* * *
Each year ended with the Storrie New Year Party, when all Old George’s seven sons and their respective partners and families gathered in Toad Hall just before the midnight bells of Hogmanay. No one was ever in party mood; it was a gathering of a bunch of people who never actually got on with each other. Some of the sons would disappear into a side room for a quick smoke of weed, some would sit awkwardly with their father and, in between, sat, stood and meandered various sisters-in-law, wives and girlfriends while little grandchildren ran around. I never got on with any of them because we really had nothing in common to talk about. I enjoyed playing with Dick’s two lovely wee kids but his girlfriend Maggie would sneer at me and make biting comments any chance she got.
‘You an’ Sean still no’ huving any kids yet?’
‘We want to wait until we’re able to afford them,’ I replied, looking at her lovely wee daughter.
‘Ye saying we cannae afford oor kids?’ she snapped back.
‘No Maggie,’ I replied, feeling the tension mounting, ‘I’m sayin’ I will huv kids when I want to – OK?’
‘Maybe ye cannae huv weans, an’ ye just don’t want to say,’ she persisted.
I got up and walked into the living room. The telly was blaring the obligatory New Year bagpipe music. Old George sat quietly in his seat. It was a sad time for him as this was the time of year his wife had died of heart disease in this very house just after she had moved in ten years ago. She came to Toad Hall, spent one night in it and died in her bed. I offered Old George some tea and lit one of his favourite cigars.
‘Steak pie nearly ready?’ he asked. It is traditional to have a big steak pie and potato dinner at ‘the bells’ in Scotland.
‘I don’t know, George, the other women are doing that,’ I answered gently. ‘I’m just standing about annoying people like I normally do.’
He laughed and told me to sit down. The bells were about to start. The Storrie family all gathered in the big room, some sitting on the floor, others on their mammies’ knees, a few on the arms of chairs and the rest on the floral sofas.
Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
‘Happy New Year! Welcome to 1985!’ the tartan-clad man shouted on the telly. Loud cheers rang out on the screen, in the street outside Toad Hall and in living rooms across Scotland. But, in the Storrie living room, each person shook hands in silence and immediately disappeared back to their steak pies and potato, to their hash, to their kids. I got up and walked into the dining room, where I sat alone and wished I could see my Mammy again.
After a while, Sean came in. ‘What you thinking aboot?’ he said.
‘Nothing … You?’
‘I miss my mammy,’ he told me. ‘She died at New Year.’
‘I know,’ I said and held him tight. ‘I miss my Mammy as well.’
All seven sons sat together with their father at the big table in the dining room where all Sean’s late mum’s best furniture and crockery was kept. The women all sat together in the kitchen, eating on their knees or at the wee pine table. In the dining room, Sean lifted his plate and walked towards the kitchen.
‘Where are ye going?’ Young George asked him.
‘I want to sit with Janey an’ eat my New Year dinner,’ Sean replied. Not looking back, he left the room and came into the kitchen. We sat together, eating in silence.
Suddenly, Young George stormed into the kitchen. ‘All us sons eat together! The wumen sit in here! Fuckin’ get back in there, ya bastard!’
‘No,’ replied Sean. ‘We don’t talk to each other. We don’t even fucking like each other.’ He kept eating his steak pie.
Young George stood waiting for Sean to pick up his plate and return to the dining room.
‘Fuck off!’ said Sean, scooping up a forkful of peas. ‘I’m not going.’
I watched as the two brothers glared at each other across the brightly lit kitchen. Sean suddenly dropped his cutlery with a loud clatter. He stood up and turned to me.
‘Janey, get yer bag,’ he said very quietly. ‘We are leaving.’ Then he started shouting: ‘Fuck you, George! Fuck yer big family dinner! Janey is my family – OK?’
Within minutes, we were out of Toad Hall and into the cold air of a Glasgow street, walking towards our car.
‘Sean,’ I tried to reason with him, ‘you shouldn’t huv done that. It was a family thing. He only wanted you all to sit and eat with yer dad.’
