The Willerby Sonics

A Willerby Story

Sammy’s parents gave him a pair of roller-skates for his eighth birthday.

They were white with blue wheels and were just what he’d asked for.

He was so delighted he leapt up, danced on the spot and hugged his mummy and daddy as tightly as his arms would squeeze.

“I’m going to whizz!” He said, “Faster than Sonic!”

Dan and Sally exchanged a look.

“Maybe not to begin with, special guy,” said Dan. “It’ll take a bit of time and practice.”

Sammy grinned at him. “That’s OK,” he said. “I can do my perseverance. Let’s go now!”

...

To begin with he fell a lot and there were many tears.

“You’ve tried it,” Dan said, gently as he held him, after a particularly bad one that knocked all the breath out of him, “You don’t need to carry on if you don’t want to. If you want to stop, we’d be just as proud.”

Sammy sniffed and wiped at his eyes, “But I want to do it,” he said, “I can keep trying. Let’s try again tomorrow.”

He was determined and – maybe just a little slower than most children his age did – he got better.

Dan and Sally took a video of the first time he skated – slowly and unsteadily but without falling once – from their house all the way to the pub. They watched it again and again after he’d gone to bed, laughing and crying at the same time.

“The doctors said he’d never ride a bike,” Dan said, “and look at him now.”

“Faster than Sonic?” Said Sally.

“Not yet, but I wouldn’t bet against him,” said Dan, “let’s take him to the rink next week – I think he’s earned it.”

…

The Willerby Roller-Rink was on the Sharp Farm and pulled in skaters from miles around and dimensions near and far.

The Sharps had started it as a just a concrete floored barn in the 70s for their kids who’d brought friends, then more friends, then friends of friends.

It took a nasty accident for the Sharps to realise they needed to get more organised and official – one Saturday afternoon a young brownie got knocked unconscious after a bad fall and for half an hour nobody seemed to know who his people were or how to get hold of them. Things turned out fine in the end – word got back to his village elders somehow, and they arrived shortly after the boy came round on his own. No real harm was done – just a dramatic lump on his head and two black eyes, but everyone agreed it had been a necessary wake-up call; a hundred or so young humans and boggarts of all sorts careering around in the gloom with rules they worked out as they went along was – the parish council all agreed - a recipe for disaster.

So – with help from near, far and very far - the Sharps got organised.

Now the Rink had a polished wooden floor that glowed under white floodlights with tiered seating around it. In the late 90s, the Sharp children, now grown with children of their own, added a shop and a café serving milkshakes, burgers, chips and chicken nuggets.

There was a well-established programme of regular events - recreational casual skating in the evenings Monday to Wednesday, a silent disco on Thursday nights and then a proper disco late on Friday for adults only.

The Halloween Skating Party was the most popular of the seasonal events. It brought in so many people of all types that a system of glowing coloured arm bands corresponding with different time slots had to be brought in.

Outsiders remarked on how remarkably high quality the costumes were, which always made the insiders laugh.

The weekends were mainly reserved for sports team practice – there were several roller hockey and derby teams – but Sunday afternoon was always reserved for beginners like Sammy.

…

Halfway down the track to the rink, Sammy stopped and pulled at his parents’ hands.

“I don’t know if I want to do it now,” he said, “maybe tomorrow after a bit more practice?”

Sally dropped to a knee so she could look her son properly.

“Darling,” she said, “it’s Monday tomorrow and there won’t be another chance until next week. You were looking forward to it a minute ago – what’s changed?”

“When we went to watch before,” said Sammy, “they were all fast like Sonic and they were pushing each other. What if they bump into me?”

“They won’t be going so fast,” said Sally, putting her hands on Sammy’s shoulders, “when we went it was a roller-derby – this is just for beginners to practise.”

Sammy nodded, his slightly-too-big helmet wobbling on his narrow forehead.

“Will you be with me?” He asked.

“Of course we will,” said Sally, “the absolute whole time.”

The Rink’s sound-system was playing Disney hits. It smelled of chips and echoed with the high, excited voices of children of many sorts.

A train of half a dozen pre beard dwarves were screaming in delight as they were pulled around by a put-upon looking adult who could have been any age from forty to a hundred. A mixture of goblin and human pre-teens skittered nervously as the clung to the chest high barrier.

There was – Dan noted with pleased surprised – even a family of fawns with roller wheels strapped directly to their delicate cloven hooves, the adults on the edges of a chain with their two kids between them.

“Come on, champ,” said Dan, “let’s get those skates on – it’s going to be so much fun!”

And right up until the end it was.

