by Damian Barr
Now I’m standing over him. I can’t hear my heart any more. I’m not even sure I’m breathing. After this I will be a saviour. A hero. I’m doing the right thing, I tell myself, as I wrap one end of the cord round each hand to make a loose noose. Dodger’s head slumps forward. I plan to call the police as soon as I know he’s really dead and tell them everything so they can take my willingness to cooperate into account. I’ve got nothing to lie about. They’ve been here before, they know the story. They’ll be sympathetic, probably grateful. Joe snores on.
Not wanting to give Dodger any chance to wake I pull the noose totally tight straight away. The plastic digs into his stubbly neck, his head snaps up and his eyes pop open. No, they’re already open. They’ve always been open. I keep pulling, tighter and tighter. The plastic warms and slackens in my hand. Fuck! Fuck! It’s stretching. Elasticity is a basic property of plastics – I know this from physics. It could snap. He could live! I pull harder and it must be working cos he puts his hands up and pushes his fingers between his neck and the cord. Air gets inside him. He’s staring at me and his eyes are bulging. The streetlight shines in his eyes making them yellow. A stupid grin splits his face. Quietly, he starts laughing.
Then he hisses, ‘Wit you gonnae dae, eh? You gonnae cull me? Eh? Wit you gonnae dae, eh?’
I pull harder and harder but his fingers are there now and the plastic is slackening and my hands are slippery with sweat. I nearly stop then he says, ‘Wit you gonnae dae, eh, jessy?’
At that his face blurs into Logan’s as I pull and pull and pull and he sniggers under his stinking breath like Muttley the Dog and he shouldn’t be laughing by now, shouldn’t be breathing.
He lets go of the cord and drops his hands and dares me: ‘C’mon, nancy boy, do it!’
Now there’s nothing stopping me. I really could kill him. But I don’t. I can’t. Not because I don’t want to – but because he does.
I drop the cord and it drapes round Dodger’s neck. He’s not laughing now. My hands throb as the blood comes back and I wish for my old mittens.
‘Back tae yer bed,’ he whispers, jabbing at the ceiling and rubbing his neck as if he’s just taken his tie off after a hard day at the office. ‘Night night, sleep tight.’
Joe snores on.
I walk back upstairs, not bothering to be quiet, and push my hands hard against the sharp Artex, feeling the pinpricks of plaster pierce my skin. I close my bedroom door, turn the key, slide the bolt and replace the nails. I look at the blood on my hands then turn out the light.
Chapter 14
‘Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.’
Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Party Conference, 9 October 1987
For my sixteenth birthday I am given wings. I’ve begged for an aviary ever since Charlie the Canary and my dad has finally given in and built me one. I hand him his tools and it’s the longest we’ve spent together in years. I love being close to him even though he doesn’t say much. He doesn’t say much to anybody, it’s nothing personal, I know that. After two days of huffing and puffing and hammering and nailing it stands stinking of creosote in our back garden. My stomach turns at the all-too-familiar acridity: it remembers being pumped all those years before.
‘Yer a cuckoo right enough,’ says my dad, handing me the key for the shiny new padlock.
The aviary will be perfect when the smell goes. Uncle Joe ‘found’ some railway sleepers for the foundation, he’s handy like that. I went with my dad to the B&Q by Forgy to get the rest. He smiled down at the cashier and she blushed up at him and the whole lot was 50 per cent off and I worried we’d get stopped as he filled the car boot. The black-felt roof slopes backwards and you can open the plastic windows to keep it dry and well ventilated. Cages run along one side from waist to ceiling and the shiny steel bars ping off the front for easy cleaning. I’ve got enough room for about thirty budgies. Nearly too many to name but I’ll still give them all names and talk to them and listen when they talk back. I’ll keep them safe. Most importantly I’ve got my own space outside the house with a lockable door where me and Heather can just hang out. We won’t need to burden her mum and dad quite so much.
Now I just need some birds. Pet shops are pricey, you’re better off going to a private breeder, says Danny’s dad, who still keeps canaries. He tells me to get the Scot-Ads.
