All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Answer: someone who’d rather be further advancing his attempted symbiosis with a leather armchair while watching endless repeats of Celtic games on satellite pay-per-view.

  She toured the store methodically, threading her trolley along every aisle apart from the pet-food section, briefly skirting the alcohol selection last, to pick up more cans of Export for Tom. The shelves of wine bottles glinted colourfully as she passed them, but, as ever, she wasn’t tempted to lift any. She also felt a little intimidated by the vastness of the selection, reckoning you really needed to know what you were doing when it came to that sort of thing. She didn’t drink wine. She’d had the odd glass of fizzy stuff, but it gave her a headache, and on the very rare occasion they’d been out for a meal, Tom just drank beer with his food. She remembered he had once or twice (more probably once) opted for sharing a jug of sangria with dinner when they were on holiday in Spain with the kids, but she wasn’t sure whether that counted. It had tasted like medicine.

  Her friend Catherine drank wine. She’d often have a glass or two, sometimes more, when they met up for lunch. Jane never quite caught what she was ordering, unless it was Chardonnay; she’d heard that mentioned enough to remember, and had even tried some once. It tasted worse than medicine. She knew you had to ‘train your palate’ to appreciate it, but couldn’t imagine herself doing so. Catherine only ordered Chardonnay occasionally, so most of the time what she asked for sounded like some arcane code, worse than when Ross started to talk technical. Every so often she would urge Jane to have a glass, but as they usually met for lunch in Bothwell, where Catherine lived, Jane would have to drive afterwards. She liked the idea of drinking wine, but it was the same as she liked the idea of learning to play piano. She suspected it was a bit late to start, and besides, you’d need to go to night school or something to learn your way around all those bottles.

  Jane headed for the checkouts, habitually scanning along the row. It wasn’t busy, but she’d have to own up to queue length not being the only criterion for her choice of conveyor belt. Embarrassing as it was to admit, she preferred not to be served by a certain cheerful elderly lady, identified as ‘Margaret’ on her name badge. Margaret was pleasantly chatty and entirely efficient, and had done nothing to Jane that any rational person could complain about, but had nonetheless meted out the greatest offence in a passing remark, all the more wounding for it being an inescapable truth.

  Jane had often been at the supermarket in charge of one or both of Michelle’s kids, for whom Margaret always had a smile and a wave; and when Jane was there on her own, the sight of a few bags of chocolate buttons on the conveyor belt would prompt an affectionate enquiry after the wee ones. It was on one of the latter such occasions that Margaret committed her great oblivious sin, in response to Jane’s relating her recent success in getting the weans to take a nap one afternoon while she got on with the ironing.

  ‘Aye, us grannies ken the score,’ she had said.

  Jane could still feel that moment, the sensation of paralysis as disbelief and denial crumbled, leaving a shattering revelation amid the broken shards of the illusion with which she’d been deceiving herself. All right, maybe that was laying it on a bit, but she’d never experienced such a sense of life having ambushed her since the first time she found out she was pregnant.

  Us grannies. She and Margaret, this white-haired and bird-like woman with false teeth and wrinkled fingers, who was old enough to be Jane’s mother. It was intended as a show of solidarity, even sorority, but in that moment Margaret had held up a mirror and let Jane see how the world saw her. In that mirror, she looked like Margaret. Us grannies ken the score.

  Jane had technically become a generation older the moment her first grandchild was born, three years ago, but Margaret’s remark was the moment when she belatedly felt it. At the time of Rachel’s birth it hadn’t meant anything: she knew she hadn’t got any older and it was still the same face in the mirror. Her thoughts had only been of joy at the sight of her granddaughter, tinged admittedly with a few concerns about Michelle, only twenty-two and following in the missteps of her mother, who’d found herself in the same position at nineteen.

