All children get into devilment every now and again.
I know, but he shouldn’t have done it.
I blame them next door. They want to get that Little Ronnie to behave.
We can hear his shouts through the wall.
No good tanning him now, my nan continues. They should’ve given him some discipline before.
No, but Sean is responsible for his own behaviour, Mum.
They should be more worried about that dog biting somebody, I doh know about the kids playing with it. I can see why yer want to move. Away from all this carry-on.
Okay, it’s done with now. Let’s see what happens about moving. It’s nothing to do with this.
My mum doesn’t speak to me for days. When she does, all she says is that I shouldn’t have said to the police to take me to my nan and grandad’s. That makes me feel even worse because I thought I’d done the right thing. We were going to Ronnie’s anyway and I thought my mum would worry about a police car in our street. I’m banned from seeing Ronnie for a week. I think it’s going to be worse again when my dad comes in, but he just says to never do it again and falls asleep in the chair during Coronation Street.
The next day me and Ronnie tell Paul about what happened and he doesn’t believe us.
Diane kept the pub for twenty years or more. Her husband had walked out not long after they’d taken it on, didn’t like the hours, went off with a woman from Langley Green. Tommy would come back every now and again, like he did. Diane gave me my first proper pub job when I turned eighteen. She didn’t remember who I was. I told her one Saturday night when we stayed for a lock-in. She laughed. I worked weekends; learned the cellar in the week. Caesar had replacements over the years. There was a Doberman called Brutus when I worked there. Diane lives with her sister in Tenerife now. The pub’s boarded up. Kids break in and cause mischief. Everything worth nicking from it has gone. I had a look at buying it, but there’s no saving the place. They’ll knock it down soon.
Sunday mornings my dad takes me for a walk down the canal, if he’s not at work. There are abandoned buildings where the first workshops and factories were. Cobb’s Engine House is near the start of the tunnel that goes under the hill and comes out in Tipton. It used to pump all the water out of the mines. Johnny wanted to paint a picture of it. Henry Ford, who made the cars, bought the engine to put it in a museum in America. People go to the ruin to sniff glue now, older boys, young men, punks, skinheads; it says NF all over the walls.
One Sunday morning, we see some skinheads on the path ahead of us and I realize that Steve, Paulie and Yvette are there, part of this group of ten, fifteen, shaved heads with bottles and bags stood in front of the engine house and the ridges of long grass, blocking the path. I think about how Johnny said there were thirty of them, how he knocked one in the cut, how he fought them. I know now that he didn’t fight them.
I want us to cut across the grass and head down to the canal towpath that way but my dad walks a few steps in front and I know he won’t move for anyone.
Come on, woss the matter? he says and I shuffle along and look down at the path like when Johnny looked down at the concrete at the zoo.
The skinheads won’t move. I can see that. There’s Steve and Paulie standing right in the middle of the path with a few others. Yvette is patting a dog, a grey whippet that another girl skinhead is holding on a lead. I like whippets. My grandad has taken me down to the Mushroom Field in Cromwell Green where they race whippets on summer nights and the men stand around and bet with each other and count out money into one another’s hands. We saw Charlie Clancey race his dog, Angel, and he came over and spoke to us. He looked angry because his dog was slow. Angel had hard, gleaming eyes like the dog on the path now.
Angel’s a devil, Charlie had said, making himself laugh.
They still haven’t moved and my dad is walking more quickly, I swear, right at them. I drop back. He says, Come on, Sean, but doesn’t turn his head to look at me; he’s staring at Steve and Paulie and the other skinheads now. One of them is taller and thinner than Steve and Paulie and has a swastika tattooed on his neck. I can see it clearly because we’re so close to them. They’ve stopped talking to each other and are looking at my dad. He doesn’t slow down.
All right, he says quietly, a few steps away from Steve and the one with the swastika who looks, and looks, and then steps off the side of the path so my dad can walk right between them.
All right, mate, Steve mumbles, and I notice that he looks down as my dad passes. My dad doesn’t even look at him.
Hello, Sean, Yvette says and looks up from the dog with a smile, All right?
