Date: Fri, 20 May 2022 21:04:57 +0000 From: olhap8464972175@elude.in Subject: THE MONKEY'S GRIN, CHAPTER 6 THE MONKEY'S GRIN by Oliver Hapland This continues the story of thirteen-year-old Martin who inherits a certain piece of intimate sports equipment with magic powers. Martin has accidentally left the cricket box at Colin's house. Will Colin be tempted to invoke the monkey's malevolent powers before Martin can get it back? Meanwhile, Martin's hopes of getting it on with his best friend seem fading fast. Sorry for the long wait after the last chapter: I've been really busy. I hope to get on more of a roll with the coming installments. Thanks to everyone who has emailled me; it is so helpful when writing to know that my stories are so appreciated. Keep the feedback coming: comments encourage me to write more! Email me at olhap8464972175@elude.in Warning: this story contains sexual activity by boys. This story is fiction. It is an artistic exploration of its themes and does not condone them. Readers who enjoy this story may like to read my others, such as 'The Lustful Little Mouse', 'Little Lord Barry' or 'Gulliver's Pageboy' (see links below): https://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/adult-youth/the-lustful-little-mouse/ https://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/historical/little-lord-barry https://www.nifty.org/nifty/bisexual/celebrity/gullivers-pageboye Please consider making a donation to Nifty to continue providing all these wonderful stories http://donate.nifty.org/ THE MONKEY'S GRIN CHAPTER 6 Following my scare falling off my bike, my mother was all for me taking the Monday off school to recuperate, but I insisted I was fit enough to go in. There was no way I wanted to have to explain to everyone that I had had a day off after being rescued by the fire brigade dangling from a railway bridge with my trousers round my ankles! It wasn't till break time that I was able to catch up with Peter - and he was with Charles again. I had a bone to pick with him. The two of them were at the drinking fountain by the refectory door and I found them engaged in flicking water at one another. They ignored me when I said "Hi". I persisted: "I came round for you on Saturday." "Yeah, my mum said," Peter replied, not looking at me, as he held down the water fountain's lever with his long, spatulate fingers and loosed a palmful of water at Charles. "Why didn't you wait for me?" I said. "I did wait, but you didn't show up." Charles bounded into me with his bag as he dodged the airborne spray. He was a not-unattractive boy, with his straight hair swept to one side, but he was sullen and something of a loudmouth, and I had long been wary of him. He sent me sprawling into some kids who were swapping football badges by the doors. "Oi! That was my foot!" When I had regained my balance, I stomped back over to Peter. "You didn't wait very long for me!" He glared at me, his nostrils flaring. "I did wait. Then Charles knocked for me and I went out with him." As Peter paused, his new friend seized the opportunity to dive in and splash him from the arcing stream. Peter stepped back shaking the droplets off his school blazer, and the two of them burst into laughter. As Peter skidded to retaliate, he said to me: "You're not my only friend, you know!" "Come on, Pete," Charles called, straightening his collar. "Let's go and chat up Margaret and Philippa again." The two of them seemed very chummy together and that annoyed me. "Well, I've got other friends, too!" I bellowed. Peter looked at me, his face set. "Good! So we're even." I stood fuming, a hatred for both Peter and Charles bubbling up in me like milk in a saucepan when it suddenly boils. "And I don't need you!" I shouted. I turned on my heel and left. "Fine!" he called after me. The kids by the doors were laughing at the scene I had created and I barged past them stormily. I went into the boys' "bogs" and locked myself in one of the cubicles. This was somewhere that I would often come when I was upset or if I needed to get away from the shoving and jeering of school life for a few minutes. I pulled down my pants and sat on the uncomfortable black-plastic toilet seat with my chin in my hands. So Peter and Charles were chatting up girls, were they? I couldn't imagine what they saw in Margaret Foster or Philippa Shepherd: very plain girls both and, in the case of Philippa, plump and with spots. It was quite true that I did have other friends as well as Peter. I was chums with several of the boys in my class and, since Peter was in 3N rather than 3J, I only saw him at break- and lunch-times anyway. I kicked moodily at the brown ceramic floor tiles with my scuffed school brogues. Not being Peter's friend anymore just meant that I would have to hang around the playground with my classmates. At cricket we could dress on opposite sides of the changing room - we wouldn't even have to talk to one another! Then it occurred