by Damian Barr
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, by way of hello.
‘You should be.’
‘I am. Honest, I am.’
He’s ignored me every day for over five years but I forgive him just like that. Because he wasn’t really ignoring me, he was ignoring himself. I’d tried and failed to do it too though maybe not as hard as him. From then, when we’re on the scene or with Heather, we call each other ‘Sister’ like Nettie and Miss Celie. Heather has forgotten, or at least forgiven, the milkshake. She isn’t jealous and I love her even more for that.
Friday night is our night and the only night we all feel free. When I finish my shift at the New Lotus I change into something tight that I’ve bought from Burton’s with my wages and get the train to Glasgow where I meet Mark and Heather. I down a bottle of Kiwi and Melon 20/20 on the train to catch up with them and we all bounce into Bennett’s, paying twice on the door for our youth. Mark goes to the bar because he’s the prettiest and gets served the fastest and we ignore the dirty looks from Johnny in the corner. We’re done with him now. We only drink from bottles because you can’t be sure about the glasses. We scrutinise every face on the dance floor. We watch for lesions. Has he got it? Has she? Do women even get it? We speculate wildly about who is doing what to whom and imagine what everybody at school would say if they could see us now. All the men fancy Mark but I don’t mind because he makes them buy drinks for all three of us. Then Madonna comes on and we’re Vogue-ing our arms off because this is the one place where we can get away. It’s called a dance floor and here’s what it’s for, so, come on Vogue! Sister!
The one book I’ve stopped reading is the Bible. The spines of the primary-coloured Gospels from the Scripture Union are now as creased as they will ever be. For years and years I’ve prayed and prayed to Jesus to make me like everybody else so they would like me or at least stop hating me. At Keir Hardie I kneeled down in assembly and at Scripture Union, bowing my head and steepling my fingers, asked Jesus to get my mum and dad back together, to heal my mum, to strike Logan down and make me normal. I used to be like everybody else. At Brannock there are no prayers in assembly, we don’t even pray in number one doss subject RE with the acne-scarred Miss Mackie who actually cried when we Frisbeed a yarmulke when she was explaining about Judaism. She got her own back, sliding an acetate of Auschwitz on the overhead projector.
I still say my prayers every night in bed, usually out loud cos I can’t hear myself think for Teenie and the cousins bouncing on the beds next door and Joe and Letty and Dodger and my mum shouting over the music downstairs. I am careful to wank before I pray so I’ve no sinful thoughts in my head. I know off by heart the bits of the Bible that condemn me. Thanks to Leviticus and Revelation I know all about hell, the real hell that burns hotter than the smouldering fires beneath the Bing or the white-hot furnaces of the Craig. As a homo I will be outside God’s love – unwelcome at Scripture Union, barred from church and chapel, turned away from the gates of heaven by a celestial Big Jinty. I’m starting to think maybe Jesus wants me the way I am. After all, he can do anything he wants – he walked on water, he raised the dead! His dad made the world in seven days as a side-show to the ever-expanding universe. I want to do stuff with boys. Surely that’s not my fault. Isn’t everything God-given? Everything including AIDS – the punishment for not resisting temptation. I feel doomed in this life and the next.
Lying in sick bay I decide there and then that I have to break up with Jesus. After years of praying and being good I’m getting nowhere. I’ve got faith but I’m rapidly running out of hope. As for charity, I did that sponsored walk and me and Heather do the Oxfam 24-Hour Famine every year – surely the biscuits we sneak can’t count against us that much? I didn’t win the Dux at Keir Hardie but I’ve got As ever since and me and Heather are on track to be the first ever joint Dux, our names engraved in gold on a board in the school foyer for ever. I’ve been good. But still, I’m gay.
I close my eyes and say the Lord’s Prayer as usual and then I start another prayer. I tell Jesus that I love him, I really do. I love him for dying for our sins, for bleeding on the cross in Jane’s gift shop at the Grotto. I tell him I know I am a sinner but I’ve tried, Lord knows I’ve tried, to be the same as everybody else. After Mark shunned me I started going out with Heather and didn’t touch another boy for four years, not until Johnny told me it was time I did something for him and then, well, it was only about three minutes before I came in his eye and he fell off his bed cursing me. I even tried doing it with a girl to be sure.
