Maggie & Me

by Damian Barr

  In every episode Mr and Mrs Hart solve thefts and murders which Max pronounces ‘moy-duh’. Often the corpse or culprit is sniffed out by Freeway the dog. He’s called Freeway because the Harts rescued him from the roadside. I fantasise about finding a puppy beside the road that goes from Motherwell to Glasgow, where my dad took us to see the Christmas lights in George Square. ‘M8’ doesn’t sound quite as good. Anyway, the doctor says I’m allergic to cats and dogs.

  My wee mum is getting bigger like she’s been at the Tunnock’s. My dad kids on that he can’t lift her and she shoos him away.

  ‘Not long now, son,’ she says, patting her belly and looking at the pram.

  Our neighbours on one side are the Browns. Mr and Mrs Brown have had white hair for ever and a grown-up son called William with hair so thick and black you can’t see his scalp. I spend hours at my bedroom window staring down at the top of his head while he lies out on the one sunny day that year. All three of them go out to work every day. I never see them mow their lawn but it’s never any longer than my pinkie. A hedge of yellow roses grows round it and this summer I pushed my hand through the fence and nicked some to mix with water to make ‘perfume’. My mum said it smelled lovely.

  ‘Stunning whites.’ My mum envies Mrs Brown’s brand-new automatic washing machine. ‘Her twin-tub’s gone the journey,’ she says, crossing herself.

  On the other side are the Connors, all eight of them bursting out a three-bedroomed house the same as ours. ‘You’d think the Council would move them up,’ says my mum. She’d hate it if they flitted, no more mid-morning cuppa with Leena (‘only the priest calls me Coleen’).

  My dad would love them to be anywhere but next door. Leena and Gerry don’t work, they’re probably too busy looking after Bernadette, Mary, Brendan, Sean, Aileen and Danny. ‘Bloody Catholics,’ my dad says and his bloody Catholic wife jumps up to clout him. That’s his last word on religion.

  Danny is only about my age but Bernadette, the oldest, is already at Taylor High School. She’s got a turn in her eye so you never know where she’s looking. Our back garden has a green for drying washing and a pebble-dashed concrete shed same as everybody else’s in the Gas Scheme. Ardgour Place is part of the Gas Scheme, which means we’ve got central heating. We don’t have a chimney, not like the Coal Scheme where Granny Mac stays. She doesn’t trust gas, says it’s a dry heat and pats her chest.

  The Connors have paved their back garden and turned it into a zoo. They’ve not got dogs or cats. Everything is exotic. There is: a hutch full of wriggling biting ferrets which Brendan and Sean take out every Sunday after church to put down rabbit holes in the fields by the burn. A tame magpie called Maggie living in a big old wardrobe – if she likes you she lets you tickle her ear-tufts, if she doesn’t she’ll go for your eyes. Once she got out and dive-bombed Mrs Brown and her white hair was streaked red. That was the end of Maggie. ‘She flew away,’ said my mum, waving at the sky.

  The Connors’ shed has been extended into an aviary full of canaries which sing and sing till you think they’ll burst. They hop spastically from perch to perch stopping every now and then to peck tiny perfectly round golden seeds. Danny shows me how to carefully blow the husks off the top so they can get to the good stuff. I want my own canary more than anything in the world and I usually get what I want. ‘You’ll spoil the laddie,’ my dad warns, but he never says no. He bought me a rocking horse after he won on the Grand National. I plead and beg and they both make a show of saying no until one day Charlie appears in our living room in a golden cage all of his own. He’s made of sunshine and songs. At night we put a tea towel over him so he goes to sleep.

  Danny is a few months older than me and can do no wrong. He is my best friend in the whole world. His eyes are the green of the barley in the fields behind Granny Mac’s house before they cut it and burn the stumps. He’s magic with animals. He shows me not to be scared of the ferrets – to hold them tight to stop them biting. I let him play with my toys because his are all hand-me-downs and I don’t mind if he bashes up my Tonka, I don’t really bother with it anyway.

