by Damian Barr
‘Smith,’ I say, surprised by the stiffness of the sheep’s lung as I pick it up and hand it to her. ‘Suck it.’ She shakes her dumb head. ‘That’s what Mr Garvie’s going to do when he gets back and if he sees you doing it first you’ll get extra marks.’
Leeanne has never had extra marks. She was the last to read at Keir Hardie and probably should’ve been on the blue bus to the special school. She picks it up, rattling that feeble phlegmy cough she’s always had, puts it in her mouth and sucks hard. Mr Garvie walks in just as she vomits. Unable to speak for sick she points at me but I calmly deny it and he won’t believe her and nobody else volunteers blame so we all do lines for the rest of the class. No, biology’s not for me.
Modern studies, moddies, is all about debate and I love it. Heather prefers places to politics so she takes geography. Mr Roebuck, the moddies teacher, buys all his clothes from a charity shop to ‘challenge capitalism’. We don’t tease him too much about the fusty smell and big paisley ties because we like him. He’s a rebel who lets us walk around class and go to the toilets without his asking permission. It was him who told me about Spitting Image and now I watch it every week on the portable in my room. He explains the issues behind the Craig’s imminent closure and says that politics trumps economics. Mr Roebuck runs the debating team and the public-speaking team so I sign up for both.
One lesson he says we’re going to have a special talk but we’re not allowed to tell anybody else about it. Then there’s a knock at the classroom door and in swagger two guys who remind me of Uncle Joe. They look us over and nod behind them to a shorter, slighter man with dark spiky hair and stubble. He seems familiar. They’re all ancient, at least thirty. Pleased to have an audience he jumps on a desk and says that revolution is freedom and Scotland must free itself from Maggie and her unjust Poll Tax. We don’t pay it in our house, not because we’re rebels but because we’re all on benefits. Same way we escaped the recession – you can’t get negative equity on a Council house. Secretly I agree with a lot of what Maggie says – you should work hard, you shouldn’t take benefits unless you need them, it’s not wrong to want more. But the Poll Tax doesn’t seem fair. The spiky-haired guy takes off his green Parka and he’s banging his fist about taxing the poor to benefit the rich and we’re all on our feet cheering when the door bursts open and Mr Margrave flies in all furious. For a second the two bigger guys don’t know what to do but before we can blink Mr Margrave says quietly and firmly that he’s ‘very disappointed’ and they’re hanging their heads and Mr Roebuck is wanted in his office. On the News that night I recognise our visitor as the leader of the Poll Tax Riots: Tommy Sheridan.
PE, home economics and tech are all remedial and drama is too gay even for me. Inspired by the Crystal messaging system which allows us to gossip with one another from any of the BBC Master microcomputers in the school, me and Heather take computing studies with Mrs Shaw who is new to Brannock. On her first day she wears knee-high boots and a pencil skirt. We test her as we do all new teachers. When she goes out we make paper aeroplanes and stick them into every inch of the ceiling tiles. She walks back in. We’re all working at our computers keeping one eye on her. She says nothing. How can she not see the ceiling full of paper aeroplanes? One flies down on to her desk. She ignores it.
The bell rings and as we fumble for our bags and start to shuffle out she says, ‘Forgotten something?’ and makes each of us reclaim the plane we made from the ceiling, standing on chairs and desks to get it down. She knows she will make us all late for the next class and we’ll all get in trouble. She is unbroken. Next time, when we’re finished writing a number generator program in BASIC, she lets us play Tetris till the bell rings. Within a week of her joining Brannock she’s spotted laughing in corridors with Miss Campbell. She won’t take any crap but we decide we like her.
Our absolute favourite class is English (where we cry over Anne Frank so we choose French over German for our modern language).
‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she will be mine for life,’ sing-songs Mrs Kennedy on the first day of Standard Grade English. ‘Or he.’
One wet Sunday I’m flicking channels and it becomes apparent that Mrs Kennedy has modelled herself on Miss Jean Brodie, the eccentric Edinburgh teacher in her perilous prime. The rrrrolling Rs, the immaculate coiffure, the overly personal anecdotes about her and her Harvey’s trips to the theatre – we are her set! I rush to the phone, glad it’s not cut off for once, and dial Heather’s number so fast I get it wrong and when I do get through I’m so overexcited she thinks my mum and Dodger have finally killed each other till I explain and she rushes to her telly. We feel mildly cheated by Mrs Kennedy but decide not to let on. We are, after all, her crème de la crème.
