by Damian Barr
Miss Walsh is on my mind as I take the incriminating poem to Miss Campbell. I sit opposite her in her guidance room and remember the time I went to her not long after I’d tried and failed with Jacqueline Slattery. Before I could say anything she told me about something called Clause 28, said she wanted to help but was legally prevented from promoting homosexuality. Clause 28 doesn’t matter now because I’m not here for help, I’m beyond help. On the wall is the poster of the whirling merry-go-round on Brighton Pier and I wish I was riding one of the horses round and round for ever.
Miss Campbell reads my poem silently but her face says everything. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘I agree with Mrs Kennedy. You can’t submit this.’
‘Why?’ I ask. ‘I mean, you’re a maths teacher.’
‘That doesn’t matter. It’s just . . . Damian, it’s too . . . personal.’
The guidance room is a torture chamber of the unsaid. I know and she knows and neither of us dares say it out loud because then it’ll be true.
‘Miss,’ I say, formalising this moment. ‘I think I’m gay.’
She puts the poem down slowly and sits up as straight as she can in these low-slung chairs.
‘You think?’
‘I know.’
‘No,’ she says, as if denying me permission to go to the toilet. ‘You’re not.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘And what about Heather?’
‘Heather knows,’ I explain. ‘She doesn’t care.’
‘She should care. I care. This is not what I wanted for you, Damian. This is going to make your life very difficult, more difficult than it already is. I, you . . . just no.’
I explain that I’ve got no choice, there’s nothing I can do, I want to change but I can’t. I’ve tried. I start to cry.
Her face is set. It’s a face I’ve seen before when she’s about to suspend a problem pupil. I’ve broken no school rules. There’s no punishment for her to dish out. Nothing she can say or do will change anything. So she stands up and opens the door.
‘Out, I don’t want to hear any more about it.’
I run straight to Mrs Shaw who is typing away in the computer room. Nothing can stop me now I’ve said it out loud. I feel freed up by the telling, unburdened. She is kinder, says Miss Campbell is just worried, only wants the best for me, and I realise they’ve already anticipated this, discussed it. I tell her I’m going to tell my mum, I’m going to tell everybody, I’m never going to lie about myself again. She cuddles me then holds me at arm’s length and looks at me hard and wishes me luck.
I turn the poem in. I win the gamble. I get my A.
I have always relied on the kindness of teachers.
Chapter 17
‘I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.’
Margaret Thatcher, Observer, 4 April 1989
It’s the 12th of October 2009. I am now thirty-three years old. I’ve made it to Brighton where I live with my own Mr Hart and our pet chickens. It’s sunglasses and scarf weather and I’m sitting on the pebbly beach opposite the Grand Hotel. TV crews are rehearsing spontaneous remarks for their reports on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Brighton bombing. The sky is obediently Tory blue. The sea dazzles with dancing sun pennies. I still can’t believe I really live here.
Walking along the seafront I smell the Grand before I see it. Chlorine floats up from the swimming pool in the basement, wafting through the revolving doors with the scent of gingerbread biscuits being laid on complimentary tea-trays and the faint hint of beeswax from parquet floors walked on by the well-heeled.
You can easily identify room 629 where the timer detonated at 2.54 a.m. on 12 October 1984. It came from a VHS recorder just like the one me and Teenie used to watch at my dad’s. The bomb’s room no longer has a balcony. It stands out like a black tooth in an otherwise perfect smile.
Famous for needing fiendishly little sleep, Maggie was still awake in her suite (the aptly named ‘Napoleon’) when the bomb went off. She was probably working on her big speech for the next day, which was also her birthday, and I like to imagine she allowed some small bit of herself to get excited about that. What exactly was she doing right then? Looking up from her notes out to the watery blackness? Eyeing the whisky decanter? In that explosive moment five people were killed and thirty-four seriously injured but she was completely unharmed. Minutes after the blast she emerged, Terminator-like, from the rubble with dust clouds billowing around her. I watched it all in black-and-white on the portable telly in that flat in Carfin.
Looking merely mildly inconvenienced as she left the half-destroyed hotel, Maggie paused to give a determined interview to the BBC: ‘You hear about these atrocities . . . you don’t expect them to happen to you . . . life must go on as usual.’
