Read by Greg Page
Poor Wet Patch, when we were in year three at primary school he went to the toilet and forgot to shake it. He came back into the classroom oblivious to the large and embarrassingly obvious wet patch that had formed on the front of his grey trousers. The name stuck. By the time we moved up to secondary school no one ever referred to him as anything else other than Wet Patch.
We mocked him.
“It’s going to take a long bloody time,” I pointed out.
“Not if everyone chips in,” he said.
That kind of set the ball rolling.
It was as if he laid down a challenge. Soon kids from all over the estate were lining up to add to the ever-growing mass of the wad’s sticky circumference. Day by day, through the addition of saliva-coated lumps of Spearmint Gum, Juicy Fruit, Bazooka Joe and Hubba Bubba, the wad grew incrementally fatter and wider.
Someone said we should try for the Guinness Book of Records.
That gave us a greater motivation.
We spent our pocket money on gum. We raided our parents’ purses and wallets for money to buy more gum. Those with a penchant for the old five-finger shuffle, shoplifted gum. Younger kids became the victims of bubble gum muggings.
Wet Patch was in his element.
For once he was the centre of attraction for all the right reasons.
One day we all turned up at the back of the outhouse to find that he’d built a set of curtains from old tent poles and some plastic sheeting. He’d also constructed a little stage from three planks of wood and a couple of upturned milk crates.
Wet Patch clambered up onto his stage. We all stood with arms folded, diligently chewing the gum we’d brought as our tributes for the day. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” announced Wet Patch. “May I present, for your delight and delectation, the magnificent and awe inspiring gigantic wad of gum!”
He pulled at a length of string and the plastic curtain fell open. There was the wad, bigger and pinker than ever. It looked like a full moon in a Halloween sky, wetly gleaming, littered with craters and crevices.
“Step right up,” said Wet Patch from the vantage point of his makeshift stage. “Pay in gum and watch the wad as it grows and grows.”
It became a thing.
Each day Wet Patch would climb dramatically onto his stage and put on a show, throwing in ever more ambitious adjectives into his increasingly melodramatic introductions. One day the wad might be outstandingly astounding, the next it would be a miraculous magnificence, the day after a feat of fantastical phantasmagoria.
In turn we chewed and stuck, and chewed and stuck, till our jaws ached.
The bigger the wad became the more palpable the sickly scent that hung in the air around it. The sugary aroma attracted bluebottles and wasps and huge, hovering clouds of midges. They became trapped within its gummy pinkness. There were days when the wad looked like an aerial view of the Somme, trenches and foxholes littered with thousands of insect corpses.
The wad consumed the husks and cadavers, assimilating them under oozing pink tendrils. Wet Patch decided we should bring it live offerings. We would kneel before the wad with a woodlouse or a ladybird held between our grubby index fingers and press our sacrifice to the wad, before spitting gum from our mouths to increase the rubbery mass.
The wad had expanded into an erratically sprawling disc, spread out in a ragged circumference that must have stretched a good three or four feet across the brick wall. When Wet Patch made his announcements and pulled back his plastic curtains we knelt down before it, as if we were Aztecs supplicating the Sun God.
One day one kid got herself caught up in her undone shoelaces. As she tripped and fell she scraped her hand on the uneven surface of the little tar path beneath the wall. The gash on her palm began to bleed. She wiped the blood onto the wad.
Some said that at that point the wad began to quiver and twitch. Others swore blind they’d seen it throb and pulsate. The crimson streak of blood seeped into the spit-coated surface. Some said they heard the wad let out a satisfied burp.
The next day Wet Patch climbed up onto his stage and produced a safety pin.
He held it aloft.
“Bubblegum or blood?” he asked.
We all chewed our gum and looked at him as if he’d gone mad.
“Bubblegum or blood?” he asked again.
“Blood,” replied someone at the back of the crowd. “Blood, blood, blood.”
We all picked up the chant.
“Blood, blood, blood. Blood, blood, blood.”
Wet Patch made his announcement and pulled back the curtain. The pink wad throbbed monstrously before us. The first kid stepped forward.
“Thumb,” said Wet Patch.
The kid held up his thumb. Wet Patch pricked it with the sharp point of the safety pin. Blood bubbled up on the thumb. The kid removed his gum from his mouth, smeared it with his blood and pressed it to the wad.
