Free How To Be a Boy by Tony Bradman

together.
    The train was its own radio, a pirate half tuned between stations.
    “Yes, I got her digits,” I said quietly, ignoring them both, looking out at the slow snow falling.
    I saw a FOX just once in that same stretch of road. It was night and a wet October and the rain had just stopped
.
    Its nose was close against the tarmac
,
VIXEN GIRL
,
and was silvered by the streetlights
.
    And the river mist made a nimbus of light around its fur
.
    We saw her jump out of the car. There was a sudden billow of warm air sucked out like steam as the passenger door opened. She was fast but in slowed motion too. With her lean legs and her torn black tights, she pulled herself up, fast and slow, up and onto the high wall of the secret gardens, the private park by the river.
    From near the river I walked, late one night, a night of snow, slush, stopped and stilled of a sudden. The street was wet with reflected lights
.
    There was the fungal smell of gardens. And of the privet above the fences, dark with rain water and moss. You were in the middle of the late and silent road. Your beautiful nose close to some night scent which arrested you
.
    The car drove off with a squeal and a great cloud of exhaust fumes in the cold air.
    “NIGHT THEN, DARLIN’,” she screamed out from the top of the wall, half laughing and half crying at the retreating red tail lights. And then she fell back and over and through the low angled barbed wire into the dark.
    I vaulted past the laughing hooded Meado boy, and scrambled up onto the ledge that ran along the wall. Then she looked at me once, direct. Light haloed her head, a turned-down neon smile now on her face. Oh, and she was tall and long-legged, and her eyes, like the fox’s eyes, reflected back the light from the silvered road, from the iron lamps, from the bridge.
    You did not fear me. You watched me
.
    I pushed my hooded head over the ledge, and Pimsa and Meado shouted up to me:
    “What’s up, man?”
    “Oi, nerd. Wotya doin’?”
    I felt for the barbed wire, found a gap and dropped down deep, on the other side, into the secret gardens, landed on iced mud and snow.
    Silence then, like a closed gate, like a barred door, between us, and then I lost her, somewhere on the grounds; gone to earth.
    A tangle of spiky bushes grew tight against the high bricks, sentries to keep out scum and droogs like Pimsa, and Meado, and me. Sharp branches and brittle twigs. I was scraped up, cut and scratched up altogether, like a Lee Perry mix, bits of thornbush and jagged holly. My hood fell back onto my shoulders.
    “You all right?” I called out into the slush and the cold dark. I could see yellow lights in the big warm houses beyond the garden grounds.
    “You following me, posh boy? Nick off. Go on, leave me alone,” sobbing.
    They patrol the grounds with dogs.
    I tracked her, the girl with the neon smile. I tracked her by sound location. I could see it in my head: a real tracker, the one in
Alien
, a big tracker, with the little red blip dot getting nearer to the other little red blip dot, all on a grid of neon lines and all the time the sound response bleeps speeding up. I pushed on through the bushes, and I could hear Pimsa and Meado on the other side of the wall.
    “Wotya doin’?”
    “Where are yer?” (Laughter) “Leave ’er alone, come on?”
    “C’mon, Mead. Ferget ’im – the bastard, ’e’s in love, innit?”
    The fox wasn’t scared of me. It just stared as I walked forward, it just stayed there and watched me coming towards it; the
VIXEN
was in no hurry
.
    I found her easily enough, slumped, half crouched against a tree, her feet in the slush. She watched me coming.
    “That’s far enough,” she said.
    “Are you all right?”
    A shout from Pimsa further off towards the pub. “I love you, my darlin. Ha ha.”
    Then there was just the sound of the weir water from the lock gates, and the trees dripping, the ice melting.
    I walked up to her.
    “Where is he?” I