‘Why?’ he shouted at me. ‘Why? We are not a fucking family any other day of the fucking year!’ We drove home in total silence.
* * *
On 2 January, Sean and I opened up for another new year at the Weavers. The locals were all there in their droves. The bar was busy; we cooked sausages and chips for the businessmen; we kept our daily vigil for heroin users trying to sneak into the toilets to have a fix. We had decided to try and pull our fraying relationship together. He knew his temper and behaviour were getting out of hand and agreed to seek counselling for his mood swings. But he was not good at discussing his feelings. All his life, he had been encouraged and trained by Old George to trust no one and to tell no one about himself, his business or the family business. He was naturally defensive and our lady therapist had problems from the beginning. Sean had refused to go through his family doctor, so the therapy was all paid for privately and Sean’s natural thriftiness soon persuaded him to stop paying good money to argue with a strange woman when he could do it with me for free.
That summer, we decided to go together again to Newquay, where we had been so happy before. One night, as we sat together on the beach, Sean surprised me by saying, ‘Janey, come off the pill and we will try, eh? If you don’t get pregnant in six months, then go back on it and we can try another time. It just means that it was not meant to happen. It’s just like havin’ a wee gamble.’
‘I am not sure,’ I replied. ‘I still worry about us. What if I have a baby and you go fucking mental again? I can hardly run out into the street with a small child.’
‘I promise,’ he begged me, ‘I will never hit ye again, never threaten ye again. Trust me, Janey.’
After two weeks in Cornwall, we headed home. That same week, my Dad and Mary got married. It was a lovely affair at the local registry office. Sean and I went along to join Mij, Vid and Ann in the reception room; it was good to see all my family together.
The following Saturday was the day of Live Aid, when Bob Geldof pulled together the biggest rock concert in history. Sean had borrowed a big-screen TV and we threw a party to celebrate the event. I got up that morning to clean the bar and Gay Gordon was waiting downstairs for me.
‘Good morning, dance partner,’ he said, holding two doughnuts and some fresh milk. He liked to dance with me in the morning.
‘I don’t feel well,’ I muttered. I felt sick and weak.
It took us 20 minutes to get the pub clean and then we sat down to breakfast, playing the jukebox full blast. By the time Annie Lennox was belting out ‘Sweet dreams are made of this’, I was on my knees and vomiting in time to the drumbeat. I sat with my head against the cool tiles of the toilet, looking down into the bowl, hoping the wave of nausea would pass. Doughnuts look horrible when they have been freshly puked.
Gay Gordon popped his head round the toilet door. ‘Pregnant!’ he shouted at the top of his voice.
‘Fuck off, poofy!’ I moaned. ‘I am not pregnant!’ I wiped my mouth with our cheap, hard toilet paper.
Then it hit me. Fucking hell – I COULD be pregnant. I had stopped taking the pill for two days in Cornwall. I had secretly hoped that, after six years of being on it, I would still be protected. I really didn’t want a baby. But surely it was not physically possible? It was only two Saturdays ago that I had started having unprotected sex and then only for two nights. Not six months. Only two fucking nights! It could not be possible. I told Sean as soon as he came downstairs.
‘Go get a test at the doctor’s,’ he replied with a wide
smile.
I made the call. The appointment was set for Monday. Sean was excited. I was scared. That Saturday, when Live Aid performed to the world, I danced with Gay Gordon, sang with the customers and cheered as Freddie Mercury and Queen took to the stage. Outside, I looked happy. Inside, I was nauseous and terrified. We raised about £1,000 for the Feed the World charity and everyone cried as the Cars sang ‘Who’s Gonna Drive You Home?’ with images of poor starving children on the big TV projection screen. Bob Geldof swore at the nation – ‘Get out of the fuckin’ pubs! Get your hand in your fuckin’ pockets!’ – and I vomited up pig meat and bile from two sausage rolls. Sean spent the weekend staring at my stomach as we lay in bed at night. He never spoke. He just stroked the wee roll of fat I had always seemed to have.
