The Wrong Boy

by Willy Russell

  Only I don’t know why he bothered asking because before I could say owt he’d picked up the remote and obliterated Unbearable Bob and the Blockbusters.

  He said, ‘It is rude, you know, Raymond, watching television when you have a visitor.’

  I said, ‘It’s not half as rude as walking into a person’s front room and switching off their telly.’

  But he just ignored me and said, ‘So! Shall we introduce ourselves, Raymond? I’m Neville.’

  I just looked at him! He nodded though, like he was trying to prompt me. ‘And?’ he said. ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’ I said.

  ‘And what’s your name?’ he said.

  I just frowned at him.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘aren’t you going to introduce yourself to me, Raymond?’

  I was starting to get worried! He seemed like a lunatic person.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘tell me who you are.’

  ‘You already know who I am!’ I said.

  But he was grinning and shaking his head and said, ‘No, Raymond. I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Well, I think you do!’ I said. ‘Because you’ve said my name three times already.’

  But he was shaking his head and still grinning his gormless grin.

  ‘Did you know, Raymond,’ he said, ‘that the Native Americans of North Dakota believe that the giving of one’s name is the giving of a gift. Did you know that?’ he said.

  I just gawped at him.

  He nodded. ‘Well, it’s true,’ he said, ‘and in giving his name a person is giving the gift of friendship; he’s declaring that he bears no hostility. And that’s why I think it would be very good, Raymond, if you could introduce yourself to me. So, shall we try again?’ he said. ‘I’m Neville.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘And I’m pissed off!’ I said.

  I thought that might shut him up but he seemed delighted. He sat down and opened up his file as he said, ‘You see, Raymond, hostility. You feel a hostility towards me, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  Then he nodded too and said, ‘So shall we try and explore this a little further, Raymond? Have you any idea what’s causing you to have these feelings of aggression towards me?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘I wanted to watch Blockbusters but you’ve switched off the bleeding telly!’

  He looked at me and nodded. ‘So shall we explore this a little further?’ he said. ‘You see, what you’re really saying here, Raymond, is that given the choice between interacting with an inanimate box or with a human being, your preference would be for the television. Is that right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And … do you have any idea why that might be?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘because the telly’s not boring.’

  He looked at me. ‘But me,’ he said, ‘a fellow human being, you find me boring?’

  ‘Extremely,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Well, that’s intriguing, isn’t it, Raymond,’ he said, ‘because you’ve only just met me whereas many, many people who’ve known me much longer than you consider me to be quite the opposite of boring.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you go and talk to one of them?’ I said. ‘And then I can watch Blockbusters.’

  But he just opened up his pad instead and started writing things down in it. While he was doing that, I said, ‘Can we have the telly back on now?’

  He ignored me though and said, ‘So! Shall we talk about this hostility, Raymond?’

  But I ignored him then, like he’d ignored me. I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I just sat there staring at the blank telly.

  ‘So shall we, Raymond?’ he insisted.

  I looked at him. I said, ‘Is that why they call you the So Shall Worker?’

  He looked puzzled then. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘So shall,’ I said, ‘so shall, so shall, so shall. You’re always sayin’ it!’

  He just stared at me. Then he said, ‘Does this happen a lot, Raymond?’

  ‘Does what happen?’ I said.

  ‘Getting your words mixed up,’ he said, ‘confusing them.’

  I said, ‘They’re not mixed up. I haven’t confused them at all.’ I said, ‘It’s you, you keep saying it! So shall we explore this? So shall we talk about that? So shall we do this? So shall, so shall, so shall!’ I said. ‘So that’s why you’re the So Shall Worker.’

  He looked a bit peeved.

  But I just shrugged and said, ‘So! Shall we put the telly back on now?’

  He ignored me again. Then he looked through his file and he said, ‘Now you’ve spoken with Mr Wilson, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘the Lert!’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘The Lert!’ I told him. ‘Wilson, the Lert!’

  He frowned at me. ‘Why do you call him that?’ he asked.