Sammy got the hang of it faster than either of his parents had expected, especially given how much smoother and faster the wooden rink was to the rougher road he’d practised on. He fell a couple of times but only to his padded knees and each time was up and away again straight away.

By the second half of the session, he was pushing away his parents’ arms and proudly skating by himself.

“Go and sit down,” he called, waving Dan and Sally away, “I can do it! Let me do it on my own!”

Dan started to shake his head, but Sally caught his eye and put her finger to her lips. “Let him,” she whispered.

They were both so in love with the sight of their son so strong, agile and proud they lost track of time and were surprised by the buzzer for the end of the session.

Dan stood up.

“Time’s up, champ!” He shouted. “Come on off now.”

But Sammy was too far away to hear him above the music and was so wrapped in his own happy world he didn’t notice that he was the last of the beginners left on the rink, or that it was rapidly filling up with fast-moving older skaters carving circles and arcs backwards and forwards and weaving between each other as effortlessly and gracefully as bats at dusk.

“I’ll go down and get him” Dan said, already up and picking his way to the nearest gate.

On the rink Sammy had at last noticed his session was over and was gingerly making his way to the same gate.

Just a few moments more and he’d have been there safe in his dad’s arms.

He was so close he reached out, grinning, was mouthing, “I did it,” when he was hit from behind with deliberate force by Hog, a big, rangy goblin-boy who played as the pivot for his village’s roller-derby team.

“Get out of the way!” He shouted, as he pushed him with the flats of his hands.

Sammy left the ground and smashed into the barrier so violently he cracked his helmet and mashed his face against the wood so hard it left burns that didn’t fade for a week.

Hog skated away back to his friends, and Dan – desperate, heedless of the other skaters - ran to get his screaming, hyperventilating son.

It took Sally and him nearly two hours of holding and rocking to get him to stop crying and for the next week he couldn’t go to school or sleep in his own bed because he was so frightened he’d be hit from behind by something he could not see.

Worst of all he seemed to have forgotten he’d asked his parents to leave him.

“You left me on my own,” he kept saying, pushing them way, then pulling them in, crying, “you left me all on my own.”

Dan and Sally told Mog, the Goblin Over-Queen what had happened and not knowing what else they could do, left it at that.

They threw away Sammy’s broken helmet and pads and put the black-and-white lightning bolt skates up in the loft.

“It’s OK,” they told each other, “These things happen. The goblin boy can’t have meant to push him that hard, He’s got lots of other hobbies. He doesn’t need to be a skater.”

…

Fourteen-year-old Ivy Bevan did not think it was OK.

She’d been just behind Hog when it happened and saw the whole thing.

She saw Sammy’ go up, saw the air between his skates and the rink and heard the thud and crack as he hit the wall. She heard him scream and saw the panicked look on his father’s face as he swung him away and through the swing door, patting at his body as he checked for broken bones.

That was bad enough.

But even worse was what she did not see the next day or the next or any day after that - Sammy tottering down the street in his kiddie roller-skates with his nice but posh and weedy parents on either side of him, grinning and waving at her, proud to be a skater just like she was.

She could not let it go – the injustice burned at her.

This was not the first time Ivy had felt like this.

She could not abide seeing the strong pick on the weak and had been suspended twice from her school for her extrajudicial interventions.

She knew she was supposed to “tell a teacher”, but had little trust in authorities in general.

To her authority spoke in polite posh voices like those of Sammy’s parents, there before the real trouble began and never any help when it did; uselessly asking her about her feelings when her mum got confused and found life hard then taking her away and locking her up, leaving nothing behind except her clothes and her CDs.

Authority was someone telling you there was nothing they could do to help but they were very sorry.

They – Ivy had learned – had to be tolerated but they could not be trusted and were not to be taken seriously.

Both times she was sent home from school she accepted the punishment as an inevitability but felt and showed no remorse.

“It’ll be worse if you do it again, you know,” her dad said to her the second time, after she’d hit a Y11 boy with a rounders bat during PE after she heard he’d made a Y7 beg on his knees for his own lunch money.

Ivy had shrugged.

“Would you do it again?”

“Yes,” Ivy had replied without having to think about it.

“What if you get expelled?” Her dad had asked her.

“Then I’ll come and work with you on the farm,” she replied.

Her dad had started to say something but then thought better of it and grunted and nodded instead.

“The farm isn’t any easy option.” He said, “so just make sure you’ve thought it through.”

Then he went back to his dinner.

…

Ivy took her father’s point about consequences – she did not want to be banned from skating and there was more to it as well – Hog required a deserved a proportionate level of humiliation to Sammy’s – a punishment that would keep him away from the rink forever.

