How I Killed Margaret Thatcher (14 page)

Months went by and this was how we lived. Some weeks there was no work from Charlie at all, but usually there was some. In the slow weeks, my dad sometimes worked on the cars for Harry Robertson.

Harry would swap bits from different cars around all the time. He would then stand there looking at the parts he'd laid out on the pavement or inside a car's bonnet, scratching his head. Sometimes he'd sell one of the cars and stand shaking hands with the new owner in the street, trying not to look too relieved.

Nothing but old bangers, my nan, who knew nothing about cars, would say. Meks the whole street look a mess.

Sometimes my dad would help Harry fix one of his puzzles. My dad could fix anything. He stood there looking at the broken engine for a long time and then he'd move a few things around, or get Harry to fetch something from one of the other cars or his toolbox, and the car would start up again. If Harry sold a car that my dad had helped him on then Harry would give my dad some money. He'd take the notes out of his cigarette packet while they stood in the entry and pass them to my dad. It was the same as with Charlie; they had to check for government agents. I always kept a look out. My dad told me not to worry. I pictured the SAS coming from out of the allotments or over the rooftops and wondered how I wasn't meant to worry about that.

When the dark nights and bad weather came there was less work of any sort. My mum and dad talked in whispers in the kitchen and sometimes I listened, sometimes not. They talked about money. My dad talked about moving, moving away to find work. I tried to imagine it. If we had to go I hoped it would be Australia or somewhere. My mum didn't want to move.

I will move, she said, but not far, not far, Francis, our lives am here.

There's nothing here.

Our lives am here, Francis. Our lives.

It's February. I watch the clouds coming. They don't come like usual; they come from the wrong direction. I tell my mum. Usually, if you're out the front at my nan and grandad's you can see the wind blowing the clouds past Dudley, they come, high and white, past the castle and Top Church. The best place to see them is from the top of Cawney Bank; you can see them drifting on their way. They're called the Severn Jacks. Cromwell's soldiers must have watched them, sitting here on the same hill, firing their cannons at the castle. Shakespeare used to watch them from the river bank in Stratford. The weather always comes that way. It starts somewhere near America, near Jamaica, and comes across the Atlantic and picks up rain on the way. It rains on Ireland and Wales and the clouds come up the Severn and sometimes they rain on us. Not today, though. The clouds come the other way. My mum's not interested what direction the clouds are coming from. She says it looks like snow, though.

The clouds are a strange shape, dark on the undersides and there's a glow around them on the horizon. When I go out it feels strange and still. I think maybe something has happened, like a nuclear disaster or something. The cloud isn't in a mushroom but it billows like in the films of nuclear bombs on telly. If the weather comes the other way it's from the mountains in Russia, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. There's nothing between us and those mountains, freezing cold air coming across Polish and German plains for hundreds of miles and all the flat land east of us, like Grantham, where Margaret Thatcher grew up. It must've been cold growing up on a flat plain like that with no hills for shelter. I think for a moment that it's the end of the world, that we'll see planes or angels come flying out of the dark clouds. Everyone thinks there might be a war at some point, but people don't talk about it that much.

Wim done for with that clown with his finger on the button, my grandad says about Ronald Reagan, especially with her egging him on. He means Margaret Thatcher. There's a button you can press, if you are President of the United States or General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and fire off all the nuclear missiles you want at different cities. It's called Global Thermo-Nuclear War.

Sometimes I look on the map and pick out all the places that will get bombed that I'll probably never visit, like Chicago and Vladivostok and Aberdeen. I've invented a game where I roll two dice to get a number, say eleven, and pretend that's the number of nuclear bombs each side has got and then I work out where they'll drop them. I look at the atlas and work out the best places. The first few are easy, like Moscow and Leningrad and New York, Washington and London, but then it gets harder. The places that will get bombed are capital cities, and places with army bases, or ports, and then cities with lots of factories. If Margaret Thatcher works fast enough all our factories will close and we'll be safe because we won't be rich or powerful enough to deserve a nuclear bomb. It's something to think about.