It seems most of the boys in my year have had a go on Jacqueline Slattery – Slattery the Slag. She’s a rite of passage: a provisional driving licence, your first drink, learning curves in Lycra. She’s a year above us and bra sizes beyond all the other girls. Freckles struggle out from under her foundation and her long hair is pube curly. She smells of Body Shop White Musk and something like Granny Mac’s scullery on a Friday. She wants to be a beautician. She’s got a lot to learn.
She’s a slag, a hoor and everybody knows it. But she’s not bothered. Her mum doesn’t let her out on weekends but that still leaves lunchtimes. It’s as easy as being nice to her in the queue for lunch. Telling her I don’t believe the stories, she’s not a slag really and I know what it’s like to be talked about, to be misunderstood. Try before you buy, I think. Maybe I can go through with this. Even though it’s January and sort of snowing I suggest we go for a walk in the woods behind the school where everybody except me does cross-country. I hold her hand and we talk and she says she likes me and suggests we lie down. Walter Raleigh-style I lay my blazer on the long frosty grass under a bald hawthorn. She lies down and pulls her navy pleated skirt up over her hips in a horribly familiar way and, not wasting the movement, hooks her pants down. There it is, the fanny, the hairy pie, the legendary minge that all the boys have licked. I feel close to them and at that my cock twinges.
‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘Ah’m fuckin’ freezin’.’
Approaching it like a biology dissection, I delicately press the fleshy mound, noting the straightness of her pubes, and ever so slightly part the flaps. It’s smooth and red like the inside of a balloon. Jacqueline looks bored and grabs for my crotch but falls back with a sigh when I start spreading her flaps. Then it happens. Like the New York streets in The Equalizer, steam wafts gently from the hot place between her legs. We look at one another through it. Before I can say or do a thing her pants are up and she’s on her feet shouting at me, telling me not to tell anyone anything or she’ll say I couldn’t get it up. That’s that. I feel even cheaper than her.
So, Jesus, I did Jacqueline Slattery to try and change because you weren’t making much effort. Give me a sign, strike me down or miraculously transform me there and then from She-Ra into He-Man. I string the prayer out, keeping it going longer and longer, hoping he’ll intervene at the very last minute. ‘I really am going now . . .’ But nothing. No response. No distant voice at the end of the line. So that’s that. I’m sorry it’s come to this, I say. It’s not you, it’s me. You won’t change me and I can’t change myself. What will happen after I die I don’t know but I do know I’ve got to find a way to live here and now. I know you can’t love me, it’s not fair of me to ask. So this is my last prayer. It’s over for you and me, Jesus, just like it was for my mum and dad. Amen.
Chapter 16
‘You know, if you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything, wouldn’t you, at anytime? And you would achieve nothing!’
Margaret Thatcher, interview for Press Association, 3 May 1989
My dad shows me how to gamble. Cards and dice are to him what bottles and cans are to my mum, only he hides it better and sometimes wins.
I graduate from playing pontoon with him for pennies to the Tossing where fistfuls of notes are won and lost. He takes me for some overdue and uncomfortable father–son bonding but I appreciate him making the effort. He doesn’t bring Teenie because it’s not a place for girls (even
though she’s starting to look more like a woman) and I’m not to tell her about it and I don’t – I love owning a bit of him that she knows nothing about.
The Tossing is an illegal outdoor gambling circle. You get there by bouncing along a country lane long after the road runs out to a clearing hidden by giant chestnut trees. All the cars park facing in so they can play into the night, their headlights on so they can still see the surprisingly shiny Victorian pennies land. All depends on guessing the combination: heads, tails or split. The same money just goes round and round from hand to hand. Some men are forced to walk all the way home after losing their cars, time enough to make up an excuse for the wife. They accept their losses readily because they believe that one day they’ll win it all back. Some do. Most don’t. I sit on an engine-warm bonnet between two of my dad’s pals and I couldn’t be happier. One of them is a baker and he brings overly sweet seconds. It’s all going well until I’m allowed to throw my first toss and one of my coins bounces off, never to be found. My dad doesn’t take me back after that. I’m bad luck.