  I just shrugged. ‘Because that’s what he told me,’ I said. ‘He told me he was a Lert.’

  The So Shall Worker frowned again. ‘Do you mean’, he said, ‘that Mr Wilson said he was … alert?’

  I nodded. ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘a Lert! And they’re threatening to take over the world, the Lerts. Mind you,’ I said, ‘you probably know that!’

  He stared at me, the So Shall Worker. Then he looked down into his file again and he said, ‘When you were younger, your mum took you to see a doctor, didn’t she, a special sort of doctor.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘Psycho The Rapist.’

  He looked at me all squinty-eyed, the So Shall Worker. He said, ‘Say that again.’

  I said, ‘Psycho! Psycho The Rapist.’

  He just carried on looking at me.

  I said, ‘What’s up?’

  He said, ‘Have you always done this?’

  ‘Done what?’ I said.

  ‘Taken words,’ he said, ‘and twisted them into other things.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s just something that happens,’ I said, ‘like the witch on the beach.’

  He sat there frowning and looking puzzled.

  ‘The evil witch, on the beach!’ I told him. ‘Like when you’re first learning to read and you have to put the words together by sounding out the different parts of the word. And that was the first really big word I ever had to read out loud. I had to sound it out for the teacher. And then I was dead frightened when I did because I thought Peter and Jane might get caught by the evil witch and then we’d never be able to read about Peter and Jane no more.’

  He was just staring at me, the So Shall Worker.

  So I told him, ‘It was all right though, in the end; because the Sand Witch wasn’t a witch who lived on the beach at all. So Peter and Jane had never really been in any sort of danger of being captured by the evil witch. And as soon as I’d got used to putting the two parts of the word into one, it was just two pieces of bread with some jam in the middle.’

  He was staring at me with his mouth open and his forehead all creased up. He said, ‘What was?’

  I said, ‘The sandwich!’

  He stared at me for a bit longer. Then he started writing in his file again. He suddenly looked up though. And he said, ‘So even when you were very young you were seeing things like evil and fear and blackness, this … blackness in something as … innocuous as a sandwich?’

  I frowned at him. ‘What do you mean,’ I said, ‘what blackness?’

  But he just shook his head and he wouldn’t say anything more about it. But I knew then, I knew he must have been talking about me with Wilson; the So Shall Worker and the chief Lert, comparing notes. But nobody had ever asked me about the blackness!

  It was at the assessment centre; we had to do things like stupid art therapy classes. Wilson used to turn up there to see how I was doing. He always looked at my pictures. He’d stand at the back of me, looking over my shoulder and saying nowt. Sometimes he’d pick up my drawing and take it over to the art therapist and the two of them would stand there quie
tly talking about it, with one of them occasionally looking over at me and the other one nodding. But no-one ever asked me about it. Nobody ever came over and asked me, ‘Raymond, why do you only ever use the colour black in your pictures?’

  They just kept nodding and looking at all the black things I drew – the black sun, the black moon, the black trees, black snow – and concluded that it was me demonstrating all the blackness I felt inside of me. But I wasn’t at all bloody black inside and if someone had bothered to ask me I would have told them that with me sitting at the back of the art therapy room and all the other kids being bigger than me, by the time I got to the crayon box, the only bleeding colour left was sodding black. But nobody ever bothered to ask.

  All they ever did, all of them, was just keep looking for what they wanted to see. And when it was all over, the assessment, and they’d got their profile, Wilson explained to my Mam that I’d be much better suited to the dedicated and sympathetic environment of the progress school.

  Sunny Pines, my Mam said it was called. She said, ‘It sounds nice, doesn’t it, Sunny Pines?’

  But I didn’t think it sounded nice at all; it sounded like something you put in the toilet to try and hide the smell. I didn’t want to go there.

