That night my mum sits at the kitchen table and cries and my dad smashes his fist on the table three times. I get up from bed and listen from the stairs. I doh know what we’ll do, my mum says.
I’ll think of summat.
I just doh know what we’ll do. I told yer, Francis.
Listen to me.
I day vote for em. So whatever happens yer cor blame me. My mum is crying really hard now but I can tell my dad isn’t going to hit her or anything; he’s standing at the kitchen table ready to thump it.
It ay nothing to do with that, my dad says and slams the table again and then he starts speaking slowly. I doh want yer to worry abaht any of it. It’ll be fine, we’ll be fine. If I lose me job I’ll get another.
It ay as simple as that, Francis.
It is.
The next morning my dad takes me to the park to play tennis before he goes off to work, even though it’s Sunday. When I get back I sit in the garden for a bit and watch a squirrel climb up the scaffolding for the new houses while the radio plays inside and my mum does some work in the kitchen and everything is okay.
I swear that bastard Eric has took the camera.
My grandad spent months rummaging in drawers for it, muttering to himself.
It ud be just the sort of trick he’d play. I knowed he was no good all along.
Every night after school Little Ronnie likes to walk over to the Ash Tree, find a stick from somewhere, and rattle the gates until Caesar, the big Alsatian, goes for us; howling and dribbling and jumping up at the gates. Sometimes the woman who keeps the pub leans out of the window to shout and we run off or flatten ourselves against the wall so she can’t see us. I don’t like doing it. I’m scared of the dog, that he’ll get his jaws through the railings and bite us; or that instead of shouting from the window the woman will come down the steps and grab us, with her rollers in looking like Medusa, and she’ll turn us into stone, or lock us in the cellar.
We look for planks of wood at the back of the row of old houses that the council hasn’t finished pulling down. We’re not meant to go near the empty houses. There are only a few left now; it’s mostly piles of rubble. This is where the gypsies camped. Men have been working on it all summer. Paul Hill goes and plays in the houses, Jermaine did too, before he left. At school, they tell us not to go near the houses because they’re dangerous.
Am yer allowed? Paul asks us. It’s a stupid question. No one’s allowed, not even adults. Even Charlie Clancey has to sneak in there in the middle of the night to see if there’s any rag and bone.
I’m allowed, I say, but I doh want to.
I’m not allowed to go anywhere in the dark on my own, let alone the ruined houses to set off fireworks.
Paul makes chicken noises and runs around until Michelle says, Why would he want to go playing in them stupid houses wi yow? He’s got better things to do. There’s a spell on them houses, any road. Anyone who goes in there dies before they leave school. It’s happened to loads of people. My nan told me. There’s a ghost in there. It’s an old woman who puts kids in a hole in the ground because all her own babbies died in a fire.
Paul shuts up for a bit but then asks if we want to go to the houses to see if we can see the ghost.
I say no thanks and then he says, No, too busy gooin off to the library.
He saw me one night after school. He was with his mum, they’d been to buy some shoes in the Arcade and they were coming out the entrance when I came walking up the road with a pile of books under my arm. Paul’s mum made a big fuss of bumping into me and told him he should be like me getting books from the library to help with his school work and it was why I was clever and he kept getting bad reports. He looked shy when she was talking but the next day at school he started calling me the Librarian.
I know what I should do: tell him to fuck off or punch him or at least threaten to fight him, but I don’t do anything. I feel like I did with the skinheads at the zoo. I look at him as he says it and then I look away and pretend he hasn’t said anything at all and that I don’t mind being called the Librarian.
At least he can read, Michelle says and looks like she might punch Paul herself. Then she goes, A-a-a, k-k-k, like Paul does when he’s trying to read out loud and he goes red in the face.
Yer shunt let him call yer names, she says to me.
