Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival

by Godley, Janey

  Despite or perhaps because of the newspaper coverage, it was a huge success. Complete strangers came from miles away to see it. I had written a play that worked! I was so happy that I had finally got to do something creative.

  * * *

  New Year 1990 came with a bang. Literally. The biggest fire-work display we had ever seen was organised to celebrate the start of Glasgow’s year as ‘European City of Culture’. All it meant to me was facing a whole year ahead of 3.00 a.m. extended licensing hours and late shifts. Sean and I were still doggedly trying to make things work between us, after almost ten years of marriage, so we were constantly under stress even without this certain strain of longer hours.

  Old George and Sandra were now a full-time couple and, when they visited the Weavers, she would talk condescendingly to me. She was, after all, the boss’s girlfriend – he owned the whole building – so she quietly explained to me, ‘You have tae show me some respect, Janey.’

  In some ways, I did feel sorry for Sandra. In the Storrie family, there was a tendency for the boys to fuck women, then pass them on to their father. She had dated two of his sons – Young George and Michael – and now she was firmly ensconced with the patriarch in the family home but, in practice, she was treated by one and all as some cheap concubine. I believe Old George did have genuine feelings for her. She had had various breakdowns and had been admitted to the local mental hospital for short spells. He did care for her as a person. But I could never really hold a lengthy conversation with her because she only had two mental starting points: she was either full of Valium or in a screaming mood. And the dogs didn’t help.

  Old George kept his two Alsatians – Brindle, the evil black vicious one, and Junior, the blond passive happy one – in a dog pound at the back of Toad Hall and Sandra owned two literally shitty Yorkshire Terriers – the kind of wee bitey dogs that tremble and demand ribbons in their hair. I hated them. They had never been house-trained properly, so they pissed and shat randomly on any and every surface they could find. Toad Hall was a grand house, but it stank of dog piss.

  Sean also hated Sandra with a passion because she would make eccentric comments when he was trying to talk business with his dad. If money was being discussed, I would always leave the room, but Sandra sat there and even managed to bring squirrels into the conversation during one of Sean’s attempts to engage Old George in details of a complicated financial business venture. Whenever we left Toad Hall, Sean’s temper would have reached boiling point.

  I had resigned myself to the fact that our marriage was unlikely to last. Sean’s violence against me had escalated. One night, when I was asleep, he came noisily into the bedroom; I woke up, complained and snapped at him. He jumped on the bed and held me down, the fingers of his right hand tightly closing round my throat. I could hardly breathe and was starting to see bright white lights pulsating behind my pupils. I kicked him hard in the crotch and he jumped off me.

  ‘Oooh! Fuck!’ he screamed.

  He left, slamming our bedroom door behind him. It went very quiet. I panicked and quietly lifted up the sash window in our bedroom. I looked out and, still wearing my cotton pyjamas, lifted my leg very carefully through the wooden frame, brushing my calf against the hard sandstone surround, and climbed out onto the foot-wide stone ledge which ran round the building. It was drizzling with rain. I was terrified to look down. I slowly edged my way along the side of the building and tapped on Sammy’s window. I had to be quick. If Sean came back into our bedroom and realised I’d gone out onto the ledge, I had no idea how he might react. Sammy opened his window, surprised.

  ‘Just let me in, you fucker,’ I told him.

  I jumped into his room with no explanation because I had to make it out of his bedroom, down the hall and through his front door before Sean opened our front door which was right next to Sammy’s in the main landing. My heart was thumping; I felt I had to get out of that building. Sean is going to kill me! Why else would he grab my throat? Maybe he has gone to get a knife? He will be back with it soon. I was so scared; I just scuttled down all the stairs, threw open the front door and ran through the streets in my pyjamas and bare feet, splashing through puddles as the dark sky rained down on me. No shoes again. I always seemed to be running away down empty streets in the rain. My bare feet will do for now. At least I am still alive.