  I’d seen kids from the special school. You could always tell the kids who went there because they didn’t get the ordinary bus and they had to stand at the lay-by instead and wait for the private minibus. And they always got picked on, the special school kids; spat at and called four-eyed twats and window-lickers and told to get back to fuckin’ looney school, by all the nice, normal, ordinary kids who went to the nice, normal, ordinary schools. And even when you were inside the special school it was horrible because all the teachers were dead hard and they had to be hard and nasty because there were really big lads in there who’d even fight with the teachers, let alone the little first-year kids who got made to do awful things or got picked on and battered up at playtime. I didn’t want to get picked on and battered up. I didn’t want to go anywhere near a place like that. And I never would have gone there; I would have just refused to go, if my Gran hadn’t got ill and become such a big worry to my Mam. It was after my Gran came back from Scotland. And I’d been waiting for her to come back because I knew that when my Gran found out my Mam was sending me to a special school, my Gran’d go mad and tell my Mam she must be out of her mind, sending me to a school with all the dyslexics, the disturbed and the don’t-know-what-to-do-withs. My Gran wouldn’t be impressed by the fact that they were called ‘progress’ schools nowadays. My Gran would just say, ‘Yes! And water’s called Perrier nowadays. But giving it a bit of fizz and calling it by a fancy French name doesn’t stop it being wet!’

  But my Gran never got to say anything like that; because when my Gran did get back from Scotland she was never really the same again. Mr McGough who was in charge of the Progressive Pensioners came round to see my Mam. And he said they’d had a terrible time with my Gran. They’d all gone on a two-week coach excursion called Scotland’s Suffering: The Sites of Caledonian Misery. And at first my Gran had been having a marvellous time, seeing all the sites of suffering and slaughter and the catacombs in Edinburgh where the streets had been sealed shut and all the people with the bubonic plague left to die. My Gran was made up and said it was a real tonic, being in a country where there’d been so much misery and all the people seemed so suitably sombre.

  But then the coach had stopped near Dumfries so the pensioners could visit the house where Robert Burns had suffered such hardship and penury before he died his tragically early death from overwork and rheumatoid arthritis and the stupid doctor who made him drink mercury then stand up to his neck in the freezing waters of the Solway Firth. And Mr McGough said he knew my Gran had been particularly looking forward to that part of the excursion which was generally considered to be the tragic high spot of the whole trip. Only, when they got there, my Gran said she was feeling a bit weary and didn’t think she was up to the excitement of all that misery. She said she’d just sit on the coach. And Mr McGough didn’t think any more about it. He went off with the other pensioners, believing my Gran had just got a bit overwhelmed by the wealth of such sustained Scottish suffering. But when him and the other pensioners returned to the coach, they found my Gran was sat there with a sheep. They all stopped and stared at my Gran. But she just patted the sheep on the head and told the pensioners, ‘Come on, he’s a good dog. He’s very placid, he won’t bite.’

  All the pensioners looked at each other. Then Mr McGough said, ‘Now then, Vera, what’s this?’

  ‘It’s Rex!’ my Gran said. ‘Rex, my dog.’

  And that’s when Sylvia Mortimer told my Gran, ‘Don’t talk tripe, Vera! How can it be your Rex? You told me yourself, your Rex died, didn’t he? Didn’t he get run over by a trolley bus in Trafford Park when you were only twelve?’

  And apparently my Gran frowned then. She turned and looked at the sheep. Then she slowly put her fingers up to her mouth as her eyes filled up with tears and she asked, ‘What have I done?’

  My Gran was all embarrassed after that and said she didn’t know what had possessed her to do such a stupid thing. But everybody on the coach was dead nice to her. And Mr McGough (who’d always been particularly fond of my Gran) said, ‘Vera, forget about it. It’s just a bit of a lapse, that’s all. It happens at our age, Vera; we all have our little lapses.’

  But my Gran told him to stop being a patronising pillock. And Mr McGough was made up then because he knew that my Gran was all right again. Only my Gran wasn’t all right. Because when they got to Galashiels, my Gran went missing and they had to get the police. They found my Gran outside the gates of the local junior school, where she was stood crying and saying that she’d get the cane because she’d forgotten her homework.

