Maggie & Me

by Damian Barr

  ‘Ah’m away tae Glasgow tae help Mr Claus,’ she explains. ‘He’s got some big parcels tae deliver. But he’ll not come if yous are bad!’

  Teenie jiggles. She’s asked for a horse (again). ‘Not a My Little Pony.’ We let ourselves be tucked in. It’s not even four o’clock.

  ‘Will Big Brenda look after us when yer out?’ I ask.

  ‘Och no,’ she says. ‘Logan’s here.’

  I force my face to stay the same until she’s shut the door.

  I must have fallen asleep reading with the light on because I wake up when it snaps off. My bedroom door is shut and there’s not enough light coming through the curtain to see.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I ask the room.

  Silence.

  ‘Who’s there?’ my voice goes. I know who’s there.

  ‘Who’s there?’ echoes back a twisted mewling girly me.

  I pull the covers up over my head but they’re ripped straight off. I screw my eyes closed. ‘Ma mum –’ I start but he belts me across the face with the back of his hand.

  ‘Yer mammy nothin’. She’s no here.’

  ‘What for?’ I ask. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says and belts me again. ‘Shut it.’ He clamps one hand over my mouth. ‘Don’t. Wake. Yer. Brother.’

  With the other hand he pinches my left ear and pulls harder and squeezes tighter, rattling my head, and it’s agony so I kick at him and as I do the lobe comes away from my head and there’s warm wet relief as blood runs down my neck. He drops me on the bed and leaves a bloody hand on my pillow. All I can think is, ‘These sheets are fresh for Christmas’.

  ‘Gerrit cleaned.’ He’s silhouetted in a flash of light as he opens my bedroom door. ‘Or no Santa Claus for you.’

  I touch my hand to my ear and feel a draught in a strange place but it’s still there and crusting already. I pat the sheets and feel stickiness everywhere. I don’t know where to start. I fall back and everything goes black.

  It’s dark and my eyes are open.

  ‘Damy, it’s yer mum.’

  I don’t say a word. I make little noises and pretend to be asleep. She’s got to go away. She can’t see this. I’ve lied and lied to her and everybody else, told them all the stories they wanted to hear. She shakes me gently.

  ‘Daaaaamy, guess what Mr Claus has brought.’

  Plastic bags rustle at her feet. I can feel the Christmas cold she’s brought in from outside. She’s rattling a box, a big box.

  ‘It’s yer Millennium Falcon,’ she whispers and clicks on the lamp to show me.

  At light-speed she knows everything. The box slides to the floor. She leans over me and gasps and ‘Oh’s and touches my sticky scabbing ear and I can’t stop myself wincing. She sees the bloody handprint on my pillow.

  ‘Stay here.’ She pushes herself up off the bed and walks out my room not stopping to close the door.

  That’s it. No shouting. No screaming. No nothing. Only the sleep-shattering smash of the full-length mirror.

  ‘We’re leavin’.’

  Chapter 8

  ‘So I return to my main theme: building the healthy society. Many people are beginning to realise that if we are to sustain, let alone extend, the level and standards of care in the community, we must first try to put responsibility back where it belongs: with the family and with the people themselves.’

  Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Social Services Conference Dinner, Liverpool, 2 December 1976

  ‘We’ve nowhere else tae go,’ my mum says, dragging Teenie with one hand and carrying Billy with the other. It’s snowing. Everything is silent. We head down the brae towards Motherwell. Snow can’t settle on the Craig – it’s too hot and stands out dirty and noisy in a white muffled world. I hope we’ll catch my dad on the road but it’s after midnight and between shifts. There’s a big banner made from bed sheets on gates saying Save the Craig. The S is backwards and I want to fix it. On the billboard across the road there’s an advert for Shell that somebody’s spray-painted with FUCK YOU, MAGGIE! Granny Mac always says if you’ve nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I wish Santa had brought Teenie a horse cos we’d all be sitting on it now. We’ve been walking for twenty minutes when a taxi finally stops and when my mum says ‘Forgewood’ the driver hesitates and I do too but we get in anyway. Forgy is always in the Daily Record – it’s Europe’s biggest housing estate, noted for stabbings, chip-pan fires and gangs. Even the ‘polis’ are scared of Forgy.

  The whole block is in darkness when the taxi stops outside. The driver doesn’t wait for us to be let in. ‘Wit the fuck?’ shouts a man’s voice through the intercom by way of hello.