  We’ve not started primary school yet. When we do we’ll be separated. He’ll go to St Theresa’s, which is for the Catholics, and I’ll go across the road to the ‘non-denominational’ Keir Hardie Memorial Primary with everybody else. My dad’s Protestant and my mum’s Catholic. I am neither. Or both. I can’t work it out. For now we go to the same playschool every afternoon. In the Wendy house we act out bits from our favourite programmes – Hart to Hart, CHiPs and Battlestar Galactica. He never wants to be Mrs Hart but he does plant a kiss on my cheek at the end of every episode. I always start our games and I make sure it’s just us in the Wendy house.

  After playschool we all file out two-by-two holding hands to meet our mums at the gates where they wait smoking and gossiping. It’s 3 p.m. but it’s November so it’s already dark and cold. There’s Danny’s mum but where’s mine?

  ‘Don’t worry, son,’ says Leena, seeing panic skitter across my face. ‘Yer mammy’s all right. She’s in the hospital.’ Hospital! My lip starts to go. ‘She’s havin’ the wean! Yer wee sister! Yer daddy’s there an’ all! She went in this mornin’.’

  Leena puts her hand out and I notice her fingernails are chewed even shorter than my mum’s. Danny takes one hand and I take the other and we walk back to 25 Ardgour Place. Wee sister, eh?

  Danny and I sit end to end in our bath and we get away with splashing more than usual. Leena sits smoking on the toilet pan with the pink tasselled lid down flicking ash into the sink. Having only two weans to watch is a holiday for her – Gerry is next door with all the rest of hers. She jammies us up then makes us our tea . . . a treat I’ve dreamed of: Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle. We’re even allowed to rip open the sachets of soya sauce and squirt them in ourselves. Just when we think it can’t get any better we’re told we’re allowed to stay up because it’s a Special Night.

  Hart to Hart flies by and we all guess who did it. Then it’s the News.

  ‘Poor bastards,’ says Leena, shaking her head. Danny doesn’t flinch at the bad word and neither does she. ‘Ah know they’re English but . . .’

  Gerry and Leena shout at each other all the time, we hear them through the walls, but ‘bastard’ has never been used in this house, not that I’ve heard. ‘Let the poor bastards make a livin’. Under the ground, who wants to go under the ground every day? She’ll no rest till they’ve no jobs, not wan. No wonder they’re gonnae strike.’

  Danny and I sip hot sweet tea and wish for the News to finish.

  ‘Fuckin’ witch! God forgive me, but ah hope she burns in hell, so she does.’

  She doesn’t look too scary, this blonde smiling woman they all hate. Whenever she comes on my dad turns it over: ‘No coal, no steel, son. No coal, no steel.’

  Next it’s a programme I’m not even allowed to watch with my mum. It’s eight o’clock – maybe even nine! The music for Tales of the Unexpected sounds like an ice-cream van slowed right down. It makes me feel funny. Skulls and puppets and playing cards birl round and round. It’s like when my mum took me on the waltzers at the shows spinning round and round and the goldfish I won flew out the plastic bag of water and we had to watch it flipping slower and slower as we went round and round faster and faster. It stopped before we did. Once I sneaked out of bed and sat halfway down the stairs and watched this programme start through a crack in the living-room door before my dad caught me and carried me up. Now I am sitting in the living room watching it. If this is what happens when my mum has a baby I want a family as big as Danny’s.

  Flashes of lightning split the sky revealing a graveyard. The camera pans down across a headstone then goes below the ground through soil and tree roots then down into a coffin. Is there a body? A skeleton? Danny and I watch through our fingers pretending to be more scared than we are. Light flashes inside the coffin as a match is struck and I wonder why a dead person would smoke. It’s a young blonde girl. Her face fills the t
elly as she realises where she is. The walls of the coffin are glass and she can see through them and she screams! And we scream too! And Leena decides ‘Enough is enough’ and leads us up to bed so we leave the girl in the glass coffin for ever.

  I am in my Battle of the Planets pants and Danny is in his Buck Rogers pants. We’re both in white vests, simmets, my dad calls them.

  ‘Don’t be telling yer mother I let yous watch that,’ says Leena, tucking us in. She bribes us with a bag of salt and vinegar crisps from behind her back. ‘Share nice,’ she says, clicking off the light and heading back to the telly.