  And after that it went from bad to worse, Mr McGough said. In the end, he decided the best thing was to bring my Gran back home and leave the rest of the Positive Pensioners to enjoy the remaining Scottish misery without them.

  My Mam went straight round to my Gran’s. But when she got there, my Gran seemed like she was just her normal self, complaining about being brought back from Scotland and saying Mr McGough was a mithering tit!

  My Mam was dead relieved. And because she didn’t want my Gran to be ill, she told herself it probably was Mr McGough making a lot of fuss over nowt. It was only as she was leaving my Gran’s that she saw the three tins of Pedigree Chum on the sideboard. And my Mam said, ‘What’s this, Mother? Whose is the dog food?’

  My Gran looked at it and frowned. ‘It’s not mine!’ she told my Mam.

  ‘Then whose is it?’ my Mam asked.

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ my Gran said. ‘It’s Rex’s.’

  The doctor said it was hard to say. He said you could never be sure. He said sometimes just a lack of oxygen could cause that sort of behaviour. Physically, he said, my Gran was doing very well for a woman of her years. And when he asked my Gran the questions, like what her name was, when she was born, what was the name of the present prime minister, my Gran just gave him a look and said if he wanted to sit there playing silly bugger quizmasters, he could at least ask her a few decent questions. The doctor smiled at that and said, ‘All right then, Vera … let’s see … right . . the chap who was in charge of public health at the time of the Crimean War …’

  ‘Aye aye,’ my Gran said, ‘that’s going back a bit, isn’t it?’

  ‘Come on,’ the doctor said, ‘you wanted a difficult question so I’m giving you one. What was his name and what was particularly noteworthy about him?’

  My Gran just glared at the doctor. Then she suddenly smiled and said, ‘Easy. J. M. Barry! Different spelling but same name as the little Scottish feller who wrote Peter Pan. And when he died, it was only then that they discovered that the J. M. Barry of the Crimea was really a woman who’d been passing herself off as a man.’

  The doctor was impressed. He smiled at my Mam and as he put his stethoscope away he sa
id, ‘Well, I can’t see there’s much wrong with a mind like that.’

  And as he was going, the doctor told my Mam, ‘She seems fine. Just keep an eye on her.’

  My Mam was overjoyed. And she said it was all a false alarm and probably it was just a lack of oxygen from being cooped up in that coach for a week. But my Mam’s relief was short-lived because on Sunday night my Uncle Jason and my Aunty Paula turned up at ours. I was trying to watch The Antiques Roadshow but I couldn’t hear anything because as soon as he walked in, my Uncle Bastard Jason started kicking off about my Gran. He said he’d been called out by the police who’d found my Gran stood outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken at six o’clock on a Sunday morning. And when they’d asked her what she was doing, my Gran had said, ‘Waiting for my finger-lickin’ chicken wings and my barrel of barbecued beans!’

  My Uncle Bastard Jason said him and my Aunty Paula had had to take my Gran back to theirs for the day and all their Sunday dinner had been disrupted because my Gran wouldn’t eat the sirloin of beef and kept asking what had happened to her barbecued beans and her finger-lickin’ chicken.

  My Uncle Jason told my Mam it couldn’t go on like this and they’d have to think about putting my Gran in a nursing home. But my Mam was horrified when she heard that.

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ she said. ‘There’s no need for that. It’s just a lack of oxygen. There’s nothing wrong with my mother’s mind. She’s just a bit confused at present, that’s all.’

  But my Uncle Jason started growling and said, ‘Yes and I’m bloody confused, Shelagh! I’m confused by your stubborn bloody refusal to accept what’s right in front of your nose. Whether you like it or not, the fact is that our mother is no longer all there. She was never fully there in the bloody first place if y’ ask me. But lately, she’s gone dafter than a day out in Blackpool! And something’s got to be done! It’s all right for you,’ he said, ‘living out here in Wythenshawe. But we’re on the bloody doorstep. We’re the ones who have to pick up the pieces.’