Less have a picture, Johnny, come on, eh.
The three of them stand posing, leaning on the railing of the bear pit; the bear somewhere below them. There is no one else around.
Dyer wanna come in the picture, Sean? the girl says. Now’s a chance to say fuck off but I don’t. I just stand there.
Johnny says, Goo on, Sean, dyer wanna get in the picture?
He jerks his head for me to pose with them. I’ve never seen him like this. He looks down at the ground and his hair hangs in his eyes. If he fought thirty of them down by the canal he could easy fight these three now.
Maybe he’s playing along with them. Maybe he’s going to kick them over the railing into the bear pit. I don’t know why he wants me in the way. I want to run. I know there is trouble coming.
Johnny takes a picture and they all grin.
Yvette says, Smile, Sean, and I try to smile.
Lovely. Good picture, Johnny?
Johnny nods and looks down at the camera. I swear his hands are shaking. He holds the picture and waits for it develop.
Yer gooin up the Wolves this year, Johnny?
Johnny nods.
And away?
Some wiks. I work some Saturday mornings so it depends.
Good lad, Steve says. It’s funny how he says that, like he’s older than Johnny even though they’re the same age.
Our faces appear from the photo’s white mist. I look happy in the picture, like I’ve just met long-lost friends. They can go now.
Good lad, Sean. Could do with that hair cut, though. Yer enjoying yer trip to the zoo, eh, Sean?
This is Steve again. His eyes look right into me.
I nod.
Arr, an me.
He pulls three ten-pence pieces out of his pocket and holds them out to me and says, Get yerself an ice cream, son.
I don’t know what to do.
Come on, Sean, where’s yer manners?
I open my hand and take the money. Thanks, I say.
Good lad.
Paulie leans forward and touches Johnny’s camera.
This is a lovely camera, Johnny. Can I have a look?
Johnny lets him take it; opens his hands and lets him lift it out of them.
I think, Please do something, Johnny, please, and almost straight away realize he isn’t going to, so I hope that a zookeeper comes along quickly, or someone, anyone. I’ve never been to the zoo when it hasn’t been busy.
I hear the elephant trumpeting from up the hill.
Steve leans in now, touches the sleeve of Johnny’s jacket; that badge with Anti-Nazi League written on it.
What’s this, Johnny, eh? What’s this?
Johnny doesn’t say anything.
The other two have taken a few steps away from us. They’ve got the camera. I realize they are stealing it as Steve says, Oh, yer saft cunt, really quietly, gently almost, and then leans back and takes a step away before he punches Johnny quick and hard so you could almost not realize it has happened and Johnny staggers backwards into me.
Steve strolls away from us and joins the other two and they pick up their pace a little bit, look up the path, maybe they see someone coming. Paulie holds the camera up in the air and Yvette blows us a kiss before they turn and hurry round the corner and into the trees, and I hear their whooping and shouting again.
Johnny’s nose bleeds across the concrete. He holds the sleeve of his jacket to it with his head bowed. You’re meant to hold your head back for a nose bleed, I want to tell him; that’s what they make Little Ronnie do at school. I’ve got the thirty pence in my hand. I stick it in my pocket.
You okay? he says, leaning against the railing, bleeding.
Yeah, I say. Yeah. I am. I’m fine.
He was right about Lubetkin, who’d built that shining city on a hill for the animals to live in. Someone told me that before Lubetkin arrived the Earl of Dudley wanted to keep the animals in mock-castles to match the one on top of the hill, instead he got a city of the future: socialist, concrete, pure and clean.
While they built the zoo, this is in the mid-thirties, they cleared the centre of the town and moved the people to the new estates, spiralling out from the castle: shining new cities of their own, with broad streets named after birds, trees and flowers and houses with kitchens and neat, brick toilets.
