Between the Bridge and the River (3 page)

In 1979 the European Court of Human Rights banned corporal punishment in Scottish schools. A year too late for Fraser and George.
They grew up being whacked across their outstretched hands by state-endorsed bullies. The hands had to be placed up, in front, in supplication, to receive the Calvinist benediction of pain.

There is a town in Scotland called Lochgelly, which was badly affected by the court ruling. Lochgelly was the town that made the belts for teachers to use in schools. The “strap,” as it was called by the children and teachers alike, was about eighteen inches long and an inch thick, with two or three strands on one end and a hole at the other, so it could be hung in the classroom as a deterrent to the unruly.

It came in three densities: the Lochgelly Hard, the Lochgelly Medium, and the Lochgelly Soft. There was some talk among the kids that there was such a thing as the Lochgelly Extra-Hard but most dismissed this as scaremongering. Actually, those in the know, and Fraser was certainly one of them, were acutely aware that the Lochgelly Soft was the one to be most feared. In the hands of a skilled thug like Mr. Weir (a.k.a. Le Merde), the French teacher, the softie inflicted a terrific shock of pain followed by a numbness and trembling that lasted for almost an hour.

It was the drama of the strap that really made it terrifying, though. The Ritual. The fact that a teacher, normally a sedate portly smoker with a disappointed air, would be so full of hate that he would shake off his torpor and use all that energy and a piece of expensive equipment to hurt a child was just awe inspiring to the victims. It really instilled terror, and that’s the thing about terrorism—it works. Especially for the terrorists—they might not get what they want but it feels damn good trying.

For many terrorists, the means
is
the end.

Some of the sexier teachers really got off on the fear. Big Jim Sullivan (Assistant Headmaster—Lochgelly Soft—a.k.a. Big Jimmy, God, T.T.C. [The Total Cunt], and Skippy) used to carry his around with him in the inside pocket of his academic cloak.
A cloak
—in a comprehensive school in Scotland in the 1970s. Darth MacVader.

Miss Allen (History—Lochgelly Medium—a.k.a. Fannypad and Wonder Woman) kept hers in her handbag next to her sanitary towels and her dog-eared copy of
The Joy of Sex
. She was having an affair with
Mr. Stirling (English Lit.—no belt—beard, long hair, velvet jacket, a.k.a. Pretty Boy, Hippyshake, and Gilbert O’Sullivan). The pupils punished Mr. Stirling mercilessly for his nonviolent teaching methods until he started sending them to T.T.C. to be dealt with. It was, just as the children had supposed, not true that he was nonviolent. He was just a coward. A sneaky coward who got someone else to do his dirty work. Of course, Mr. Stirling was English.

Fraser and George and all the other children had to be ever vigilant in the face of such an intelligent, perverse, and cruel enemy. Sun Tzu wouldn’t have lasted a fortnight.

Nowadays, Scottish kids are contained using the much more humane system of the X-box and heroin.

Fraser wasn’t particularly badly behaved. He got into no more scrapes than anyone else, just the usual pranks and pushing matches with other boys. His curse was that he was charismatic and physically attractive. Tall, black hair, blue eyes, straight teeth—all present. All white.

Genetic luck is what made him stand out from the herd. A crime in itself. Not that it’s unusual to be punished for your DNA. Millions were packed into the ovens for just that, so in many respects Fraser got off very lightly indeed.

It wasn’t a case of why he was punished. It was a case of when.

So Fraser left school when he was sixteen. He wasn’t stupid, or academically unsuccessful, but he couldn’t take the fear and the constraint any longer. Mr. Tweed, his English teacher (Lochgelly Medium, a.k.a. Tweedy and Hammy Hamster), was terribly disappointed. He confronted Fraser through a nibbled Ritz cracker.

“Why? Your results are just getting good. You work hard for the next two years, you could go to university.”

“I’m sixteen. I can leave. I’m going.”

“You hate school so much, you want to throw the rest of your life away?”

“That’s not how I see it, sir. I just don’t like to be in an institution where they tell you where they would like you to be by ringing a bell. I feel like a lab rat.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

The conversation would have gone on, perhaps Tweedy would have talked him out of it, but the bell rang and he had to go and force-feed Dickens to 4B.