to me that we wouldn't be having any more sleepovers and that made me sad and resentful - especially with the mention of those girls, since I was just becoming hopeful that something might actually "happen" between Peter and me. I sat up and put my hand down to shake off the last drops of piss. On the back of the door, someone had written "There ain't no black in the Union Jack" in felt-tip, with "black" and "Union Jack" in capital letters and underlined. Underneath, someone else had drawn a rudimentary penis, to which another person had added "Nigel sucks this" with an arrow. There would be trouble when the caretaker spotted that little lot! Who was this Nigel? - I couldn't think of any. Was he someone who was thought to be a bit queer? Or, more likely, someone who was being maligned by an enemy - perhaps by someone who themselves wanted secretly to do that particular thing to Nigel; I knew from playing with Colin that even straight boys liked to suck dick sometimes. Pushing my school tie aside, I peered between my legs and peeled back my foreskin a couple of times, contemplating a quick wank before Geography, but my penis refused to be roused: the bogs were not the most conducive of places to getting sexy feelings - although that hadn't stopped me in the past! The door of the next cubicle rebounded loudly and there was laughter and the lively voices of two or three boys outside. That decided me and I yanked my trousers up and pulled the chain. Besides Peter's betrayal - which I had determined I didn't much give a stuff about anyway - I had more pressing matters to think about that evening. I had to get the cricket box back from Colin before he tried to use it on anyone. I was now convinced that the monkey exacted a forfeit for non-cricket services that the box was used to render - especially if they were sexual ones. Colin didn't go to our school: he went to Saint Luke's, which was situated in the middle of the New Town and was reputed to be quite rough. "No, you're not going to go to Colin's again today." "But Mum! I need to get something!" "Colin's mother won't want you there every day." Mum was just going upstairs with the washing that evening. "But it's important!" I stamped my foot. Why were parents so difficult? Why did they always have to treat you like a child? I was grown up now: I was thirteen! "Martin, you're not going out in the evening. You have homework to do." "You don't understand!" She put down the washing basket. "What have you left there that's so very important?" "It's my cricket pad." "Oh, for heaven's sake, Martin!" she said, stooping to pick up the basket again. "I thought it was something really urgent. You'll see Colin on Friday for cricket, anyway. Get it then." So there was no way of getting the box back before the weekend, or even of warning Colin. I didn't know his telephone number. The only person I could think of who might have it was Peter - and obviously I wasn't going to ask him! I thought about going to Colin's on the way home from school so that Mum wouldn't know, but it was a long way to walk and I wasn't sure which bus would go there. I paced around the house restlessly that evening, unable to corral my feelings. I was hurt and angry with Peter, and - if I had allowed myself to admit it - angry with myself about the way I had behaved towards him. Also, I kept thinking about Colin - what we had done together seemed to have brought us closer. By Tuesday evening, I still hadn't been able to persuade my mother to let me out. There would be no more discussion of the matter and that was "final", she said. I continued to pace around anxiously and couldn't seem to focus my mind on anything - not even masturbation! - and had started biting my nails again, which Mum always told me off about. "Please stop wandering around like a lost soul," she said, as I shuffled about the kitchen. "Here, you might as well make yourself useful, if you're going to get in my way," and she handed me a jar of sauce that she had been struggling to open. I took it smugly, expecting to be able to pop the lid off, no problem. But after a minute or two of straining, I had to admit defeat, hot and frustrated. At school on Wednesday, Peter sidled up to me with his new chum. I was hanging around the tuck shop with some boys from my class, finishing a bag of "beefy flavour" Wotsits. "Charles has got Top Trumps," Peter said. " 'Ace Helicopters' - and we wondered if you'd like to play with us." He pushed his thick fringe out of his eyes ostentatiously. He sounded sincere and almost apologetic, but I wasn't going to share him with Charles: Peter was used to having his own way and his presumption that the world revolved around him always annoyed me. If he had a new best friend now, I wasn't going to allow him to have me as well. He would have to choose! "Leave me alone!" I said and turned away, hating myself though, almost as soon as I had said it. When I got home after