So anyway, I am taking a gamble now.
We’re doing our UCCA forms and it feels like I am writing a letter to my future. Miss Campbell oversees the application process. I tell her I want to apply to Oxford, I want to be like Sebastian in Brideshead. She explains that if you choose Oxford you can’t apply anywhere else. So it’s there or nowhere.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Oxford’s not for you.’
I’d rather she slapped me. She also looks pained. Am I not clever enough? As my guidance teacher she has to approve my application so I can’t just apply and lie. I can’t even forge her signature because she signs every form herself and there are only a few pupils from Brannock High School applying anywhere anyway. No Sebastian for me, not even Charles Ryder. Maybe Adrian Mole. I am so shocked it doesn’t occur to me to apply to Sussex.
I’ve already decided I’m going to study journalism. If Jennifer Hart wasn’t enough, the midnight adventures of Kolchak the Night Stalker on BBC Two solving supernatural mysteries with the aid of a tape recorder, a typewriter and whirring spools of microfiche are. I want to tell and sell stories. I love politics, which seems like gossip on a national scale – Spitting Image is one of my favourite programmes, the long-nosed Maggie in a pinstripe suit my favourite puppet. There aren’t many journalism degrees but the BA at Napier University in Edinburgh is my top choice. My mum still dreams about me being a doctor so I’ve told her I’m applying for medicine at Aberdeen. She believes me. She still believes Heather is my girlfriend. She’s not been to a parents’ night for years – my dad’s never been – and the school doesn’t ask questions because I get good grades.
In my UCCA statement I highlight my experience as Captain of ALL the school quiz teams, including Young Consumer; debating and public speaking; my leading role in the Save Eldorado Campaign (I wrote to Points of View and organised petitions to keep the doomed BBC soap going because I fancied Marcus Tandy); and my directorship at Young Enterprise. I do it all with semicolons.
Me and Heather passed Higher English and we’re sitting the CSYS exam – the last hurdle before uni. Mrs Kennedy bustles into the English staff room with our creative writing portfolios under her arm. She turns to me first. After six years of straight As I expect only praise. I have submitted a poem called ‘Snake Eyes’ about a man who stakes everything on one roll of the dice, one look from another man across the table, which transmits a signal only he can decode. I dare Mrs Kennedy to call my bluff.
‘I won’t let you submit this,’ she says, dropping my poem on the table.
‘Why?’ I dare her.
‘Because, because, I wouldn’t want your grade to be affected by . . . maybe you should discuss this with Miss Campbell.’
This thought terrifies me because I care what Miss Campbell thinks. She and Mrs Shaw have become my friends, well, as much as teachers can be friends. At lunchtime, me and Heather and Scott McAlmont, John Jackson, Sonia Morrison and the other geeks hang out in Mrs Shaw’s computer room even though only Scott is taking her class. Sometimes Mark joins us. The BBC Micros gather dust in a corner while we fight over whose turn it is to play Lemmings on the new IBM. So long as we bin our cans and crisp bags Mrs Shaw is happy to give us our own space away from the foyer. Sometimes she comes back five minutes before the break is up to laugh along with our gossip, always careful to wag a finger when we take the piss out of a staff member, while memorising our jokes to cackle with Miss Campbell. A couple of times each term they take me and Heather out for pizza to DiMaggio’s in Hamilton and we reveal our hopes and fears for uni. We have garlic bread and bottomless colas and their full attention. It feels impossibly grown-up.
‘How are things at home?’ Miss Campbell always asks, knowing they’re always terrible.
I just nod. When Mum and Dodger have given each other black eyes yet again and I’m seriously considering phoning social services and getting us taken into care, I say, ‘not great.’ Me and Teenie often discuss running away but decide it’s better to stay together, stick it out, because we’ll escape soon enough.
In addition to Miss Campbell and Mrs Shaw we have one more friend on the staff. Miss Walsh is barely older than us sixth years. She’s fresh out of teacher training and is doing her first year of professional practice at Brannock High School. Her fringe, like her job, is new and she’s still getting used to both. Waist-length hair the colour of Galaxy chocolate that my mum wouldn’t put up with washing falls over freckled shoulders that are always bare. She drapes little cardigans around them like Sandy in Grease. Too young to be staff and too old to be a pupil, she is stuck between worlds. She sees that we’re older than our years but younger than her supposed peers and joins us in the computer room. We let her. I’m taller than her, can get my arm round her shoulders as she proves one day when she pops up in my armpit.