Chapter 11
‘Defeat – I do not recognise the meaning of the word!’
Margaret Thatcher, quoted in The Battle for the Falklands by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins
Wednesday is the worst. Every Wednesday morning brings a benefits bonanza for my mum, Dodger and my uncle Joe – she gets disability benefits for the brain haemorrhage she had when I was nine. She calls this her ‘Wednesday money’ and queues at the post office to get her benefit book stamped by the woman behind the counter with the tight grey bun and tight grey face. I know she needs this money, I know she deserves it – she can’t get on her bike and get a job because some days her balance is so bad she can barely walk. She’s not sponging like Dodger and Joe. But I wish she’d spend it better, buy some shares in something or save up to buy our house off the Council. Make us rich!
All queues, even ones that promise to take you somewhere good, are depressing. This one is especially bad because everybody in it has something wrong with them or claims they have. Dodger’s got a dot-to-dot scar round each shoulder where his arms join his body as if they’ve been stitched on. They kind of were after he fell drunk in front of a car. He wears a T-shirt that reveals his scars when he moves his arms, which he can now do easily and painlessly. My uncle Joe is a master of the art and, priest-like, dons a stiff white collar. He makes sure to wince slightly as he queues, leaning on the woodchip walls for support.
It’s a wonder his back manages to hold him up as he walks down Newarthill high street past Streaks Ahead and into Bullah-Bullah’s Paki shop for a carry-out: Buckie for the men and White Lightning super-strength cider for the ladies. My mum grabs a few token messages: tins and packets, nothing that needs actual cooking because she still hasn’t learned. She struggles with a dusty brown paper sack of tatties and my uncle Joe, keen to start drinking, lifts them with just one hand. The act is over. I try not to look at Bullah’s son Ahmed behind the counter because I know he’ll tell everybody at school. Anyway, I think, how come he’s got a full moustache at twelve?
I know the party will start when I’m still at school. I’ll only be halfway through maths with Baldy Laing by the time Mum, Dodger and Uncle Joe are back at 15 Rannoch Avenue with their carry-out, the front door open to whoever wants a drink.
It’s the dark green bottles of Buckie they love. Made by Benedictine monks in Devon, Buckie is a fortified strong red wine (15 per cent). Cranked up with caffeine, it’s stomach-churningly sweet and stupidly cheap. When vomited up – as it always is – it hangs in glossy molasses-like strings, reeking like turpentine, that you’ve got to pull from your mouth. Ninety per cent of the monks’ brew is sold in a ten-mile area in Western Scotland called the Buckfast Triangle, where countless men disappear. Newarthill is right in the middle. It’s unholy stuff and my mum’s doctor prescribed it to her when she was pregnant with me to build her up. The monks we study in RE have consciences.
By the lunchtime bell they’ll be on their third bottle. The music will be turned right up while me and Heather get our usual table in the corner and I eat my favourite lunch of baked potato, cheese and beans with a battered sausage.
By the time the bell rings at 3.30 p.m. Heather is giving me a look across French class that says soon it’ll j
ust be us. Everybody chucks their books in their bags and races out. They couldn’t flee faster if the school was on fire, streaming out in all directions to Carfin, to New Stevenson, to Holytown, to homes where their parents wait with meals on the table. We’re the last to leave and even Madame Auberge is itching to go. Heather and I are the only people going further into the school as we head to the library.
The library is two classrooms knocked into one and it’s governed by the Dewey classification system and Miss Harris. The shelves are real wood and cover the walls from floor to ceiling so the books on the bottom get scuffed and the ones on the top get dusty. There are two BBC Master computers with monitors that flash green letters against a black background. The internet has yet to be imagined but for now a system called Prestel connects us to other schools. The gossip potential of this is huge but for now the books are more attractive than the computer.
Standing behind her counter, but barely taller than it, is Miss Harris. She knows me well as I’ve avoided PE here every week of every year so far on account of my ‘asthma’. She’s the only person I’ve ever met from Edinburgh. She has short, chalk-dust curls tight to her head and will always be a Miss. She still lives with her mother and every Christmas buys a new Cliff Richard calendar for her office out the back.