Monday came soon enough. I woke, vomited and pissed into a bottle for Dr Cameron. It was just a few simple questions and the handing over of a urine sample.
‘Have you told Old George yet?’ Dr Cameron asked. He had been the Storrie family doctor for years.
‘Told him what?’ I replied, quite annoyed. ‘That I vomit too much? No I huv not and you aren’t sure I am pregnant yet.’
All Tuesday night, I vomited constantly.
‘Fucking hell!’ I cried, sitting and sweating on the toilet floor. ‘I hope I’m not pregnant if this is what fucking happens!’ I tried to stop Twinkles the cat from crawling over me as I puked.
Wednesday arrived.
Sean and I waited on tenterhooks for news to come. I had wanted to buy a home test kit. Sean hadn’t.
‘I’m no’ sure they can be trusted,’ he had told me. ‘And they cost money. The doctor is free and is more exact.’
We went downstairs to the bar to call Dr Cameron, as we had never had a phone in our flat.
‘Nope, sorry, Mrs Storrie,’ Dr Cameron’s lovely wee wife chirped over the line. ‘It is negative. Maybe next time, eh?’
I breathed a big sigh of relief.
‘To be honest, Sean, I’m glad,’ I told him. ‘I wisnae ready tae have a baby. We aren’t really settled and I’m scared of being a mammy. I must just have some bad bug. That’s why I am so sick. We don’t even know if we should be together, do we, Sean? We do get a bit fucked up, eh?’
Sean sat with his eyes looking straight ahead: ‘Yeah, but I really wanted a wee girl an’ to be a good daddy.’ He smiled sadly.
‘I don’t like weans, really, Sean. We should work on getting ourselves stable an’ we huv all the new rooms above the pub to get going soon.’ I smiled and slid along the fake leather seat to hug him.
The phone rang.
‘Hi, Weavers Inn …’ Sean answered. There was a pause. ‘Hang on, I’ll just get her.’
Sean held the phone out to me. I listened to what the woman on the other end of the line said, then she hung up. Sean gave me a quizzical look.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘They made a mistake … I am pregnant … Oh fucking hell! I am gonna vomit!’ I blurted out and ran to the toilet. For quite a while after that, we both sat on the floor of the ladies’ toilet, me throwing up into the bowl and Sean smiling happily as he held my curly black hair back so the puke didn’t hit it as it came out of my mouth.
‘I hope she doesn’t have your curly hair, Janey,’ he laughed. ‘It gets so tuggy.’
‘I am having a boy,’ I spluttered between spews.
‘Nope, only girls cause this much trouble,’ he insisted. Sean was over the moon. He phoned his dad and told him within minutes.
‘That’s great news,’ Old George agreed. ‘That’ll put to bed all the rumours she can’t huv weans, Sean.’
‘Did naebody think it might have been me with dodgy sperm?’ Sean shot back. ‘Why is it always the woman’s fault?’
‘Ye kidding?’ asked Old George. ‘With oor sperm? I had seven of you, didn’t I?’
My own Dad and Mary had just come back from their honeymoon and came straight down to see us and hear the good news.
The vomiting didn’t get any better. Whenever customers were congratulating Sean, I was busy holding onto the sides of a toilet pan and trying desperately to hold down any saliva I had swallowed. Food was not an option. Everything came back up again. Within two weeks, I had lost nearly a stone in weight and that wee roll of fat I used to try to get rid of was gone to be replaced by a sunken, white, flabby, sick tummy. Everyone in the bar had a story to tell or a remedy to ease morning sickness. I couldn’t give a fuck what they thought as this wasn’t morning sickness; this was 24/7 sickness and I didn’t believe anyone could suffer this much and live through it. I had never been this sick since I was 14 and had mumps and nearly died. Sean got very frustrated. His building plans were falling into place and his workload was doubling and all I could do was vomit in time to the jukebox. By five weeks into the pregnancy, I was shattered, had lost even more weight and could hardly stand. I lay in bed one morning listening to Sean complain about my lack of work.