  ‘Joe, it’s me, Lynn,’ my mum snaps at her younger brother.

  We’re buzzed straight up and Auntie Cat appears, belting up a pink housecoat and looking confused.

  Uncle Joe stands square, bare-chested in a pair of green Gola shell-suit bottoms, ready for a fight. ‘Wit the fuck?’ He points at me, at my bloody ear.

  Cat takes me and Teenie into the spare room and tucks us top to toe in a single bed then retreats to the scullery to make tea and ask questions. Billy, somehow, sleeps in my mum’s lap.

  Teenie is sleeping. I’m lying awake trying to listen. These sheets rustle every time I roll over and they stink of pish. An hour later mum checks on us.

  ‘Yous all right?’ A pause to light up. ‘This won’t help Cat’s nerves.’

  No wonder Cat’s nervy, married to Joe. He’s a big man – not just physically – at six foot with knotted arms so huge he struggles to find shirts when he’s got to go to court. Everybody calls him ‘Big Man’. In the queue for benefits at the post office everybody waves him to the front: ‘On ye go, Big Man.’ There’s never any delay or disagreement and certainly not from Cat or his kids: Shawn, Aidan and Tricia. If you mess with one MacManus – Uncle Sean, Uncle Brendan, Uncle Thomas, Uncle John, Auntie Louisa or my mum or any of my million cousins – you’ll have the Big Man to answer to.

  ‘We’re only stayin’ a wee while,’ says my mum, tucking us in even tighter. ‘We’ll be all right here.’ She’ll have the couch when Uncle Joe is finished sitting and smoking.

  Cat appears, wringing a dish towel. ‘Cuppa tea, hen?’ she asks and the light, a bare bulb, goes out.

  The blankets are itchy wool and soon I’m wheezing. I’m in my pants cos we didn’t have time to pack anything when we ran away from 1 Magdalene Drive. I walk into the living room and ask for a duvet. I catch Joe saying, ‘Ah’ll fuckin’ kill him,’ then he spots me and I think he’ll stop swearing and maybe smile at his nephew but he doesn’t. ‘Whit yae up fur?’ My mum and Cat spin round, owl-headed. ‘In this house when yer down, ye stay down, got it? And ye dae as yer told.’

  Another angry man.

  Cat looks like she needs to say something but as usual my mum gets in first. ‘Joe, the laddie’s had enough.’

  ‘Aye well,’ he says as if maybe I have. ‘Bed!’

  I fall asleep thinking about all the presents back at 1 Magdalene Drive.

  So now we live in a flat in Forgy with my uncle Joe, my auntie Cat and younger cousins Shawn, Aidan and Tricia. I’m ten and Teenie is five. ‘It’s only till the Council gives us a house,’ promises my mum.

  Keir Hardie Memorial Primary School is twenty minutes and 20p each way away on the Number 44 bus. It’s not a school bus so my mum sits me and Teenie at the front before paying the driver our return fare and telling him to watch us.

  Joe doesn’t work but he’s always doing something and Cat spends her time running after Shawn and Aidan and Tricia who do nothing. When she gets a spare minute she sits down with a cuppa and a Tunnock’s Tea Cake. She tenderly undresses each biscuit, ensuring she doesn’t crack the perfect chocolate dome beneath. Using the only fingernail she hasn’t bitten to the quick she edges the red-and-silver wrapper off before smoothing it flat with the back of her hand. From a drawer in the scullery she conjures a shiny silver ball which must be heavier than it
looks from the way she holds it. After she’s eaten the biscuit and finished her tea she smooths the new wrapper on to the ball, writing-side down. The whole perfectly round, perfectly shiny thing represents hundreds of Tunnock’s Tea Cakes. Thousands of stolen minutes.

  My mum helps Cat with the housework and Cat praises us for being tidier than her lot, which only makes them hate us more. Tricia pulls Teenie’s hair and Shawn hits Aidan then blames me. They’ve all got nits. Cat and my mum seem more relaxed when Joe’s out doing whatever he does. They spend lots of time talking then stopping when one of us comes into the living room. Sometimes they’ll pick up a Kay’s catalogue and pretend to be shopping and I hope they don’t notice it always opens at men’s underwear. For a minute’s peace they visit their pal Clare Buchan – Clare The Bear.