Heather and I are still officially going out though neither of us is really clear about what this means. We hold hands a lot and snog (no tongues). We vie for top place in most classes. She’s hasn’t got a mousse-crunched spiral perm and her face isn’t caked in pan-stick and she doesn’t reek of Tribe or Exclamation! She’s one of the cleverest, most beautiful girls I’ve ever met, the missing middle sister between Lucy and Susan Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Our relationship shields us both: me from being a poof (true) and her from being a virgin (also true). We know we love each other and we hate almost everybody else. Miss Harris is happy to grant us sanctuary and we talk to her about books. Only the cleaners are left when she packs away the date stamp and the ink pad that somehow never dries out. It’s 4.30 p.m. and the coast will be clear of cretins so we can walk home safely. Even the Catholics from Taylor High School down the hill in New Stevenson will have walked up in their Rome scarlet uniforms. At the end of term the two schools send their biggest boys to fight and sometimes it turns into a riot. We walk downstairs and cross the echoing foyer without care, looking up at the gold-lettered board where we hope to see our names emblazoned as the first joint Dux. The double-doors swing shut and the janitor squeaks across the lino to lock them behind us. We walk up the steep car park where Miss Harris’s white Nissan Micra waits alone. We watch her drive up Newarthill high street and beyond all the way to Edinburgh. Her brake lights blink a message I’ve yet to decode.
This Wednesday I decided I’m not going to Heather’s house. The Ds are lovely but I eat into their kindness a little bit more every day even though they’d never say or do anything to make me feel awkward. Well, Mrs D wouldn’t. I am, after all, her daughter’s boyfriend. I feel the unique discomfort of a guest wearing out their welcome. I’m going to go home to my own house.
‘Are you sure?’ says Heather, her perma-pink cheeks blushing with concern.
‘Nae worries, hen.’ I butch it up, turning on my heel and swaggering off.
I hear it before I see it. Crystal Fucking Gayle is wailing and the front door is open, ‘heating the street’, as Granny Mac would say. Cigarette smoke chokes the air and I cough my way through and go straight up to my room where it’s just as loud. I click my black-and-white portable into life and catch the start of ‘Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours . . .’ There are two tellies in this house and this one is mine. Just like this bedroom with the locks I’ve fitted on the door is also mine, all mine. I can hear them and smell their smoke but they can’t get in here unless I let them. Madge and Harold are having an argument about something to do with Charlene and my stomach is rumbling. It’s Wednesday so there will be plenty of food, maybe even a Chinky with dark glossy noodles and chunks of what I hope is chicken.
Neighbours never lasts half an hour like it says in the paper so I creep downstairs just before six to sneak some food. No one hears the stairs creaking. I think about Pertwee my pet cockatiel passive smoking on her perch and decide I’ll move her to my room. Through the living-room door I see: Uncle Joe dancing with Big Letty from next door, Dodger drunk in a chair conducting an imaginary orchestra and Andy teaching tricks to his Rottweiler Tara. No Mum. I am taking this in when somebody jumps out from behind the door.
‘BOO!’ he says and they all laugh. I dutifully jump. ‘Come in the scullery wi me,’ says this man I don’t know. He rests his hand on my shoulder and says, ‘Tall fur yer age, eh?’ and turns me round, pushing me into the scullery and kicking the door shut with a flick of his foot. The doors are only cardboard so the noise is barely muffled.
‘Ah jus want my tea,’ I say, rhyming ‘want’ with ‘pant’ so I don’t sound like the punchable Public Speaking Competition winner I am.
‘Git me a can and we’ll hae a wee talk,’ he says, showing surprisingly white teeth.
I wonder if they’re falsers like my dad’s. Wanting to get away but feeling pleased he’s trusted me with this manly request, I step towards the fridge-freezer.
Cold dawn is breaking behind the fridge door and spilling across the floor when he’s on me, grabbing my arms and wrapping them round the fridge-freezer while pushing his thin hard body against mine, his crucifix belt buckle stabbing into the small of my back. I’ve barely had time to shout ‘MUM!’ when he pulls the freezer door open and shoves my head in.