school, there was a Gibson's Electrical van outside and I had to knock to be let in. "I can't find my key," I told Mum when she opened the door. "Oh, that's all I need!" she said crossly. "Everything's going wrong today." I could hear cricket commentary coming from the kitchen: someone had the radio on. There was never cricket commentary on the radio in our house unless I myself had put it on to listen to. I pulled off my shoes and went to investigate. In the kitchen, the washing machine had been moved out into the middle of the floor and a pair of work boots could be seen poking out from behind it. A battered portable radio, that didn't belong to us, stood on the worktop and from this emanated John Arlott's excited voice: ". . . Selvey delivers straight down the line and it's driven away - a glorious stroke by Richards . . ." I chucked my school bag on to the kitchen table and stopped to listen. The boots moved behind the washing machine and a man popped up. "Oh, 'allo, mate," he said. "Just home from school are you?" He was still kneeling down and half hidden by the machine. He looked me up and down, not disinterestedly. He was a black man, youngish, in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing a big knitted hat in red, yellow and green, reminding me of a tea cosy. His face was rugged and stubbly but not unfriendly. I was rather stunned at finding a black man in the kitchen. He continued to eye me up and down and I stood not knowing what to do, as John Arlott's voice burbled into incoherence at the edge of my consciousness. I hadn't really the experience at that age to trust my intuition, but I certainly felt there was something unusual, something . . . well sexual . . . about the way this man was looking at me. But perhaps, I reasoned, it was a cultural thing and I was misinterpreting it. Whatever it was, it made me curious enough to linger. "What's the score?" I asked him. "It's West Indies 83 for 2." We listened as another ball was played. "You like cricket, do you?" he said. "I love it! I play for Grantwich - junior, that is." "That's good, man. You look like you play a good stroke." His saying that gave me a warm feeling but I wondered how he could possibly tell. Viv Richards hit a four. "Do you play?" I asked, to get the conversation going again. "No, man," he chuckled and shook his tea cosy. He went back to working a screwdriver in the rear of the washing machine. "I ain't never been no good. It's my uncle who was the cricket star. He toured India with the West Indies' team. His name was Nelson Walcott. Before the war this was." How exciting: to meet someone who was related to someone who used to play for the West Indies! How strange the twists and turns of life! Twenty minutes ago at school I had no idea that I was going to be talking to a West Indian in my kitchen. "My granddad was in India before the war," I told him. "He was a cricketer. Maybe he saw your uncle play!" "He was? Now there's a t'ing! My uncle tell me once that one time the Vice King guy came to watch a match and they had Pimm's and cucumber sandwiches and all the men stood around in white suits even though it was blazing sun. He said that was when he first wanted to come to England: 'Any country that produce people who can stay so cool,' he say, 'is somewhere to be!' " I took off my blazer and sat up on the table, swinging my feet in their grey school socks. The man watched my feet swinging. He started to tell me more stories about his uncle in India and, because he asked me, I told him a little about my granddad. Granddad was grown up by the 1930s, of course. He used to tell me about his boyhood in India, with its mixture of religions all rubbing shoulders, quite literally, in the streets. He and his friends would play cricket against the native boys - even though they weren't supposed to - and go swimming in the river with them "in the nude", as he told me conspiratorially once. I didn't tell all of this to the repair man. It was amazing, though, how quickly I got to feeling comfortable with him; I don't think we heard much of England v The West Indies. I suppose the man was used to chatting to customers and putting them at their ease as he fixed their appliances. He had a way of talking that made me feel special, as if he were really interested in me; I felt I could trust him: I even found myself telling him about Peter and about our bust up. "That's a shame," he said. "When you have a friend like that - what you've known a long time - it means much more than some new guy who just come along. I bet your friend is really hurting inside, even though he don't show it." He pushed a finger up inside his hat to scratch his head. "Man, when I was your age, I had a friend and me and him was like that-" and he crossed his slender fingers, one over the other, to show me "-we was inseparable: you couldn't prise us apart with a cane knife. We done everything together . . . and I mean EVERYTHING!" He