Maggie & Me

by Damian Barr

  ‘C’mon, time for dinner,’ announces Miss Kane.

  We pile into two taxis and head for Brighton where we’re promised whatever we want. This will take my restaurant meals to ten and I can still taste each one course by course. It’s been a long day and it’s getting dark but we’re determined. Up ahead Brighton Pier flashes out of the night, plunging straight out to sea. It’s a long finger dripping with diamond rings beckoning us in. A brightly lit merry-go-round spins twin-tub fast. I realise I’ve seen it before – there’s a poster of it in Miss Campbell’s guidance room. Our taxi driver doesn’t notice any of this and stops at a red light. Not one of his passengers has eyes for the road. As the light turns amber I spot a nightclub called Revenge. The queue to get in is all young guys and some of them are holding hands. They’re not scared-looking or even acting ashamed. I worry for them. Amber goes to green and I stare at them through the rear window as we jerk forwards. I feel myself blushing and blinking.

  We take the biggest table at the Chicago Rib Shack and I confidently order sticky ribs followed by Mississippi Mud Pie. We’re each allowed a shandy. I panic when the bill comes in case I have to pay in 50ps and what if I’ve not got enough but Miss Kane pays.

  The quarter final is the next day at the Brighton Centre. It’s big and grey and ugly like the uni and sits right on the seafront like some huge experimental seashell. This is where Maggie gave her ‘I will survive’ speech the day after the IRA bombing. I’ll be sitting where she stood.

  We queue with all the English schools and everybody sounds like Grange Hill or The Famous Five. Heather is checking out the competition. I’m busy scanning for obvious homos but what would I do if I found one? All I can think about is Revenge.

  Our match is up first and we’re against the other Scottish teams: The Borders, East Lothian, West Lothian and the Highlands. ‘Tcheuchters,’ Mrs D mutters, happy not to be in the minority for once.

  The winning team – us – will go on to the semis and ultimate glory. A rumour sweeps the hall that a celebrity will present the prizes. This breaks down the barriers between schools and we rush from one team to the next: ‘Her from Blue Peter’, ‘The guy from Knight Rider’, ‘Roland Rat’, ‘The Governor of the Bank of England’, ‘Madonna!’ and finally ‘Maggie Thatcher’. All seem possible.

  The buzzers connect to a flashing scoreboard. The quiz master is a local DJ doing his best Bruno Brookes impression. Maybe it is Bruno Brookes. Everybody and their responsible adults crowd into the cavernous hall to gauge the questions and the competition. Miss Kane, Mrs D and P-P-Peter beam from VIP front-row seats. I think I see the man from the train station three rows behind and I smile. A stranger stares back.

  ‘An appropriate question,’ says the DJ, shuffling his cards and grinning plastically. ‘In what year was the Act of –’ BUZZ! and East Lothian lights up.

  ‘The Act of Union was 1707,’ sing-songs their captain, her Edinburgh accent as foreign as any English.

  The first round is all about Scotland and we’re clearly not patriotic enough. I curse our curriculum for including only English history. My knowledge of Scottish monarchs is limited to a rhyme Teenie taught me: ‘Mary, Queen of Scots got her head chopped OFF’ and on the ‘OFF’ you decapitate a dandelion with a flick of your thumb.

  At the end of Round 1 we’ve yet to score. ‘Plenty of time,’ says the DJ. Heather flinches. Maybe our buzzer isn’t working? Four rounds flash by and the only one we get is ‘negative equity’.

  ‘And in last place it’s Brannock High School,’ says the DJ, with a final shuffle of his cards.

  ‘We are the champions!’ sings bisexual Freddie Mercury over the loud-speakers. I try not to look bitter. I never lose and what I’m really losing is Brighton – the final is tomorrow and now we’ve got no reason to stay. We’ve only got accommodation so long as we’re in the competition. Heather nudges me into sporting applause. We won’t be meeting any celebrities. I will never get Revenge. As we trudge off we’re handed an envelope, probably our train tickets. I open it and out falls a Virgin voucher for £50, more than I’ve ever had. I feel a bit Wonka. Straight away I know what I want.