  Clare the Bear’s den is an identical flat across the road on the ground floor. Not a single room has carpet. Her scullery has thick paper sacks of potatoes by the stone and trays of eggs by the dozen. The washing pulley is always going up or down. From oldest to youngest her six weans are: Kerry-Marie, Michael, Alice, Johnny, Fallon (after her in Dynasty) and the baby everybody forgets. Their dad is the Wee Man – half Clare’s size, he lives in fear of her and ‘works’ with my Uncle Joe. Kerry-Marie is my age and everybody agrees she was an angel in her first-communion dress. All the rest are Trouble. Clare makes me call her Auntie Clare because the Wee Man’s big brother, Terry, is married to my auntie Louisa. All three women agree Terry got the looks but that doesn’t matter because apparently he’s ‘heavy-handed’.

  Because I’m too big to play with weans and I’m terrified of all the boys my own age the three women let me sit behind the couch. Quietly I pretend to read while they talk. I’m on the last Hobbit book. I learn lots. I know that Clare ‘slips a powder’ in the Wee Man’s Buckfast Tonic Wine when she wants some peace and he sleeps for days. I know that Cat’s dad’s got mouth cancer and his nose rotted off so it’s hard for him to smoke. The nose-hole is covered in flesh-coloured Elastoplasts that suck and sag like bellows with every breath.

  Logan makes a custody claim saying my mum is unfit and there’s not sufficient room for Billy at Uncle Joe’s. The court makes my mum send Billy to Logan’s mum while they decide. I know that if it meant never seeing Logan again I’d probably let him have Billy – he’s never hit his own son. I know giving him away would break my mum’s heart and I’m at least ashamed for thinking it.

  Forgy is a war zone. People call it Beirut. Smashed windows stare you down and burnt-out cars sit on bricks from crumbling balconies. The grass is green when it’s not brown with pit bull shit and evil emeralds from broken Buckie bottles sparkle on the swing-park where the swings are wrapped noose-tight round and round the frames. Mrs Patel has a cage round her counter because refusal to give credit often offends. She gets called ‘Paki’ to her face now her customers are finding it hard to pay back their tick since their benefits got cut. My mum gets less disability benefit now but she’s no less disabled – she’s still having trouble with numbers and words and her headaches make her cry. Even though she’s got nothing she still finds money to give to Clare or Cat, or anybody that needs it, or seems to. ‘The shirt off her back,’ Granny Mac says.

  Now nobody uses the bin sheds, once the latest luxury, because you don’t want to go in there in the dark so bin-bags stew in the communal closes. We’re closer to the Craig so we can still see the sky glow but now it’s only every other night. On the dark nights there’s burgling. The Craig is being forced to wind down. The men are fighting it. My dad signs a petition that’s delivered to 10 Downing Street by steelworkers from the Craig. He’s in Maggie’s hands now. She’ll do the right thing, she will, I think she will.

  Clare the Bear was sewn into her polar-white wedding dress and she doesn’t care who knows it, which is lucky cos everybody does. Her boobs are even bigger than Mary the Canary’s. They jiggle and brim and threaten to spill out and I’m shocked when she puts one in the mouth of the nameless baby because I’ve only seen that on the News, the poor starving black women in Ethiopia trying to feed their hollow babies, the ones my Granny Mac goes round the doors collecting for. Every time I see Clare she crushes me to her massive boobs and they smell sour but not in a bad way. I think she knows they don’t work on me. When she’s not shouting at her weans or screaming at the Wee Man or singing ‘Danny Boy’ in her surprisingly girlish voice, she’s smiling and I know my mum is thinking she should fix that front tooth lost when a neighbour said something about her Michael. They were right but that didn’t stop Clare wading in. ‘Ah left her without a name.’ Her laugh whistles through the trophy gap. The women sit talking and drinking strong sweet tea from chipped mugs. When things are very bad, or very good, they sip super-strength Diamond White cider and think we don’t notice the cackles. Whatever the mood, Cat is always the quietest.

  Motherwell Council is Doing Something About Forgy because they say that’s where all the problems come from. They’re right. It’s minging, a total dump. The only person at school that knows we’re here is Mark and he won’t tell anybody. Joe’s phone’s been cut off and the phone box is vandalised so I write Mark long letters about how much I hate it here and he writes me back about how much he hates his stepmum. I nip Teenie till she promises not to tell where we’re living because things are bad enough.

