Chapter 12: Change in Status

The rest of the Coaching Clinic was easier, at least for me. Grandad took me there each morning, and Dad turned up most afternoons, spending quite a bit of time talking to Soapy. Mr Ashton didn’t push me physically, but made me work on my ball skills and general agility. He also paid me lots of attention during the discussion of the training films we watched during our mid-day ‘rests’. I was to be a midfielder. Ashton’s instructions were succinct.

“Chase the ball! Your job is to dominate the midfield and win the ball, then link with the forwards. If the ball comes anywhere near you, challenge for it.”

“So I’m just following the ball?”

“If it goes past you back into our half, follow it back. If it goes forward into theirs, follow it forward!” Ashton grinned. “You are fit enough to spend 90 minutes running.” You’ll be in trouble with Mr Bliss and your Dad if they see you standing around.”

I got to go out with Robyn on Friday night. The plan was to hang out at Mary’s World again, and then go to Franks and get intimately reacquainted. But poetry and folk singing had clearly become an Auckland ‘thing’, and the place was packed. Mary had employed a couple of staff, but was still run off her feet and people were standing waiting for tables. We looked at each other and shook our heads.

“Bed?”

“Bed!”

Walking back to ‘my/our’ bed at Frank’s place was a pleasant change from running everywhere. Lying in bed smooching was even nicer. Until I got cramp! Robyn was concerned.

“Jesus! Are you okay?” I’m sure I didn’t look it.

“Cramp! Can you massage my calf?” She could and she did. We had no liniment, but Robyn seemed to be able to ‘tune in’ to my body in a way quite different to Dad or Grandpa. Her ministrations weren’t anywhere near as good for the cramp, but gradually my calf relaxed, and my dick got hard.

I was lying on my front, but Robyn picked up the energy. She started to stroke my buttocks.

“It was all hard – but after I massaged the muscle, it softened right up!” She giggled. “I bet you’ve got another muscle like that!” I took very little persuasion to play along.

“Help help! I’m developing Cock Cramp!”

“Roll over. I’ll massage you!” I did and she did. But the muscle got harder and harder. Eventually, she wrapped me in rubber and used my length to push a tablet into herself.

“Poor Baby! Just lie back and let me treat that Cock Cramp!” It was really nice to do just that! After a few minutes Robyn climbed off and wedged a couple of pillows under my bum before remounting me.

The change was interesting. The pillows held my body in a shallow arc with my genitals at the apex, and her sit bones pressed on some very interesting places in my groins as she strummed her clit and ground her pelvis in circles. We came pretty much together. Lovely!

It was still early, and over some cheese toasties and a cuppa sitting up in bed, and a relatively friendly discussion about who was responsible for dealing with the toast crumbs that resulted, she caught me up on the ‘news’.

The AYD had responded promptly to Marylyn Rowe’s letter of complaint on Pauline’s behalf, and ‘Dirty Dick’ Hart had been suspended as tutor while an ‘investigation’ was carried out, but he had refused to cooperate and quit the organisation. Pauline was really enjoying the drama group with Alister in charge.

Aapi’s cousin Sina had been allowed to have a boyfriend, invite him home for a meal, and go to matinee movies with him, She had asked Aapi how to teach the boyfriend to ‘get her off’, so it seemed things were going along well there. Aapi and Pauline were ready to go ‘all the way’, and were just waiting for the safe time in her cycle, and he was smooching with Alison and starting to do some unspecified ‘other stuff’ with her, so it seemed things were going along well there too.

Allan and Mrs Thomas were still up when we got back to Robyn’s. They were very very pleased to see us. Emma had rung earlier in the evening to tell them that Mary’s World had been raided by the cops, and they had been worrying. The thought crossed my mind that it was perhaps unusual for parents to be glad that their teenage daughter had gone to bed with her boyfriend instead of visiting a coffee bar as planned, but I kept my mouth shut.

About thirty cops had surrounded the place and separated out and then searched all the performers. They had arrested four people for ‘drugs’. Mary had been taken to the ‘station’ but not arrested.

Even though I had spurted an hour and a half previously, I still got hard when Robyn anointed my upper lip with pussy juice again after our goodbye smooch. I was careful not to lick my lips as I jogged home to the Grand Kerr’s for a shower and bed.

My elevation to the First Soccer XI increased my status at School, but not by much. The First XV rugby team were a long way ahead of everyone else in terms of status, followed by the First Cricket XI, with Soccer and Hockey a long way behind. What it did do was give me permission to use the ‘Firsts and Prefects’ locker room in a new building where the floor was cleaned regularly, the showers were always hot, and the area didn’t smell of seventy years of accumulated sweat.

I was pretty much ‘on my own’ in that place. The other members of the Soccer XI didn’t use it unless they were also Prefects, and the only Hockey player who I ever saw there was ‘Cinderballs’ Cockburn, who was also a prefect. That left the ‘Ruggerbuggers’ and the prefects and me. I was aware that I would be the youngest there, and I was expecting some ‘hazing’ when I exercised my newly acquired privilege. I got it.

There was no outright bullying, and no physical invasion of my space, but some of the Ruggerbuggers made remarks about my physical appearance when I showered.

