We Don’t Want You

I was out walking the dog.

Nothing unusual. An August afternoon, walking through the gardens near where I was staying in Italy.

There were three or four boys on bikes. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. Riding around the way teenagers do when they have nowhere in particular to be.

Another boy came towards them from the opposite direction. Maybe a year older.

They knew each other.

One of the group rode up to him and, pointing at his friend, said:

“He wants to give you a hug.”

The boy answered with a gentleness that caught my attention. His voice was soft, his manner graceful.

“No, I can’t now, thanks. I have to go home. Maybe next time you can walk me home.”

Then he said something along the lines of:

“I know you’re good friends.”

I cannot remember every word exactly.

I remember perfectly what happened next.

As they moved away, one of the boys shouted:

“That’s never going to happen. All four of us are moving away because we don’t want you.”

Another one said:

“Oh, come on. Poor guy.”

I kept walking.

And I was fucking angry.

I don’t know who that boy is

I don’t know his name. I don’t know where he lives. I don’t know who he fancies.

I don’t know whether he is gay, straight, bisexual, or whether at thirteen or fourteen he simply has more interesting things to think about.

And I don’t want to know.

Because that would already be a mistake.

A soft voice is not a sexual orientation. Graceful movement is not a declaration. And we should not need to know who somebody desires before deciding whether they deserve respect.

I know only what I saw.

A gentle boy.

And four boys who had understood that his gentleness could be used against him.

That is enough.

Who taught them?

The easiest reaction would be: what horrible little shits.

I admit it. That was mine too.

Then another question arrived, and it was much more interesting.

Who taught them that he was the right one to laugh at?

Because somewhere, we learn this.

We learn that one voice is too feminine. One gesture not masculine enough. One body too fat, another too thin. One boy strange. One girl easy. One person queer. Another a loser.

The vocabulary changes.

The machinery is remarkably efficient.

Find a difference. Point at it. Wait for everybody else to laugh.

And there you have it: normality, freshly manufactured.

I doubt four thirteen-year-olds sat down one evening to develop a social theory of exclusion.

They absorbed it.

At home. At school. From friends. From us adults. From things we say when we think they are not listening. From jokes we call harmless. From the internet. From everywhere.

Children are not born knowing who should be left outside. At some point, somebody teaches them.

The important word wasn’t “you”

It was we.

“All four of us are moving away because we don’t want you.”

We.

Four against one.

We are here. You are there. We decide who belongs. You wait to find out.

That is what stayed with me.

Exclusion does not always need violence. Nobody has to throw a punch or push somebody against a wall.

Sometimes it is enough to tell a person that the place they thought they had does not exist.

And at thirteen, “we don’t want you” can become much bigger than four words.

It can become a question:

What do I need to change so they’ll want me?

Maybe my voice. The way I walk. My hands. Maybe I should not be so gentle. Maybe I should speak differently. Laugh when they laugh. Learn to be slightly less myself.

That is sometimes how we begin constructing an acceptable version of ourselves.

Not because anybody formally orders us to.

Because we have understood the price of admission.

The one who said “poor guy”

Then there is him.

The boy who said, “Oh, come on. Poor guy.”

He is the one I keep thinking about.

Because he knew.

He felt that they had gone too far. For a second he stepped outside the group and saw the person on the other side.

Then he stayed with the group.

And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable part.

We often imagine scenes like this have two roles: the bully and the victim.

They don’t.

There is at least a third.

The audience.

The one who laughs. The one who smiles. The one who looks at their phone. The one who thinks “poor guy”. The one who disagrees, but not quite enough to risk becoming next.

An audience can turn cruelty into entertainment.

Without one, a lot of cruelty suddenly becomes much less funny.

And then there’s me

This is where the story becomes irritating.

Because I was there too.

And I did nothing.

I kept walking. I got angry. I imagined grabbing all four of them and shaking some sense into them.

But I said nothing.

Part of me thought that if I intervened I would start an argument. Knowing me, we might still be there.

Nice excuse.

The truth is that I did not intervene.

And that is exactly what made me think.

It is very easy to go home and ask where the parents are. Where the school is. What society is teaching.

Much harder to ask:

I was there. What did my silence teach them?

This does not mean an adult should aggressively confront four minors. Quite the opposite.

But perhaps one sentence would have been enough.

“Guys, that isn’t funny.”

Four words.

No sermon. No trial. No hero.

Just somebody interrupting, for a second, their certainty that what they were doing was normal.

I didn’t do it.

Next time, I hope I will.

I don’t want to rescue him

There is another trap here.

Turning him into the fragile boy who needs saving.

I do not know him well enough even for that.

Perhaps he is far stronger than I imagine. Perhaps he went home, ate something and five minutes later was thinking about something else.

I hope so.

Or perhaps the sentence hurt.

I don’t know.

I do not want to build a story around him simply because I watched him for a few minutes.

That would be another way of deciding who he is without asking him.

What I can tell is what the scene did to me.

I recognised someone

The anger came too quickly to be only indignation.

It hit somewhere specific.

In that boy I recognised something.

A delicacy. A way of inhabiting his body. A grace that perhaps left him slightly exposed.

And suddenly I was not sixty-one anymore.

I could not even tell you what age I was.

I simply recognised a boy I might have been.

Perhaps, in some way, I was.

And that is probably why, for a few seconds, I wanted to react for him.

Not because he needed me.

Perhaps I was the one who wished somebody, many years ago, had reacted for the boy I remembered.

That is the part that hurts.

Some scenes do not belong only to the present.

They find a door we left open and walk straight through it.

Don’t become less

I don’t know what I would have said to that boy if we had been alone.

Probably nothing.

A strange adult suddenly delivering a speech about life while walking his dog would have been fairly alarming.

But I know what I would have wanted him to understand.

Do not lower your voice. Do not police your hands. Do not take up less space. Do not become harder. Do not become less gentle. Do not become less yourself to make other people more comfortable.

And above all, do not become the person who hurt you today simply to stop somebody hurting you tomorrow.

Because perhaps that is how the machinery keeps running.

Somebody gets excluded.

They learn the rules.

And a few years later, desperate finally to stand on the side of we, they find somebody else to leave outside.

That is what we need to interrupt.

Not only bullying.

The machine that keeps manufacturing somebody we don’t want.

Four boys told him today:

“We don’t want you.”

I don’t know if they’ll remember it tomorrow.

He might.