This mustard-yellow classifieds paper comes out every Wednesday. It costs a pound and my mum always buys it before blowing the rest of her money. ‘Early bird and all that,’ she says, tapping her nose, sure of a bargain. It’s like the Holy Ghost Fathers’ Garden Fête only she doesn’t need to move from her chair. She doesn’t read out loud any more but she still moves her lips as she intones like she’s praying. In these yellow pages she’s found a second-hand Kenwood mixer (still in box), a nest of three glass-topped chrome coffee tables (only one chipped) and Lucy, our West Highland terrier (possibly too feisty). I turn my nose up at second-hand. I want better things than Scot-Ads. I want new things.
When she’s finally finished haggling in her head I’m allowed to take it out to the aviary. My mind flutters with what I might find as I flick to the ‘PETS’ section. The bottom right-hand corner of each page, where my mum has licked her finger to turn it, is blotted and sags off. That’s how cheap Scot-Ads is. Under ‘BIRDS’ there are blue, green and opal budgies. All pretty enough, but I want a lavender and they’re rare. I’ll have to keep looking. Disappointed, I start lining the bird cages with the paper, scanning the other sections as I go. There are dodgy-sounding motors, designer jeans that no longer fit and Council tenants hoping to swap houses. The last double-page spread is headed ‘CONTACTS’.
Here it seems people are on offer.
‘31yo guy seeks VGL female 25–35 for fun. No kids.’ What kind of fun? ‘55yo lady seeks solvent gentleman to treat her right. Smokers welcome.’ ‘BIG Girl About Town, size 18, 5’10” seeks man who can handle her.’ There are columns and columns and each one has a box number you can write to if you’re interested. Dozens of someones each seeking a somebody. There’s a handy guide to decoding: ‘VGSOH’ is ‘very good sense of humour’, ‘NS’ is ‘non-smoking’, ‘ALA’ is ‘all letters answered’. There’s no explanation of ‘VWE’. A box at the bottom warns that you must be ‘18yo’ to place an ad or reply.
Near the bottom of the list the ads turn ‘GAY’. I feel a shiver of recognition and shame for something I’ve not yet done but already know I will. ‘Married couple after bi fun. Daytime only.’ ‘Young gay guy seeks active older.’ Active how? ‘Bored of scene 25yo seeking LTR with genuine guy.’ What scene?
There are five ‘GAY’ ads and they’re definitely not going on the bottom of a birdcage. I think about showing them to Mark but he’s still sneaking off in his lunch hour to have sex with that fat forty-year-old when her husband is out at work. He’s told everybody, the whole school knows she starts crying when he climbs off her to put his uniform back on. I don’t believe he’s turned straight, not really. I haven’t, as much as I want to. I still smile at him and he still ignores me, walks past. I still miss him.
That night I pull the nails over my bedroom door and sit down to reply to all the ads except this one: ‘Gay pensioner seeks grandson for discipline.’ The terms and conditions warn you must be twenty-one or over to place or reply to ‘GAY’ ads because that’s the legal age of consent. Get caught doing anything underage and you’re both off to jail. I click to select the black ink from my multicoloured pen and in my neatest handwriting begin ‘Dear Sir’. No, too formal. Ripping the top sheet off the lined A4 pad, I start again. ‘Dear Mister’. No. Finally I settle on ‘Hello, my name is Damian. I saw your advert in the Scot-Ads and I wanted to get in touch . . .’
Before I know it I’ve covered one whole side. It excites me to think that a total stranger will suddenly know about me. It’s the same impulse that makes me sneak downstairs at night an
d quietly ring random long-distance numbers, muffling the dial as it spins, just to hear the foreign voice on the other end, another voice in another world. Sometimes I say ‘Help me’ and hang up. Mostly I say nothing. My eyes are automatically drawn to the digits of my dad’s number which Mary the Canary refused to give me but which I stole from her by looking over her shoulder at the dial when she rang him for a lift home when she took me shopping once. She was tipsy that day and didn’t catch me spying.
The men I’m writing to aren’t a million miles away. They’re right here in Scotland. They might even be in my village. They might read between the lines and work out where I live and track me down and kill me but hopefully not before we’ve had sex.