A fight would not do it even if she won it.

It needed to be more and this required planning.

So, Ivy planned and then with others who loved Sammy enough to see him revenged, she plotted.

For months.

…

The annual Willerby Roller-Derby was always on the afternoon of the first Saturday in February.

It was a major event in both the village and further afield and drew in hundreds.

Many in the crowd had been participants in their younger days when sprains and broken bones were less inconvenient. Now although many missed the thrill, they had to be satisfied by the sight of their youth thunder round the oval track.

The Derby began with the four competing teams skating the rink’s perimeter to music they chose, one after another in parade, led by their jammers with the blockers behind them, the reigning champions going first.

That year it was Hog’s village team who emerged first to the drone of martial bagpipes, dressed in green and red harlequin squares, their jammer holding the trophy high above his head so everyone could see it.

Ivy studied Hog closely from the side as she and the Willerby team waited their turn, saw his glinting clan jewellery, observed his swaggering confidence and the way he waved and leered at the crowd.

She knew by the way he moved he’d never once thought of what he’d done to Sammy since he’d done it.

Perhaps not a deliberately cruel boy, she thought, but a thoughtless, inconsiderate one who expected the world to mould itself around his whims and moods because he was big and from an important family.

Ivy led the Willerby team out to Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, all dressed identically in hooded black cloaks.

She had spent longer than she’d planned to that morning on an Instagram make-up tutorial, but it had been worth it – her face was a leering skull that glowed bone white under the lights, transforming her into the demon she wanted to be. She knew when she got going the mask would split and run with her sweat, which would make it even more pleasingly gruesome.

Hog would recognise her but that wasn’t a problem.

She wanted him to.

The Willerby team won their first match – against the Underhill dwarves – with little fuss, 40 jams to 10. The dwarves always fielded tidy and well organised teams but this year while their jammer was brave, they had little imagination; once the Willerby blockers worked out their plays, they were able to easily stop her breaking through allowing Ivy to quickly build up a big lead.

By the final two jams the difference in scores was so great Ivy and her team allowed themselves some showboating – backwards skating, spinning and waving to roars of approval from their supporters.

In the second match Hog’s team easily overcame the Brownie village they were pitched again with a tight, muscular and controlled performance that made the result obvious from very early on.

Ivy watched Hog closely, how he marshalled the other blockers with pushes, shoves, calls and insults, running his team from the back.

He was good, she noted. Tough, technically competent, cautious and then decisive when he needed to be - raised to lead.

Ivy moved to the barrier and on the goblin team’s victory lap leant over it and caught Hog’s eye.

Slowly and deliberately, she drew her finger across her throat and pointed at him.

He just stuck out his tongue and laughed at her.

Unexpectedly, the dwarves beat the brownies in the play off for third and then there was a half an hour break before the final.

While the goblin team skated the rink, whipping up the crowd, Ivy and her team huddled together in the changing room going through their plan one last time.

Then the five-minute buzzer and this time to Metallica’s Enter Sandman, they skated out one after the other.

They were met by catcalls, shouts and jeers from the goblin team, who had arranged themselves in a circle in the middle of the rink.

Ivy went straight for Hog. She pushed hard between him and the goblin to his side to separate him from his team. Her blockers then moved into the gap and together they bundled him into clear space before moving out to skate around him in a circle.

At the centre Hog spun round, his long, swept back ears twitching in all directions as his instincts tried to work out from which direction the greatest threat came.

Ivy broke away from her team into a tighter orbit around the disorientated goblin, skating backwards so she could look right into his eyes, her face the perfect melting skull she’d planned it to be.

Hidden by her blockers and drowned out by the music, nobody in the crowd saw Ivy reach open her hand to show Hog the photo of Sammy she’d pulled from the village WhatsApp group and printed at school, or heard her shout “for him,” before she and her black-clad team wheeled away leaving him alone to make his way back to the other, confused goblins.

…

At the second buzzer the two teams moved to their starting positions behind the pivot line, the blockers first and then their jammer.

Then the go siren, almost lost in the roar of the voices of many people of all sorts from near and far, and off both teams went.

Rather than try to break through the pack ahead of her for the first point of the first jam, Ivy again went straight for Hog and shoved him without trying get past at all.

Shaken by what had happened before the match he was slow to react, giving her the chance to follow her first strike with another so hard it sent him spinning into the barrier wall. Ivy stopped and as he tried to recover himself shoved him to the ground, drawing gasps from those who saw her do it.