We all held up our thumbs.
“Blood, blood, blood,” we howled.
Day by day the wad grew fatter. Maybe it was just the heat of the sun that was causing it to swell. Maybe it became bloated on all the blood we freely gave. Maybe it became engorged on the flies that flocked to it. Logic told us one thing - superstition suggested the other.
When Wet Patch made his announcement one lunchtime, and pulled back the plastic curtain the wad seemed somehow animated, squirming and writhing, as if trying to free itself from the constraints of the wall.
“It’s hungry,” said someone.
“It needs to be fed,” agreed Wet Patch, jumping down and examining it.
“Blood, blood, blood,” we chanted. “Feed the wad! Feed the wad!”
And sugary saliva sloshed around in our mouths as we chewed our gum and waited for our thumbs to be pricked. Wet Patch raised his hand and motioned for silence. He climbed back up onto the makeshift stage.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he announced. “The time has come for the grand finale. The scene is set for a stupendous end to the show.”
We all looked at each other. It was unheard of for Wet Patch to make a second announcement. What was he talking about anyway? How could the show be over when no one had called the Guinness Book of Records yet?
Wet Patch jumped down again.
“Who remembers my real name?” he asked.
Again we all looked at each other.
Dozens of blank faces stared back at him.
I couldn’t for the life of me remember him by any name other than Wet Patch.
Wet Patch nodded his head sagely. It seemed to me that this was exactly the response he’d expected. “And so I take my leave,” he said, and bowed to us all with a studied theatrical flourish.
Everyone started chewing their gum lot more slowly. Suddenly we were all feeling quite uncomfortable. This was not how it was supposed to go. By now he should be busy pricking thumbs with his safety pin.
Wet Patch spread his arms wide and stood there like Jesus on the cross.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “prepare yourselves for a spectacular climax!”
He took a step back. His school blazer became stuck to the pink, pitted surface of the wad. There came the sound of kids spitting gum, kids swallowing gum, kids choking on gum. Wet Patch took another step back and pressed himself so far back into the wad that you could see the indent of his body.
Strands of gum crept like tiny fingers into his hair. Pink tentacles entwined themselves almost tenderly around his legs and arms. Did the wad fall from the wall through the gravity of its own weight? Or did it fall around Wet Patch like some monstrously ravenous predator?
Who knows?
But fall it did.
And Wet Patch fell with it, twitching and convulsing as it smothered his face, blowing huge pink bubbles as he expelled the last dregs of air in his lungs. His fall smashed the planks on the makeshift stage and brought the curtain frame clattering down. The momentary spell we were under broke with the shattering.
In a chaotic frenzy we pulled and clawed at the wad, yanking back stringy, pink stands. Curling our fingers into the gooey mass that encompassed his face, trying to clear a space to allow him to breathe, each of us almost overcome by the intense sugar rush of the syrupy stench that rose from the pulsing wad.
But it was too late.
Within those horrible, undulating strawberry folds, Wet Patch fell deathly still. Bubblegum had its blood. An ambulance was called. The medics were too late to revive him. I heard that they had to put him into the mortuary freezer so the gum would become brittle enough for them to chip it away from his suffocated corpse.
There was an investigation by the police. This was followed by an enquiry by the education authority. Both proved inclusive. Death by misadventure was the coroner’s verdict. The misadventure was ours. Wet Patch engineered it that way.
I’ve visited his grave often over the past thirty years. All the world is a stage; reads the fitting epitaph his parents had carved into the granite. I chew a piece of gum and stick the wad to the headstone. It’s not disrespectful. It’s an act of atonement.
At least I come.
At least I remember his name.
(c) David Turnbull, 2016
David Turnbull is a member of Clockhouse London Writers. His fiction has been published in a number of anthologies, including Beware the Little White Rabbit (Leap Books), We Can Improve You (Boo Books), Creeping Crawlers (Shadow Publishing) and Kitchen Sink Gothic (Parallel Universe Publications). A regular contributor to Sein und Werden magazine, he can be found at www.tumsh.co.uk
Aged six, Greg Page was cast as Joseph in his infant school nativity. Somebody put a tea towel on his head and he became someone else. He hasn't been himself since. He can be contacted via www.roseberymanagement.com, and has no idea what he's done with his keys.
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