I doh know what we’m gonna do, my dad replies.
He stays in bed until late in the morning. My mum says he isn’t very well, if people ask. I think he’s okay. He’s tired and worn out because of Margaret Thatcher. I understand. One teatime she is on the news and he looks up at her face and says, I doh know why somebody doh shoot that bitch.
On the days he stays in bed I go upstairs and read the paper to him when I come home from school. If it’s a Thursday I leave it open at the jobs page. My mum reads the jobs to him as well, then she comes downstairs for her glass of wine, then gin, or both on some nights when it’s not gone so well.
‘Our history is the story of a free people – a great chain of people stretching back into the past and forward into the future.’
When Margaret Thatcher called a general election Johnny was good to his word and I helped him. We delivered Labour Party leaflets, round by us, all over Cinderheath for Jim Bayliss, the councillor, who Johnny knew through the football club. I’d do one side of the street and Johnny would do the other. On some of the nights after school, as the election got nearer, Jim let me go in the car with the speaker and let me talk into the microphone. I got to take turns with his nephew, Rob. He was a couple of years younger than me, a football prospect, Tom Catesby’s son; he ended up at the Villa, then back at Cinderheath, years later. He runs the junior side there now. Robert Catesby: I thought his name was somehow a good omen.
Use your vote, use your vote wisely. Vote Labour, I’d say. Vote for Dr John Gilbert. Vote Labour.
I doh know how her thinks her’s gonna win with all these millions unemployed. Two, three, fower; they’m lying about them figures, I’ll tell yer that for nothing. I doh know nobody with a job. My grandad is talking over the telly and a report that says Margaret Thatcher is ahead in an opinion poll. It says people think she’s doing the right things.
I’ve got a job, Dad, my mum says. She’s even got a couple of extra hours’ cleaning on a morning now.
I mean man’s work, men’s jobs.
And what abaht me? Johnny says.
Yer know what I mean.
My grandad never talks about Johnny as a real worker. I think he feels bad that Johnny has to work as hard as him, wishes he’d gone back to college, or that he’d not made him leave in the first place. Johnny looks at my grandad. Johnny stands up at the kitchen window. My grandad doesn’t look at him.
I’m the onny one turning up any rent, after all, Johnny says and he looks at my grandad again and my grandad won’t look at him, stares at the arm of the chair.
It’s true that some people are going to vote Conservative. There are people in the big houses on Oakham Road with blue posters up. I’ve started writing their addresses down in a notebook in case we might need their names any time in the future. I told Jim Bayliss I’m doing it so we’d know where they lived as research for the election, so they don’t do things like pretend they want a lift to the polling station and then go and vote Tory when they get there. That sort of thing happens all the time. I heard the men joking about it. Really, though, I’m writing their names down in case there’s a revolution and we can send the police to their houses or stop them in their cars like the police did to my dad. You need this sort of information. I haven’t told anyone that’s my reason, though, not even Johnny. I know I have to pretend I want everything to be fair. I couldn’t care less whether the election is fair or not. I just want to win and make sure that Margaret Thatcher isn’t prime minister any more. She can go and live in the Falkland Islands if she loves them that much.
There are people who say to your face that they are going to vote Conservative. They’re not all in the big houses, either. Some of them live round by my nan and grandad’s.
A man shouts, Enoch was right, after us down Juniper Close when I deliver a leaflet and he tries to set his Alsatian down the street after us but the Alsatian barks and then sniffs round the lamp-post. Enoch Powell is a big hero to them. Even he doesn’t like Margaret Thatcher, though, so I don’t know what their problem is.
We might be disappointed by the election, Sean. Yer know that, don’t yer?
What dyer mean?
Well, the Conservatives will probably win. Margaret Thatcher will still be prime minister. We’ll carry on best we can. I don’t want yer to worry about it so much. It’s nice you’re helping out but yome thirteen years old, darling. I doh want yer to worry so much. Maybe I shouldn’t have let yer go and help em. Why doh yer ask Michelle what her’s doing at the weekend? You’ve been happier lately; less look forward to summer. Doh worry about the election.
We’ll win, I say, we’ll win.
We didn’t. The people loved Margaret Thatcher. They loved her, wanted her to be prime minister for ever, some of them, anyway. They loved other people being put out of work; they loved the factories closing; they loved rich people being rich; they loved the royal family and the House of Lords and the Empire; they loved Britannia ruling the waves; they loved going to war; they loved other people being poor and sick; they loved selling everything off to rich people to make them richer; worse, selling stuff that we already owned back to us. They loved rubbing our noses in the dirt. That’s what they wanted and that’s what they got.
Voting was meant to be fair. I decided right then, that night, when I was allowed to stay up to watch the results with my mum; that voting wasn’t fair at all. My dad had stayed in bed, he had voted, though, and there was no worry about who he’d voted for this time. We would have to do something else to get rid of her.
If you were going to kill her, when would you do it? I ask Johnny. He laughs and then thinks about it.