Heather hates her. ‘She’s always blowing her fringe out her eyes and she looks at you.’
After a couple of weeks Miss Walsh – call me Michelle – asks if I want to go out after school.
‘I’ll bring Heather,’ I nod. ‘And Mark.’
‘No.’ She lays her hand on my forearm and it’s small and warm. It’s also red and flaky, scalded-looking. She pulls it back. ‘Just you and me. I want to talk.’
I’m too flattered to question why she doesn’t want my friends around. I tell Heather I’ve got an extra shift at the New Lotus. I feel guilty but excited when Michelle picks me up from the bottom of my road in her red Ford Fiesta. I want to know what she wants to talk to me about.
‘We’re going to the pictures,’ she says. ‘In Glasgow.’
The orange lights flash familiar overhead and I remind myself I’m not going to Bennett’s. On the way Michelle tells me all about her husband and I’m shocked to learn she’s married so young but she’s Catholic, as I guessed from the name and the freckles. He’s a bully and he doesn’t understand her. I reach over to the gearstick and pat her hand. The stress has given her eczema, she says. I know all about bullies. We arrive at the newly opened Forge Shopping Centre and Multiplex near Celtic Football Ground at Parkhead. It’s all glass pyramids and steel. ‘For the yuppies,’ my dad says, even though the yuppies are dying out in the recession down South. ‘The money folk.’
‘What do you want to see?’ she asks, getting out her purse.
There’s only one film I’m interested in and it’s not a horror but I am terrified of seeing it: Philadelphia.
We sit in the front row in the dark and I watch Tom Hanks slowly die of AIDS and when it gets to the opera bit I’m bawling and she offers her breast for me to lay my head on and I’m worried I’ll stain her nice creamy blouse.
Back in the car I dry my eyes and she goes on about her husband more and all I can think is: I’m going to die of AIDS. Maybe she thinks my sadness is for her. We stop at the bottom of my street and she jerks the handbrake on with surprising strength. Her hand wanders on to my leg. It’s doing no harm so I leave it t
here. Her husband thinks she’s having an affair. He checks up on her. She wishes she had a more sensitive man in her life. I nod a lot. The windows are steaming up. Suddenly her hand, her flaky red hand, is on my face, caressing my tear-smoothed cheek. She leans in and I smell popcorn on her breath as she opens her mouth and I manage to say ‘No’ and open the door and more or less fall out. I slam it behind me but open it again just as fast and she looks hopeful and I say, ‘Thanks for the film,’ and run round the corner and burst into the house panting.
‘What’s wrong?’ says my mum, unusually sober.
What’s wrong? Everything is wrong. But I can’t tell her that. So I tell her about Miss Walsh instead and she’s on the top step before I can stop her but the red car is long gone.
‘Did she touch you?’ my mum demands. She repeats the question and stares at my crotch and I cover myself with my hands.
‘Yes,’ I say and start crying again for the film, for my doomed future. ‘No!’
My mum is raging and that makes me feel loved: how could I ever have doubted her? ‘Harlot!’ she curses. ‘Hoor. Touchin’ ma laddie. Wait till I get into that school in the morning. I’ll leave her without a name!’
But my mum doesn’t phone Brannock High. That night Dodger kicks off and they end up fighting and when she remembers to ask me about it the next morning I am super vague, change my story. I think about telling Miss Campbell and Mrs Shaw but I don’t want to get into trouble. Michelle asks me to go out to her car at lunchtime. As soon as the doors are closed she puts her hand on my arm and I shake it off. You’d think I’d slapped her. I tell her she has to leave me alone. I talk about appropriate behaviour and boundaries and don’t let her get a word in. She says she doesn’t understand and I talk about involving the police. I say I’ll tell her husband we’ve been having an affair. She turns whiter than a school shirt on the first day of term. After that she doesn’t try to hang out with us again. She finishes her placement a term early. I think of Sandy ending the prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It feels good.