looked at me significantly and I couldn't breathe: did he mean what I thought he meant? "You shouldn't let your friend be taken off by this other boy," he said. "You must be missing him or you wouldn't be telling me. I give you some advice for nothing: go and get your friend back, tell him how you been feeling." I looked down at my knees, my emotions suddenly a swirl both of shame for the way I had behaved towards Peter, and also fear that it might be too late to put things right. But there was something I wanted to know: "What happened to your friend?" "Oh, he got married, nice girl. They got a kid. I got a photo of him somewhere . . . here," he fished in his wallet and passed me a crumpled photograph, taken at a Christmas party, of a man holding a little boy. I was surprised to see that it was a white man. Mum came in then and was startled to find me in such rapt conversation with the repair man. "Ah, missus," he said, standing up and giving a little deferential nod. "Here is what was the problem: I found this stuck in the pipes." He held up a small flat object with something dangling from it. "My key!" I cried, jumping up. "Oh, Martin!" my mother scolded. "You really must be more careful what you leave in your pockets. You can't expect me to check them every time!" The man handed me the key and I thanked him kindly: it was such a relief to have it back. "Well, that's two problems sorted out," Mum said chirpily; she was obviously happy that life could go back to normal. I watched the man as he stowed the photo of his friend away and filled in some paperwork. I couldn't help noticing the bulge at the crotch of his overalls; I had heard it rumoured somewhere that black men had big dicks and I wondered now if it could be true. I was suddenly curious about what a black man's one looked like. I touched my own dick through my school trousers; my balls had been aching for the last couple of days and I rubbed them surreptitiously. "So long!" the man said to me, as he picked up his tools. "I enjoyed talkin' to ya. Maybe we see one another again sometime - if washing machine stops again." "Yeah," I said, "I hope so." "And remember what I told you," he said over his shoulder, ". . . about your friend." After I had watched the Gibson's Electrical van turn the corner, I felt a great need to go and have another look at Granddad's things. I remembered that there was a photograph album. I wondered whether there might be some photos of Granddad in India. I bounded upstairs and, standing on tiptoe, edged the box down off my wardrobe. Then, sitting in front of it on the rug, just as I had with Peter on that first evening, I rummaged around, pushing the bat and shin pads aside, and found the album. I lifted it out. Until then I hadn't paid it any attention; my obsession with the cricket pad had eclipsed all. About ten or eleven inches square, in green leather with tasteful Art Nouveau patterning, it was quite weighty and smelt old. I opened the cover. There was a sepia-toned photograph of a family on the veranda of a bungalow; the figures were too small to identify. There was another photo of a grand colonial building with groups of people standing stiffly in front, the women with parasols and the men in uniforms; then another of people sitting in an old-fashioned open-topped motor car. None of these people looked like my granddad. Then, turning a page, I found him: a little boy in a waistcoat and tie and short trousers: "Alfred Theodore Dempster," the caption read, "aged 12." Although I had never seen a picture of him so young, in that face were the unmistakable puckers and dimples that I had known and looked upon many times, sitting opposite Granddad at the dinner table or on the settee. I sat gazing at the picture for some moments. The boy was very nice-looking; the sort of boy whom I might like to know. It felt peculiar to be seeing wise-old Granddad at the age of twelve - that was even younger than me! How on Earth had this little boy grown to be so old? Carefully, I turned the fragile pages, wanting to find out some more about this cute-looking boy. As well as photographs, there were clippings from newspapers, yellowed with age but perfectly readable: notices of births; reports of society functions; local events. One of these clippings made me sit up. It had a photograph of a boy in cricket whites leaning on a cricket bat, his dimpled face beaming with a broad mischievous smile. The boy was wearing a cap, and the picture was rather over exposed, but it was clearly young Alfred Dempster again. "Local boy is cricket wiz!" proclaimed the headline and the top of the page bore the words "Civil and Military Gazette, Friday, June 20, 1913." I got down on my hands and knees on the rug so I could read the rest: Lahore youth, Alfred Dempster, set a cricketing record last Thursday when he became the first boy to score a double century in the Punjab Schools Cricket Cup championship. Dempster, 13, from