I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey

by Stephen K Amos

‘That sickly weasel?’ Mr Hackett liked to pick on Dustin because he thought that he was weak and easy game. ‘Dustin! You don’t want to play games with me!’ he shouted at no one in particular and everyone at the same time. His face was already getting that bluish tint.

  ‘He’s hiding in the cupboard, sir!’ I shouted out.

  ‘I bet you think this is very funny, Amos! Well, you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face!’ Mr Hackett was already striding as fast as his little legs could carry him to the back of the room, his head wobbling and his mouth revving up for the abuse he was about to dish out.

  ‘What did I do, sir?’ I stood up and held up my hands innocently as he pounded past me.

  ‘Sit down!’ He threw open the door. ‘DUSTIN!’

  I ran behind Mr Hackett and pushed as hard as I could on the small of his back and he sprawled into the closet. I slammed the door shut and, although my hands were shaking a bit, I managed to lock it from the outside before he could get up and turn around. I couldn’t believe what I’d done.

  I turned to the whole class who were staring at me with open mouths and for a split second they could have turned against me. Then Dustin launched out of the coats at the back of the room and hollered. ‘Whoooop whoooop! Yeeeaahhh!’ he screamed out and suddenly everyone else joined in. It was like all hell had been let loose in that classroom with the kids dancing around the aisles in between their desks and chucking their pens and papers everywhere.

  Mr Hackett was banging on the door and shouting at the top of his lungs from inside the closet and so we just whooped louder and banged our desk lids up and down and all the while Dustin was clutching his stomach with laughter. The louder Mr Hackett banged the louder we shouted and I was strutting around at the front of the class shouting, ‘Moon Face! Moon Face!’ at the top of my lungs. It seemed like ages but probably only lasted about five minutes, and I was doing my ‘Now you see him … Whoops you still do,’ when the head teacher walked in through the classroom door.

  ‘What’s going on in here?’ demanded the head to a roomful of ashen-faced and deathly quiet pupils. Suddenly, all we could hear was the banging from the supply closet and the cries of Mr Hackett.

  ‘Let me out, you little shits! You’re going to be in so much trouble now.’ The head teacher ran to the back of the room, found the key in the lock where I’d left it, opened the door and Mr Hackett’s giant blue face came out of the closet door hyper-ventilating with rage.

  All the pupils were in shock, except for Dustin who was still clutching himself with laughter. Mr Hackett couldn’t contain himself and, quick as a flash, ran over to Dustin who was now in a heap on the floor. ‘What’s so funny? What’s so funny, you little shit?’ he screeched.

  Dustin still didn’t get up and he was really clutching himself hard now and going a bit blue himself with the strain of it all. I thought he had better get his giggles under control. Mr Hackett grabbed him from up off the floor by his shoulders and pushed him up against the wall, but Dustin still couldn’t catch his breath.

  ‘I’ll show you!’ screamed Mr Hackett, but by now we could see something was wrong and Dustin’s eyes were popping bloodshot out of his head and he was grabbing at his own throat.

  Mr Hackett was still pushing Dustin up against the wall and shouting into his face when the head teacher barged him out of the way. ‘Mr Hackett! Put him down!’ Dustin collapsed to the floor still clutching at his chest and throat.

  ‘He’s having an asthma attack!’ screamed out Cindy hysterically. Mr Hackett’s jaw dropped open.

  ‘Don’t just stand there! Get the nurse!’ shouted the head teacher to Cindy, who ran out of the room as quickly as possible.

  They had to call an ambulance to the school, and if there’s one thing teachers hate more than kids who play truant, it’s kids who are dying on their watch. That day the maths class was dismissed early.

  I thought I was going to get expelled, shopped to the police straight away or worse, for starting the whole thing. I was terrified of what my parents were going to say and I was really worried about Dustin too. Instead, something weird happened. It turns out that when the life of a pupil is hanging in the balance suddenly that pupil is elevated from being just a sickly kid and becomes an actual human being. I hardly got into any trouble at all once it was clear that Dustin was going to be OK and came back to school. The rest of the kids, who’d been given a little taste of freedom from the tyranny of teachers, were vague about the details of the whole incident in the way that kids can be.