  When I stopped running I was far enough away, sitting in the dark rain beside an old graveyard. I was worried people passing in the street might see me and realise I was half naked and barefoot. Maybe they will think I am a loony or something and report me to the police. Maybe if my Mammy had run away from Peter like this she would still be alive. Then I realised that I was being irrational. Sean had not threatened to kill me at all. Yet something inside me had now blown up. I was now so fucking angry with Sean. Angry with myself. Angry with that bastard Peter. I am going to go home right now. I am going to confront Sean. I am going to tell him how scared he has made me. And, after that, I will never have to run barefoot in the street again. I was so full of burning hatred and boiling fury that I stamped in my bare feet all the way back through the puddles. As I turned the final corner to see our building, Sean was standing there in the street. My pyjamas were by now soaked through and the constant silver rain was blowing all around him. I could not tell from his face if he was angry or sorry. But I didn’t care.

  ‘I am fucking sick of being scared,’ I told him, loud and fast. ‘I am fucking sick of you making me run in the rain … Look!’ I pointed at the pretty wee windows of the Barratt homes opposite; bright warm lights twinkled behind peach curtains. ‘Do those people run in the night?’

  ‘Where the hell did you go?’ Sean asked me in a genuinely concerned voice. ‘I went to the kitchen and when I came back, you were gone.’ He stood there in the rain, his shirt soaked through, with his arms outstretched towards me. ‘What the fuck is going on with us, Janey?’

  ‘I thought you were gonna kill me,’ I explained, still angry. ‘You keep frightening me. You might just totally lose it one night and you might really kill me.’

  Sammy hung out the first-floor window: ‘Is she OK, Sean?’

  ‘Yeah, Sammy,’ Sean shouted back. ‘It’s OK. I upset her.’

  ‘Fucking upset me?’ I screamed. ‘Fucking upset me? You had your fucking hands around my fucking throat!’

  Peach curtains twitched in the Barratt houses.

  ‘Come upstairs, Janey,’ he pleaded, looking defeated.

  ‘Fuck off!’ I screamed back. ‘Fuck off!’

  ‘If you thought I was capable of killing you, why did you leave Ashley with me?’

  ‘I know you would never hurt her,’ I whispered half to myself, exhausted. I walked towards him but shrugged off his attempt to hold me. We went back upstairs and sat in our living room. I shivered. Sean got me a towel. Sammy, who had been looking after Ashley while she slept, went into the kitchen to make us some tea. Sean got up and stood over me.

  ‘Janey, I am sorry. What makes ye think I am gonna fucking kill you? Whit makes ye think that?’

  ‘Well,’ I hissed at him, ‘are you telling me that men don’t kill their partners? Are you telling me – me – that they don’t do that, that this fucking constant bullying is OK? You fucking – fucking – really scare me.’

  Whenever Sean hit me … afterwards, when we talked about it … he always admitted it was his fault; he never blamed me; he never said, ‘You made me hit you’; he always took the blame. We talked through the night. Sean sat quietly trying hard to explain his fears, his uncontrollable angers, how hard it was being him, being Old George’s son; and all the time my heart was split in two for this man who loved me but who made me scared. I wanted to leave the room. I wanted to leave him.

  ‘Sean, this is the last time I go through all this. If you hit me one more time I am going to the Polis. I am taking that child who’s sleeping in there and I will get so far away from you that you will never see her again.’ I was adamant. I meant every word. That ni
ght, I slept with Sean wrapped around me like he was clinging to a lifebuoy in stormy, dangerous seas.

  Early the next morning, Ashley came running into our bedroom. She jumped up onto the bed and hugged Sean: ‘Wake up, Daddy, I love you – look, it’s snowing!’ she squealed. I lay there watching her kiss his head and drag him out of the warmth of sleep to go look through the window with her at the cold white world outside.

  ‘So, Ashley,’ he laughed. ‘Who is gonna build a snowman?’

  ‘I am, Daddy! I am! I am going to build a snow-daddy – a snowman that looks just like you!’ she giggled.

  I rubbed my swollen feet and said sarcastically to her, ‘Make sure it has no mouth. At least then it will be a snow-daddy that can’t shout at Mummy.’

