There’s something about black leather gloves that makes my neck hair braid up like the ribbons on a corset. I couldn’t tell you why. But I’ll give it a go. 

We’d got moved from one primary school to another when I was about five or six, my brother and I. I’d been laying in the playground, inside a giant Thomas The Tank Engine structure the school had put in to brighten up the place. A demilabyrinth of crevices. Benches in every carriage and, somehow, almost always empty. The sun felt nice on my face. I lay there, eyes shut, watching as waves of incarnadine and rose pulsated across my eyelids. Peace, before I knew what the word meant. 

My eyelids blackened. Two girls came into my lunchtime chalet. One I’m sure I’d ended up going to college with. I’m sure she’d had her nipple sucked by my brother and that she’d had noticeable lip hair - according to my brother. The other was a little overweight. Nothing else about her stands out in my mind. I’d had a dream about her once. I don’t remember whether it was before or after all of this. She was an octopus queen who tried to cuckoo my mother from me. I’d woken up coarsely croaking for her to shut up as she hugged my mum and morphed into her sucker-covered skin. 
They kept bugging me. Talking to me. Trying to get me to play with them. Prodding, prodding, prodding. Pulling my eyelids open and pinching my cheeks with their grubby fingers. Honey or something. What ever foodstuff or snottiness seems to live on the fingers of every six year old. 

Realising there wasn’t much I could do to be rid of them, I unzipped my brushed polyester trousers, the colour of every rainy day and hellscape I can ever remember, pulled down my y-fronts and presented what I’d recently discovered to be my penis - a weapon in this instant, a funny friend in most others - like a feral sewer rat. It resembled an oak tree struck by lightning, scaled down by about a million. I’ve plucked that figure out of thin air. It’d take far too long to accurately calculate the difference in scale between an adult oak tree struck by lightning and my five or six year old phallus. 
As expected, they’d screamed and ran. Alone again. On the road again, the road of my daydreams. What I didn’t expect came next. In strolled the lunchtime attendant. My penis was away, luckily. Nestled safely beneath my boyhood briefs. My tail? That was tucked fearfully between my legs. 

They’d ran directly to the sternest lunchtime attendant on duty. Not a teacher or parent. A little weird, looking back on it. I don’t know why she worked there, volunteered there. A power play maybe. Younglings on which to exercise all her sternness and exact all her vengeance. Just a gal on the town getting her kicks any way she could. I don’t even know whether she was paid. She tugged me off the bench so hard my shoes were almost left behind. 

The next umpteen minutes, a fragment of eternity, were spent stood beside her, my hand knotted inside of hers like a damp towel being wrung out. Her glove felt like the howling and gnashing of teeth, the impending doom of mother’s fury. They say the present is a gift. Not then it wasn’t. At that moment, it was a jack in the box. A pain in my pert, underage arse. 

I was escorted back to class by Mrs. Goebbels when the bell tolled, marking the end of lunch. She informed my teacher as to the turn of events. Mrs. Brannan. The love of my infant life. She’d fed my curious mind daily and, as others worked and my concentration waned, she’d caught me looking down her top. No rage then. She’d just asked kindly that I get on with my work, in a South African twang. 

My mum came to pick me up early. Completely unrelated. I had a diabetes check-up at the hospital. We were in P.E. when she walked into the gym. She actually worked at the school, helping out with the bigger kids. The ten year olds who hung out in a bigger playground. Childhood flashing was kept strictly separate, you understand. 

I’d grabbed her arm and raced out of the room so that she wouldn’t have to hear about the shit-storm that’d gone down. No luck. Mrs. Brannan followed after, pronking through the gym doors like the gazelle she was. I didn’t blame her. She was just doing her job. Just like I didn’t blame my nan every time she offered me a biscuit twatted up with raisins. My mum turned, they talked in hushed tones, and I took thirty nervous paces. My tail, you wonder? Exactly where I’d left it earlier on. A sloppy goat minus the foam. 

Furious. Seething. Composed. She cleared her throat and we walked to the car, a trail of sweat or piss behind me. 

The doctor said my diabetes was all in good order. He called me a very responsible little boy. He did tell me to stop cracking my knuckles, that my fingers would fall off. I refrained from telling him that mum would be taking care of that later on. The praise dripped off me like wax from a candle, rain on a speeding car window. But I hoped it would make mum forget about everything else. It didn’t. 

We got in. Dad was away working. Lucky? I don’t know. Maybe he’d be on my side. It wouldn’t be the first time - in retrospect. If I had to imagine what the grim reaper sounded like, I don’t think her voice at that moment would be a bad reference point. The blood in her face had reached a rolling boil. She sent me to bed early and I cried beneath the sheets, my socks wet with sweat. 

You can lead a lamb to slaughter, but he’ll never forget your gloves.