  And Mr Hackett, rather than blaming me for the whole thing, focused his time on claiming to be seriously claustrophobic. Pathetically, he tried to explain that he’d suffered a psychotic moment of madness and that’s why he’d been manhandling and screaming at a little boy who was about an inch from suffocating.

  Mr Hackett got fired from the school within a week. The kids in class were so grateful to Dustin and me for getting rid of the hated maths teacher that they actually started being nice to us and, most importantly, Dustin and I became best friends. We said to each other seriously a few weeks later that if only we’d known beforehand that Mr Hackett was badly claustrophobic, well, we would have played the prank a whole lot sooner.

  Weirdly, I saw Mr Hackett again about a decade later in a gay club, waggling his head from side to side and making eyes at anyone who’d look his way. I avoided eye contact. So it looks like that particular incident wasn’t the first time that he’d been stuck in a closet after all. Maybe it goes some way towards explaining why he’d been so bad-tempered as a teacher. Hey! The life of a closeted gay maths teacher with claustrophobia can’t be easy, but he didn’t have to take it out on us.

  9

  After coming back to London, my family settled down around Tooting in South London. We still moved houses a lot but basically stayed in the same area, moving a few stops either up or down Zone 3 of the Underground’s nefarious Northern Line. Tooting is full of weird and wonderful characters and soon people-watching became my number one pastime. You can’t help absorbing things from your surroundings and I may have been born with funny bones, but around where I grew up there were a lot of funny people. Now when I say funny, I don’t mean Noël Coward funny or even Jimmy Tarbuck funny – I mean funny like a Grace Jones in her ‘I’m Andy Warhol’s muse and like to eat live babies’ phase.

  There was the mad old lady who lived in a bush, shouting to herself and to passers-by who got too close. Maybe she lived in a bush because she wanted privacy, but it was hard to avoid her because dressed in formless rags and complete with unkempt sticking-out hair she blended into the bush perfectly. You could be wandering happily down the street whistling to yourself without a care in the world when suddenly you’d catch a glimpse of rustling leaves in the corner of your eye and the next thing you knew the bush would start screaming gibberish at you. I could have given Usain Bolt a run for his money on more than one occasion after running into her.

  Then there was the weird man who wore a bicycle helmet covered in little multicoloured fairy lights. This mad genius had actually rigged his bicycle with a generator that powered the lights when he pedalled. I thought he looked very festive, like a kind of homeless Father Christmas. Except he didn’t have any presents to speak of except for a can of Special Brew and a mangy dog on a rope and you definitely wouldn’t want to sit on his knee.

  The White Lady was a pretty amazing sight to see. She was in fact a totally respectable black woman, but the odd thing about her was that she wrapped her entire body from top to toe in glisteningly clean white cloth and she bound her hair in the same white material. Not only that but she painted her face and hands with white make-up. What surprised me was the fact that she seemed to have plenty of friends who’d stop and chat to her completely normally and without saying things like ‘Are you mental or what?’ She looked like a tall, slender, very much alive Egyptian mummy.

  The White Lady originally hailed from Nigeria and so, in spite of her odd looks, Mum g
ot to know her very well. Also Mum was working as an Avon lady at the time and so it made sense for her to get to know this woman who clearly had a need to buy large amounts of make-up. Apparently something had happened to her during the Biafran civil war in Nigeria that had badly damaged her and she’d fled to London. I could always tell when the White Lady was visiting because Mum would put an extra layer of protective plastic sheeting on all the furniture (she put protective covers on everything anyway as a matter of course). Nobody would ever accuse Mum of being overly sentimental and when the White Lady left our flat she would say that it was a shame to see a young woman end up this way but ‘How can she have enough time on her hands to be able to get ready like that every morning? That sista is of one kind (odd). It’s because she has no issue! And think of the cleaning bills!’