  Sean looked over her head and, mouthing the word Sorry, put his hand out to me: ‘Come and see all the snow, Janey.’

  I watched Ashley play happily in the snow and buried my fears until the next time.

  * * *

  It was hard trying to bring her up with a good attitude. She was surrounded by uncles – Sean’s brothers – who often verbally attacked each other in front of her.

  ‘Yer daddy’s a bastard,’ Young George told her.

  ‘Mummy,’ she asked me later, ‘why does Uncle George say bad words and call my Daddy bad names?’

  I tried to be polite about the arse. ‘Never mind, babes, just ignore him.’

  * * *

  Around that time, we were hosting regular party nights at the Weavers and even had ‘Safe Sex Nights’ where we invited all the HIV awareness groups to come along and distribute their information. Ashley was, of course, around while this happened and there were colourful balloons everywhere. All the customers would play games with condoms and learn about safe sex from the local authorities’ Scottish AIDS Monitors who came along to leave pamphlets. HIV was by now not only affecting the gay community but also heterosexual heroin addicts who shared needles; and other sexual activities had made a surge in the crossover of HIV a real threat to everyone. At one of our safe sex nights, there was a competition where you had to run with a cucumber and put a condom on it; whoever could get the condom over the cucumber first won. We let Ashley compete in the race but she didn’t really understand what it was about.

  She had been told by us what HIV was: we had had to explain to her why it was dangerous to touch any needles she found lying in the streets outside the bar and about the danger of coming into contact with other people’s blood. I had kept it simple, brief and in very general terms but she was very intelligent and asked a host of questions which I tried to answer honestly so, in her head, the one thing she was certain of was that it spelt certain death. She was surrounded by addicts and many were HIV positive.

  Sean had rented out the wee shops we owned next to the Weavers to the Calton Athletic Support Group, an amazing and innovative drug rehabilitation group fronted by Davey who used to live in one of our flats upstairs. He was not only clean and off smack himself, he was now managing to get other addicts off heroin with his own drug-free therapy. His ethos was to build self-confidence through group support, keep fit and self-worth. He had addicts running marathons, playing football and signing up for various educational programmes such as confidence building, health awareness and nutrition. Families were reunited, marriages were saved, young men and women were again walking with their heads held high instead of dying in squalor in the Calton.

  It was astonishing and heartening to watch young people walk into those wee shops which had lain empty for years. They would walk in looking like skeletons, with that junkie schlonky walk, hunched over, dragging their feet and then, six months later, they’d be standing outside in the sunshine in their shorts and buff six-packs looking fantastic and girls would look at them in a way they’d not had girls look at them in a long, long time. Not all addicts were successful but many did stay clean and it felt good to have this positivity around and beside us. The odd thing about addicts is that they do repair very quickly. When ex-addicts came into the Weavers, they were virtually bouncing on the balls of their feet instead of sidling up saying, ‘Janey – you wanna buy a cat?’ which was something an addict did say to me; he had it in his pocket.

  But Davey was not the only person involved in running the Calton Athletic Support Group. One other, well-dressed, man often came to the pub to collect shop keys for their meetings. I knew Old George disliked this man and, one evening, when I was sitting with Ashley waiting for Old George to arrive at the Weavers, I looked through a window and the neatly dressed man was standing in the street outside.

  ‘Oh fuck!’ I said without thinking. ‘All I need is Old George to walk in now!’

  ‘Who is that man?’ Ashley asked. I grabbed our fat bunch of keys and muttered, ‘He’s someone who was locked up in prison for killing another man and he smeared his own shit up the cell wall.’ I ran towards the door and looked out to see if Old George had parked his car yet. It was OK: there was no car yet, but he was due at any time. I did not want to talk to the man.

  ‘Ashley,’ I said quickly, ‘go give these keys to him for me.’

  She happily trotted off and approached the well-dressed man, who smiled down at her. ‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘Are you the man who killed someone and spread jobbies up the walls?’