  After a sombre lunch of fish and chips on the pebbly beach we go to the Virgin Megastore. We snigger at the name. Heather is studying the cassette singles when I point to the videos. My mum doesn’t like me watching Channel 4 after that time she turned on My Beautiful Laundrette and we both had to sit there because if one of us turned it over it meant acknowledging something. I sneak bits late at night with the volume right down, and watch all of The Lost Language of the Cranes in near silence. Virgin has a section with a big GAY sign but I can’t go there. I rush straight past to the books. Heather knows what I’m after and finds them first. I hover, afraid to place a hand on the glaring cover. ‘Go on,’ she nods. I pick it up and nothing happens. I grab the next one and the one after that until I’ve got them all. We’d tried to get them out of the library but it didn’t stock them, wouldn’t. Heather pushes me towards the cashier, a girl, thank God. I blush as I hand her the vouchers. Do I want a carrier bag? Yes, thank you. I linger but all she says is ‘Next’ so we rush off giggling and join the others heading for the train station.

  ‘What did you get?’ asks Miss Kane, eyeing my bag.

  ‘Oh, it’s a present for me,’ lies Heather and I take her hand and we smile at each other and can’t wait to read Tales of the City.

  Chapter 13

  ‘You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.’

  Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years

  The second time I try to kill a man I’m fourteen. Killing a man seems a very grown-up thing to do – like writing in biro. That night I stand outside myself watching myself doing the thing I always knew I was going to have to do. There are no surprises. Not yet. It’s OK, I think, I can square it with the police and other authorities. There’s no greater authority in the land than the Prime Minister and I can make Maggie understand. She knows the value of education and I’m a Grade A student who has never been in trouble before. I’m a Young Consumer.

  It’s after midnight on a Wednesday night and as usual everybody’s out cold: sleeping where they fell. All the lights are blazing and the cassette is straining on its spool as I pick my way among them, a scavenger on a battlefield. Some change has fallen from Uncle Joe’s pocket but I know he counts every penny so it’s not worth stealing. Big Letty has gone back next door, keeping up appearances. Nobody moves. Only my mum has made it up to bed. Yes, Wednesday is definitely the best night for this job.

  I’ve dialled 999 more times than I can count for the police to come and break up fights between men and women who five minutes ago were best pals, more maybe. Sometimes they send a fire engine as well and our neighbours stand on their front step tutting as the blue lights dance across their faces. The police know us now and greet me by name.

  Handcuffs are to Dodger what my dad’s watch is to him. Even so, my mum says she loves him. ‘Dodger’s not a bad man,’ she says. But he does bad things. He doesn’t work, he’s never sober and he never knows when to shut up so he’s always fighting someone, usually my mum. They spin together, a mess of limbs, kicking and biting and scratching and swearing and it’s all OK the next day, only it’s not. ‘His daddy was a drinker,’ says my mum, like she never touches the stuff. ‘And his mammy too.’ One night Dodger and his brother and his daddy and his mammy went beyond their usual beyond. ‘She went to poke the fire and fell in,’ says my mum, raising her hands. ‘Puff, her nightie went up! That was that.’

  This, I think, would stop me drinking. Not Dodger. He’s not stopped since. His own worst enemy. Mine too. If I can just get rid of him, I think, the parties will end and my mum will stop drinking and things will get better. Our house will be quiet, normal, safe.

  I tell myself I’m doing the right thing as I slip out of bed. Outside the fug of my covers it’s cold because, as usual, there’s no money for the gas meter. The other single bed lies empty, ac
cusing me of selfishness, but I don’t care – I need my space. One by one I pull back the three nails clawed over my door before slipping back the bolt I bought myself from B&Q. This is the oldest door in the house – the only one to survive since it was built, solidly, for coal miners. When we had miners. The other doors are flimsy and most have been kicked or punched in, their cardboard honeycomb hearts on show. Not my door, not my room.