And, actually, both sides have got enough bombs to blow the whole world up so it doesn't really matter what order they do it in. Plus, even if the bombs don't drop right on us we'll have to live through a nuclear winter and get radiation sickness or live in the caves underground for hundreds of years, like my grandad says we will.

It's only a game for me, though. I got the idea from another game in Johnny's room called Risk. In that game you have to try and take over the whole world, like England did when it ruled India and Africa and Australia.

I'm gooin back out, my dad says.

What now?

I said I'd see Charlie. There's summat he wants me to look at.

Now?

Now.

Yer tea's ready. Iss nearly dark.

He wants it dark.

Am yer gooin out in that thin coat? Get yer big coat from the garage.

My dad winks at me and my mum goes looking out the back for the coat he does the garden and washes the car in. I want to ask if I can go with him. I know he'll say no and so I don't say anything.

The east wind doesn't bring bombs or angels either; it brings snow, and it starts snowing while my dad stands there with the door open, waiting for my mum to find his coat, with the light beginning to go.

The snowflakes are so big that they make a noise when they land on my coat. I stand with my hands out, my mouth open, catching snowflakes. In no time the drive is covered, the cars; it's dark as my dad walks off down the road. My mum calls me in and I sit with a hot water bottle and look out of the front window at the snow falling in the glow of the streetlight. Down on the main road I see cars skidding past at first, then the flashing orange lights of the grit van, then no cars at all. I know there'll be no school tomorrow and I hug the hot water bottle, pleased. But all the time I'm thinking of how I watched my dad walk down the road into the snow and how I could see the shape of his body grow fainter and fainter, the snow falling in his footsteps, until he disappeared.

It's how I think of him now, I suppose. I picture him with the snow slowly erasing him; like a wave looming above him, white horses spitting and menacing to bring our whole life crashing down. I pick these things out now, that in another, different life wouldn't have registered at all.

Charlie Clancey is down the police station. He was arrested in the snow. My nan phones my mum to tell her. The machines they've been dismantling, the iron they save from the dead factories, it's not theirs to take. No one else wants it, though. Margaret Thatcher's decided nothing is any use in them, so it's rag and bone really; Dad and Charlie are like the Jawas cleaning up old droids in Star Wars. That's how I see it, anyway. They're doing a good job. The police don't see it the same.

They come for my dad on the day I go back to school after the snow. The snow is hard and packed at the sides of the road, dazzling in the February sun. I know it will turn to mud and slush. There's no morning raid or SAS coming through the windows. They knock on the door and my dad goes off to the police station in Dudley to be questioned. They don't arrest him. One of the policemen said that they want to arrest him, that they've been watching him, that they'll get him eventually, like they'll get them all. The policeman said that quietly, by the desk in the station, under the picture of the queen, not when they were doing the questioning. I hear my dad telling my mum this, sitting at my listening post on the stairs.

Fat bastard, my dad says, about the policeman.

I bet he's the same one that sat on Michelle's dad's head. I'm going to tell her.

Charlie's still in there, poor bloke.

Fuck Charlie, my mum says. I've never heard my mum swear before, ever. I doh wanna hear his fuckin name in this house. Iss stealing, Francis, theft; iss wrong.

This house is why I was doing it. Any road, how's it stealing if they'm gonna leave them machines there to rust?

I doh care about the house. I doh care. I was happy in the flat. I'd be happy anywhere. I've tode yer. I doh want a big house. I never wanted to buy this one. All this wanting more. All this talk of more. Houses and cars. We cor afford it, any road. Even in work. I wouldn't want it if we could. I was happy, Francis. I was happy.

She's shouting and then she does a big sob and I know she's crying. I can't tell what my dad's doing. He's not banging the kitchen table or anything like that.

Charlie was doing us a favour, he says.

My mum laughs now but she's not really laughing.

Yow could still go to prison, yer know that, doh yer? Just because they ay charged yer today. This ull go on and on. Yow heard what that policeman said to yer.

Charlie woh say nuthin.

Charlie this, Charlie that.

She grunts now and I hear a slap and she's trying to hit my dad. I can hear them shuffling across the kitchen; the stool scrapes across the floor then topples over. My dad's going Sh, sh, sh to her. She takes a big breath.