  I think it’s possible there was some chemical in the water supply in Tooting that was making people act strangely and it was no surprise to me that the biggest mental institution in South London was at the top of a big leafy hill round the corner from where we lived. A mental institution with a big outpatient clinic. The local shopkeepers were used to people with bad Tourette’s coming into the shops to buy a bunch of bananas while barking at them like a dog. Some of these characters were probably patients out for a stroll but the rest of them just felt at home in this environment and gravitated towards the area. This was care in the community before there was a government policy on care in the community.

  There was one old Caribbean guy who was my favourite of the whole mad lot. He was teetering somewhere between insane, eccentric and just plain old. Mad Marvin or Marvin the Menace, as the local kids called him. He would always wear the same tattered old jumper and raggedy shorts even in the dead of winter and you’d see him out all the time because he had about a hundred dogs. He’d walk them in the local park a dozen at a time. They were completely wild and would try and chase after the boys as they rode their bikes shouting, ‘Oi! Marvin the Menace!’ The kids didn’t have much to worry about as most of the dogs had only three legs. He had come to live in London in the fities because his dad had fought for the British in World War II. If I thought things were tough for black people in the seventies and eighties, it was nothing compared to the abuse he’d suffered and it had unhinged him pretty badly.

  He was funny and he did funny things. Like one time he was arrested on the open-air top deck of a double-decker bus for lighting a Bunsen burner. When the police got him he said, ‘All me want is a cup of tea a’ door’, before presenting them with a tea bag, mug and billycan. He told me later, ‘Stephen, the judge was a fair man. He said “Sir, nex’ time you want a drink o’ tea on a bus make some before you go out and keep it in a Thermos”, before he show me his Thermos that he keep himself behind the judge’s desk! An’ they let me off wit’ a warning. Ha!’

  Marvin didn’t have much, but he did live in a big house at the bottom of the hill, which he said his mum and dad had left him when they died. Whether that was true or not was highly debatable because Dad told me that all the houses in that row were squats and that I shouldn’t hang around down there. Marvin was always worried that the authorities would take his house away from him. He’d say: ‘I’m getting to be ageable. Them dogheart man wait till I lose the last marble in my head and I’ll end up in that hospital up the road with the rest of them.’

  With all of these unique individuals in the neighbourhood there was always someone to pass the time of day with. You couldn’t leave your doors unlocked or anything, but there was a sort of community spirit and so people noticed when, one day, a truly weird and highly scratty white man turned up and started to hang around with Marvin. This guy scared all the kids because, bizarrely, he had no lower jawbone at all. I don’t know if he’d lost it in an accident or was born that way but he looked very strange and when he talked his lower lip vibrated weirdly and he spat. He was always hanging around Marvin and so everyone began to avoid both of them in the park.

  Marvin didn’t seem happy to have this new companion and after a while even my dad noticed that he was looking very down and so one day we finally asked him what was going on. He cried out to us, ‘That man jus’ won’t leave me alone! Him say that it be his house that I’ve been living in all these years. He took me front door key, copied it and now he won’ go away.’ He looked up to my dad and quietly added, ‘An’ him kick the dogs.’ Dad, being Nigerian, had a lot of respect for his elders and even though Marvin wasn’t playing with a full deck of cards it broke Dad’s heart to see him brought so low.

  Since moving back from Nigeria some subtle changes had come over my whole family. The challenges that we’d faced there made any difficulties we encountered here in the UK seem much more manageable. Stella and I had become a lot more confident in dealing with the other kids at school and Dad had relaunched his construction business in London with gusto. We were still living with far too many kids (and Mum was pregnant again!) in a small flat, but money wasn’t as tight as it had been in Africa. Dad’s hard work was paying off and his self-esteem rose in line with his earnings. In the past he would have just stayed well out of the affairs of local people but now he confronted this jawless white man in the park that same day.

  ‘What are you doing tormenting an old man? You should be ashamed of yourself. Why don’t you take yourself away from here before I call the police?’

  Although the interloper cringed visibly at being challenged by Dad, he frothily lisped back, ‘Call the polithe then. What will they do, ey? I can live here ith I want to. Mind your own buthineth. That house ith too big thor an old man anyway. He jutht wants it thor himself. He shouldn’t be there. He thtole it.’