According to my letter I’ve left school and have a job in Motherwell. I sign off ‘Yours sincerely’ and read through the whole thing again. Clicking the pen for red ink I draw a box on the bottom right-hand side and write down my height, hair colour, eye colour and build: six foot, dirty blond, blue, slim. I can’t afford the £2 to get photies done in the booth at John Menzies in Motherwell so I’m hoping the description and my age (twenty-one) will be enough to tempt a response. They can’t all be dirty old men and if they are my age will definitely work. I copy the letter out four times, practising my signature differently each time, and address each envelope to the right advert, making sure I’ve not accidentally replied to a full-figured older lady seeking afternoon SM. Scot-Ads assures all readers they will send any responses directly in a discreet brown envelope. I don’t get much post but I’ve started to send off for university prospectuses already so I can pretend it’s one of those when it comes. If it comes.
I wait. And wait. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The lips of our letterbox remain sealed. At lunchtime on Friday Heather demands to know why I’m so moody. I haven’t told her about the letters but she knows something’s up so I just say ‘Home’. That’s explanation enough. Who wouldn’t be stressed out by 15 Rannoch Avenue compared to the wall-to-wall carpeted sanctuary of the bungalow her dad built with its well-stocked cupboards, Shield-blue bathroom suite and utility room with dishwasher? She looks at me sympathetically and I feel familiarly guilty.
I want to tell Heather the truth about me. I want to tell her everything, I do. I hate lying to her. But I’m scared she’ll think I don’t love her. I do love her, really love her, just not like that. And I don’t want her to think I’m using her, wasting the time she could be with other boys. So I drop hints here and there, test the water. Heather buys me a ticket for New Kids on the Block – it’s our first concert – and we both scream just as loud for Donnie Wahlberg. I’m taller than most teens and my waving hands hit the spotlight and for a second my shadow covers the arena, briefly brushing Wahlberg’s face.
I keep my vigil by the letterbox and finally a reassuringly anonymous brown A4 envelope addressed to me plops through. I can tell from the heft I’ve got replies. I can’t take it to school because if someone steals it I’m dead so I slip it under the door of my aviary for later. Moddies is a jiggling leg, chemistry is doodling atoms, double maths is an eternity of equations, and even English can’t end fast enough. That day I skip the library and tell Heather our homework ’n’ gossip session is off because I’ve got a migraine, which is almost true. I’ve got to get home to the letters, to read them and reread them and find the man who’ll take me away. For the first time ever I join the newly freed 3.30 p.m. crowd rushing home from school and I look just as excited as them.
Back at 15 Rannoch Avenue I go straight round the back to my aviary and lock the door behind me. Carefully I unstick the big brown envelope. Inside are four smaller envelopes, all different. All four have replied. Four chances! I feel like Cilla Black on Blind Date. I choose the smallest first, carefully slitting it with the Stanley knife my dad left. I scan the whole thing quickly, not daring to let my eyes settle on any one sentence in case it disappears. It’s in tiny script and covers one side of the sort of writing paper Granny Mac uses to enter tiebreaker competitions in People’s Friend. It’s from a fifty-four-year-old man called Fergus who admits he said he was thirty-five in his advert because he didn’t want to put guys off. He likes under-twenty-fives and he’s into school role-play with him as the pupil.
Fergus is a no.
The second is in a thicker envelope that suggests a birthday card. It’s sealed with a kiss. The handwriting is loopy and the dots over the is are bubbles, possibly even deformed love-hearts. David! Left school at sixteen and is a trainee hairdresser. David LOVES Kylie, Jason and Sonia! Anything Stock Aitken Waterman! He LOVES the scene but recently fell out with his ‘sister’ so he needs a new one. How do I do my hair? Am I passive or active? Who do I fancy off Neighbours? Who knows about me?
David is a reluctant maybe.
The third envelope is so thin I could probably read through it if I held it up to the light. Inside, the paper is ruled with thick black lines, like bars on windows. Paul is writing from Barlinnie – the Glasgow prison that my uncle Joe avoids. Paul did say he was after a penfriend in his ad but seriously . . . He’s using up his paper allowance on me so he really hopes I’ll write back. He doesn’t say what he’s in for but he does include a picture. More like a mug shot really, him staring straight into a camera, an evil Mr Potato Head.
Paul is a never.