Indeed, it must. Does. Has.
It’s too many years since I’ve visited Mark or Heather, since our secret nights out dancing at Bennett’s. Life in Brighton is busy. Most days I commute into London to whatever paper I’m working on and most evenings I arrive home late, the express from Victoria rarely all that express. Mrs Hart never had to take public transport.
My last visit to Scotland changed my life. I was at Lancaster University studying English literature and sociology but wanted to get even further from home, so far it would stop being home for ever. The English department offered a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin. I went for the interview without even looking at an atlas and got it. They covered travel and tuition but I needed something to live on. I rang my old teachers Miss Campbell and Mrs Shaw and they put the word out to their friends. Within a week I was summoned back to Brannock for a meeting with a lawyer. His name was Mr Brown.
‘Just be yourself,’ Miss Campbell said, showing me into the headmaster’s office.
Mr Brown looked like a friendly vicar in a pinstripe suit. ‘Sit down,’ he said, from behind Mr Margrave’s desk. I looked around, never having been bad enough to be summoned here.
‘So, Mr Barr, how much do you need?’ he asked, reading over my CV.
‘Sorry?’
‘How much do you need?’
‘Don’t you want to know what I need it for? Or make sure I actually deserve it?’ I laughed nervously, wishing I hadn’t worn denim dungarees.
‘You’re eighteen,’ said Mr Brown. ‘I am sure you’ll find ways to spend my client’s money and that at least some of them,’ he peered over his half-moon specs, ‘will be wise.’
‘I need £5,000,’ a sum twice my student grant and more than I could imagine.
‘My client will give you £10,000.’
He was already writing a cheque. I couldn’t believe it.
‘Thank you –’ I started.
‘Don’t thank me,’ interrupted Mr Brown, already putting the lid back on his fountain pen. ‘Thank my client.’
‘But who is your client?’
‘My client wishes to remain anonymous. All he asks is that you write him a letter each term relating your progress. It is a specific condition of his gift that you do not even attempt to find out who he is. Understood?’
I nodded and stood. I almost bowed. He handed me the cheque and it didn’t turn to air and I thanked him again, turning to leave, my hand on the door handle.
‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
I froze. No, I did not. But I did have a boyfriend. I remembered coming out to Heather, Miss Campbell, Mrs Shaw, my mum, my dad and everybody else. I looked down at my black-leather brogues, the ones my auntie Louisa gave me because she said I had a long hard road ahead. I promised never to lie again about who I was.
‘No,’ I said, without turning round. ‘Why?’
‘She’d miss you, that’s all. Well, safe travels, Mr Barr.’
And so I went to Texas and when I got on the plane I tried to look like I did it all the time and turned left not knowing there was a first class. The stewardess let me stay. Mr Brown is long dead but every now and then I write a letter to my mysterious benefactor. I’
ve never had one back. I’ve travelled lots since then (never first class!). So has Heather. She taught English as a foreign language all around the world. We joke that all her pupils have a lovely Scottish accent. She’s settled down near Worcester. I live here by the sea. Mark didn’t make it to university. He was more than smart enough but it wasn’t for him, he said. He got a job as a care assistant instead. He’s still in Scotland.
Mobile phone reception is patchy on Brighton beach but a couple of bars of signal blow in from the sea and I get through to Heather and we agree that yes, it’s been far too long, and arrange a visit for the following week. I always leave Brighton reluctantly and every time I get on the train I feel a flutter of panic, a seagull caught in a sudden gust of wind. As I board the intercity to Glasgow I remind myself I’m not fourteen and being forced back to Scotland after losing the Young Consumer Quiz final. The sea will be waiting for me when I get back. It will.
This train feels faster than usual and soon, almost too soon, I arrive at Motherwell Station and there she is, leaning on the old navy-blue Cavalier she got from Mrs D. It’s years since I’ve seen her, two or three at least. It’s a whole decade since me and her and Mark were last here together. Apart from the fact she’s finally opted for a fringe, Heather looks just the same as the day Mark dared me to throw a milkshake on her legs. We cuddle and for a moment I think how things might have been different and she smiles when I explain the flowers I’m carrying are for Mark, not her.