“Prick ‘n Hairs!” one called me – evidently my balls weren’t big enough. I hesitated a moment, then thought ‘what the hell!’.

“That’s ‘cos I get to empty my balls somewhere except my hand!” There was general laughter, but my hazer kept on.

“Have you got a boyfriend then?”

“No, I’m straight – but thanks anyway!” He bristled, and started to move towards me, but Jack Gavin took my part.

“Knock it off. Kerr’s got just as much right to be here as you do!”

That was enough. From then on, no one was actively unfriendly, and although no one was particularly friendly either, I happily settled for that, and trained hard on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That training was something I had very little choice about.

Dad had evidently come to some sort of arrangement with Soapy Bliss that he would do ‘fitness improvement’ with the XI. He was now on salary in his job as a surveyor, and had a lot of freedom to rearrange his work schedule, so he was able to turn up on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a clipboard and stopwatch, and each practice, he put a couple of the squad through an ‘assessment’, and provided a training and exercise schedule for them to follow. One guy protested, and Soapy gave him a very clear and public message that he could either ‘get with the program’ (though I wouldn’t hear that term for another thirty years), or go play for the 2nd XI.

I asked Dad about his knowledge of what he called ‘training at the edge’. We were sitting in his car, about to deliver me back to the Grand Kerr’s, and for a moment, I thought I had made a mistake, because his body tensed, and his face got hard.

I pushed a bit, reminding him that he had known how the ‘coaching clinic’ would affect me, even without knowing that Albie Ashton would stretch me to my limit and that my own stubbornness would take me past it. He softened, and with a touch of sadness, told me that he had been in Fred Allen’s training squad in 1938 and 1939.

“We called him ‘Fred the Needle’. He could be a really demanding bastard.”

“Was that the All Blacks?”

“Not officially, but everyone knew that he would be the manager/coach if a South African Tour actually went ahead in 1939, and his training squad would be in the team.”

“But the war cancelled...” Dad interrupted me. For a second or two, he had the ‘thousand yard stare’.

“Not now mate. Some other time.” I reached out to put my hand on his arm, and realised that this was the first time I had ever comforted my father.

The study group settled into a routine. Four of us at Robyn’s on Sunday’s, five at Frank’s place on Mondays and sometimes Fridays, with Aapi and Pauline ‘resting’ in my room quite often. Sometimes they were joined by Alison, who was very interested in watching them play ‘hide the sausage’, and sometimes Alison and Aapi did ‘sexy stuff’ on their own, and even though Alison wasn’t ready to go all the way, they always seemed to enjoy themselves.

I continued to have a nice time with Robyn. There was no doubt that we had a strong mutual sexual attraction, and we had become friends as well as lovers and study partners. No troo lurve, no happily ever after, but really really nice right now.

We shared the cleaning and washing at Frank’s with the other three, but Robyn and I did the bulk of it. Frank had purchased a second hand ‘Whiteway’ washing machine with a central agitator and a wringer on a swivelling arm and set it up in the (now very crowded) laundry, and we set up a drying rack on the veranda, where there was some protection from the smoke from the railway. Eventually, Frank designed a clothes rack and pulley system that we used to hoist the drying clothes into the ceiling of the parlour above the fire. That worked well and certainly improved the way everything smelled.

The school term was three weeks under way before the soccer season started, and I made my debut for the First XI. Thanks to the training regime, we were lots fitter than the opposition, and ran them off their feet in the second half to win 3-0. I thought I played well, and both Dad and Grandad came to the game and seemed pleased with my performance. Mr Bliss gave me a pat on the shoulder and a ‘Well done Kerr’ when I passed him on the way to the changing shed.

That Saturday night, Mary’s place got raided again. Four more arrests for ‘drugs’, and Mary was again taken to the station. Robyn had been invited to dinner at the Grand Kerr’s, and once again seemed to have a lot of fun with Grandma. We would probably have gone to Mary’s World if we hadn’t eaten with the Grand Kerrs, but I was pretty stuffed after the game, and by the time the after dinner cleanup was finished it was pushing 9pm, so we just went back to Frank’s for a ‘massage’. With predictably delicious and lubricious results.

We got back to Robyn’s before midnight, and found Allan and Robyn’s mum still up, and worried. They were again very pleased and relieved to see us. Although we were completely oblivious at the time, the fallout from these raids was to have quite a big impact on our lives.

We got the story direct from Emma the following Monday. She turned up with Frank while Aapi and Pauline were ‘resting’ during study group and Alison, Robyn and I were wrestling with quadratics. Actually, I was wrestling, Robyn seemed able to factorise them in her head, and Alison wasn’t too far behind. We sat around the table, abandoning algebra for gingernuts and a ‘cuppa’, and when Aapi and Pauline emerged looking happily ‘rested’, Emma and Frank dropped their bomb.

“Mary rang at lunchtime. She has been charged with ‘Keeping a Premises’, under the Misuse of Drugs Act. She got a lawyer and they were interviewed by an Inspector who accepted her story that she had no idea that anyone was selling Marijuana in her Coffee Bar, but it’s pretty clear that someone was dealing there. So Mary’s in the frame. The lawyer kept arguing that there’s no mens rea and the cops eventually agreed to drop the charge if she ‘divests herself’ of the business.” Robyn evidently couldn’t resist.