Well, I doh know, he says, cleaning his football boots on the back step. That’s a good question. If you think about successful assassinations, like Abraham Lincoln and the Kennedys, well, iss usually when they’m in a vulnerable position. Lincoln was in the theatre, relaxing, Bobby Kennedy was in the kitchen of a hotel, yer know; yer have to get em when their guard’s down or they’re somewhere they wouldn’t be usually, right through history. So I’d go for either somewhere where she felt really safe, or a time when she was in the open and really vulnerable and weak. Maybe when her’s on holiday or summat. Then he laughed a little bit more. I doh know if her goes on holiday. I’m sure there’s plenty of people thinking about it right now.
I’m thinking about it, I say.
He laughs again and says, And me, our kid, in a voice like my grandad’s.
I think, No, I really am thinking about it. I know where there’s a gun.
Doh worry abaht it, Sean. It’ll be all right. We’ll all be all right.
We weren’t all right, though, were we?
I’ve left my maths book at home. We have a test tomorrow. It’s the end-of-year test, to sort out the classes for September. I have to do well to get into the top group so I can show my mum and dad that I’m working hard. It makes them feel better. I’m not thinking about the gun. I’m not thinking about Margaret Thatcher. No one cares anyway. Everything has carried on. I ask Michelle one break-time whether she saw the election.
What yer bothered about that shit for? she says and then asks me if I like her nail varnish. It’s silver.
Yeah, I say, yeah, iss nice. Better than them gloves with no fingers.
What?
Yer looked like summat out of Thriller.
She whacks me on the shoulder but laughs and things feel all right.
I knew there was something wrong when I got to the house. I’d never liked it; it was like it was never really our house, not at all, and that we’d bought it, or were buying it, but it would never really be ours. I don’t know why they didn’t give it up earlier. I don’t know why they kept on scraping the money together, borrowing more somehow, whatever. It was the reason my dad went back to work for Charlie when he got things together again after coming out of prison, the reason my dad started getting out of bed in the morning.
I thought of the ghosts o
f the trees out the back and the branches leaning towards the windows like Margaret Thatcher’s fingers reaching out to get us. Unlike my nan and grandad’s house, which really did belong to us, all of us, and to my great-granny and my great-grandad before us, who I’d only ever seen in a tiny sepia photograph dressed in uniform for some war or other, that was in a drawer in the sideboard and is still there today. Maybe I’ll save some of the photos from the bonfire, stick them up on the wall of the pub. People love that kind of stuff, after all. How we used to live. We was poor but happy. Don’t think for one minute that’s what I’m saying, though.
I own that house now. I bought it with the pub takings, cash. Not that we had to pay much for it.
Margaret Thatcher would be proud.
It belonged to the council, but that meant it belonged to all of us, everyone had a share. And when we were dead and gone someone else would have it. That was how it was meant to work.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, that’s what my grandad would say, even though he’d then spend an hour telling Johnny that if he thought things were ever going to change for the better he had another thing coming. That’s what I was thinking about, the house, at least that’s what I remember. I might have been thinking about Michelle’s silver nail varnish and whether I’d get to walk home with her after the test or whether Rodney James would be hanging around to see her, when I came through the door and saw the handprint of blood on the banister rail.
I can hear the sound of something dripping, a very faint drip, drip, drip, and I think how you never get sounds like that in our house where everything is new and quiet, not like at my nan and grandad’s, where there’s always a tap dripping or the pipes bursting in the winter if you’re not careful, and the sounds of the plumbing from all the other houses in the row. There’s just this drip, drip, drip and everything is icy cold.
I went cold, I remember that. And I remember I said hello and I might have even called out Dad? even before I saw him, because who else could have been in the house? I knew where everyone else was and I’d just left my mum and I was old enough, too old, to believe in monsters and ghosts, although I still liked to tell myself I did. It was only later that I realized that the monsters and ghosts existed all along, whether I believed in them or not.
There is blood in a puddle on the chair by the phone, the phone is off the hook, the mouthpiece dropped on the floor with a handprint like on the banister, and there’s blood on the stair carpet and on the walls on the way up.
I remember thinking that the blood had made the same patterns as the shit that Jermaine had smeared on the toilet walls back at primary school.
Drip, drip, drip. The bathroom door is open and as I turn at the top of the stairs I can see the water pooling inside the door and the metal floor strip is holding the puddle of water back from coming out onto the carpet and the water is pink. There’s a pool of water with swirls of red in it and I’m looking at that and then look up so I can see through the half-open door and there’s my dad sitting underneath the sink, leaning against the bath. His chest and head are turned towards me and his arm is dangling over the edge of the bath.
The sink tap is running. Harry’s shirt is blocking the plughole. I know it’s Harry’s. I saw him fixing cars in it last night. Light blue, short sleeves, with oil stains where he’s wiped his hands. Water comes over the sink’s brim, drip, drip, drip. My dad is grey. His eyes look at me but he can’t see anything and his mouth is open and I can see his teeth and it’s like he’s empty. He’s not here. There’s blood in his lap. There are more red handprints along the bath, on the edge of the sink, on the door. I stand there and look at him, can’t move, stand looking and looking. There’s blood. His eyes look like pearls. I know he’s dead. I stand here for a long time, I can’t move. They killed him. They killed him.