‘Of course they are,’ she says. ‘I’ll drive.’
We joke about how her dad’s eyes would vibrate out their sockets if he caught me behind the wheel. I’ve written off two cars (and counting). ‘You’re too easily distracted,’ she says, mirror then signal then manoeuvre.
I’ve told my family I’m coming. My mum’s had my old room ready for weeks and Teenie has changed her shift at the hospital and Billy is taking a day off. All for the prodigal son. Dodger is long gone so my dad might drop in. I’ll take Heather home for my mum’s burnt offering. We start trading news about everybody we know or knew. I tell her I got an email from a pal in Glasgow about Big Jinty – she lost an arm after catching a skin infection on a sunbed but she’s still a bouncer on the door at Bennett’s. Heather nearly crashes laughing. This is the gory gossip we love, Glasgow gothic.
Soon we’re coming up to the Craig only it’s not there. There are no cooling towers puffing clouds into the sky, no massive factories, no giant diggers. Even the great steel gates, padlocked for ever in 1992, are gone.
‘Where’s the Craig?’
Heather studied geography. This is the sort of thing she knows.
‘Gone,’ she says, dry as ever, gesturing with one hand as if she made it disappear.
‘I can see that.’
Echoes of the protest. ‘MAGGIE! MAGGIE! MAGGIE! OUT! OUT! OUT!’ Maggie’s broken promise. All those men. My dad’s last shift.
They’ve even taken all the old soil away – toxic, they say. Soon there will be a college, a sports centre, a call centre and some affordable housing. The Craig is being regenerated, forgotten. There’s only one sunset now.
Heather motors up the brae through Carfin. It takes some effort but I stare at Flat 1, 1 Magdalene Drive – my eyes find my old bedroom window now double glazed with white plastic frames. My mum’s handrail still guards the steps and it’s surprisingly shiny. A man who looks like Kev pushes a double buggy.
‘And where’s the Sippy?’ I ask with a mock outrage that’s not totally mock. All this progress in my past without my permission.
‘Stop asking me like I’ve done something with them!’
All those acres of powdery chalk are gone, blown away maybe, covered by hundreds of Barratt boxes in neat ranks.
‘It was technically a brownfield site,’ says Heather.
They’ll never know what went on in their foundations.
Carfin quickly turns into Newarthill and now we’re passing Keir Hardie. I remember the Polaroid that Mr Baker took of me and Mark and Brian on our last day at primary school. I wonder where it is now. I know where Brian is. He drowned aged eighteen at a party on a loch; his funeral was our first and only class reunion. Me and him were the last to learn to swim.
‘Do you want to go in and see Miss Campbell and Mrs Shaw?’ I ask Heather as we approach Brannock.
‘Nah,’ she says. ‘They’ll be teaching.’
‘We could go in and make sure nobody’s scrubbed our names off the Dux board.’
‘I’m sure we’re still up there.’
We roll past Brannock, talking mad fast rubbish, our accents reverting to type, beyond type. We do our best to sound worse than the ‘worstest’ Rab C. Nesbitt character, shouting ‘Haw hen’ and ‘See you, ya bam!’ We camp it up and laugh more than we should. The houses they built over the Bing look like they’ve always been there now. I wonder if the frogs still find their way back.
Leaving Newarthill we go down through New Stevenson past Granny Barr’s old house. Granpa Barr died years ago and didn’t get a good turnout. At his funeral I shook hands with cousins, uncles and an aunt I’d not seen for decades. At the tea after there was nothing savoury, not a single sandwich – only tiers and tiers of puffs and fancies.
‘He’s no here to stop me now,’ said Granny Barr, her cake-round face powdered with icing sugar. Diabetes got her not long after.
A few doors down is Logan’s mother’s house. She’s dead too but he’s in there. I check my seatbelt to make sure it’s on. Heather says nothing, just pats my hand. A couple of years ago Logan got jumped. They actually kicked his head in and now he carries around an aneurysm. Tick, tock. He can’t even race his pigeons in case the excitement makes it blow. The police never caught the men that did it. He won’t be getting a good turnout.