  To which Marvin cried, ‘No! You vex me now. Me know meself. Me no tief. Don’ accuse me!’ He was clearly getting very upset and feeling very helpless in light of this scary-looking white man.

  ‘Well pwoove it then. You can’t!’ And Jawless went back to the big house trying to act as if nothing had happened, leaving poor Marvin sitting on the park bench taking comfort from the six or seven dogs he’d brought with him that day.

  That evening my dad complained to Mum. ‘It’s just not right for Marvin to have to put up with this greedy intruder. He’s too old to handle this himself.’

  ‘If it’s his house why doesn’t he just call the police and be done with it?’ Mum was always reasonable in a crisis.

  ‘Most of those houses down there at the bottom of the hill are just squats. Who knows who really owns them? If Marvin ever had any documents to prove it’s his I’m sure he’s lost them by now. And if he calls the police or the council they’ll probably repossess the whole lot anyway and he’ll be totally homeless.’

  ‘Why are you getting involved in his business anyway? He’s a grown man. And a Caribbean at that,’ piped up the White Lady who was pawing through a catalogue of Crystal White cosmetics my mum had laid out for her. ‘Can’t he act for his own best interests?’

  ‘He must be seventy years old and you know he’s not all there upstairs. No! An old man is there to talk. His days for action are long passed. What muscles can he flex around this bully? Imagine spending your final years being pushed around by a jawless white man. Something must be done.’

  And so Mum put on a pot of coffee and the three of them set to it. ‘So, we can’t call the police or the council?’ said the White Lady. ‘And we can’t just magic this white man away. Maybe I should sneak up behind him and say boo! Give him the fright of his life!’ She cackled and everyone in the room turned to her at once. If she hadn’t been sitting on the sofa in our living room with a cup of coffee on her white-painted hands it might have been quite frightening. This apparition in white did indeed cut a ghostly figure.

  ‘This man is a coward of the worst kind. Abusing a defenceless old man. His fear can be his undoing,’ said Dad as he sipped his coffee. ‘Let us find out a little more about our unwanted neighbour and see if we can’t spook him right out of the borough.’

  The White Lady smiled b
ack at him and said, ‘I suppose I can make some enquiries.’

  So over the next couple of weeks, the White Lady launched a surreptitious investigation into the troublesome intruder. I often saw her chatting away to the neighbourhood eccentrics who, though a little on the weird side (to put it mildly), were best placed to see his comings and goings. It’s true to say that it’s the street spooks who are the experts on the local community. They know which marriages are failing. They know which kids are out buying drugs on street corners. They know who’s going out of business. All the life that we ignore as we’re rushing about living our lives is noticed by these people and they took a special interest in Marvin; he was one of them, after all.

  To no one’s surprise, the White Lady found out that Jawless was without any friends and was a total lowlife sponger. He never bought food and always took half of Marvin’s sandwiches when they were in the park together. He was afraid of the dogs and would have got rid of them if Marvin hadn’t defended them like they were his own children. And Dad learned that he liked to drink in the local pub every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, where he would sip his beer disgustingly through a straw in the corner. Dad came home and tried to mime this to us by pulling a hilarious face and using many horrible slurping sounds. Mum said that he was mad to get involved in the business of a were but she couldn’t help laughing a little bit too.

  One Saturday morning not long afterwards, Dad and I were in the park when the White Lady came up to us and whispered something to Dad that made him laugh heartily. He followed her to a bush where he talked with Marvin and the bicycle-helmeted man (complete with dog on rope). The bush they stood next to would give the occasional shake and so I figured the bush woman was involved in the conversation too. When Dad came back to where I was playing, he smiled and said, ‘Stephen! You just watch. Tomorrow we will put that evil interloper under heavy manners!’

  The next day Dad was strangely excited and at about ten o’clock at night Marvin came around to the back of the flat with two of his least mangy dogs. In fact they were pretty energetic and were barking all over the place. When Mum heard all the commotion she came out the back and screamed, ‘Get those dogs away from here.’