Ronnie likes to go to the ruined houses as well, even though he’s not allowed out either. Sometimes he sneaks out with his older sisters and their boyfriends, especially when his mum’s out, because his dad can’t keep track of them all and goes out to mess with the cars in the street instead. His dad can’t remember all their names, I swear. The other day in the street I asked whose birthday was next, because they always have a party, and he looked at Julie for a while and then said, That one.
Paul got taken home by the police one time, because they drove past when he was jumping out of an upstairs window of one of the old houses. It was nearly bonfire night and he’d been setting bangers off inside the empty rooms. I can’t think of anything worse than being arrested. I’m not scared of the ghost, I know Michelle made that up, even though she swears it’s true, but I am scared of the police.
Johnny tells me that the police are corrupt, which means they only do things for themselves, or for people who give them money or for the people who control them, like Margaret Thatcher. He tells me that they arrest loads of people who haven’t even done any crime and tell them to say they have done it and then they beat them up. He says it happens all the time. It’s one of the reasons there are so many problems. They keep beating you until you sign a confession. Johnny goes on a demonstration about it. Paul says the police were all right and took him on a ride round in the car before they drove him to his front door. When Johnny starts complaining about the police, my grandad says, Well, doh do nothing wrong, then.
Bonfire night was always this time of equal anticipation and dread. There’d be the smell of smoke and dead leaves all that week and the smoke would make a fog that wreathed the hills and muffled sounds, apart from the screaming of rockets down entries or the crack of bangers in abandoned houses.
I made a guy with Ronnie that year. We sat on the back step and stuffed a pair of Natalie’s tights with screwed up newspaper. I imagined the tights on Natalie’s legs and thought of the pictures in the drawer in Johnny’s room. It was the only time we did a guy. We used to have a bonfire at my nan and grandad’s but no guy, just fireworks, then we’d go to the big fire at Cinderheath on the Saturday. My nan didn’t like the guy. Who could blame her really, when you think about it, everyone cheering the burning of a man?
We need a face, Ronnie says, sticking a paper plate on the deflated football we are using for a head.
Less just draw one, I say.
The one we’d seen at the top of Churchill Precinct, with older boys from the Rosland estate rattling a tin, had got a line drawn on for a mouth and two dots for eyes.
Yer doh atta mek him look handsome.
Lights are coming on along the row of houses and shreds of fog have settled across the allotments. There’s a smell of dying leaves and smoke. It starts to rain. I want to get inside.
Here yam, boys. Why doh yer use this?
My grandad gets up from the kitchen table and comes to the back door. He rips a page from the newspaper: Margaret Thatcher’s face. He laughs.
We fix her onto the football and then we burn her on the night; we cheer and bake potatoes in her embers.
We’d drive past Holbeche House occasionally. It would be a Sunday afternoon, summertime, with boards at the roadside advertising strawberry picking. Holbeche House was where the gunpowder plot ended. The plotters were all from the Midlands apart from Guy Fawkes himself, who was from York.
The plot’s real leader was Robert Catesby; it was Catesby who should have been on the bonfire. I read about him in the library, the best sword fighter in England, a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Shakespeare’s cousin’s cousin’s cou
sin. I wrote about him in one of my notebooks. When we had our assembly at school about how the gunpowder plotters were caught, I knew I was on their side, that they were our men. It wasn’t about religion, though. Apart from my nan, no one in my family was interested in that. My mum didn’t want me to go to church school, would roll her eyes if my nan suggested it and say I was fine where I was. Anyway, I came to love Cromwell as much as Robert Catesby; more so, maybe, because he won, after all. It was the idea of rebellion that I liked, the sense of revolution; of a world turned upside-down.
When the plotters escaped to Holbeche House they were chased by the Sherriff of Worcester and his men. There was a siege. Robert Catesby mistakenly left gunpowder that had got wet out in front of the fire and it set light, injuring some of the plotters. As smoke poured from the windows of Holbeche House, the sheriff’s soldiers started shooting and climbed in through the windows. Catesby was shot dead. The plotters who lived were taken to London to be tortured and killed.