  I’m still too tall and my teeth have come in funny and I get headaches from reading which means I need specs but I refuse to deal with them as well. Teenie is popular – her hair has stayed blonde, not that she bothers with it, and she’s pretty but not too pretty and she’s great at sports. She’s normal.

  The massive scheme-wide renovation means double-glazing all the windows and putting central heating in all the flats. All the coal fires will be boarded up so there’ll be no shame if your chimney’s not smoking. A central work-store is built and armies of plumbers descend and I worry Logan is among them. Unbelievably Uncle Joe gets a job. As a security guard. On his first and only shift hundreds of yards of copper pipes just disappear. Afterwards the Wee Man is seen shaking hands with the scrap man. Everybody knows but nobody will grass him up – not here. Joe is clever enough not to get caught so he’s probably clever enough for a proper job but I don’t complain when there are new shoes and a new school uniform for fast-growing me.

  From behind Clare the Bear’s couch I hear more and more about a man called Dodger. It’s party central here every Friday when the furniture is pushed to the wall and everybody sings to Daniel O’Donnell or some other pirate tape. I spotted Dodger dancing. He’s shorter than Joe but taller than the Wee Man, his hair is thinning but what’s left is black and I’ve never seen a tan like it. His teeth are white like my dad’s but not false cos you can see his fillings when he laughs and his eyes are brown sugar. ‘Half-caste,’ cackles Clare and I know without looking her boobs are shaking. Dodger likes a drink, they all do, but he really does. My dad never drinks and Logan doesn’t either, not really. My mum didn’t drink till we had to move here – at first I thought it was her tablets making her stagger and slur. I beg her not to drink with them but she ignores me.

  ‘Aw c’mon, Lynn,’ says Cat. ‘Let yer hair down.’ They all laugh. Even Uncle Joe’s got longer hair than her tight red curls.

  So my mum starts off with a wee Diamond White. Dodger drinks till he bounces from foot to foot like a bandy lizard on hot sand. My mum dances with him and he makes her laugh. He’s a good drunk, a happy drunk, till he’s too drunk, then he spews his ring and cries and conks out. Sometimes I watch a dark patch bloom on his jeans as he pisses himself and still he doesn’t wake. Or he gets fighty.

  ‘The man’s entitled tae a wee swallae,’ says Clare. ‘But he’d never lift his hand, not tae a wummin or a wean.’ Like Uncle Joe, Dodger’s not a bad man, not really. He’s just badly behaved. That’s what they say.

  I’ve got no pals here. Really I’ve only got one pal anywhere and that’s Mark and he’s up in Newarthill but not allowed to visit.
I see him at school and when my dad picks us up for custody we hide in his shed and gorge on horror books. My dad hardly has us any more, which I don’t understand cos he’s less busy now they’re cutting shifts at the Craig. I sit at Joe’s living-room window every second Friday with my schoolbag packed watching for the red Ford Escort with the figure crouched over the steering wheel to come flying round the corner. ‘He’s busy with work,’ Teenie says when he doesn’t show. My mum looks angry. I want him to come just so I can shout at him.

  One of those abandoned Fridays when everybody’s over at Clare the Bear’s and all the weans are in bed, I turn the telly on. Joe says no telly after 9. p.m. Once he caught me watching and locked it in the cupboard where they hide it when the TV licence van comes round with its twirling dish. He’s not here now. I read Salem’s Lot with Mark and the film is coming on and I know he’s watching it too so I’m not alone even though he’s in Newarthill. I watch as the picket-fence town is slowly taken over by vampires that no one wants to believe are real. A wee boy is back from the grave floating in his jammies at the bedroom window in a cloud of smoke and he’s tap, tap, tapping at the glass. ‘Please let me in, it’s cold,’ he begs and I’m thinking would I let Teenie or Billy in? By the end I’m so scared I can’t even turn round so I crawl into bed with my eyes closed and lie there till they all come rolling back and Cat is shooshing but I can’t hear my mum. Where is she? Dodger’s tanned face floats before my eyes.

  That week there’s no money so me and Teenie have to walk the three miles each way to Keir Hardie. My mum takes a hand each and soon we’re in Motherwell town centre where House of Fraser has closed down and been replaced by a What Every Woman Wants! Superstore with giant pink stars screaming 99P! in the windows. It’s undignified, like the day I turned up at Granny Mac’s and saw her gigantic elasticated pants drying on the line.