  I gasped, but I heard the man laugh: ‘Yes I am. How did you know that? Are you Mij’s niece? You sound a lot like the wee girl he told me about. Do you have an uncle called Jim?’

  ‘Yes, I am Ashley Storrie. What is your name?’

  ‘I am Jimmy Boyle.’

  He looked over her head at me and smiled through the window. I did not smile back.

  * * *

  It was around this time I bought Sammy a large gold sovereign ring set in a very distinctive diamond-cut mounting which he wore on the very recognisable skinny middle finger of his right hand. Sammy liked decorative jewellery although ironically, in Glasgow’s East End, the more showy jewellery you wore the poorer you actually were. Sammy wore gold chains round his neck and had a tiny new girlfriend called Sarah, who was blonde, pretty, very intelligent, in her mid-twenties and worked in one of the local ‘massage parlours’ which doubled as sex salons to get round the letter of the complicated British and Scottish sex laws. In the 1980s, massage parlours arrived as an everyday front for prostitution. There had been shebeens – drinking dens – before where, sometimes, sex went on but the women in them weren’t really prostitutes – they were just women who would fuck men for drink. These new massage parlours were run as businesses and often financed by newly rich drug dealers with their large cash incomes. Their status symbols were owning a gold sovereign ring, a Pit Bull Terrier, a blonde girlfriend, a large BMW and a massage parlour named after something classy from a Harold Robbins novel. Sammy had no problem with Sarah’s job and neither did I; she was a good friend to me and Ashley loved her company. One day, when the two of them came back from a trip playing on the swings in the park, Sarah mentioned she was going off to do ‘a shift at work’.

  ‘What is your job, Sarah?’ Ashley asked, as Sarah changed into her white nurse-style uniform. Sarah and I locked eyes and a slight pause followed until Sarah said very casually, ‘I’m a hairdresser, honey.’

  Ashley looked surprised: ‘Then why don’t you ever cut my hair?’ she asked. ‘I need my hair cut, sure I do, don’t I, Mum?’

  ‘Sarah is too busy, Ashley,’ I laughed nervously. ‘That’s why I don’t like to ask her.’

  Sarah would stay the night with Sammy then come downstairs into the bar each morning and we would have a coffee together before we each started our shift, albeit in very different jobs. One day, inevitably, I asked, ‘Don’t you mind having sex all day with strange men? Doesn’t it feel weird?’

  ‘Well,’ she explained, ‘I make great money and I could never go back to working a 40-hour week for shit cash.’

  ‘Yeah, but fucking strange men all day?’

  ‘The sex is easy and, you know, so
metimes it’s really good,’ Sarah said, her big brown eyes twinkling over the mug of coffee.

  ‘What’s it really like?’ I asked, as I pulled the bar stool closer and watched her put on her lipstick. She turned her face and looked in my eyes. ‘Janey, all you do is just shut your fucking eyes and imagine every £10 note and £20 note being dropped into your purse. You lie back, smile and take it any way you have to and – as they pull their dicks out of you – you visualise all the stuff you can buy.’

  * * *

  My brother Mij’s girlfriend was also a ‘working girl’; like Mij, she was on heroin. He came over to the Weavers to see me one night, looking very upset; I took him upstairs to chat and, as he stood in my kitchen, he told me, ‘Janey, it’s all fucked … Ma hale life is fucked!’

  Then he started to cry. I pulled out one of the chairs for him to sit down. It had been so long since I saw anyone, other than Sean, cry. I was incapable of dealing with it. I tried not to show my own feeling of inadequacy.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mij?’ I asked, standing over him as he slowly lowered his head into his hands. All his previous visits with fake tales of lost Giro cheques and stolen wallets rushed through my mind. ‘If this is another one of your scams to get cash you can fuck right off!’

  ‘I am HIV positive,’ he blurted out through his tears.

  I stood there in shock, not knowing how to react.

  ‘I got tested and they told me last week.’

  I looked down at him, hugging his chest with his skinny arms.