I think she wants to be abused.”
“I’d abuse her,” one of the other boys said and the conversation progressed from there, with the younger boys trying not to look confused while the older boys talked, in detail, about how precisely they would abuse her and how grateful she would be. Women, families, and pensioners walked past, no doubt in their hundreds. We owned that space, and no one said anything.
We pushed it, I suppose, and the adults took action. That’s the real story here; the one I want to tell. Not a true story, but not a lie either. A true story is just something that actually happened.
Tamsin’s comments to the laundrette owner did not change that much over time, but nor did she get bored of them. Every time he saw us there he knew what was coming. His initial shrug-and-take-it approach melted. He started to say things like, “I should call your parents” or “Shouldn’t you be at school?” but the kids would laugh him off.
“I’d love to see you fucking call my parents,” Tamsin said. “I’d love to hear what they’d say to you after what you’ve done, you fucking pervert. I’d like to see what you’ve got to say to my Dad.”
“I’m going to be a vet,” she told me once. “I like the smell of cow shit and dogs are cool.”
“I like the smell of petrol,” I told her.
“You’re fucking weird,” she said. “Cow shit’s much better.”
“Bullshit, you mean.”
“Yeah, that’s what you’re saying. Bullshit—bullshit—bullshit.”
All of our conversations were like this. You can probably tell that I was a little in love with her. She wasn’t interested in me though, because I was too safe.
One of the boys who used to sit with us was called Feggis. His surname was Feggis. It was what the police called him when they saw him.
“You behaving, Feggis?”