All right. I nod, nearly running after my dad now.
Iss Sean look, Paulie says. I can tell he’s drunk or whatever because of how bright his eyes are. There’s a bag of glue rustling in his hand. He puts his thumb up. I put mine up to him too. My dad turns briefly and I hurry to keep up with him.
Who’s yer mates? he asks with half a smile.
Oh, Johnny knows em, I say.
He motions down to the towpath and the mouth of the tunnel and we carry on with our walk like nothing’s happened.
My dad showed me where the canals went and how they joined up. Where we sat, where it was flat and broad, the horses used to pull the barges along but up ahead, my dad pointed, in the tunnel, men had to lie on their backs and leg the boat along through the darkness. I said I would’ve liked to do that and he smiled and said how much hard work it would be. But that was good; work was good. The canals met the river at Stourport. The river flows out through Worcester and then on to the sea, other rivers joining it as it goes, into the Bristol Channel and the Irish Sea and then the cold, dark Atlantic. I remember realizing how everything was connected, pictured supertankers, Spanish galleons, nuclear submarines, sailing up the viscous water of the cut from all the strange places in the world; Matsuyama, Paramaribo, Archangel, places I’d look at in the atlas on the big table upstairs in the library.
The skinheads couldn’t knock us off the path. It was them that had to step out of the way for us. My place was secure in the world, right here, settled, and I remember a feeling of peace. I could hear the shouts from the football pitches over the hill and the skinheads laughing and smashing bottles, but they were nothing to us now. I remember the feeling of warmth and safety, like the feeling when I sat round at my nan and grandad’s with the fire on in the winter before everyone started to bang on the door and come in for Sunday tea.
I understood that the place where we lived was old, ancient. There were stories and secrets running through it. The ground beneath our feet was nine-tenths hollow, dug out for limestone. We were held up by insect skeletons millions of years old. There had once been a tropical sea where we lived now. I read how the top of the hills that we lived on had once been the bottom of the sea. I collected trilobites in a Quality Street tin. Ronnie’s dad took us to Wren’s Nest to find some and we went to Saint Francis’s to see the windows and down to the cemetery to put flowers on Duncan Edwards’ grave.
What’ll we do if there’s a war?
Head to the caves, son. We’d all live underground, my grandad says.
I can see that, when I ask, my mum is worried because she doesn’t know the answer. She hasn’t been in a war like my grandad. He knows what to do. Margaret Thatcher might start a war to help her new friend, Ronald Reagan, who is the new President of the United States of America.
Fool, him, my grandad says, as he watches Ronald Reagan on the television. They’d have bin better off with the monkey.
Ronald Reagan used to act in films with a chimpanzee called Bonzo.
The television shows Russian tanks rumbling through Moscow and the soldiers marching along with big steps and boots, then the screen switches to Ronald Reagan smiling and waving, back in America. I like to watch the Russian soldiers march when they show it on television on May Day. May Day is workers’ day, so the Russian soldiers march for us under their red flags and hammers and si
ckles. The people’s flag is deepest red. It’s complicated, though, because the Russian soldiers still might come and kill us even though they’d be attacking Margaret Thatcher and we’d have to try to make friends with them, our enemy’s enemy.
If there’s a war the Russians will drop a nuclear bomb on Birmingham, so we’d have to go underground and live in the caves. That’s how human life might survive. When I look at the patterns of the trilobites’ bodies I think of the labyrinth underneath us, the twists and turns. There are lakes and great caverns under Dudley. There’s one by the zoo called the Singing Cavern that’s so big you’d have to ride across it in a ship. That’s where we’ll live when they drop their bombs.
I used to dream of Theseus striding through the labyrinth to kill the minotaur, of Bilbo creeping through the misty mountain tunnels with his magic ring, stories from the books I read. I imagined how we’d evolve as we lived underground, how we’d end up with huge eyes and curved backs like the Morlocks in The Time Machine. Slowly we’d change into pale frogs, worms, burrowing back into the water and the dark.
Sean said hello to some of yower mates this morning, day yer, Sean?