  Danny pops the bag and we take turns tingling a crisp on our tongues. The Gas Scheme heating is on but I kid on I’m cold and snuggle in to Danny who puts his arm round me. Something hard pokes me. My pants start to feel tight so I slide them off, kicking them down my legs and over my toes. Danny does the same. The bed squeaks. I roll over to face him. This feels much warmer. We rub against each other, ignoring the crisp crumbs crunching under our legs. Danny rolls on top of me and we keep rubbing. This is new and good and we’re out of breath but giggling. I pop another crisp in my mouth.

  On snaps the light!

  The squeaking and giggling have given us away. Leena starts to say something and I sit up knowing I’ve done something wrong. But what? I try saying sorry but I can’t. I’m scared but it’s not that stopping me. It’s the crisp. The salt and vinegar crisp that is completely blocking my gullet. Jumping on the bed, totally pant-less, I tilt my head back and point at my mouth like a mad mime. My eyes are popping as I jump up and down.

  Scared and trampled, Danny shouts, ‘FUCK!’

  Leena’s face goes from angry to annoyed to afraid in a second as she pounces forward and picks me up. With one hand she crushes me to her chest – flat like my mum’s – prising my mouth open with the other.

  ‘Hold still,’ she says.

  I wriggle like a ferret. The crisp will not go down. I cannot cough it up. My eyes widen as she pushes her fingers in my mouth. ‘CRK!’ echoes in my head as she pokes through. Air whooshes into me. Carefully she lays me back on the bed.

  Danny is already pretending he wasn’t crying. Without being asked, we both put our pants back on (me in his, him in mine). Leena takes us back downstairs where she can watch us and the telly. The News is on again and it’s the strikes and riots down south again. We take an armpit each.

  ‘The pair of yous,’ says Leena, looking down at us anxiously but not unkindly. ‘Ah don’t know. Yees are murder.’

  ‘You mean moy-duh,’ I say.

  And we all laugh together like the Harts.

  In the morning I wake late and Danny’s already up cos the bed is empty. It really is a bit cold now so I jammy up and head downstairs. The clock says it’s past lunchtime. Leena is drinking tea in the scullery with my dad who is usually sleeping or at work now.

  ‘Where’s ma mum?’ I ask, looking round like she might be in one of the cupboards.

  ‘Shhh, she’s in bed, son,’ says Leena, winking, and we wordlessly turn all of last night into a secret.

  My dad picks me up and carries me over to the pram and we look down into it. There’s a funny kind of basket in there and inside that there’s a tiny bundle of pink wool with a face and masses of curly white-blonde hair.

  ‘That’s yer wee sister,’ he says. ‘Christine.’

  ‘She’s teenie!’ I say, amazed by her smallness. And I love her.

  Chapter 2

  ‘The future requires that industry adapt to produce goods that will sell in tomorrow’s world. Older industries that can’t change must be slimmed down . . .’

  Margaret Thatcher, Airey Neave Memorial Lecture, 3 March 1980

  Fires burn beneath my feet. I’ve been warned that hell-red flames flicker and dance deep below the Bing and they’ll eat up wee boys who don’t do as they’re told and stay away. I play here anyway, we all do. Wheezing from running I lie down on the smooth shiny coal dust that glitters impossibly black and press my face against the warmth I imagine down there. Certainly my face will be warm later when I’m trying to explain away my dirty clothes.

  The Bing is a man-made wasteland of black slag heaps about two square miles. It takes me a good ten minutes to run here full sprint, the ground underfoot changing from the grey concrete slabs of Ardgour Place to football-scuffed playing fields to sparkling blackness. Teenie is a toddler now and follows me everywhere but I make sure the back gate’s locked so she can’t follow me down.

  The Bing forms a barrier between Newarthill and the neighbouring village of New Stevenson where Granny and Granpa Barr live with their fat white cat Snowy. My mum says we don’t visit them any more because when my dad wheeled the pram down to show me off Snowy fell asleep on my face and when my mum grabbed it by the tail and swung it over her head it was the cat they were upset about.

  The Bing is mountains of sparkling black diamonds. No trees can take root on its loosely packed slopes which suddenly give way to cake-slice cliffs. Here and there a bright pink spire of rosebay willowherb flashes a warning. In the middle of it all there’s a crater that’s filled with rain over the years and become a great big pond burping with frogs.

