"Ben Jeapes - Pages Out Of Order" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeapes Ben)

Thatcher would be the nation's salvation. James Callaghan was a Communist
(no one was too sure what a socialist was). Liberals were all bent.
Tom Melton could do nothing right. He was small and his fair skin made him
look even younger than he was. His voice refused to break, lodging itself
in the higher registers (he left the choir to get away from this stigma,
in vain). He had an accent so refined that even we noticed. He liked
reading books and he played a musical instrument (the clarinet, and well
-- he was a Music Scholar). He was a sensitive, emotional boy and he was
targeted for destruction.
We were placed in the same form, where his unpopularity and my cultivated
nebbishness drew us together and we moved from shy liking to proper
friendship. Since anyone who failed to come up to scratch was tagged as
bent or queer ("gay" hadn't entered our lexicon yet), we both acquired the
label. I did sometimes wonder, in the way that adolescents do, but since
the sight of Tom in the shower did nothing for me I decided the others
were wrong.
Half term came and went, and Tom refused to talk about it. I imagined a
week alone with Mrs Melton and sympathised. I had learnt, to my
fascination, that his parents were divorced and his mother had custody of
him, though Daddy paid the bills. His father, an unspecified businessman,
had left for another woman. I still hadn't got used to the idea that
adults (especially parents) had sex even when they didn't want children.
The second half of term was much like the first, and then the threat of
the holidays loomed. After his reaction to half term, I could guess how he
felt about four whole weeks at home.
"Come and stay with us," I invited, after consulting with my parents up in
Hereford. His face split into the biggest grin I had seen.
"Can I? How long?"
"As long as you like, really."
Mrs Melton didn't give in without a fight but we got Tom for the week
before Christmas, at the cost of my spending a week with the Meltons in
the new year.

Third form, Spring term, 1979
One term down, fourteen to go. I pitied Tom, torn between an unhappy home
and a school he loathed. I had mentioned his unpopularity to my father,
who shrugged. He had been through the system himself thirty years
previously.
"He'll have to learn to cope," he had said with rough sympathy. "And you
can stand up for your friend, can't you, son?"
Well ...
"Of course," I said quickly. Dad shrugged.
"So there you are. Perhaps things will get better when his voice breaks."
This happy day was still a way off when things changed.

The true bane of Tom's life was a boy called Stephen Gale. Perhaps because
he never quite made it at anything: he wasn't quite good enough for the
team, he wasn't quite accepted as a leader of our year. Older boys smirked
slightly when they spoke to him. The main reason for his general
unpleasance I didn't learn until later, but all these little things piled