  She was forty-six now, forty-three when Rachel was born. There’d been lots of jokes about her being a granny and applying for her bus pass, but she’d happily laughed it all off because she still considered herself young. Being a grandmother at forty-three didn’t change the fact that she was forty-three, any more than it had altered the status of her school friend Jennifer when she became an auntie at the age of nine. Forty-three was still young. Forty-six was still young. You’re only as old as you feel, ran the cliché. She’d known people who’d been in their fifties since they were adolescents – she had in fact been foolish enough to marry one. Age was merely chronology. She knew what being young meant. It meant that life still had plenty in store for you; maybe even that it still had more in store for you than you’d already experienced. It meant there was still time to do all those things, whatever all those things might be.

  Margaret’s remark hit her so hard because it forced her to realise that by this, her own definition, she was no longer young, nor had she been for some time. She felt pulled forward in some temporal vortex, at the end of which she was sitting there, white-haired, bird-like, with false teeth and wrinkled fingers, never having done any of those things. There was no time, and life had little in store but more of the same. Suddenly she was in the third act, the beginning of the end. Us grannies ken the score: we’ve had our whack. This is it.

  When Jane was a girl, it felt like the greatest treat when there was a James Bond film on TV on a Sunday night, an epic adventure that made school the next day seem a long way off. The Sixties ones were best, with Connery, but even OHMSS was a fantastic escape. It didn’t matter about Lazenby because, unlike her brothers, she wasn’t watching them for James Bond. She was watching them because they were like a two-and-a-half-hour holiday, a tour of enticing locations and a vicarious glimpse of a lifestyle that was a world apart. Scuba-diving in the tropics, skiing in Switzerland, chateaus, mansions and hotels. One day, Jane Bell had always dreamed, she would go to a casino on the French Riviera, dressed in something you’d get lifted for in Glasgow, and she’d arrive there in a convertible classic sports car. It wasn’t a yearning for riches, for money (although, as her mother used to say, it came in handy when you were paying for the messages); it was a yearning to prove she could be that woman, who could wear that dress, drive that car and walk into that casino. And Jane Bell could have been that woman, she was sure, but she wasn’t Jane Bell any more. She had become Jane Fleming, and Jane Fleming ken’t the score.

  Jane got pregnant when she was nineteen. She’d wanted a lot more from life than even her Riviera fantasies before that happened. It was just before the third-term exams in her first year at Glasgow Tech, two generations and a lifetime ago. She was studying engineering, one of very few females doing so at the time, but having grown up in a house with three older brothers, she was used to the ratio and all that went with it. They were exciting days, and not just for the usual reasons of adolescent liberation. The cultural insurgence that was Punk was well under way, and with it a sense that nothing couldn’t be changed; everything was finally up for grabs in an ailing and long-stagnant society. The meek acceptance that everything was in the clutches of an older generation and a higher caste was being noisily trashed. That’s what the purple Roneo-copied fanzines said, anyway. Almost everyone she knew was ‘starting a band’, even if for many the declaration of intent was as important a statement as any music they may or may not ever get around to playing.

  Jane wasn’t much of a rebel. She got on well with her parents, for a start. They were kind to her and she liked to please them in return, liked to see them happy with her, their one little girl after three rowdy boys. She liked pleasing them as she liked pleasing people in general, hideously uncool as that was to admit. She’d been brought up to endeavour to do what was right, whether that be work
ing hard at school to get good results or going the messages for old Mrs Dolan next door. John Lydon would have had her ceremonially thrown out of that SPOTS gig if he’d had any idea of what was in his midst. Jane wasn’t out to change the underlying social order. She was just intoxicated by the energy of it all, of youth fearless and unfettered. She cropped her hair short and dyed it blue. She mutilated this old red tartan frock of her auntie’s to make a two-part tabard and mini-skirt affair. The top half was barely held together down the sides by safety pins and hairy string, while the bottom provided minimal cover but maximum contrast against her preferred Day-Glo green tights. She still had a photo somewhere. She looked shocking, awful, ghastly. But in a truly magnificent way.