It was at this point that Fraser’s and George’s roads took different directions. Fraser was leaving and George was staying on to take higher education. He wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer.

George had developed a thing about standing up for people he thought needed his help since the time he had whipped Willie Elmslie with a fishing rod on the canal bank; plus he thought it would be like on TV.

Different case every week with satisfying endings and lessons learned. Also—good money.

“It’ll be like being an accountant without the fun,” said Fraser.

“Thanks,” said George.

“You are the wind beneath my wings,” said Fraser.

“Fuck off,” said George.

They had been drifting apart for a while.

Home was sanctuary, the only nonviolent place in Fraser’s life in the 1970s. His father never hit his kids, really because of all the fuss it caused, not through any real philanthropic notion. Mr. Darby’s fear of intimacy extended to not punishing his children. Mr. Darby liked order. Liked things neat. This is because, as a ten-year-old child in Glasgow, he had seen twenty-three of his classmates killed when a German bomb fell on his school. He never wanted to be around anything that untidy ever again. Any kind of untidiness made him nervous. He even thought of himself as Mr. Darby.

Fraser’s mother, Janice, was actually quite a happy soul but she had to hide it because, like all pseudo-intellectuals, she thought being cheery made her look stupid, which of course she was for believing that rubbish in the first place.

She liked to talk about Sartre sometimes, just as insurance.

The fact that Fraser had left school without any academic qualifications or certificates was a source of worry for his parents. His mother
was actually secretly grateful. She lived on worry and Fraser’s behavior was a particularly nourishing source. That’s why he was her favorite. She had another kid, Fraser’s older sister by two years, Elizabeth. An attractive, well-adjusted young woman who excelled in school, so was of no real interest to her mother.

Actually, during Fraser’s rise to fame, Elizabeth got a Ph.D. in chemistry, married her high-school boyfriend Duncan, had two children, adopted another, and became the head of research and development for a large pharmaceutical company, but she always thought her mother would have been more interested if she’d been an anorexic lesbian circus performer with an addiction to self-mutilation.

And she was right. It wasn’t that her mother didn’t love her, it’s just that Janice could only express love through concern and interference, and you can’t really apply that to someone who’s doing fine.

Fraser’s mother managed to love him a lot. Ever since he was a baby he had provided her with fuel. He got croup at an early age. He was late with potty training. He didn’t speak until he was two, he had terrible tantrums. He wet the bed. He was her dream child.

The bed wetting was a godsend. She dragged Fraser to specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists, none of whom seemed to think there was much wrong with him but a small and rather weak bladder. Janice was sure it ran deeper, it was in “his subcontinent.” One therapist, a pale-skinned and freckly ginger quack with a hacking cough whom Janice had been referred to by her exasperated GP, actually prescribed a bed-wetting monitor for Fraser.

An experimental device being tested by the National Health Service at the time, it was an electric blanket that fitted under the regular sheet that when hit with urine would emit a blood-curdling siren that would wake the whole house. The idea being that the patient would learn to avoid setting off the siren by going to the bathroom.

It really worked in reverse; Fraser damn near shat himself the first time it went off, as did everybody else in the house. The device only lasted two nights, until Mr. Darby decided it was disrupting family life, but by then it was too late. Fraser had developed a problem with his subcontinent. That is to say, he became subcontinent. Peeing
himself in moments of great stress or when standing too close to a passing fire engine.

His father always thought he was gay, which meant he didn’t really count. His father preferred Elizabeth. Good, reliable, and hardworking, like a Volvo.

The real reason Fraser left school is that he knew sooner or later a teacher would give him the strap and he wouldn’t be able to hold the pee till he got to the bathroom. He would pee himself in front of the entire class.

Like most teenagers, he couldn’t have lived with that.

He left school to save his life.

Fraser sat in the leather armchair on the set decorated to look like the sitting room of a Scottish church minister’s manse in the 1950s. A standard lamp next to him, a small table with prop books and a cheap print of
The Monarch of the Glen
on the cardboard wall behind him. A stuffed canary sat self-consciously on a wooden perch in a gilded cage.