Me and Ronnie get our sticks as usual, rattle the gates, and instead of feeling the vibrations come through my hand and then through my whole body, which is the best bit of the whole thing, the gate swings open and Caesar runs from his kennel. He comes right for us, teeth bared, like a wolf. I shut my eyes and wait to feel his jaws sink into my flesh or for him to crash me to the floor and then go for my throat. I can hear Ronnie wailing, standing next to me. Caesar’s paws skitter on the concrete, I get a whiff of his breath and fur and he runs straight between us. I open my eyes as he sprints into the road, almost into a police car that slams to a halt, past a woman with a pram on the opposite pavement, into the rubble of the first row of demolished houses, before he jumps through the glass-less window of the old butcher’s shop. We hear him howling across the wasteland.
Come on, I say. I grab Ronnie’s arm and try to run. The woman with the pram is staring at us but the police haven’t got out of their car yet and the woman who keeps the pub hasn’t arrived at the window. If we can get to the church we can run through the graveyard, out into the field where they buried the cholera dead, over the main road, into the allotments and in through the back door of the Robertsons’ and into Ronnie and his sisters’ bedroom in about two minutes. Even if the police come round after us one of his sisters could say she’d walked home from school with us.
The pub doors fly open and the woman stands there in her curlers and dressing gown and shouts, Get here!
She’s shouting at us. There’s no sign of Caesar. We’ve still got the planks of wood in our hands. The police car passenger door opens and a policewoman gets out to the crackle of the radio.
I cor move, says Ronnie, as I shuffle towards the pub.
Get here, now! the woman shouts again, which gets Ronnie started, his head bowed.
We get to the pub steps together: Ronnie, me and the policewoman. The policeman pulls the car into the kerb. He even flashes the lights and puts the siren on for a second. I want to drop the wood, but I can’t seem to let go.
This has been gooin on for months an I’ve had enough of these bleedin kids pestering my dog. The woman’s voice booms along the road even though we are all standing right next to each other now. The policeman joins us as well. They’re both holding their hats in their hands like someone’s died. I look at the handcuffs and truncheons on their belts and think I’m going to be sick.
Months of torment, mekkin that dog’s life a misery. She is laying it on a bit strong now. I think Caesar quite enjoys our visits. I reckon he waits for us to have a good bark and jump up at the gates. We give him an excuse. I’m the one who doesn’t like it. Ronnie starts to cry.
No use bleartin now, yer little bully, the woman goes on.
The police haven’t said anything yet.
I look out across the hill from the steps. There’s a street of rubble where they knocked the old houses down, piles of old bricks with rags and bits of pipe sticking out of them, then the row of empty houses, with the boards pulled back from the windows and doors so kids like Paul can play there, and Charlie Clancey can get in to take the copper pipes before the council get them. Beyond the rubble is our school and then the top of the hill. I can see Rodney James doing keep-ups on the football pitch, waiting for the others to come out I suppose. Lorries are rumbling past on the main road. There’s the streak of rain from a cloud somewhere over the hill. I wonder where it’s falling and wish that I was there instead of here.
Cromwell killed the king. I had a bag of model roundheads and cavaliers. They fought a real war, not like at Holbeche House or at the Iranian Embassy, but one with proper battles. I would put the cavaliers in the castle and the roundheads would surround it and then there’d be a siege. At some point the roundheads would come and knock the castle down. That was pretty much what happened in the actual war. Cromwell Green was named after Oliver Cromwell; Kates Hill after one of his men. Before that Kates Hill had been called Cawney Hill, after the crows and ravens and old English birds. Cromwell won: there’d been a revolution. He called England the Commonwealth and called himself the Lord Protector. When you win you get to give places new names: Londonderry, the Falkland Islands, Bombay. That’s another of the reasons I changed the name of the pub, because I could, because I’d won.
