How I Killed Margaret Thatcher (2 page)

It was a Friday, the day after the election. We always had fish and chips on a Friday. We must have tried to carry on as normal because I remember that we all ate fish and chips with me face down on the kitchen table. My mum rubbed cream into my wounds and then splashed vinegar on my chips, just the way I liked them.

Well, it ay hurt his appetite, look, my grandad said.

My dad worked with the tweezers. He put the splinters in a jam jar as he plucked them out. I kept the jar for a long time on the windowsill in my bedroom. It looked like a jar of spiders' legs. I had a dream of giant spiders coming over the fence at the back of our house, seeking terrible revenge for the trees, where they once lived, that had been chopped down to make space for the new houses. Every autumn we'd get a plague of spiders. They used to invade my nan and grandad's house too, coming in from the cold off the allotments. My uncle Johnny would sit out on the path and draw the cobwebs with soft pencil in his sketchbook. We lived in the new houses, in Elm Drive, away from Crow Street, and away from Cinderheath and Cromwell Green. There were no elms on Elm Drive, but there were crows on Crow Street. I buried the jar in the garden, in the end. Then, later, when we lost the house, the jar of spiders' legs was gone for ever.

Ronnie comes round to get some peace from his sisters and to borrow some felt pens to get his homework done. We were asked to design our dream house. I'd done mine. It was easy. I went out the back of my nan and grandad's and drew their row, then I turned round and where the allotments are I drew a football pitch. I put the chicken run that Ronnie's dad, Harry, built in their garden, even though they had to get rid of the chickens when the fox attacked and a man from the council came round to tell them off. Ronnie cried for days afterwards; he was the one that found them. He told me there was blood and feathers spattered against the chicken run and that the blood had been bright and shiny on the walls of their little house and then dark and sticky on the ground, thick and nearly black with bits of chicken guts in it. There was a trail of blood and guts out under the fence and into the allotments. Ronnie said if he saw the fox he was going to kill it.

How will yer kill it?

I'll shoot it.

Yow ay gorra gun.

It doh matter, I'll still shoot it. Yow've never sin nothing like it, Sean.

I have.

No, yow ay, doh lie.

I sid me great-granny when her was dead.

Was there blood?

I nodded. I think there was. I day see it, though.

Where?

In a washing-up bowl.

I'll kill the fox, if it comes here again, Sean.

Ronnie crept downstairs for a few nights and waited on the back steps for the fox. I don't know what he planned to do. He hasn't got a gun. He hasn't got anything.

In my drawing I kept everything else the same, including the shed that I fell through. I put in the view of the castle and all the works and the gantry at Cinderheath, and that was it. I wish we still lived in Crow Street, at my nan and grandad's, and not up the road in our new house, but I don't say anything.

Crow Street runs down and off Kates Hill like the way water does in a storm. At the bottom you can turn into Cromwell Green Road or head straight over the main road for Cinderheath. You used to be able to turn left to go up into the town, into Dudley, but there's a wall there now and the roar of traffic on the new bypass behind that. You have to walk the long way round these days, although I don't suppose anyone bothers. In those days, if you looked over the fence you'd see all the factories spread out beyond the allotments and to the left, the castle on the hill; hard and bone-coloured in the sun, grey in the wet, staring out over us. The quickest way to Cinderheath was along one of the winding paths through the allotments. That was the way my grandad went to and from work, loads of the other men too.

The Robertsons lived in the end house of the row, so they had an extra bedroom, but it was still too crowded with the five girls and Ronnie. Next came my nan and grandad's. In the other end house Jermaine, another friend from school, lived with his mum and sister, and sometimes his stepdad. In between was Mr and Mrs Blower's house. They were old, and to me then seemed as ancient as the pharaohs. Their daughter, Geraldine, who was nearly the same age as my nan, used to bring their dinners on a plate every day and shout ‘Meals on Wheels' down the entry. The Blowers had a tortoise called Albert. In the summer, he'd walk up and down the back garden and Geraldine would bring him a bit of lettuce for his meals on wheels. Ronnie would come round and we'd feed him the lettuce through the fence. Jermaine painted his shell once, with two little pots of paint you get for model planes: airforce blue and steel grey. The Blowers didn't like it and Geraldine and Jermaine's mum had a row across the fence.

Letting that child run wild while yome up to yer tricks up theer.

Woss that meant to mean, yer jealous, dried-up old bitch?

Albert didn't seem to mind the paint. Mr Blower told us that Albert used to have a wife called Victoria but she'd long gone. Albert was as old as the Boer War. He'd moved with the Blowers from their old house in the town to this house when it was new, in
1936
. My grandad told me that he thought Albert used to die and rise again most years, that he didn't make it through the winter in his shoebox in the airing cupboard and that if you looked carefully the tortoise had a different shell each spring.

The houses continued in fours all the way back up the hill. Paul lived with his mum, brother and sister about halfway up and me, Ronnie and Jermaine would knock for him on the way to school. The school was at the top of the hill.

Elm Drive is right down the other end of Cromwell Green Road. Our house was brand-new then. The windows of my room looked out over our back fence at the space where the old dairy had been, which was laid out as plots for more new houses. My grandad said that when he was a boy he used to walk all the way to the cow sheds that had been here to stroke the cows' fat, wet noses; beyond that had been the trees: ash, sycamore, elm, and a lane that used to run through a farm and into Oakham.