  Standing on the landing, I crack the door to my mum’s room. In the only double bed in the house she lies alone – her tiny body barely interrupting the blankets, her small silhouette just visible in the dirty orange light shining through her curtains from the streetlamp outside. My mum, struck by White Lightning, totally unconscious but thankfully not naked. Her eyes, that high unhealthy watery blue of one who nearly died, screwed shut beneath thin almost see-through lids. Her tiny fists, nails chewed to nothing but still painted bright red, balled up like a baby’s. A martyr to ‘her nerves’. She’s no danger, I think as I close the door, to anybody but herself.

  Across the landing in the last of the three bedrooms Teenie has rolled into a corner facing the wall, her unbrushed blonde hair covering her face. She’s nearly as tall as me now, captains the netball team. ‘You read enough for the two of us,’ she says when she gets her report card, the lone A for PE. She wants to join the Army when she grows up. I’ve lost track of who’s got custody of Billy but he’s at Logan’s tonight. Next to Teenie snores Tricia who’s only ten but wearing a bra in her sleep. In the other single bed sleeps her older brother, Shawn, and their younger brother Aidan. They’re always being suspended and will soon be expelled. The air is sweet with dried piss from rubber sheets. If they wake I’ll hear their sheets squeak. I will make quiet work.

  I pad downstairs. There’s no need for me to creep quite so theatrically but that’s what they do on telly and that’s how I imagine Lady Macbeth did her deed. So I creep, brushing my hands along the spiky Artex walls. I remember the one and only time my dad came to the house and caught Dodger laying into my mum and pulled him off then picked him up and smashed his face into the Artex wall, grating it like cheese. He’s collected us from the bottom of the street ever since, when he turns up.

  There are fifteen stairs. Each one seems to move below my bare feet but that’s only the carpet slipping because my mum laid it herself. With my other hand I grip the banister to be sure I don’t fall and wake anyone.

  My room key is balled in one hand the way I sometimes hold my balls. Comforting. Slowly I ease the living-room door open.

  Most of one whole wall is window but the Venetian blinds are drawn. Our house is the only one on the street to sport this seventies fashion and it embarrasses me that people walking by can tell we’re poor just by looking. Even old Mrs Buchan across the road has fancy ruched Austrian blinds. Not us. The dirty heavy Venetians, once white but now smoked the yellow of dirty teeth, are staying put – this way the party can go on all day and night without the neighbours seeing in. Of course, they can hear everything. My mum is unashamed – doesn’t give a fuck what they think, she says. There’s only one person she cares about. Granny Mac often does the rounds of her brood scattered in the surrounding streets. Walking past 15 Rannoch Avenue she can hear evil but there’s no need for her to speak of it so long as she doesn’t see it. The Venetians are like the curtains at confession. I am glad of them tonight.

  Here and there, the surprisingly sharp metal shafts are bent where somebody’s fallen into them and tried to grab on. ‘Fucking red hand of INLA,’ Dodger calls it. The same dirty orange light seeps its way in from outside (a sodium light, I learned in chemistry).

  Joe’s chunky bulk eats the length of the couch, rising and falling as he snores. I know he’s naked beneath the blanket because his Y-fronts are on the floor. For a second I think about peeking but resist because if he wakes and sees me standing over him the whole house will be up and I’ll get a kicking and then everybody will know for sure what they think they know already.

  As if he’s been dropped from above, Dodger sprawls in the armchair in the corner facing the telly. The national anthem has long since finished and the Union Jack has flickered away. I’d not seen an actual Union Jack until I went to Brighton. Red, white and blue. The telly whines like a dog waiting to be let out. I click it off. Dodger is wearing snow-wash denim jeans frayed round the ankles and a white T-shirt stained by the strings of black drool slabbering out his mouth. Not a thin delicate trickle but thick sticky strands like the stuff that comes out the fat Baron in Dune. He’s spewed on himself as he does most Wednesdays. His tongue is tarred black but it’s not with Mrs Rayson’s Black Jacks. It’s after midnight and he’s not asleep – he’s unconscious. The top of his head, bald now, shines in a shaft of light from the blinds. He’s still not actually ugly with his big brown eyes but maybe his very unScottish tan is actually just his liver giving in. But he’s ugly when he’s drunk and that’s most of the time. I lean right into his face – closer than I’ve been to any man before. Closely packed stubble pushes through his skin. His black breath bubbles up at me in a burp and I gag silently.