It’s strange, though, you hear different stories over time. Since we were told all that at school, I’ve heard that Kates Hill was first called Cats Hill, from the days when they’d clear the castle and the market of wild cats, put them all on a wagon and release them on the hill, which didn’t have a name then and was woods where no one lived except witches. And that Cawney Bank wasn’t named after the crows at all, but after the rabbits, coneys, that burrowed into its side. Perhaps the truth doesn’t matter in the end; it’s only the stories that count.
A shape comes from the entry at the side of the butcher’s shop. I used to wait there with my nan when I was in the infants school, for pork chops and tomato sausage and caul, when she made faggots. There was a tiled floor and the sun would come through the window and make the knives shiny; there was a calendar on the wall with pictures of cows in green, sunny fields. The room would feel hot and smell of blood. Now my nan goes down to Cinderheath or Shakespeare’s on Watson’s Green Road. When the shape comes from the shadows of the entry, you can see it’s a man, limping, holding a dog on a rope.
Caesar! the woman shouts now and looks across the road. Here he is, padding through the rubble, a piece of old rope round his neck as a lead, being walked along by Tommy Clancey who has a can of beer in his other hand and an unlit cigar in his mouth. It turns out that he’s been living in the abandoned flat above the old butcher’s for weeks. Tommy and Caesar zigzag through the piles of bricks to the sign that says DANGER, where Caesar cocks his leg, and Tommy, swapping the lead to his beer hand undoes his zip and goes as well, splattering the base of the sign. When they finish, Tommy strolls out on to the pavement, looks both ways very carefully, and comes across the road with a panting Caesar.
We get taken home in the police car. Well, to Ronnie’s first. I say that I live next door, at my nan and grandad’s. Paul is lying about the police being all right. They tell us that if the dog had been hurt we’d have had to go to court and probably get sent away to juvenile detention. Then they make a big show of knocking on Ronnie’s front door first and then my nan and grandad’s. There’s only my nan in. She has to phone my mum. My nan is never angry with me but today her face goes white with rage. She has to ask the police in while they wait for my mum to come. They come in through the front door. She makes them a cup of tea. I sit on a chair staring at the floor. Then when my mum comes, we get the big lecture all over again. I can hear Ronnie getting a good hiding next door. It’s probably what they do if they take you in for questioning, beat someone up in the cell next door to scare you. The police tell my mum about all the trouble they’ve had with kids causing problems with the houses. My mum is good, though. She says I’ve never been allowed anywhere near that site and if the council or the builders
put a proper fence up around it to make it safe then maybe there wouldn’t be as many problems. The police want to go after that. The policeman keeps eyeballing me, like he wants to hit me with his truncheon. I feel bad for Caesar. It would have been terrible if he’d got lost or run over or something but we hadn’t meant for him to escape. It was a game.
The police talk quietly again to my mum as she lets them out of the front door. When they’ve gone she comes back in and pounds me round the head and tells me to get out of her sight. I go upstairs and sit on the edge of the toilet seat and don’t dare move for a while. I have never been in so much trouble. I haven’t even had chance to say that we found Tommy Clancey.
He’d been sleeping in the old butcher’s shop since he returned from Stourport. That was how he lived, heading out to the countryside towns for the summer: Bridgnorth, Bewdley, Stourport. He’d sleep out by the river and then head back to Dudley for the winter, picking up work as he went. He lived like that for years. He was still doing it when I came back for good. The woman who kept the pub, Diane, was so grateful to him for bringing Caesar back that she lifted his ban, which meant that he was banned from every pub in Dudley apart from the Ash Tree. He even did a bit of work collecting glasses and changing the odd barrel. She paid him in drink. Caesar carried on into old age, barking at children as they walked past the gates.
Nearly an hour, they was sitting in here, my nan says. Nearly an hour. Longer than when they come last time. They could’ve been off catching crooks. Instead, they was drinking tea in here and walking the mud off their boots onto the clean hall carpet.
She doesn’t say this to me, but to my mum.
I know, Mum, I know.
They want to be ashamed of theerselves. I day like the look of him, the policeman, looking at Sean like he was a criminal.
I know, Mum, I know.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 8