Then she skated away leaving him on the floor, just as one of the goblin’s jammers broke through the Willerby pack to score the first point of the match.

The second jam was the same as the first, except this time both Ivy and her blockers targeted Hog, double tapping him with a shove to the left then right and leaving him sprawled on the wooden surface, rubbing his head in consternation.

This time the goblin jammer broke through the Willerby pack and passed four of the Willerby team before Ivy broke through.

In the third jam things changed.

This time, expecting the same, the goblin pack was disorganised and loose so when – after again shoving Hog hard – Ivy spun away she broke through easily and pulled her team level.

And that’s how it went for the rest of the match – Ivy and her team mixing up scoring points and roughhousing Hog, so the goblins weren’t able to make an effective defence.

Without Hog to organise them – who was far too disoriented, confused and increasingly angry to think straight – their team began to fall apart and by the end of the match Willerby was scoring freely with Ivy breaking through the goblins at will.

A goblin of a different sort might have managed the situation better than Hog did but he was too used to having things his own way to adjust and once the crowd began to laugh at him, as he was knocked down again and again, he lost whatever was left of his self-control.

The laughter began with the Willerby fans and started quite early.

It spread to the neutrals and before long every time Hog went down there was a mocking chorus that was the same jeering “ohh” made by football fans when a player missed a penalty.

In the last few jams, Hog didn’t even try to organise a defence but instead flailed out at Ivy in pathetic attempts to knock her down, but he was too tired, too angry and too humiliated to get anywhere near her and instead embarrassed himself even more; in one of the last jams he lost control completely, overstretched in trying to punch Ivy and the overcorrected too much, falling hard on his backside to a roar of laughter from the entire crowd.

Dazed he stayed where he was and Ivy, to more laughter, blew him a kiss as she lapped him.

By the final buzzer – which Willerby won by the biggest score on record, the match had assumed a farcical feel with the entire crowd giving an ironic cheer when Hog managed to stay on his feet for the last jam.

If Hog hadn’t been so proud he might have eventually come to see the funny side, but he never did – he never went back to the rink at all.

He stormed off and would not come out for the award of the trophy, then slipped away before the music and dancing.

Ivy thought he might do that, so in the dead-time between the end of the game and the presentations, she slipped her photo of Sammy under the goblin changing room door and banged loudly on it. On other side she’d scrawled him a message, something she’d heard on one of her mother’s old CDs:

“Karma Police. This is what you get, when you mess with us.”

It was – she decided – good work.

But – she thought a while later watching Sammy walk down the street hand-in-hand with his parents – it was not quite enough.

Revenge was a good start, but it hadn’t fixed things.

Mending was needed.

There was more to do.

…

Ivy knocked on Sammy’s door a couple of weeks after the derby, her teammates behind her.

Sammy’s dad opened it.

“We’re here to take Sammy skating,” she said.

“Oh,” said Dan, Sammy’s dad, surprised, “that’s kind but he doesn’t skate anymore.”

“I know,” Ivy said, “I know what happened, I know why he doesn’t. Can I ask him though?”

Dan was about to say no but then Sally, his mum, appeared behind him and touched his shoulder.

“Let her speak to him,” she said, “it should be his choice.”

Dan brought Sammy down from his piano and sat at the kitchen table. He was smiling, thrilled at a visit from big children who’d never called on him before. Ivy took the chair opposite him, her team standing behind her.

“Sammy,” she said, looking him straight in his starry blue eyes, “we all seen you skate. You’re fast and you’re good - you’re what we call a jammer – like me. Your job is to go fast, get past things, look ahead. We know why you stopped too. You had no blockers, so you got hit from behind when you weren’t expecting it. That’s something gone wrong, but that’s no reason to stop, especially when you’re as good as you are.”

She stopped, leant forward and took his hand.

“You got blockers now. You don’t need to worry about what’s behind because that’s where we are and we’re a champion team. We don’t let anyone past. You only need to think about forward and going fast.”

Sammy looked back at her.

“Fast like Sonic?”

“Just like Sonic ,” said Ivy. “Just like him. Faster.”

…

So, Sammy did skate that day.

His mum got his blue and white skates down from the loft and his dad had the good sense not to say anything about the lack of helmet or pads.

Sammy skated the next day too.

And the day after that.

And after that.

And the next year at the Derby the Willerby Team wore blue suits with spiked hoods and Sammy led them out, as talisman not mascot, his parents waving at him proudly from the bleachers.

Which is how the Willerby Team got a nickname that lasted a long, long time, long after all its members had changed and long after the reasons for it were forgotten.

The Willerby Sonics.