the Cantonment, said he was "thrilled to bits" with his score of 207 not out, which beats the previous record of 163 by a considerable margin. Cricketing legend W. G. Grace has already wired his congratulations to the boy upon hearing the news . . . My jaw was hanging open. I had never dreamed that Granddad was so good! In my cricketing career, I had never even managed a half century, let alone a double! And to be telegrammed by W. G. Grace! . . . I wondered suddenly if the telegram might be in the album somewhere. I hunted through quickly and, sure enough, there it was! Why had I never heard about any of this? This would have been a cracking bit of information to have told the repair man! Granddad had never mentioned anything about it to me. If it had been my double century, I would have boasted about it like anything! I sat awed by this photograph of Alfred Dempster: the amazing personage who grew up to be my grandfather - until I noticed something; although the picture was smudgy and faded, I was almost certain I could see that young Alfred was wearing a cricket box under his cricket whites. Could it be that this boy's prowess at the crease was the result of help from the grinning monkey? That would certainly explain why he hadn't wanted to tell anyone about his achievement later in life - because he had cheated! My feelings for my granddad had risen to adulation and then dropped to contempt in the space of a couple of minutes. Well, not contempt exactly - he was still my Granddad, after all - more a sort of realisation that he was probably just like me: a bit of a naughty boy. That set my mind thinking about the other naughty things I had done with that box. I looked at the boy leaning with affected casualness on his bat. I fancied there was something knowing about the smile on that radiant young face, beneath the jauntily perched cap. Could it be that Alfred Dempster, at thirteen, was like his grandson, Martin Dempster, at thirteen? We had a shared passion for cricket: was it possible that he was also like me in other ways? Did he discover other non-cricket uses for his cricket box, just as I had? I remembered how I had got a hard on the first time I had tried the box for size, that evening with Peter. It had struck me then that Granddad's balls must once have nestled snug in that box, just like mine, when he was also a frisky teenager: Granddad's balls full of spunk. What a strange thought that that spunk was why I was here. . . My reverie was interrupted by a call to dinner. "Mum, tell Martin to stop pacing up and down the landing when I'm trying to study!" Kathy's voice came from her bedroom. This was later that evening. I still couldn't settle on anything, such was my anxiety still over Peter and Colin and the loss of the box. I had just about managed to get through my homework, but after that, even sitting down was difficult - "ants in my pants" is how Granddad would have described it. I still hadn't been able to masturbate: it was four days now - which was unheard of for me! "For goodness sake, Martin!" Mum called crossly from downstairs. "Will you find something to do!" I went into my room and slammed the door. I slumped down on the bed. I didn't even feel like listening to David Bowie: what was wrong with me? My eyes settled on the green photograph album. Opening it randomly in the middle, another newspaper clipping caught my eye: "Boy's lucky escape from croc," it read. The report was about a boy of fourteen, whom it did not name. The boy had fallen from a bridge over a river when the planking had given way. The part of the river in question was notorious as a breeding ground for crocodiles, and the boy, who was wearing only bathing drawers, had been saved miraculously from going in the water only because his garment had caught on a nail. He was left hanging over the river for half an hour before he was rescued - whilst crocodile-like shapes circled in the water below. The report said that the boy had suffered "some torsion" as a result of the ordeal and had been detained in hospital for a week. The similarity with my own experience on the railway bridge was striking. The boy in the bathing drawers must surely have been my granddad, or else why should he have kept this clipping? Had Alfred Dempster done something naughty with his box that the monkey had exacted payment for? In spite of these misgivings, I thought how useful it would have been to have had the box to see into the mind of the black man in the kitchen. He had looked at me as if he were weighing me up. Had he wanted to do something with me - like he had with his friend at school, with whom he did "everything"? Alfred Dempster, in Lahore, in 1913, I supposed, must have had the desire to look into other people's heads for the same sorts of reasons that I did. I stood up and regarded myself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door. I had changed out of my school uniform into jeans and