Yow used to laugh at him. Charlie the tatter. Charlie the gypo. Now Charlie's the onny thing between us and losing the house, the only thing between you and going to prison. If you think I'm the sort of person who wants yer to risk going to prison so we can live in this stupid house you don't know me at all. Yer doh know me.

I want us to get on, you know. I want a nice house. Yow want one too. Woss wrong with that, wi wanting things?

What is the matter with yer? I ay changed, Francis. Iss yow thass changed. I knew it. Yow asked for this. I hope yome happy with it now, I really do. I doh care what house we live in.

I hear my dad pick up the stool and put it back in its place.

I was doing it for you, he says, for us.

Yer was doin it for yerself, my mum says, and then the back door slams shut.

They stopped speaking. They'd talk to each other in front of me but they'd avoid each other, even in the house. My dad slept on the settee downstairs then would go up to bed when my mum got up to get me started for school. He'd stay in bed until late in the day until my mum went up to see my nan or to do her cleaning. I know she'd take him a cup of tea up sometimes, try to get him going.

I went to school in the slush and watched for the police from the front window when I got home.

Now there's a war, a real war. Not like the one with the IRA or Iranian gunmen or against the rioters. We're going to fight a war against Argentina. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, which belong to us, even though they're almost on the other side of the world, right down in the South Atlantic, near to Cape Horn, the tip of South America, on the way to Antarctica. They're rocky islands in the middle of a rough, freezing sea, with more penguins and sheep than people, but the people speak English and they think they're English and have red telephone boxes and stuff like that, even though the nearest proper country is Argentina. This all comes from the days of Empire, when English soldiers went off and captured places and England ruled over them all, ruled the waves, like in the song. That was how we got so rich.

They'm bloody welcome to em. What use am they to we here? Nobody knowed where they was till yesterday.

My grandad says this to Johnny. They're not arguing. Johnny is nodding his head.

I thought they was in Scotland, my nan says.

The reporter on the telly is saying that the generals in Argentina might have made a miscalculation about Margaret Thatcher's appetite for a fight.

You've only got to look in her eyes, shining like Michael Campbell's and Mani Singh's that night when they had that massive fight by the Spar, when the police came, the same ones that took me and Ronnie home, and we all had to run off, to see that she wants a fight. One look at the television for the last three years with Margaret Thatcher talking about strikes and people rioting and the IRA and anyone, really, who didn't think like her, should have shown the Argentinians how much she'll enjoy a war.

The SAS'll go, I say.

I hope they sink, Johnny says.

Watch what yome saying, my nan says. Doh get yerself into any bother.

I doh care, Johnny says.

It was worse for the Argentinians than for us, though. Johnny told me that if you were his age in Argentina you'd be forced to go into the army to go and fight in the Falklands and if you didn't want to go that was no use because you got put into a plane and the plane flew high over Buenos Aires and then dropped you, without a parachute, into the River Plate, These people were called the Disappeared, although everyone knew where they'd gone. Johnny still wanted Argentina to win, though. Our enemy's enemy was our friend, he said.

In the end, though, it was me who was injured in the Falklands War.

Propaganda, thass all it is. They must think we was all born yesterday, my grandad says. Iss all about oil, gas, any road. They think we'm stupid. They'm spending all our oil money on the dole so they need to find some more. Thass all iss about, yow watch what happens.

Just watch what yome saying, my nan says.

I doh care, my grandad says.

We play Falklands War at school. Everyone wants to play as the SAS. I say that I'll play as Argentina. The hut where they put the bins is the Falkland Islands, the slope below the bins is the Atlantic Ocean. I find a carrier bag swirling in the wind and put it on a stick and say it's the Argentinian flag. I prop it on top of the bins and everyone else runs around, trying to get the flag and invade the islands. I'm taller than most of them and the bins are on a slope. I'm looking down on everyone; it's easy to defend these islands. If this is what the real war is like, Argentina will win, I think.

But really I don't want to play the game. We're too old for this sort of silliness. We go to secondary school in September. They're changing the system soon so kids go a year earlier, at eleven, so in a way we should already be there. We're going backwards, acting like little kids playing soldiers. I want to play football like normal.