To be fair, I wasn’t expecting that. I start kicking my feet but to no avail because I’ve taken my shoes off in the house – I obey the rules even when nobody else does and Granny Mac says you shouldn’t bring dirt indoors on your feet: ‘Think where they’ve been.’ If you’d only been on the street at the front of her house you’d be fine because she bleaches it every day straight after scrubbing her steps. So I am kicking behind myself with the holey smelly socks of a fourteen-year-old. I can only kick with one foot at a time because if I lift both feet off the ground there’s nothing to support my neck and I half hang myself. My feet don’t connect with his legs and he pushes even harder. He’s shouting something but I can’t really hear for the blood booming in my ears. Inside the freezer his words settle alongside a lone pea trapped in permafrost for ever like a lost polar explorer.
So here I am.
These are the last things I will ever see: the empty plastic ice-cube tray where I once experimented with cryogenic suspension of bumblebees, Hans Solo-style; the hieroglyphic stickers of a chicken, a leg of beef and a fish, each with the maximum number of months they can be stored in here, and a box of fish fingers, with the bearded Captain Birdseye girning for ever.
I’m not sure how much air is in here and I curse myself for not paying more attention in maths because if I had I’d be able to calculate the volume and work out how much time I’d got. By the way, I can now reveal the answer to that age-old question – the light does go off when the freezer door closes. I won’t be able to share this fascinating discovery with anyone if the man jamming my head in the freezer has his way.
I stop shouting for help when I realise (a) I am using up air, (b) I am panicking myself into an asthma attack, (c) the insulation is coffin silent and (d) nobody partying in the living room can hear me over the sound of Crystal Gayle crying because some man made her brown eyes blue. The white-rubber seal around the freezer door sucks at my neck like some satanic school tie. My long-awaited Adam’s apple pushes against it, creating a gap so I won’t suffocate. I hope it doesn’t pop back in.
I’m standing, up with my arms wrapped round the fridge-freezer like it’s the world’s clumsiest, fattest dance partner. My head is jammed in the freezer bit atop the fridge. The stranger is thrusting against me. This is something I’ve imagined in my bed at night or practised with Mark. This guy has to be in his thirties.
He’s got curly dark hair like a Spanish conquistador and that rarest of things in Scotland – a tan.
‘Sunset yellow E110’. My eyes find words to comfort me. My glasses flew off when the door slammed on the back of my head but the box of fish fingers is close enough to read. I think of sunshine and fish and the two colours just don’t match. Also, why would something that lives under the sea need or want to be the colour of sunshine?
I scan the list of ingredients in an instant but that’s all the reading matter in here so I start finding words within the words. ‘Shin’, ‘shun’ and ‘sine’ come out of sunshine with minimal effort. The pressure on my neck is now continuous and I think I feel my lips turn blue. This moment lasts for ever. How long will it take, I wonder? There’s no chance of a responsible adult coming to my rescue – there won’t be a responsible adult in this house until the money stops and the hangovers start. He chooses only the best for the Captain’s table, does Captain Birdseye. Him and all those boys on a boat. Just like Captain Hook. Breadcrumbs, maltodextrin, sunset yellow E110, the bees that didn’t come back to life when I defrosted them.
I don’t know if it’s been seconds or minutes or hours or months – maybe there should be a little picture of me on the inside of the door with an indicator of how long I’ll keep in here before going off. Then, as suddenly as he appeared and grabbed me, he’s gone.
I can’t feel the belt-buckle in my back. I daren’t move in case it’s a trick. If somebody walked in the scullery right now they’d think I was just standing with my head in the freezer casually hugging the fridge and question the widely held belief that I’m a clever boy destined for better things. I let my stiff, sore arms flop by my sides. He’d act now if this was a trap. But nothing. What if he comes back even harder? I clocked his biceps. He can push as hard as he wants. My arms dangle by my sides and I allow myself to breathe deeply. Air opens my windpipe, pushing against the seal, easing the freezer door open ever so slightly. I count down loudly from ten thinking I’ll turn around and surprise him at THREE. I can’t stay here in the dark for ever with Captain Birdseye. But what if he’s looking for a sharp knife to finish me off? Good luck to him, there’s nothing sharp in this house and probably for that reason. I was fucked when it came to making the Advent crowns on Blue Peter. Not that my parents ever bothered giving permission. For once I was glad. 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . sunset yellow, sunset yellow, 6, 5, 4 and THREE! I lift my hands up and swing the door out thinking I’ll hit him if he’s standing there, buying me enough time to get out the back door and down the road to my dad’s. A seven-minute run with fourteen-year-old legs. The door hits the side of the fridge so hard it bounces back clouting my head.