I want to ask Johnny why he didn’t fight them, but I don’t say anything. We walk home. Johnny doesn’t say anything either. I mean not one word all the way. Usually, you can’t stop him talking. He holds his sleeve to his nose and it stops bleeding as we cross the Birmingham New Road. There’s blood all up the sleeve of his jacket. People look at him. He walks me back to our house as he’s agreed with my mum.
Doh say nothing to anyone, Sean, abaht this afternoon, all right?
No, okay, I say.
He waits at the end of the path and sees me walk to the front door.
Yer not coming in, John? my mum calls to him down the path. He’s already halfway to the main road.
Nah, I’ve gorra get back, he says and my mum looks confused.
Did yer have a nice time? my mum asks me. Enjoy the film?
It was great, I say, trying not to burst into tears, forcing myself not to say anything. It’s a great film. I love Star Wars.
Is Johnny all right?
Yeah, I said, course he is.
Did yer say thank you?
When I ran away for the second time it was to Mos Eisley, that bar at the start of Star Wars, the pirate city, where Han Solo shoots someone; the edge of an empire where it frays and unravels. That’s what it feels like now. I ran away to sea, worked on the cruise ships for seven, eight years while my mum drank herself to death in the room I fell from. I only came back for the very end. Deep down, I knew it was too late. I should never have left in the first place.
When you live in the middle of England, the sea is like a dream. It’s there in the rocks, trilobites that floated here millions of years ago, lying there inside the hills, but nowhere to be seen. I used to stand on Cawney Bank and kid myself I could see the sea, tried to look down all through Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, down the long banks of the Severn, to the muddy estuary glittering there way beyond the horizon.
Mos Eisley actually exists. The film-set is in the Tunisian desert, a mirage, the greedy sands of the Sahara beyond it. I went there once when we had a few days stay in Sidi Bou Saïd. Cairo, Kingston, Tangier: when I worked on the ships I’d always search out somewhere like it, bars in Naples, Liverpool, New York, places where people wash up when they’ve got nowhere else to go. You get them everywhere, though. I needn’t have sailed the seven seas. I own one, live in one now myself; carry it with me like Albert the tortoise and his painted shell. Dudley is the frayed edge of an empire, after all.
‘From France to the Philippines, from Jamaica to Japan, from Malaysia to Mexico, from Sri Lanka to Singapore, privatization is on the move … The policies we have pioneered are catching on in country after country.’
I watch my dad change after work. He wears a shirt with a tie on underneath his overalls now he has his new job. I sit on the bed as he pulls an old shirt from the drawer. I wish he’d been at the zoo. He’d have killed them. I want to tell him about it but something holds me back. Maybe it’s better not to say anything. The way he sits with his shirt off makes me think of when he used to play football. He worked at the Drop Forge then and that was the name of the team too. My grandad would walk me over there, for the second half usually, I was five. Johnny would meet us on his bike. They wore old gold shirts, like the Wolves.
Come on, Drop Forge, my dad would say and clap his hands after he’d headed the ball, and he’d say get out, out, when they cleared it and he got the defence to move up. The best was when Drop Forge got a corner and he would jog up the pitch to the other team’s goal and the players would say, Goo on, Francis. One time we’d taken Ronnie as well and my dad went up for two corners in a row and both times the ball came swingin
g across the trees and he ran in and headed it hard past the keeper. The second goal, he knocked one of their players into the net as well. It was a cup game. I remember we went to the door of the changing rooms at the end and my dad was sitting on the wooden bench with his shirt off holding a can of beer, laughing; all the shirts were in a pile on the floor in front of the players and everyone was talking at once and steam came drifting from the showers. He doesn’t play any more, because of work, I think.
What dyer do at school today, Sean?
I day go to school, I went to the pictures and the zoo with Johnny.
Say don’t, Sean. Yer shouldn’t miss school.
His face is serious, looking in the mirror on the wardrobe door with his shirt crumpled in his lap.
Iss the holidays, I say.
He looks blankly at me in the mirror.
We’m gooin to the caravans on Saturday. I say this in a panic. He can’t have forgotten we’re going on holiday, can’t have. There’s a suitcase at the side of the bed. I can see my mum’s summer tops waiting in there.