  Danny’s never said anything about that night when Teenie was born and neither have I but I’ve not forgot. I wonder if he has. Every day we run down to the Bing as soon as our school bells ring at 3 p.m. We’re still in our uniforms – mine the burgundy and sky-blue of Keir Hardie Memorial Primary School, his the dour brown of St Theresa’s Primary School. In summer the sun never really sets here – you’re further north than you think. There’s always a patch of snow-wash denim blue in the indigo of the night. We know the Soviets are pointing nuclear missiles at us because Glasgow, as Mr Baker points out on the multicoloured globe one day, is on the same latitude as Moscow. The bell rings and we all imagine it’s the two-minute warning. What will we do? Maggie’s parked her nuclear submarines in a loch somewhere and there’s more marches on the News, angry women chained to fences. Will she have time to fire back? It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s the Argies, not the Russians we’re fighting

  Last week the whole school, except Primary One, had an emergency assembly and Miss Carey the headmistress told us calmly that we were at war with Argentina and even I didn’t know where it was until she showed us on the globe. The teachers standing behind her looked bored.

  I hope the war doesn’t come here because I don’t want my dad to have to be a soldier. We watch the BBC News at One and it’s all Union Jacks and boats and planes. Two teachers point and laugh when they show Maggie wearing a headscarf driving a tank but I think she looks good, brave, glamorous even. She’ll show them!

  Days last for ever. There are no adults to stop us doing whatever we want – so long as we’re back home for our tea they’re not worried. Me and Danny and his gang spend whole summers at the Bing. What do we do? How do we fill all that time? We make our own fun!

  For starters, we play frog tennis. This is exactly what it sounds like . . . you kick your Adidas Gazelles off, roll your trouser legs up and squelch into the slippery slimy edges of the water, trying not to make a face as the cold mud pushes between your toes because you’ll get called a poof if you do. You stand very still till the beautiful golden-eyed frogs forget you’re there and one swims close enough to catch. The frog is the ball. Its arms and legs splay as you throw it in the air, the sun shining through its webbed feet, before you smash it with your bat. What’s left arcs towards your opponent who leaps like he’s on Centre Court. The first time I hit a frog hard enough for it not just to die but explode in death, covering me in guts and gore and guilt, is the last time I play that game. You didn’t really understand, I tell myself. I feel ashamed. The other boys play round after round, even Danny.

  Danny’s friends don’t like me like he does, they don’t really like me at all – they only put up with me because of him. I’m acceptable by association. I know that but I’m not bothered enough to make other friends. They a
ll think they know something about me but they’d never suspect Danny. He’s the golden-haired hero boy who can run and jump and punch all at once like the Karate Kid. He always defends me and only ever calls me ‘Barr’ to toughen me up. As usual, everybody copies him. I have to run faster, jump higher and punch harder to prove I’m one of them – and I desperately want to be one of them – and when I fall, as I usually do, this only confirms their suspicions and makes them hate me more. I am too different – too tall, my school trousers are sneaking so far up my shins my new nickname is ‘Half-mast’. I’m too skinny, too clever . . . too Protestant. ‘Proddy Dogs eat the frogs on a Sunday morning,’ they all sing to a cheery tune.

  One Saturday they’re cheering cos Celtic has won, the team of all Catholics in the West of Scotland, the Pope’s own players. They wave the green, white and gold of the Irish flag. They’ve beaten Rangers, the team that’s supposed to be mine because I might as well be a Proddy: Rangers, the red, white and blue of the Union Jack – the Queen’s own boys. Some Catholics paint gold-and-white stripes on their lawn to make the Irish flag. Proddies retaliate by painting the kerbs red, white and blue.

  Danny jumps about chanting ‘FTQ! FUCK THE QUEEN! FTQ! FUCK THE QUEEN!’

  I hate feeling left out but don’t know the words to join in. My mum told me to say ‘I support my legs and my legs support me’ when asked what team I support. This lameness guarantees you’ll get beaten up so I usually try one or the other depending if the boys asking look Catholic or not. So what are Proddy Dogs supposed to bark?

  ‘FTP!’ I burst, remembering to punch the air. ‘Fuck the Pope!’