His Orgy of Crime

By Graham Pryor

His Orgy of Crime is the narrative of a boy apart. It is in most part a reassembly of facts, the shocking incidents for which Paul is the author having taken place in the 1960s. Paul’s story commences with his going up to secondary school, where he dismisses normal schoolboy patterns of behaviour for a more sociopathic bearing. The book’s surprising conclusion, several decades later, demonstrates that one can survive – and survive very well – when rejecting the accepted norms of upright and respectable society. It also asks the reader just how responsible are we for the actions of others?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244673031

Graham Pryor

Graham Pryor studied American Studies and English at the University of Hull. Subsequently, he pursued a career in information management, leaving his childhood home in Hythe, Kent, for the north-east of Scotland, where he has lived and worked for the past forty years. Cerberus is his fifteenth novel and, he says, his favourite.

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His Orgy of Crime

HIS ORGY OF CRIME

by

Graham Pryor

Copyright

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Whilst the events and characters depicted in this book are based upon real situations and individuals, it is not a historically accurate record. Some incidents have been commingled to add weight and names have been changed to preserve anonymity.

Copyright © 2018 by Graham Pryor

ISBN 978-0-244-67303-1

First printing: 2018

https://pryortales.com/

1 – Rude Boy

From the moment I first set eyes upon him

it was clear to me that Paul Capon had an uncompromisingly impudent nature, something that surpassed the expression of mere boyish mischief and awarded him the more dangerous disposition of full-blown contempt. But, right up to the end of our tenuous association, it was also very apparent that this initial impression, gained not just by me but the reaction of the many, belied a far more complex knot of motive and talent that wrestled to be expressed.

Paul joined my primary school towards the end of our final year, in very late spring, a time when our thoughts had already turned to the long summer break to come and the slightly fearful transition that would follow, when we were to go up and begin our secondary school careers. Consequently, aware that our present society was about to be sundered, as we each went our appointed ways to grammar or technical or rural secondary institutions, there was little natural absorption of this newcomer into any of the cliques or gangs that had been our established associations for the past four years. Indeed, he made no real attempt to forge any friendships himself, participating energetically during lessons, with irritating frequency being the first to raise his hand to answer the teacher’s questions, usually correctly, but somehow disappearing during break times, such that we quickly forgot he was a member of our class. The message we inferred, right from the beginning, was that he had no appetite for community.

Evidence of the insolence that came to define him was at that time only to be found in his physical countenance, his slightly bulging watery eyes, defiantly grey and remote, which with his angrily red cheeks and pert lips gave the appearance of someone always on the verge of offering a spiked observation or a skewering retort. But in class he was well-mannered, always tidily presented and, whilst not obsequious, showed proper and expected respect to staff.

So, was that impudence I had detected only superficial, a consequence of the arrangement of his face rather than any manifestation of real insubordination? Well, so it would seem. And his failure to ingratiate himself with any one of us, was it not likely a reflection of natural reserve, the kind of circumspection one might anticipate when a sensitive child is thrust into a busy new environment, and a temporary one at that?

But that he was sensitive I did recognise very quickly. And as for his demeanour, my first impression of his brazen impertinence was validated within a very short time.

The first week of the long summer holiday was a time when we tried to cram in all of those things we had dreamed of doing whilst incarcerated in the classroom. On this particular day in late July, my friend Peter and I had hired a skiff with the intention of rowing as far down the canal to the dam that marked the end of public fishing rights, a ridiculous four miles and back to be achieved in the two hours that our five shillings had bought us. Aware of the challenge this represented and, from previous experience, knowing how heavy were these old wooden craft, we intended to engage with nature to speed our journey, proposing to raise a kite above us to help urge the skiff through the sluggish waters.

Before we reached Scanlons Bridge, where we heard the miniature railway tuning up its steam engines, a mere mile from the boat house and with half an hour already gone, the kite was launched to rescue our desperate project, only to dive on a smoky cross-wind blowing from the road above and becoming entangled in the willows that edged the canal. Minutes later, halfway up the offending tree, my embarrassment and frustration as I attempted to retrieve an impossibly knotted length of twine was swept away, for here came Paul Capon – and with his mother. Now that was an embarrassment. At least, I would have found it so.