Oh, right, he says, and starts to pull his shirt on and grins at me in the mirror.
Dad, I say, and the relief rushes through my stomach and down into my legs. He reaches out and ruffles my hair and everything is all right.
What did yer see at the pictures?
Star Wars.
Again? Was there nothing else on?
I wanted to see it again.
All set for next week, then?
Yeah.
Have yer put the cricket stuff ready, the football, anything else yer want to take?
I nod. It’s all set by the garage door.
Good. I’m looking forward to it, sunshine. He lies back on the bed. I cor wait. He closes his eyes for a moment. Yer should go to school, though, Sean. I never did, son, and look at me.
Then the phone rings and it’s my dad’s boss and my dad talks to him for a bit, then he goes back out to work. My mum puts his tea back in the cooker to keep it warm. She’s not very pleased and says this has got to stop. When my dad gets back the gravy’s gone all thick and he wipes it around the plate with his bread.
Iss gonna mek yer ill, all this back and forth, my mum says.
Iss all right, my dad says. Everything’ll be all right.
I thought my dad was joking about not going to school but it turned out that he hardly did. He’d done jobs for his uncles when he was a kid. Up at Quarry End, where they lived, no one was ever that particular about going to school. His dad was dead, his brothers all much older and moved away. They worked on the roads, labouring, that kind of thing. A couple of them worked on farms out towards Worcester. None of them settled after Quarry End was blown up.
I lie on the short, tough grass in front of the caravans with my shirt pulled up around my neck so that the grass tickles my body. The grass is strong and prickly from being eaten by the sheep and from the wind blowing in off the sea. I can hear the waves now, crunching up the beach, but I’m looking the other way, at my dad sitting in a deckchair in front of the caravan dipping a biscuit in a cup of tea. The sun is behind our caravans and the big hills are black and solid behind that. In the morning they look like mountains, with the sun behind them, all in shadow, like you would never want to go there, only on an adventure not on your holiday, then in the afternoon they look like hills again, soft and green, with sheep dotted around them and grey cottages here and there. One time we saw a hare run across one of the fields, its long shadow running next to it. A kestrel hung still in the sky, hanging there; watching the hare run.
My dad looks out to sea. He has a moustache now. My grandad says he looks like Dennis Lillee, the Australian bowler. When he bowls to us on the beach he runs in hard and fast and then sends the ball in a gentle arc so that we might hit it.
He’s out of the deckchair, springing to his feet, and he’s got his arm round me, pointing, pointing, out at sea.
Look, can yer see it? A porpoise, look! Jumping out the water, look, theer it goes again! Yer see?
I nod and pretend I can see it. I look across the grey blanket of the sea. The water looks still and empty to me, but I want to say I’ve seen it. I’m not that sure what a porpoise looks like. I don’t want to disappoint my dad. This feeling fills me and I can’t see anything. He pulls me close to him.
Yeah, yeah, I can see it, I say and try to follow the line of where he’s pointing. I see it, I say.
I can’t. I know we are looking at different things.
When I worked on the ships I used to lift my eyes to the horizon and scan the water, looking for porpoises breaking the surface. I didn’t see any then, either. It was too late, anyway. We saw dolphins a few times, whole families of them. One morning, we were near Madeira, a whale surfaced alongside the ship next to the bar where I was cleaning the glasses. It kept coming and coming, rolling through the water, this grooved, blue-black flesh rolling through the water, blotches of shellfish in tiny clusters on its flank, and it came rolling, rolling, through the water. It blew this explosion of air, hard, from its blowhole, rolling then out of the water, the same air that we breathe that had been inside this whale and down to the depths of the ocean, and the spray made a rainbow on the sea’s surface. I could see Madeira there on the horizon, jutting out of the sea, like another whale emerging. Then the whale’s tail, the fluke, rose up out of the water, black against the shining ocean, and slapped down hard on the surface, not graceful, clumsy even, and the water displaced then swirled in after the whale and it had gone, with the sea moving up and down, up and down; the whale heading down to the depths and the sea becoming slowly still like nothing had ever been there. I thought, Can you see it, Dad? Can you see this? As if it was me holding onto him and looking out across the water. Full fathom five thy father lies, I thought. Those are the pearls. And I carried on looking at the empty sea and shelving the glasses in the freezer so they would keep the beer cold. I thought about my dad’s eyes. A passenger came and ordered his first of the day. He hadn’t seen the whale either.