  I pull myself together – if I get hysterical I might give myself an asthma attack. I turn away from Dodger’s slipstream of Buckie sick and take a deep breath. Time for action. I’ve got to be calm. If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly . . . I memorised this for English.

  I feel cold even though, some miracle, the radiators are ticking into life, the pipes protesting at unfamiliar heat. I need all this to be over. The weekly cycle of feast or famine, from empty cupboards to full stomachs as they drunkenly order another Chinky banquet to celebrate what? Another Wednesday? Another party with the same songs ending with the hiss and burble of walkie-talkies as the police arrive, embarrassed, to disentangle another ‘domestic’ while me and Teenie stand in the background, hands over our ears, too bored to cry, wondering where’s Billy, where’s Billy?

  In Barlinnie or wherever I end up I’ll get three square meals a day. As a murderer, I will command respect – other prisoners will go quiet when I walk into the dining hall. I will be able to read in peace in my own cell – the door locked reassuringly from the outside. I will have clothes that keep pace with my growth spurts and nobody will laugh at me for being unfashionable because we’re all dressed the same. Teenie will probably go and live with Granny Mac and my mum, when she’s calmed down and sobered up, will see I’ve done the right thing. I did it for them too.

  I don’t want there to be blood – I’ve seen enough to know that lots of blood doesn’t mean definite death. If I use a knife he might grab it from me and the blood on the floor will be mine and that’s not what I want.

  Strangling seems sensible. A table lamp lies on its side behind the couch Uncle Joe is snoring on. The 40-watt bulb is singeing a brown silhouette through the pink nylon shade. I flick the switch off and knock the lamp. The bulb pops and broken glass tinkles. My heart pounds a Black Box beat so loud it’s got to wake them. I’m panicking in the half-dark, lying on the floor behind the couch, terrified to look up in case I see Dodger looking back at me. He’s quiet on his feet, always sneaking about. ‘Sleekit,’ says Granny Mac. I peek over the top. Nothing. Nothing stares back at me. Working quickly I pull the plug from the wall and loop the plastic cord round my arm like Granpa Mac winding the cable from his lawnmower. When it will go no further I pull once, hard enough to detach it. The cheap Made in China crap holds for just a second and I lay it quietly on the carpet. Now I’ve got my motive and my weapon.

  The same shaft of light picks out Dodger’s bald patch. I can’t see his face at all now but that suits me. He didn’t stir when I broke the light bulb so he’s properly out. A car passes outside, its headlights briefly illuminating the living room. I think about running out and stopping them and telling them everything and driving away to a new life where parents wag their fingers and children roll their eyes and families go on holiday together. I see it all in the last few seconds before
I become a murderer: the post-party chaos, every surface covered with empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays that will soon be sifted for butts. A crime scene already.

  I pick my way through the mess, imagining how clean it will all be when I’m done. I won’t be in jail for long. I’ve planned the letter I’m going to write to Maggie. She’s going to get me out. I am acting as an individual – I am taking responsibility for improving my lot. With the letter I will enclose photocopies of all my report cards and hope she overlooks the remarks about me being a chatterbox. I will also include clippings from the Motherwell Times about my achievements as Captain of the Young Consumer Quiz team. I am a more-or-less model pupil – I do library duty, I don’t fight, I don’t drink or smoke or sniff glue and I am NEVER going to get a girl pregnant. Granny Mac says it’s wrong to wash your dirty linen in public – that’s what confession is for. But I’ll have to tell them why I did it. My public speaking and debating skills will be handy then. I’ll be sure to make eye contact with the jurors and speak slowly as I explain how I was driven to it, how it was the only thing I could do to make it all stop – to give me and Teenie a chance of a normal life. Maybe we’ll get custody of Billy. I want to contribute to the state instead of being dependent on it. I want a mortgage and shares and nice things with statutory guarantees. This is the only way for us to be a family. Maggie will understand and if she needs any persuading I think Esther Rantzen will support me. Maybe they can call ChildLine and get transcripts of the call I made to them?