I've been practising with my left foot against the back wall at home and on Sunday mornings at the edge of the pitches down by the canal with my dad.

The other Sunday, after I told my dad what I was practising, he got me to leave my slipper on my right foot and put my boot on my left, which meant I had to kick the ball with my left foot when he knocked it to me. My slipper got covered in mud and my mum was angry with my dad when we got back. I was worried, especially when she really started shouting, expecting him to lose his temper. It was good he'd come out with me, I thought, but he sat at the kitchen table with his head down so I went up to my mum and said, It ay Dad's fault. Iss how yer train to get good with yer left foot.

She said slippers cost money and that we hadn't got any. That was when I finally realized that we were poor and that Johnny had been right all along. Then she got distracted because I'd said It ay instead of It isn't, and she started telling me that I had to try and speak proper English but in a gentler, calmer voice now. Then she said it wasn't the end of the world and that she could get the slipper clean and she put it in the washing up bowl with some soap powder and poured the kettle over it and it was true, it did get clean. When I turned round to look at my dad sitting at the kitchen table I swear there were tears rolling down his face.

Paul is getting angry. He started off laughing, shouting, Kill the Argies! Kill the Argies! but now he's gone red in the face and is trying to reach up to where the flag is and every time he gets near I push him down the slope. He's the leader of the British Forces, the South Atlantic Task Force. He has pictures of warships and the SAS that he's cut out of the newspaper and brought in to show us all. He's got a cousin in the army who he says might get sent to fight. He's in Ireland now. Paul thinks I'll let him win. Maybe he thinks he's stronger and will win anyway. He's not, though, and he won't.

Hold his arms! Hold his arms! he shouts to the others who still think we're playing, but they can't grab me as I dodge round them.

Paul punches me, hard. I swing a punch back but I miss. He grabs my hair and tries to whack my head against the brick bin shed that is the Falkland Islands. I can't grab his hair. He's had it all shaved off like the soldiers and the skinheads. I bring my head up fast and it smashes him in the face and he goes falling backwards and the others all shout Scrap! Scrap! Scrap! and Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! like we always do when there's a fight. Paul grabs a pole. I think how we're not meant to play around here because of the stuff that the workmen left when they did up the nursery: slabs and bags of concrete and thick metal poles like the one Paul has picked up now. He runs at me with it held over his head and I stop still, freeze. I could dodge, or swing a punch, or try to run away; no one would blame me, it's against the rules to try something like this. But I'm thinking, Come on then, let's fight about your stupid fucking islands and your cousin in the army helping Margaret Thatcher and then Paul smashes the pole over my head.

I know there's blood because there's some on my hands and spots of it on the gravel in front of me. I can't see properly. There's blood in front of my eye and I can't get up off the floor. Everyone screams and runs around. There's a whistle blowing and I can see Pete, the caretaker, wrestling with Paul to get him to drop the iron pole, which goes with a crash onto the floor, like it did on my head.

He's killed him, I hear someone shout, but it's not like when I fell out of the window. I know I'm not dead this time. It's just blood and a clanging in my ears from the iron bar crashing and it sounds like the metal I used to be able to hear being bashed at the works from across the allotments, and then everything goes black.

I come round in Mr Taylor's car. I'm wrapped in a blanket on the back seat and Mrs Jukes, the school secretary, is sitting next to me. She's got a son in the navy on the way to the Falkland Islands. There's a picture of him above her desk in the office with a poppy pinned on it, even though it isn't November, and a Union Jack. For a moment I think that she knows the truth and they're going to drive me off and drop me into the canal from the bridge and I'll be like one of the Disappeared. I'm sick onto the blanket and Mrs Jukes says, It's okay, darling, it's okay, and wipes my mouth with some tissues.

We're at the hospital and a doctor sews my eyelid back on, which was the problem, it was hanging off, and why even Michelle was crying and trying to get at Paul to punch him even when he still had the iron pole in his hands and even though she'd been one of the people shouting Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! and clapping and stamping when we started fighting. She loves a good fight.