As my dad says this I see Johnny flinch at the kitchen table and I don’t want my dad to say anything more.
Day yer, Sean? my dad says again because I’m ignoring him. I nod.
Oh, right, Johnny says.
My dad is smiling. He thinks it’s funny that I might know the skinheads. I’m not sure why. He must know they’re not Johnny’s mates, could never be.
Who was they, Sean? What was theer names?
I doh know, I say.
Well, they knowed yowers. Put their thumbs up.
I pretend I’m trying to remember. There’s no point pretending. I could tell from Johnny’s face that he knew who it was.
Is it Steve? I say. And Paulie and Yvette. They had a dog, a whippet.
Oh, right, Johnny says.
They looked well, my dad says. Skinheads. Wenches an all, with their hair shaved off. He says this as my grandad comes in the room.
What, them skinheads? Yow stay away from them. Doh get mixed up wi them. My grandad points the potato peeler at Johnny. He has been peeling potatoes for my nan. And doh get him mixed up wi em. We want yow to keep yer hair on, doh we, Sean, eh?
All right, they ay really me mates, Johnny says.
Doh get mixed up wi em, I’m telling yer. My grandad keeps the potato peeler aimed at him.
All right, Johnny says. I am twenty years old, though. Iss up to me who me mates am.
I’m tellin yer. My grandad keeps staring at him.
Later, Johnny talks to my dad quietly at the kitchen table. He keeps looking up to check my grandad isn’t listening. My dad nods his head then he gets up to pour a drink and pats Johnny on the shoulder, tells him not to worry about it.
They were beautiful; Johnny’s drawings, paintings. He’d draw all the time, in soft pencil in the first place, in the sketchbooks he kept on the go: cobwebs, the castle, the line of factory roofs. He didn’t do people very often, apart from those pictures of Natalie, and the portrait he did of my mum. On Sundays or on light nights when he was back from work in time he’d do watercolours, flowers or the shed, a row of cabbages over the fence in the allotments, the clouds floating over us. At the caravan he’d sit with his back to the sea wall and paint green-black seaweed and orange starfish or the light falling on the hills.
He tried to show me sometimes. We’d sit together at the kitchen table and I’d try to copy the lines he made on the page but I couldn’t even do that. It was about a way of looking at things. I had my books. I could see things in my own head. I thought about how he looked at things, though, tried to see some of the magic.
I think of them now, Johnny’s drawings, with the cable-cars moving in an arc across the town, cobwebs threading between geraniums. He still draws, I know that. There are piles of sketchbooks in the corner of his bedroom. The rest are in the loft. I never ask him about it. I did once, when we first started doing food. I asked him about putting some up, seeing if people would buy them. He nodded and said yes, but didn’t offer anything. I think of Jermaine’s face when I asked him that time and his son, yeah, piss artist, and I think of the pile of exercise books I used to have, up in smoke, the plans for an assassination, a revolution. I’m glad they’re ash. Whereas, Johnny’s sketchbooks: I should ask him again.
About the time I went to work for Diane, the Richardson brothers published plans to build the world’s tallest tower at Merry Hill, next to the new shopping centre. We could have looked out to sea from the top. Each day, the pub would have been in its shadow for a while. It was ridiculous, but by that point anything was possible. It never got built, but the idea itself was enough. I’ve put copies of the drawings up in an alcove by the bar and Lubetkin’s animal houses up over where the old fireplace was. I’d like Johnny’s cable-cars up there, somewhere, his cobwebs too, if only I could ask him properly.
The Sunday after that walk with my dad, he and Johnny went out together. That afternoon the camera was sitting on the kitchen table.
I knew it’d turn up eventually, my grandad said.
I found it at the back of the cupboard, Johnny said.
Johnny took me to the park one night that week and we saw Steve walking down Watson’s Green Road towards us. He had a black eye, crossed the road when he saw us coming.
You should fight fire with fire.
Yvette, Steve’s old girlfriend, comes in the pub sometimes with her husband. She works at an old people’s home in Blackheath. She worked for a while with Michelle at the day centre; Michelle says she’s a lovely woman. Yvette’s hair is permed now.