The final envelope. Will there be a golden ticket? Soon I’ll have to go in for tea, my mum will be surprised I’m not at Heather’s. The house should be reasonably quiet as they’re all reasonably sober cos they’ve no money. Unless they’ve raided the gas meter again. It’s a Tuesday so it’ll be tinned soup or something. I don’t care. This is worth it.
In envelope number four I find Johnny Kendall.
Johnny is a yes.
We exchange two letters within the first week, always to the PO Box, although he asks for my address. I agree to meet Johnny at midnight the next Wednesday. He’ll be driving a white H-reg Rover ‘like the ones in The Bill’. I tell him to park by the gates of Keir Hardie Memorial Primary School, thinking it’s just far enough from the house. Johnny says he’s thirty-one, five foot ten, rugby build, dark brown hair, butch. He’s too ‘discrete’ for a photie.
Crystal Gayle is wailing on and on and I want to smash her face in and it won’t be long before Mrs Buchan next door complains again. She goes to chapel with Granny Mac and word will get back and there’ll be another scene. Dodger never gets tired of Crystal Gayle or Daniel O’Donnell or Rosemary Clooney and he’s the only one who can work the stereo drunk. We might get fewer complaints if he picked better music. Unnoticed, I walk straight out the front door to a rousing chorus of ‘Danny Boy’.
The streets are sleeping as I slip along the road I used to walk to school. A couple of houses are as lairy as mine and I keep my head down. I look over my shoulder to make sure I’m not being followed and as usual I’m slightly gutted to find I’m not. By the school gates I see red brake lights glowing in a white car, warning me away and luring me in. This is it. I can still turn back and never reply to any of his letters and that’ll be that.
Johnny jumps when I tap the window. Good, he’s nervous too. He leans across and opens my door. He’s fat. He said he had a rugby build. I just stand there. The car smells of something that isn’t Lynx.
‘Ye getting in then?’ he asks. ‘It’s cold.’
I get in and he starts the car.
‘Stop!’ I unclick my seatbelt. ‘Where are we going?’
He’s going to abduct me, kill me, I’ll be a face on Crimewatch UK like that Jason Swift boy – don’t have nightmares. I should never have come, this is what I deserve.
‘Just a wee drive.’
‘Where?’
‘Where d’ye want tae go?’
Nobody has ever asked me this. ‘Strathclyde Park,’ I say, using my lowest voice and trying not to hesitate. There’s the reservoir, the remains of a Roman Baths and a tacky wee fairground that’s the most exciting thing for miles. It’s a place for kid
s and I feel like I’ve given myself away.
Johnny drives and asks questions and I give him yeses and nos.
‘Ah thought ye’d be mair chatty from yer letters,’ he says, as we wait at a traffic light by the Craig. I’m paranoid my dad will see me and sink low in the seat.
‘Naebody’s gonnae git ye,’ says Johnny and I look at him. ‘Not even me,’ and he laughs and puts a CD on.
The lights are still flashing when we get to Strathclyde Park but the big wheel is still. We sit and watch it and talk and eventually I manage whole sentences. After about an hour Johnny asks me what I’m doing at school.
‘English, maths and –’
He laughs. ‘So you don’t work in Motherwell then.’
‘I do.’ I feel myself blush. ‘I do!’
Indeed I do. This bit is true. I work part-time as a waiter at the New Lotus, got the job through a girl called Deirdre I met sewing gingham scrunchies at Young Enterprise, an after-school club for fourth-year pupils from schools across the area. YE is all about being entrepreneurial. There are ten of us in our company, eleven if you count the poster of Maggie still hanging on the wall of the office where we meet. Heather is the Production Director, Deirdre is the Marketing Director and I am the Managing Director of our accessories company. We sell shares in our company for 5p. After disagreements over labour conditions and a failure to launch anything that anyone wants to buy, we fold but I stay pals with Deirdre, who gets me a job with her at the New Lotus. She shows me how to write chicken chow mein (no onions) in Chinese script and warns me to decant the unused cream from the individual cream portions into a big jug lest stingy Mr Weng docks our wages. I love talking to the customers, feeding them. I got fired from being a paper boy cos I read the papers instead of delivering them. The New Lotus is my best job yet.