After a while I turn and I walk into my room and get my maths book and then I run down the stairs and out of the front door and up the hill all the way back to my mum and my nan and grandad and I can’t speak when I get there, can’t cry or shout or say anything, but I know straight away they can see something terrible has happened. My grandad jumps in one of Harry’s cars, one that goes, so it’s him who gets there first and sees exactly the same thing as me and he phones for the ambulance and probably the police, they come too now, and he does it so my mum doesn’t have to see what me and my grandad have seen.
I think my grandad shut the door and maybe he shut my dad’s eyes and mouth too, but I remember my mum screaming, just screaming. And I thought, They killed him, and I still hadn’t made a sound, but I do remember thinking that one day I would do something to the people who’d killed my dad, that I would do something to get our revenge.
I never went in that house ever again. We stayed at my nan and grandad’s and my mum fetched my things for me. I wished they could blow it up like they had my dad’s other house, blow it all up like Quarry End. We couldn’t have gone on living there anyway because we’d run out of money and the building society was about to take the house back. It didn’t matter who owned the house. It had caused more trouble than it was worth, that was what my grandad said in the first place, like a curse, and he was right.
They rode around with him bleeding to death in the back of the car for an hour, keeping away from the police. I got all this from Charlie years later, and I think he was telling the truth, even though he didn’t usually. They didn’t talk about any of this at the trial. There was something the police had done wrong so they adjusted all the times to make it look like they’d chased them straight from the factory to our house. It wasn’t like that at all, though. It meant Charlie and the others weren’t charged with anything to do with my dad, only with stealing. The police didn’t want to get themselves into trouble and Charlie told his solicitor to accept the police’s version of the events even though you could see that the times didn’t add up. Charlie reckoned it might mean a shorter sentence for him. He told me that when they first took them to the police station and put him in the cells, an officer he’d never seen before, with a smart suit on, not a uniform, serious crime squad, Charlie thought, came to the door and whispered that my dad was dead and that him and his mates were all going to get charged with murder. Charlie told me that just then he didn’t care because he felt so bad about my dad, if the police weren’t lying and it was true he was dead, and that he felt that he had killed my dad, in a way. He said that he’d sat on the edge of the cell bed rocking back and forth, whereas usually he’d sit there like he wasn’t bothered, which he wasn’t normally. Prison didn’t do anything to him. He wasn’t a murderer, though.
You didn’t kill him, Charlie, I said to him on the night he told me all this.
I did, son, in a way. I just wish we’d gone to the hospital straight away or gid up instead of running. I wish that every day.
I don’t think he could believe I was sitting there talking to him about it. He kept glancing up at the bar door, which had the bolt across, but only one. I think he weighed up whether he could beat me to the door or not, but there was no way. He resigned himself, I think, slumped down in the chair, went for confession, contrition. A lot of it was true, I think. He meant what he said. He couldn’t make me out. I think he didn’t understand why I didn’t want to kill him. By that time I’d had enough of wanting to kill people. This was fifteen years later, after I came back, after my mum died.
You didn’t kill him, Charlie. Yer day kill him.
I wish I’d done summat different.
I know. Yer day kill him, Charlie. Someone else killed him. Something else did.
He looked at me. He had no idea what I was talking about. His hands were shaking and I poured him a drink.
They rode around with him bleeding to death for an hour, keeping away from the police. They didn’t know he was bleeding to death. He said he was okay, not great, keep the towel pressed to his leg, he’d be okay. They’d been disturbed shifting the parts from a machine at a plastics place t
hat hadn’t long closed over off Greets Green. My dad was on top of the machine when the police arrived, he slipped and fell onto the blade he was trying to remove. Harry pulled him up off the blade and helped him run to the car. It hadn’t seemed that bad. He’d run, held up by Harry, his hand pressed to the wound, and they’d got in the back of the car. The police were at one end of the factory but the car was at the other so they got away. The police had to drive out onto the industrial estate and back around, in a loop of the building, which meant Charlie could pull out onto the main road. They could get away, they thought. Charlie’s mind was already racing. He’d burn the car out in the field behind his house. It was a piece of shit anyway. They could hear the police siren.
He needs the hospital, Charlie. Harry said.
I’m all right, I’m all right, my dad said.
There’s blood gooin everywhere.
Harry was beginning to panic. Charlie turned to have a look: my dad’s legs were across Harry’s lap, bleeding into it and the seat, but then he took the car up the kerb and nearly into a lamp-post.
Hold summat on it, he said. There’s a towel on the floor somewhere.
Tommy was in the passenger seat. Charlie never usually took him with them but he’d stayed when Charlie was in prison, even remembered to feed the horses. He was pissed, no use to anyone. Charlie was cursing bringing him, now.
Just hold summat on it.
That helped, stopped the blood coming so strong.
Tight as yer can, thass it, Charlie said.
My dad was breathing through his teeth.
I’m all right, he said, all right. Less get out of here.
Tie summat round his leg, Ron, above the cut. Stop it coming as much.
Harry ripped his shirt, wrapped it round my dad’s thigh above where he was holding the towel. The towel felt hot.
Thass it, thass it.
I’m all right, my dad said. I’m all right.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 15