T-shirt, but I supposed I presented the same general figure that the repair man would have looked at: my nice trim chest and tummy, legs that were beginning to make my jeans look short. I had a sudden desire to look at myself naked, but it was still early evening and anyone might walk in. So, leaving Granddad's album on the floor, I went across the landing to the bathroom, locked myself in and stripped off my clothes, folding them in a neat pile on the toilet lid. A lithe, lean, pale body presented itself in the mirror over the hand basin - a bit scrawny perhaps, but there were knots of muscle apparent around the shoulders and thighs. I flexed and tautened my limbs, twisting to look back over my shoulder, blowing a kiss to myself in the mirror - turning myself on with my own reflection. Was this what the black man was wanting to see? To be desired, I discovered, was a heady drug. I stood full-on, watching my swelling penis lift itself in heavy rhythmic pulses. I imagined in the mirror Alfred Theodore Dempster, aged thirteen . . . or Peter: these thoughts came to me almost unbidden. I watched as the boy in the mirror took hold of his cock and began to masturbate in long languid strokes. My body was already close to orgasm, wound up as it was with four days of unreleased sexual tension, which my distracted mind hadn't been able to focus into a climax. I began then to wank with resolve, observing myself from different angles, different poses: now one foot up on the basin; now side-on looking at my masturbating hand through the crook of my bent leg; now with head thrown back and one arm raised, nipples erect and the minute tuft of new hair visible in my left armpit. Just when I was ready to come, I had the urge for a different view altogether, a cruder one, and carefully unhooked the mirror from the wall before laying it on the floor. Then I squatted down on my haunches over it. The boy in the mirror squatted too and looked up at me, pumping his cock horizontally in front of of him: one firm stroke, then another, and another, the tip of his tongue visible between his lips - Christ, I've missed this! Why does it always feel SO GOOD! - It might have been Peter there in the mirror doing it, or Alfred, or any other boy with a cock. I watched as the boy's face changed: the mouth forming a pained "o", as the halo of his glans turned from red- to white-hot in his fist - Oh, I'm coming! - Abruptly, a spasm jerked the mirror boy's knees and pearlescent cords began bursting across the glass: one . . . two . . . three, thick and glistening - four days' worth. "Uhhrrg!" "Are you going to be long in there?" Kathy's voice came from the other side of the door. I froze with my crimson cock still pulsing spunk feebly on to the mirror. "I'm just on the toilet," I called out, in what I hoped was an ordinary, matter-of-fact voice. I cleared my throat: "Uhh! Urhh!" That much-needed orgasm seemed to clear some sort of psychological blockage and I got through the remainder of the week without too much worrying - it was nearly Friday by then, anyway. On Friday evening, I ran into the changing room at the cricket club to find that everyone was there except Colin. The others were larking about as usual. I asked if anyone had seen him: they hadn't. No one was concerned: "He's probably got the flu." I felt panicky and sick: was I responsible for Colin's absence? Had the monkey done something horrible to him? I couldn't tell anyone about my concern, of course. Even Peter, whom I might have confided in, was lost to me; in spite of my talk with the wise repair man, I wasn't quite ready to forgive him yet. Peter changed on the bench furthest away and ignored me. My mind was distracted during practice: "Wake up, Martin! The ball's just gone right past you." Eventually, back in the changing room, while I was pulling off my socks, Merv came in and I had a chance to speak to him. "Colin's mum telephoned," he said. "He's had some sort of accident." "What's happened?" I shot back. The others turned to look. "I'm not sure exactly," said Merv, "but it means he can't do cricket." There were murmurs of concern and sympathy from the boys. I shrank down feeling totally alone. Colin! *** Readers can email me at: olhap8464972175@elude.in Check out all my stories: The Monkey's Grin -13-year-old Martin inherits some intimate sports equipment with strange powers. https://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/young-friends/the-monkeys-grin The Lustful Little Mouse -about the budding young son of a Russian diplomat in Victorian London. https://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/adult-youth/the-lustful-little-mouse/ Little Lord Barry - about a wicked boy in the time of King George. https://www.nifty.org/nifty/gay/historical/little-lord-barry Gulliver's Pageboy - a comedy about the sexual adventures of a larger-than-life adolescent. https://www.nifty.org/nifty/bisexual/celebrity/gullivers-pageboy