They’re not our caravans. They don’t belong to us, that is, but we come to the same ones every year. We have one and my nan and grandad live in the one next to us and Uncle Johnny stays in there too sometimes. He comes on the train because his holiday is different. He has to fit in with the other workers. We go and meet him and pick him up at Porthmadog and drop him off when he is leaving. We have the cars. If we go anywhere in the car then my dad and grandad get the maps out and lay them on the car roofs before we set off or look at them on the table the night before, even though we always drive to the same places and they know the way: Beddgelert, round Snowdon and past the lakes to Llanberis, to Porthmadog to the train station and shops, Criccieth for ice cream and so on.
I look at the maps with them, try to say the Welsh names and then look at all the spaces on the map where no one lives. If you look at a map of home there are hundreds of streets all together, then spaces for the factories and sometimes the hills, and canals criss-crossing the map. Here there aren’t many streets, just hills and farms, green and brown outlines, and sometimes castles and streams and rivers that twist across the map because of the shape of the hills, not like with our canals where you have a tunnel or a lock so the canal carries on in a straight line, just built through whatever was there.
One year all the Robertsons came. They stayed all in one caravan, their mum and dad and six kids plus Natalie’s little baby.
Never again, we might as well stop at home, my nan said.
I thought it was great.
I go with Ronnie down to the rock pools and collect things. He keeps a pet crab in a bucket for a few days. I tell him to walk it on a lead. One hot afternoon I lie on the rough grass and can see underneath our caravan through to Ronnie’s mum sitting smoking in her shorts and drinking from a glass with ice melting in it that Ronnie’s dad has walked over from the club with, laughing because you’re not meant to take glasses away. I know I shouldn’t be looking at her. She pulls t
he shoulder straps of her top down and I can see where her skin is lighter there and dark brown on her arms and shoulders. She’s tied her wavy black hair up on top of her head. I think of the drawings of Natalie hidden in Johnny’s sock drawer.
Six kids, older than me, rough as you like, and looking like that, I hear my mum say to my nan.
Ah, it only brings trouble, my nan says.
Here’s to you, Mrs Robertson.
Mrs Robinson, ay it?
That was a joke, Mother, my mum says.
The main reason for going on holiday is for my dad and grandad to have a rest from work. My grandad says that when he retires, which is a few years away yet, or if he wins the pools, then he’d like to get a bungalow here. There’s a row of them as you walk away from the sea and down the lane towards Llanystumdwy. Whenever he talks about it my nan rolls her eyes like she doesn’t want it to happen. She says she prefers it for a holiday. I’d like to live here, though, in the caravans, as long as we all stay.
Some people live in caravans all the time, I say to Ronnie.
Yeah, the gypos, he says.
When they knocked all the old houses down on Kates Hill the gypsies came and lived there. They lived in caravans and drove lorries. We were told not to go near them because they were dirty. People said they had a disease where you have to keep going to the toilet, called dysentery. I told my mum this while she was ironing and she said not to believe everything I heard, but to stay away anyway. I thought it was funny how everyone said the gypsies were dirty because they lived in caravans, then went and lived in a caravan for their holidays. I told my mum this and she laughed, but then she said maybe not to say that outside the house as not everybody thought the same as we did.
You mean like Margaret Thatcher? I said.
Exactly.
Why doh we think the same as Margaret Thatcher?
Well, she’s not a very nice person. Say don’t, not doh.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 5