I have concussion, a big lump on my head and stitches in my right eyelid and eyebrow.

Paul is in big trouble. I'm allowed back in class, even though I haven't had my stitches out yet but I have to stay in at playtime and go home at dinner. I want to stay off and pretend to have a worse headache than I have, but my mum makes me go. Paul hasn't been allowed back to school yet.

There has to be a meeting at the school now that my concussion's gone. Paul's mum and dad are here, and so are mine. His mum and dad don't live together and his dad lives somewhere on Sledmere with Paul's half-brother and sister. I haven't seen him for ages. He has tattoos all up his arms.

My mum says the most in the meeting. The two dads are silent. Paul's dad and mine nod to each other at the start and now they sit looking at the floor while the women speak to Mr Taylor and Mrs Jones, our teacher. We copy our dads. On the way into the meeting Paul asks me if I'm all right and I nod. The police have been round to Paul's house. They weren't friendly with him this time. He could have been arrested for what happened. My mum wants to know why he hasn't been, why he's being let back into the school, why the victim and the attacker are being treated the same.

He could have been killed, she says over and over.

I know you're upset, Mrs Bull, Mr Taylor says.

Upset? Upset? I'm livid, she says, You send yer child to school thinking they'll be safe. The onny reason yome dealing with it like this is because they was playing where they shouldn't and you wasn't watching em properly. It's all about yerselves and how yer look. I've a good mind to ring the paper up and see what they've got to say about it.

Okay. Mrs Bull, that's enough.

I know he's done wrong but he was provoked, Paul's mum says now. She's looking from me to my mum like she wants to strangle us.

Provoked! What can he have done to provoke an iron bar round the head, like that?

He had a black eye, our Paul. He ay never one to start a fight.

He did have a black eye where I hit him with my head. It's fading now. There's still a little bump on the back of my head where I did it. That bump is nothing to the bump on my forehead. The bit about him never starting a fight is a lie: he likes fighting.

Me and Paul get told to sit outside while they carry on talking. We can hear my mum still saying that I could have been killed. I want her to be quiet now. She's made her point. He was actually trying to kill me, so there's no point saying it. It's what happens in a war.

All right? Paul says again and I nod again.

We shake hands and watch the fish in the tank by the reception window. Our class comes out of assembly and Michelle sees us and comes to walk over and ask us what's going on but Mrs Jukes spots her and says, Where do you think you're going, young lady? and Michelle goes back to the class line glaring at Mrs Jukes.

This was just before they sank the
Belgrano
.

Her's onny havin this war to get bloody re-elected. People gerrin killed all for her vanity.

My grandad shouted at the television. My nan ignored him. She'd told him not to talk about the war in front of me.

A couple of days later
HMS Sheffield
was blown up; there was a picture of it burning on the front of the papers and on the news constantly. It was the ship Mrs Jukes' son was serving on. He died. She was off school the rest of the year, until we left, so we didn't see her again. We had a big assembly with a minute's silence and a school collection for Mrs Jukes. We got told that he died serving his country. I imagined him burning, burning; then drowning in the freezing Atlantic.

I saw her at Merry Hill a few years ago, shuffling along with her daughter. There were soldiers there in their desert uniforms, collecting. You see them around much more now. I looked to see if she put anything in their collecting tins but she stared through the open doors of Marks and Spencer's. I thought of her picturing her son burning, drowning, full fathom five, every morning, every day, all the time, over and over in her head. That's what it would be like. That's what it was like now, I supposed, as she walked through the shopping centre, holding her daughter's arm.

One of the soldiers put a sticker on Josh. We nodded and said thanks and then sneaked it off him back at the car when he wasn't looking.

My grandad watched the ship burning and muttered that at least the men he'd fought with had been dying for a reason. That was only the second time I'd ever heard him mention the war. There was a shoebox of medals upstairs in the back of my nan and grandad's bedroom. He'd fought in Sicily and Italy. The only other time I'd heard him talk about it was with my uncle Freddie when he came to visit from Australia. Uncle Freddie had fought, too. He'd been shot in the leg in the Normandy landings. By an American, he used to say.