Fishing for fraternity in a sea of sadism

MIDNIGHT. Five paces from the house, the burglar light comes on. I turn the key in the lock, close the door behind me, walk through the house. My girlfriend is sitting up in bed with the light on. She's not reading.

She says: 'I just saw something . . . horrible.'

'What?'

'It was . . . I saw this frog. A huge frog. In the road, just by the pub. It was completely still - it just, just didn't move. And there was this . . . trail leading from it, its guts were . . .'

'What, spilling out?'

'Don't] It was so . . . I just had to . . .'

'What . . . put it out of its misery?'

'I . . .'

'Did you stamp on it?'

'No] No, I . . . couldn't'

'So . . . you just left it there?'

She looks away.

'So it's still alive?'

'Yes.'

'And you just . . . left it?'

'Could you . . . do it?'

'Me?'

I think: I'll have to leave the house on a dark night and walk along the street, searching for a wounded frog which I intend to kill. But how? On the way out of the house, I look for a weapon which might put some distance between me and my victim, something to reduce the thing I fear, which is the crunch as the frog is crushed. A cricket bat? A walking stick? Nothing looks remotely possible.

I think of a time when I was 12, walking across some fields with my friend David, who was a few yards ahead of me. David shouted: 'Look] Look at this]' He was in a frenzy of excitment. I caught up. The road was carpeted with tiny frogs.

'Wow]'

'Let's start on it, then.'

'Start on what?'

'Well - just, you know. Stomping. Do you want to go first?'

I told David I didn't want to go at all. He was taken aback, mildly upset.

'Well, I'm going to.'

A poncy, Latin-literate prep-school boy, I said: 'Maybe you should limit yourself. Not just massacre as many as you can.'

'Like, just do . . . a hundred or something?'

'No - I thought, one or two at the most.'

David said: 'OK - four each. You stomp on four, I'll stomp on four. Otherwise I'll massacre a hundred.'

David went first, killing four with his first two stamps. He sat on the bank, picking the green and red mush from the cleats of his baseball boot.

'Your turn.'

Later that summer, fishing for mackerel, was the first time I had to deal with killing on a large scale. I'd fished before, but this was the first time the enterprise worked in any real sense: mackerel are stupid, they throw themselves at you. If you cast out four hooks, you winch up four thrashing, bucking mackerel, and then you must kill them, or have them suffocate slowly, whacking themselves against the crisp-sounding cellophane bag you put them in. So I killed for the sake of practicality.

My first method was the crudest - I bashed them on the head with the handle of my sheath knife. But then I graduated to subtler methods - slicing the spinal cord swiftly, with a razor blade, or, best of all, the method used by the older boys on the pier: putting my thumb in the fish's mouth, and snapping the neck with a quick backward pull.

I never enjoyed it. At the most, I took a professional pride in quick, painless dispatch. But you should have seen some of the others. Killing? Killing was nothing. By the end of the first summer, several boys had graduated to torture, to all sorts of elaborate methods of dealing out pain and suffering. Crabs were placed on the concrete struts at the edge of the pier, and left, unknowing, to choose their own destinies; on one side, water, on the other, concrete. Fish were skewered on the spikes at the top of the concrete sea wall and left to flap to their deaths.

The worst was the 'chamber of horrors', a torture-system in which boys lined up, each with a live creature in his hand - a crab, a whiting, a small flatfish, anything they weren't particularly pleased to have caught - and flung it at the pebble-dashed sea wall. The creature might die immediately, and it might not. As the day went on, the pile of mashed flesh grew, vaguely rippling with life, a mass grave of dead and dying matter, smelling stronger towards evening.

Was this violence 'mindless'? Not at all - it was ritualised, sophisticated. It had its rules and conventions. It was, first of all, a spectator sport: nobody did it on their own. It would have been unacceptable to have been caught throwing fish at the wall without at least doing it for the benefit of others.

This was not cruelty for its own sake, but cruelty used as a social tool, an aid to bonding. Sharing cruelty, its furtive language of euphemism and shame, brings people closer together than almost anything else - closer, anyway, than sport and alcohol later in life.

I didn't participate; I couldn't bring myself to join the brotherhood. I even tried to stop it, at first. Sometimes I - and one or two others - would intervene, wading in to the flickering heap, putting fish and crabs out of their misery. You got to do this nasty work by giving the impression, not that you were squeamish, but that you were ultra-cruel. But nobody believed you. They just used to shout 'Poof]'

Now I can see the frog, a big, unmoving lump in the road. It's squatting at the end of a viscous trail in a pool of light cast from a street lamp; little noodle-like viscera are sticking out of it, like the back of an electrical appliance. When I approach, the head moves; the frog eyes look up at me.

It's hard to do. As I raise my heel, I think: Can anybody see me? Are my neighbours looking? The thought is horrifying. And the frog? I can hardly feel it under my foot.-