‘For fucksake, Janey, my mammy had seven of us and she managed to make breakfast every morning. What the fuck is wrong with ye?’
He was shouting and being a moody unreasonable bastard, but I couldn’t even summon up enough strength to argue. I felt this overwhelming blackness creep over me. I was vaguely aware of hearing the door slam as he left. The coldness wrapped itself around me. I couldn’t swallow. I could hardly breathe. I thought I am going to die! and that felt good. The relief of not feeling like I was on the brink of another vomit was wonderful. Only the icy darkness creeping through my veins made me aware I was still alive. Four hours later, I am told, Sean came upstairs again.
He felt my head, screamed out loud and called an ambulance.
I was very cold and totally unconscious.
He thought I was dead.
* * *
I woke up two days later in hospital.
‘You have been in a coma,’ I heard them telling me.
They told me the pregnancy was killing me. I had ‘hyperemesis gravidarum’ – I thought those must be the Latin words for vomiting too much and hating being pregnant.
‘There is no real reason why it happens,’ they told me, ‘and no real cure.’
I felt terrible, like I had let Sean down; I couldn’t even carry his baby safely. While I had been unconscious, they advised him to sign a form to ‘terminate’ the baby. He had refused. He told them it was not his decision; he did not want to make that choice for me.
So, when I came out of the coma, the obstetrician advised me to ‘terminate’ the baby:
‘This is not ordinary morning sickness,’ he explained to me. ‘You may not survive the nine months without proper nourishment if you cannot keep food down properly and, in those circumstances, the baby would certainly die anyway.’
I refused to give the baby up, so they devised a plan to feed me through a drip if the illness persisted. Over the next nine months, I was fed through a drip every three days at the hospital and I was regularly admitted as an in-patient when it all got too much. I was constantly weak, lost weight but still had a fat tummy. They told me the baby was fine. They said it was me who was dying.
* * *
I never gave up work at the Weavers. Every minute I felt stable enough, I would get behind the bar and do a shift.
Patsy Paton was also pregnant. She had another partner now, but never told us who he was and it was not our business to ask. I was happy for her, as was Old George. Despite their falling out they had remained friends. Patsy was a picture of health during her pregnancy and she did her best to help support me whenever I was very ill.
As if things were not hectic enough, when I was six or seven months pregnant, the building plans were passed and we moved from our flat to the one next door in a single day. Twinkles the cat was completely confused, running backwards and forwards not knowing where she was supposed to live. I was not sad to leave as I had never really settled in that spooky old flat. I liked our new corner flat immediately. It had loads more light coming
in and the rooms were bigger and seemed more welcoming. We planned to have a separate baby room, just off the kitchen, in a recess.
Being organised, Sean had done research on all the guys he wanted to house in the proposed new ‘bed and breakfast’. Lots of young guys we knew and some of George’s older mates were more than happy to take up the offer. The newspapers, if they had known, would have called us ‘slum landlords’, but that was not the case. Our idea was to take revenue from the Government for housing unemployed, homeless individuals but – unlike other unscrupulous landlords – we intended to treat them well and genuinely look after them. No junkies would live in our building. There would only be one buzzer – ours – so everyone had to go through Sean or me to get access to the hallway. Sean planned a clean towel/bed linen service, heating and hot water, comfortably furnished rooms, a weekly cleaning service to keep the rooms tidy and in-house service 24 hours a day to anyone needing help. After all, we lived there with them.
By this time, the overhaul of the building had actually captured Old George’s imagination because he realised we were able to renovate the whole place without closing the money-making Weavers bar. He and Sean started going to sales and bought up loads of hospital beds with rubber mattresses, carpets torn from hotels that had gone bankrupt and bedside cabinets en masse. The renovation wasn’t serious structural work; it was scrubbing, cleaning, painting, furnishing and minor repairs. The Storrie family’s regular, orang-utan-like carpenter/handyman The Gow was called in to help and even my brother Vid was employed to carry out general painting and decorating.
Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival Page 17