Here they came, his mother drab in a beige summer coat, grey hair blowing and weighted against the wind by a wicker shopping basket hooked over one arm. But Paul, dapper as ever in his black gaberdine raincoat, all buttoned up despite the summer sunshine, the belt tied tight and looped, he looked almost military with his socks pulled up to his knees and wearing a crimson tie. His mother set the pace as they swept along the towpath; with her free hand she periodically urged him on with a swing at his shoulder, which he dodged adroitly, without a glance at her, his face set in that defiant mode we would later come to know so well. Eyes wide and red rimmed, lips bunched together, he strutted just behind her, just out of reach but on an invisible leash. He was staring straight ahead but seemed not to be seeing anything in particular.

Cloistered in the mass of new foliage I kept still, observing but unobserved, or so I thought. I wasn’t being deliberately furtive, mind you, I had a sense more of respecting his dignity, for surely he wouldn’t welcome the humiliation of being spotted out with his mum. And all dressed up too. But as they moved on past my tree Paul suddenly turned on his heel, looked directly at me with his lip curled into a grotesque scowl, and jabbed a vigorous two fingers in my direction. It wasn’t Churchill’s famous V for victory, either. So quickly over his mother did not (or chose not) to notice, the belligerent message he imparted was plain, although his reasoning was not.

It was only then did I notice he was wearing a school cap. For goodness sake, I gasped to myself, what sort of idiot wears a school cap during the summer holidays? But there it was, the black cap with the bright red star at its crown and the proud badge on the front, words writ in gold honouring the merits of the worthy combatants of Trafalgar, Temeraire, Redoutable et Fougueux, the new cap sitting crisply over Paul’s stark short-back-and-sides. So that’s when I first knew he would be joining me in September, going up to the grammar school. The realisation that our paths would likely cross again made small impression on me, yet my scorn was already imprinted, by the fact that not only was he wearing a school cap out of term but the cap he was sporting belonged to a school where he had yet to enroll.

Peter was still rolling around with mirth on the back seat of the skiff when I returned with the broken kite. Did you see, did…, he pointed away into the now empty towpath. The cap, the cap…, he chortled. Paul had his cap on, ‘cos he’s a Capon. D’you think he wears it in bed? Anyway, now we know he’s going to be a grammar bug like you. Somehow that made him feel better about me having passed the eleven plus when he hadn’t. Like it was my just desserts to be accompanied by someone soft enough in the head to wear a cap out of school.

It’s not Cap-on it’s Capon, like the chicken. I was defending Paul’s name and it was irritating to hear myself doing so. Peter irritated me too, with increasing frequency these days.

Woo, brrr, cluck cluck. Peter flapped his arms like wings and I was overcome at that moment by a priggish sense of superiority. Better to be a grammar bug than turned out a simple-minded artesan. Hmmm. Like I said, we were poised to go our separate ways at the end of the summer and I might find it more interesting after all to be in the company of someone brave enough to give the two fingers in a public place, better that than having to endure the childish mockery of a person’s name.

We were on a cusp, and the more the summer sped past the greater the distance grew between those who had long been unchallenged companions but were now drifting in opposite directions. We were riding an inexorably divergent stream. Unconsciously, and accepting, I began to redirect my thoughts instead towards those who, like me, had been selected for better things. At least, that’s what we had been made to think. A little more than a half dozen from my school, eight of us judged ready to tackle the rigours of a more intellectual path. Just fourteen per cent of our year. And then there was Paul, making a band of nine, or was it eight plus one? For none of the eight could claim to know him as we knew each other, and as I have made plain, he didn’t invite community.

*

Our big new school was organised into four streams, A, B, C and D, with A being the class reserved for the brightest. Another measure was that the A stream tended to be populated by kids from the wealthier homes, those with parents in the professions, the sort who lived in the large houses at the west of town. Most of them would be channeled into the