  There was a comic song around that time, the B-side of Andy Cameron’s doom-tempting World Cup single, called I Want to Be a Punk Rocker but Ma Mammy Wullnae Let Me. Jane guessed that could well have been her, had it not been that her mammy did let her. Her mum had already been through a few pointless losing battles with her eldest brother, Billy, over long hair, a skinhead, long hair again, flares, platforms and Slade gigs. If Jane had stopped going the messages for Mrs Dolan or tidying her bedroom of a Saturday morning, that would have caused more censure and concern. She feared she was, in the words of another song of the time, a part-time punk, but in that she was hardly alone. It being Glasgow, a familiar cry around the family hearth of a Saturday afternoon would have been: ‘Haw Maw, gaunny iron ma bondage troosers fur the night, pleeeease.’ It wasn’t about changing the world; it was about being nineteen.

  She called herself Blue Bell, in reference to her hair. She and her pals all had these punk names for themselves. Suzi Spiteful, Tina Toxic, Corpse-Boy, Venom, Bloodclot. She remembered two old punters behind them on a bus into town one night, listening with growing amusement at their names. ‘Whaur’s Biffo?’ one asked the other. ‘Is that Biffo next tae Korky and Gnasher?’

  She saw The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, and of course SPOTS – Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly – this last via a very drunken six-hour transit-van trip to Middlesbrough. Casinos and sports cars weren’t high on her wish list at that time, any more than a newbuild in EK with a husband and a baby. But guess what?

  For someone with dreams of distinguishing herself, of living a life that was remarkable, was there any greater failure, anything more embarrassing, then ending up a cliché? There were various ways of relating the tale, slants and spins that could be put upon the details, but the most important facts didn’t change: she got pregnant, had to drop out of college and was railroaded by her circumstances into marrying the guy. The only way she could have topped that would have been if the fateful encounter had been her first time, but it wasn’t. It was just her first time with Tom and her first time without a condom.

  Tom was a friend of her brother Steven, who knew him from the College of Building and Printing. He was twenty-one but seemed older, certainly more mature. He’d gone to college at seventeen so by twenty-one had graduated and was working in his first job as a surveyor. He had disposable income and his own car, which would have made him an attractive prospect even if he wasn’t good-looking, but he was, albeit in a rather serious way.

  He wasn’t a punk (a real waste given that Flem was a readymade nickname), but he did seem to like the music and could afford to buy more of the records than Jane or her crowd. He came along to a few gigs and discos, dressed in drainpipes and a leather jacket, but could hardly go the full bhoona, with hair and piercings, he explained, because he still had to turn up to places in a suit on Monday morning. Jane suspected Tom would never have been going the full bhoona anyway, but didn’t particularly mind. Going out with him, she felt she was getting the best of both worlds. She had her punk pals to be daft, outrageous and generally irresponsible with, and, on the other hand, she had a sensible and mature boyfriend, with prospects and money in his pocket, who made her feel grown up in a way every young woman enjoyed. His serious side was a welcome contrast with her other crowd, and it actually felt quite flattering that someone like that didn’t see her as a silly wee lassie. What he did see, she wasn’t so sure of, but she didn’t give it much thought. At that age, you don’t ask these things of yourself. You just go out until it stops being fun. When you’re truly young, you feel like the present is forever. That’s why you don’t see the future careering towards you like a runaway eighteen-wheeler.

  Before going out with Tom, Jane had sex with two boyfriends plus two one-night stands, both times drunken ‘friend-sex’ encounters with guys in the punk crowd. The punk scene had been derided as sexless and John Lydon’s withering remark about ‘two minutes of squelching noises’ was often quoted in support, but only, Jane suspected, by green-eyed chroniclers on the outside looking in. Sexless? Take adolescents in ripped clothes, add music and liberal doses of cheap alcohol. What do you think you’re going to get? The tabloid reporters with their hackneyed seaside-postcard idea of what constituted sexy couldn’t get their heads around the fact that they weren’t dressing to attract the opposite sex. They were – girls and guys – dressing to express themselves, and as far as she was concerned, nothing was sexier than that.