‘Wit’s fur yae, disnae go by ye,’ I say.
‘Get you, Granny Mac,’ says Heather, indicating left. We drive on in silence for a bit. Soon she slows to a stop. Mirror, signal, manoeuvre.
‘Don’t forget Mark’s flowers,’ she says, tightening the handbrake.
I see him now – blue eyes straight ahead, toes edging over the highest diving board, fearless. Determined. Mark had been trying for years – slashing his wrists or taking pills then promising not to do it again. He couldn’t see a way to be happy. He couldn’t see a way to be him. Not long after we both turned twenty-three he took one last leap into the unknown – hanged himself. His mother and father each insisted on installing a headstone on his grave. Neither reveals how or why their only son is down there. At the funeral I was asked to give a eulogy. His stepmother, the hated Grotbags, insisted on reading it beforehand. She handed my notes back with whole chunks scrubbed out. I nodded solemnly and stepped up to the lectern, taking an uncensored version from my inside pocket and reading it anyway, watching their faces turn white as I talked about how much I loved Mark, how he struggled to be gay in a world of bigots, how I would miss my Sister. Heather beamed at me through tears from the front row of the church.
Grotbags cornered me outside. ‘I blame three things for him being in that coffin: his mother, Madonna and YOU!’ Mark would have loved it.
I am the only boy still alive in Mr Baker’s Polaroid. Make-da-da, Mark. You and me us never part. Never.
Be strong, Maggie told us all. Get educated. Get away. That’s what she said. I listened. Heather listened. Mark didn’t.
One November afternoon at Brannock High School, Mr Roebuck pushes the telly through the door of modern studies like a surgeon rushing a patient into theatre. He slams it on and his urgency shuts us all up. Maggie is standing outside 10 Downing Street and Denis is waiting behind, as always. Why is she not wearing her usual blue? She thanks us all even though nobody watching here voted for her. She says she’s leaving the country a better place than she found it and the whole class laughs, me included. We jump out our seats and dance about and cheering erupts all over the school. Mr Roebuck shouts, ‘She’s gone!’ when she sits in the back of the car and t
hen, only then, does she start to cry. I stop cheering and sit down. Her eyes are red-rimmed like the big St Bernard next door to my dad. I feel sorry for her. Then I feel guilty for feeling sorry.
Yes, Maggie, you snatched all the milk and sent my teachers out to strike. Yes, you smashed the miners, closed the Craig and took away our second sunset. Yes, you made millions unemployed then cut their benefits. Yes, you shut down the mental hospitals and landed my already mad house with crazy Auntie Cat. Yes, you privatised gas and electricity so we ended up with a hungry meter, going to bed with clothes on so we didn’t have to dress for school in the cold. Yes, you created Clause 28 to ‘prohibit the teaching of homosexuality’, which wasn’t very successful in my case. Yes, you devised the Poll Tax so I got the most exciting moddies lesson ever thanks to Tommy Sheridan. Yes, you gave me choices when I needed chances.
Yes, you did all that.
You also saved my life.
You were different, like me, and you had to fight to be yourself. You were the only woman among all those men. You fought wars and won them, even managing to carry off a headscarf at the helm of a tank. You led by example. You made a hero of the individual, a cult of the striver and I did my homework to impress you. I was greedy for more, devouring books and turning myself into an appreciating machine. You made that greed good. You created Channel 4, which showed me my first gay kiss. You hated where I was from and I did too so you made it OK for me to run away and never look back. You offered me certainty, however grim, when I had none at home. You threw me an escape ladder.
You made it possible – but not probable – for me to be the man I am now. Today you can often be found in one of the smaller Central London parks, walking slowly, oh-so-slowly on the arm of a paid companion like a dowager aunt from P.G. Wodehouse. Your head is bent now: a symptom of your malady, history weighing heavily, maybe just all that hairspray. Your perfect do has morphed from a platinum Lego helmet to a gentle champagne-coloured halo. Few people passing would guess you were once the most powerful woman in the world. I want to come to that park and watch you. I don’t want to talk to you or trouble you. I want to see you in person just once before you go.
