Since I had no friends I didn`t want Jerry O`reardon coming round the Rectory and pestering me because I`d heard from Bee that the immigrant boy was heavy-set, far too friendly and talked of sport most the time in an accent that was as thick as fog and marmite. But I soon warmed to Jerry when he pulled from out of the Rector`s tight grasp, clambered on top of the bingo table, stared through the mess of green and orange streamers in the Penny Creek Fire Hall and roared with red cheeks: "Feel Welcome do I? I feel like I been marooned."

Bingo blotters stopped. Lit cigarettes dropped into paunches.

The immigrant boy had just insulted the villagers.

And so because none of the old church women liked the look of him and most of the village kids were little huns to him at the tea reception at the Fire Hall, Jerry, his mother and sullen brother shuttled out through the dingy stairwell and assembled in a dreary cluster under an unbrella in the parking lot.

"Should we do something for them, Hugh?" Asked Bee when we all got back to the Rectory that evening.
"The Baptists will see to them," Said the Rector puffing on his pipe in the sitting room.
"Selwyn," Said Bee, spotting me scarfing cheese in the larder. "You need a little chum."
"No I don`t," I answered. And I kept my head down and bolted up the stairs .

I hid from Jerry whenever I saw him at village functions during the stifling heat of August but fate has always been cruel to me and when September came round the fat lug was stuck in the homeroom same as me. The teacher, Mr. Darbeson, took one look at Jerry settled there into the middle of the class in his neatly pressed fourth form Irish School uniform and the teacher dropped his chalk to the floor.
"Will we sing the anthem then, sir?" Said Jerry. Moon face. Middle of the row like a green stain.
"What Anthem, Jerry?" Said Darbeson.
"The school Anthem, sir."
"Stand against the wall young man."
Jerry stood, fat legs dimpling. "Way, Sir? I int don nothing?
The teacher mulled. Turned surly.
"Recite Oh Canada for the class, please."
Jerry laughed uncomfortably and then started to frown.
"I dunno sir."
"Your anthem then please, Jerry."
Darbeson waited while the largest kid in the class, with hands like coal shovels, blew his nose like a trumpet.
Jerry stood feet together at the front of the class. He started to tremble.
"The St. Derry School Anthem is what I know, sir."
"Fine. Start please."
Jerry began to warble:

The Gawlden Cackrel Craws in the morning. Wake up children welcome the day...

At recess the kids circled like crows over a freshly tilled cornfield.
"Git away." said Jerry, kicking at them all with fat legs.

Jerry was crying after school. I wanted to get away from him immediately but he was after me like a shot and told me all about his Sunday newspapers that he used to plug up holes in the school toilet and when you took them away there was a wee hole you could look through and see the teachers smoking even though they said they didn`t. I soon broke into a trot but Jerry stayed with me telling me that he hated animals with a passion though had made an exception for a Jack Russell Terrier that his mother had imported all the way from Belfast. I looked at his fat fingers stretching for me.
"I hate dogs, especially small ones." I told him as I lunged away from those fat fingers.
"Caim down yah bennie." Jerry roared and drop kicked an ear of cow corn onto a neighbours immaculately trimmed hedgerow.

Jerry followed me all the way down to the bottom of the lane and talked so much about his horrid dog that I soon told him I would never go by to visit while the dog was alive. But Jerry was a persistent sod and before the week was out I was a bored and lonely stiff in the door way of the crummy little apartment where he lived. When we got past the beer bottles and cigarettes in the portico I was into the living room which smelled of smoke.
"Sherry`s a love," said his mother, standing in her dressing gown and dragging on a smoke.
"You have a daughter?" I asked.
A dark nose poked through a blanket.
A yip. A sudden shattering yip and that damned dog sprang from the sofa, stared at me with little mean eyes and nipped me hard when I lowered my hand to pet it.
"Ah, he`s not so bad," Jerry`s mother Bernice confided, petting the thing. "He jus` smells a bit a cat on ye is all."

Jerry threw the dog into the basement, locked the door and told his mother to put his brother to bed. He then took me straight into his room where we sat on an unmade bed.
Jerry stared right into me.
"I don`t like it here." He said. "The villagers are drips and they say bad things." Jerry handed me a photo.
"Jarge O`Reardon. Me da." He combed his hair over. "The day I turn twenty I`m chartering a plane to Belfast to avenge his death."
"What happened to him?"
"Strangled in jail by a British Saldier."
Jerry drew close. I could feel his breath on me.
"You like them then?" Jerry pointed at the stacks and stacks Gent and Mayfair magazines that were thrown in a beaten suitcase on the floor.
I hummed and flipped.
"I`m bared. You bared, Selwyn?"
I nodded, eyes glued to the pages.
"Look out the way, then." Jerry stabbed his arm long under the bed and dragged a shabby box across the room. Inside was an ugly grey metal thing that looked like a bomb. Or a gun. Jerry squatted and started to tinker with it. He peered up at me. Hair all over his red face. "Yah have past pewberty, then?"
I blinked in the darkness as he drew the blinds.
We then sat like two pigeons on the edge of the bed. There was an uncomfortable silence. Then a whirring and clacking. There on the grimy blinds before us two tall women in heavy make-up slapped at each other while a man with bushy hair and side burns grinned.
Jerry shifted in his seat.
"A bit a fuzz and yer away. Soon as the balls drop, yer away."
Jerry fumbled with the string of his satiny blue Umbro shorts, one hand twisting at the projector focus button.
He turned and yelled at me.
"Well come on then. Punch it Salwyn!!"
"It hurts."
"Look a` them two blond tarts, Salwyn," Jerry was grimacing and gasping and pointing. "Look a` them big sweaties."
We sat like blinking pea fowl and did the business.
"Tissyew, Salwyn." He screeched. "You`re not gaina use the tissyew, then?"
Unimpressed, embarrassed, exhausted, I grunted, "I`m going home."

It was carnage the whole year. We killed pigeons in the barn, shot at passing bicyclists with his bb gun, fished for tommy cod in the Cornwallis River, stuck firecrackers in the asses of live frogs, threw rotten chicken eggs at houses down the street, set the Gaspereau bridge on fire, drove the farmers tractor into a ravine, and bragged about the number of times in one day we had wacked off, pushing each other to more ridiculous limits until finally his obsession with soccer and Georgie Best and all things Irish made me hate him as much as the other kids. But stay with him I did for I was a pathetic, charmless drone and he had completely seduced me.

© 2000 John Stiles