The buxom new makeup woman, Paula, fussed with Fraser’s eyebrows, her breasts inches from his face.

He whispered to her, “Come to my room later. I’m going to fuck you, you naughty minx.”

She giggled. “You are so bad.”

But she would be there.

High up in the sound gallery, Stevie Henderson and old Charlie MacDuff smiled at each other.

“I tell you,” said Stevie, “if he forgets to take the microphone off again I’m recording it.”

Charlie laughed. “I am way ahead of you, youngster.”

Women liked Fraser. He was very happy about that because he liked them right back. He had been a tubby kid, so the primary girls hadn’t noticed him at all, preferring the boys who looked like girls.

When puberty hit, he stretched, the puppy fat disappearing so fast that he didn’t even notice. There was a day in school, though, when
Amy Harrison talked to him on the stairs, said he had nice shoes. Said he was funny. Asked if he had a girlfriend. She came on pretty strong. She made it very clear, as women do, what she thought.

Fraser was glad he had just come from the bathroom, although after she left he went back there anyway.

Amy Harrison was gorgeous, and had breasts. Unbelievable.

As soon as he got home Fraser went to the bathroom and masturbated, thinking about Amy.

He feigned illness the next day, and once everyone was out of the house, he went to Elizabeth’s room and put on one of her skirts and her tights. Then, looking at his erection in the mirror, he jerked off again, imagining the image of women’s underclothing; his hands and cock were really him fucking Amy.

The results were spectacularly pleasant for him. He vowed to do it again as much as possible. And he did. He was never caught, and when he actually started really having sex with Amy, he ended his little brush with transvestism. He didn’t think about it much until years later when he mentioned it to Carl, his therapist, who as you can imagine was delighted.

No one actually came out and said it, but vis-à-vis sex the prevailing wisdom in the Darby household was that men were horny bastards and wanted sex all the time, and women didn’t really like sex but would let men do it as a favor in return for curtains and furniture.

Maybe some women liked sex but they were bad and dirty and probably Catholics.

What amazed Fraser, as he thought about this years later, was how frighteningly accurate it was. He was very grateful that he hadn’t been brought up to believe that sex was a natural expression of love between a man and a woman. It would have taken all the fun out of it.

“Coming to you in five, four, three, two . . .”

The floor manager mimed the “one” and swept his arm below camera two.

Fraser was looking skyward, a beatific smile on his face, as if Jesus had just told him a joke he had heard before but he wanted to
be polite. After a short pause, he turned and looked directly into the camera and read from the TelePrompTer.

“Hello, everyone. When I was a wee boy I had a cairn terrier puppy—a cheeky wee thing with whiskers that made him look a bit like my grandpa. . . .”

In the sound gallery Charlie MacDuff pretended to vomit.

Fraser continued, “My father had gotten him from a man at work. He said that the owner was going to drown him because he had no room for a puppy, and would I look after him. Of course, like any little boy, I was delighted. I named him Blackie, because he was black. That dog followed me everywhere, to Mr. McMurtry’s shop when my mother sent me for potatoes, to Stoorie Burn when I went fishing, and when we went to my granny’s house on Sunday, Blackie would sit outside waiting patiently for us to come out. My granny was a proud woman and she didn’t want dog hairs on her Axminster carpet.

“When you think about it, that wee dog was a little bit like Jesus, wasn’t he? Waiting for you, a faithful, loyal, and true friend. Although you can’t nourish Jesus on Boneos and Bacon Bits, he needs your love and faith. . . .”

As Fraser continued with his ridiculous allegory, a leathery blond woman crept in and stood next to Margaret. His agent tried to ignore the woman, who smelled dreadfully of nicotine and hairspray. Margaret assumed she was another of Fraser’s “friends.” She was wrong.

“Are you Margaret Bonaventura?” asked the woman in a consumptive, forty-Marlboro-Reds-a-day whisper.

Margaret nodded.

“I’m Tracy Flood from the Sunday
Recorder
. Can we talk?”

GEORGE FARTED
and enjoyed the smell in his car.

Canned ham.

Strange his farts always smelled like canned ham, as he never ate it.

Better try it soon or not at all.