  Sex at that age felt like another youthful freedom, another new area for exploration, for expression, for fun. Meaningless? Maybe. Serious? Never. Then along came Tom and it suddenly became a psychological minefield, each minor advance in how far she could tempt him to go followed by a ghastly spectacle of guilt and self-recrimination.

  Jane’s family were nominal Prods but actually not religious. Perhaps if they had been, she’d have known a little better what she was dealing with, before Catholicism notched up another pyrrhic victory by punishing ordinary human behaviour.

  Tom wouldn’t accede to her request, even couched in his own words, to wear a condom ‘in case things go too far’. His otherwise cautious and sensible rationality was obliterated by a combination of primitive superstition and plain old denial. The logic ran thus: the big beardy punter in the sky forbade contraception, and wearing a johnny ‘just in case’ would only make going too far that bit easier. This part she couldn’t argue with; indeed was counting on to get him past this stupidity. His counter-logic, however, was that not wearing a condom would therefore constitute an insurmountable deterrent.

  In the words of the wee schoolboy, upon being told by his teacher that there was no example in the English language of a double positive expressing a negative, ‘Aye, right.’ When religion attempted to play the immovable object to human sexuality’s unstoppable force, there could only ever be one result.

  The A word loomed large in her head, filed under Easy Way Out. Toxic Tina’s older sister had had one. She could get it done before anyone found out. But ‘before anyone found out’ was always going to be a short window of opportunity, and it proved not to be one she was decisive enough to take. The catch-22 was that aborting was something she could only go through with before anyone close to her found out, but she couldn’t go through with it before talking to someone close to her. She wasn’t the most politicised student, but she knew where she stood on a woman’s right to choose: she’d signed the petitions, been to the meetings, worn the badge, and she’d do the same today. But at that most lonely and vulnerable time, her squeamishness at the thought of something growing inside her was topped only by her squeamishness at the thought of somebody taking it out.

  Her parents were as supportive as she could have possibly hoped, and in that respect she knew she’d been extremely fortunate. Matters were discussed openly and pragmatically, but she still got the sense that summit meetings had been taking place above her head. Marriage, therefore, was more arrived at by consent than proposed. There was no going down on one knee and, then at least, no ring. Tom offered because he was dutiful, responsible and caring, and because he believed it was the right thing to do. There was also the fact that his parents would rather see him burned at the stake than be father to an illegitimate child – and a Proddy one at that – but her own mum and dad
made it clear to all that it would be Jane’s decision and hers alone.

  She was so, so young. Marriage was for proper grown-ups, not kids like her. But then so was motherhood. Tom was decent, attractive, had a good job, money in the bank and she knew he’d look after her. What more could she ask for, in her circumstances? It wasn’t how she’d pictured this moment in her life, but it wasn’t the end of the world; just the end of a world and the beginning of a new one.

  Fast-forward three years and it was a far better world than she could have imagined. She had two lovely children, Ross then Michelle, fourteen months apart (she had her tubes tied after the latter given that Tom still wouldn’t countenance any form of birth control), a nice house, holidays abroad, even her own car, Tom’s promotion earning him a company one. A glimpse at how her old pals were doing showed her where she could have been had she finished her studies, and it looked like she had been the one who struck it lucky. It was the early Eighties, Thatcher was in power, nobody had a job and everyone was skint, still living like students in bedsits or in many cases back with their folks.

  On the whole, she knew she had it good; but though she had few complaints, that didn’t mean she was without regrets. There wasn’t much prospect of a career, for one. Even once the kids were both school-age, the hours between dropping them off and picking them up were rapidly filled with shopping, cleaning, ironing and cooking, leaving no scope for anything other than part-time work. It was something she accepted, but never entirely made her peace with. She enjoyed being a mum and she loved her kids, but from time to time felt this guilty admission that she still wanted something more. Not something else, just something more. Was that such a heresy, to admit that your love for your family wasn’t sufficiently all-consuming as to extinguish all other desires? Did it mean she wasn’t cut out for this? And did any other mothers feel this way too? None that were owning up to it, but that didn’t mean she was alone.