Kids all right? she asks. They am gerrin big. I doh know where the time gos, Sean, I doh.
People lived in the caves until the fifties, not underground, but in the rock houses down at Kinver Edge. The Edge is what’s left of a desert, millions of years old. We’d visit sometimes on quiet afternoons, and me and Ronnie would scramble up and down in the forest, climbing the cliff and the trees, our hands red with sandstone. There were ashes in some of the caves from recent fires, shapes cut into the walls for what had been shelves, graffiti scored into the soft stone. This is where we’ll live, I thought, as we ran up and down, pretending to be Robin Hood; this is where we’ll come to disappear.
My mum cries at the kitchen table. John Lennon has been shot. He was in The Beatles. My mum sings their songs to me sometimes. She sits at the kitchen table crying. I’m not sure if it’s only John Lennon she’s crying about. I heard the door slam this morning in the pitch black, my dad off to work. Usually he’s really quiet. Sometimes he even lets the handbrake off the car and rolls down the slope of the drive before he starts the engine along the street but this morning there was loads of noise, shouting, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying apart from my mum hissing, Well, you do that then.
Don’t cry, Mum, I say.
It’s very sad, sweetheart.
Don’t cry, Mum, I say, don’t cry, and I realize when I say it that it does no good, even though she turns and gives me a hug and goes to warm up some milk in the saucepan for me to have on my Weetabix because it’s cold outside. She has red eyes from crying when I get back that night and John Lennon is still playing on the radio and my dad is still at work.
While she’s mashing potatoes my mum goes and gets a bottle of gin from the cupboard. She pours a glass and tips some of my orange squash into it. She doesn’t normally do this. In fact, when they all have a drink on a Sunday, my mum has Britvic juice. That’s not a drink. When you say you have a drink it means beer or wine or whisky or another drink you get in a pub. Sometimes my dad will let me have a sip of his beer or pour some in a glass with lemonade for shandy. I want to say something to her, as she looks at the glass and takes a big drink of it and then pulls a face. I want to make things better, but I can’t think what to say and so she pours some more gin and squash.
All right, darling, come and
have this while it’s hot, and she puts my sausages and mash on the table. She smiles. I can’t do anything about John Lennon getting shot. I can’t do anything to make my dad come back from work. I can’t do anything about my mum being sad.
It’s not an excuse. What happened to my mum in the end, I could have done more, I could. Worse than that, I was part of the cause. That was the start of it, then. I can’t blame Margaret Thatcher for that, for my own failure; though I did, I still do.
Christmas morning and my mum and dad are happy. I’ve got a tape recorder and a Subbuteo set. When we get to my nan and grandad’s, everyone’s smiling and laughing. They give me Wolves and Villa teams and I lay the pitch and the players out in the front room. I start a league: Wolves, Villa, Liverpool, Ipswich. When Ronnie comes back from visiting his nan and grandad in Kidderminster we’ll play the FA Cup. He wants Man United as one of his presents. His dad, Natalie and the baby have stayed at home, next door.
Why ay yer all gooin, Ronnie? my nan asks him.
There ay no room in Kidderminster.
No room at the inn. My nan laughs.
I hear her whispering about it later with my mum.
It ay right, though, is it? Splitting a family up at Christmas.
Ronnie says he doesn’t mind, he’ll be back in a few days. It’s like having two Christmases.
A poor clearance from George Berry … unusual for him … lets in Souness … Souness inside to Sammy Lee … nudged on to Dalglish … turns … Oh, what a goal! Dalglish into the far corner. Bradshaw had no chance there. Three–one to Liverpool, there doesn’t look any way back for Wolves now. They will need to find some form for when they play Man United in the cup in the new year.
I am really fair and don’t let the Wolves win and I record the commentaries on my new tape recorder and make a programme called Soccer Special. I discuss the big cup game, Wolves against Manchester United, in between the commentaries, so I can play it to Ronnie when he gets back. Johnny is drunk and comes on the programme to be interviewed. He pretends to be Brian Clough.
How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Page 9
