How I Killed Margaret Thatcher (10 page)

A shape comes from the entry at the side of the butcher's shop. I used to wait there with my nan when I was in the infants school, for pork chops and tomato sausage and caul, when she made faggots. There was a tiled floor and the sun would come through the window and make the knives shiny; there was a calendar on the wall with pictures of cows in green, sunny fields. The room would feel hot and smell of blood. Now my nan goes down to Cinderheath or Shakespeare's on Watson's Green Road. When the shape comes from the shadows of the entry, you can see it's a man, limping, holding a dog on a rope.

Caesar! the woman shouts now and looks across the road. Here he is, padding through the rubble, a piece of old rope round his neck as a lead, being walked along by Tommy Clancey who has a can of beer in his other hand and an unlit cigar in his mouth. It turns out that he's been living in the abandoned flat above the old butcher's for weeks. Tommy and Caesar zigzag through the piles of bricks to the sign that says
DANGER
, where Caesar cocks his leg, and Tommy, swapping the lead to his beer hand undoes his zip and goes as well, splattering the base of the sign. When they finish, Tommy strolls out on to the pavement, looks both ways very carefully, and comes across the road with a panting Caesar.

We get taken home in the police car. Well, to Ronnie's first. I say that I live next door, at my nan and grandad's. Paul is lying about the police being all right. They tell us that if the dog had been hurt we'd have had to go to court and probably get sent away to juvenile detention. Then they make a big show of knocking on Ronnie's front door first and then my nan and grandad's. There's only my nan in. She has to phone my mum. My nan is never angry with me but today her face goes white with rage. She has to ask the police in while they wait for my mum to come. They come in through the front door. She makes them a cup of tea. I sit on a chair staring at the floor. Then when my mum comes, we get the big lecture all over again. I can hear Ronnie getting a good hiding next door. It's probably what they do if they take you in for questioning, beat someone up in the cell next door to scare you. The police tell my mum about all the trouble they've had with kids causing problems with the houses. My mum is good, though. She says I've never been allowed anywhere near that site and if the council or the builders put a proper fence up around it to make it safe then maybe there wouldn't be as many problems. The police want to go after that. The policeman keeps eyeballing me, like he wants to hit me with his truncheon. I feel bad for Caesar. It would have been terrible if he'd got lost or run over or something but we hadn't meant for him to escape. It was a game.

The police talk quietly again to my mum as she lets them out of the front door. When they've gone she comes back in and pounds me round the head and tells me to get out of her sight. I go upstairs and sit on the edge of the toilet seat and don't dare move for a while. I have never been in so much trouble. I haven't even had chance to say that we found Tommy Clancey.

He'd been sleeping in the old butcher's shop since he returned from Stourport. That was how he lived, heading out to the countryside towns for the summer: Bridgnorth, Bewdley, Stourport. He'd sleep out by the river and then head back to Dudley for the winter, picking up work as he went. He lived like that for years. He was still doing it when I came back for good. The woman who kept the pub, Diane, was so grateful to him for bringing Caesar back that she lifted his ban, which meant that he was banned from every pub in Dudley apart from the Ash Tree. He even did a bit of work collecting glasses and changing the odd barrel. She paid him in drink. Caesar carried on into old age, barking at children as they walked past the gates.

Nearly an hour, they was sitting in here, my nan says. Nearly an hour. Longer than when they come last time. They could've been off catching crooks. Instead, they was drinking tea in here and walking the mud off their boots onto the clean hall carpet.

She doesn't say this to me, but to my mum.

I know, Mum, I know.

They want to be ashamed of theerselves. I day like the look of him, the policeman, looking at Sean like he was a criminal.

I know, Mum, I know.

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 sickles. 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?