I liked the smell of the new carpets at first, lying flat in the empty rooms, looking at the clean white walls, but the smell faded and the truth was that I didn't like our house even then. It was too far from Crow Street, too quiet, too on the edge of things. And there were no other children. I worried I'd be made to leave school and go somewhere closer to Elm Drive. They were building a new school up the road to serve the new houses. Things were changing. I wanted to see the castle and the factories and live near to Ronnie and the others and to hear Charlie Clancey's cart come clip-clopping past on Fridays, with his shout of Ragabooen, Ragabooen, becoming louder and louder as he came down Cromwell Green Road and then drifting away as he went up Crow Street. He'd often stop the cart and have a chat with Ronnie's dad. Sometimes he'd let us pat the horse. He had a few that lived in the field behind his yard but on Fridays it was always the same tall brown one, breathing hard before starting up the hill. The horse was skinny like Charlie. Ronnie would reach up to stroke his ear but I would hold back, wary, looking at the horse's ribs and angry eyes. It would shit on the road in front of the houses and sometimes Charlie would jump down and scrape it up into a metal bucket and sometimes it would just stay there in the road.

Disgusting, my nan said. He shouldn't be allowed in this day and age.

I need to set me a lad on soon. I need a mate, Charlie would always say. He used to touch his back gingerly if he'd jumped down from the cart. One o yow two can start coming wi me, eh?

Neither me nor Ronnie mentioned it to the other because we both wanted to do it. One night, sat on the back step, Ronnie said, We could do every other wik, me one Friday, yow the next, split the money.

What?

Wi Charlie. We could do one wik on, one wik off. Share it.

Or we could see if he'd tek us both. Split the money, course.

I remember being glad we'd talked about it but the chance never came. I don't know if Charlie had ever been serious or not.

For ages I thought Ragabooen was the horse's name before I realized. The horse was called Paul Newman.

There is a story of the black wagon they used to pull round Kates Hill during the cholera epidemic back in Victorian times. A man left one of the old pubs, the Sailor's Return maybe, after having a few too many late at night, when they were collecting the dead. The day's bodies were left at the side of the road for collection. The man left the pub as the wagon was coming past. Startled, the horse, driver and driver's mate turned towards him. They were skeletons; all three. The driver's mate pointed his bony finger at the man. The next day he told the story; the day after that he died. In the pub I tell people that you can sometimes see them, on moonlit nights, coming down St John's Road, their ghost cart piled high with bodies. You can hear the slow plod of a horse's hooves and the creak of the cart's wheels through the winding maze of the flats. They used to dump the bodies in a pit behind the churchyard; too many to bury. That part is true.

I stayed quiet about not liking our new house. It was important to my dad. The house he grew up in had gone, blown to pieces when they joined the quarries together. I wonder now if that was why owning a house became such a big deal for him, like that would protect him, an Englishman's home and all that.

Ronnie's going crazy with the felt tips. He's already got his own motor racing track, a swimming pool, some robot servants, a Wimpy restaurant instead of a kitchen, and a helipad. While they pluck my arse everyone starts chipping in with ideas for the dream house.

What about a beauty parlour, Ron? my nan says.

What? he says.

Yer know, for yer hair and legs and that.

I doh need a beauty parlour. He pushes his glasses right back on his nose and sniffs. My mum starts to laugh.

Yer sisters might like one, though, Ronnie, and yer mom.

They ay gonna live theer. Ronnie grins as he says this. He has to share a room with two of his sisters.

How about when they visit?

He weighs this up.

How about a rodeo, Ronnie? Yer know, like we watched on that cowboy film last wik, my grandad says.

Arr, okay.

My nan glares at my grandad. She's still not speaking to him.

When Ronnie's added the beauty parlour, rodeo, snooker room and the disco glitterballs that my mum suggests, he's done.

Hope yome feelin better soon, he says to me, and taps me on the shoulder like he's seen his dad do when he's out in the street talking about cars.

Thanks, I say.

I know what's coming next.

Have you done yours, Sean? my mum says.

Yeah.

What's it like?

Oh, I copied one of the houses off that leaflet dad brought back the other day.

Yer should've asked yer uncle Johnny to have a look at it.

My uncle Johnny did art at college for a while. Then he had a row with my grandad about turning some rent up every now and again so now he works in a place that makes steel window frames, a factory like all the others. It's funny because now that he goes to work and gives my nan a bundle of notes on a Friday night my grandad keeps nagging about when he's going to go back to college. He's always asking to have a look at his sketchbook and telling him how good his work is, when before he'd always ask him what he was wasting his time for and if he was painting a flower why couldn't he make it look like a flower. Johnny told me he might go back to college sometime soon or that he might go and live in France. He wants to be an artist like Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh's his favourite artist; mine too. I can't draw or anything like that. I'm rubbish at it. I don't want Johnny to see how bad I am.

I shout out and pretend that my arse is hurting. It isn't. Well, no more than it was before, but I don't want to have to talk about the dream house any more. The leaflet my dad brought home was from the estate agent's with houses in Kingswinford and Wall Heath, places like that, almost the countryside. I don't want to move again. I don't know why I said I drew one of them. They're miles away. I would definitely have to change school.

Maybe we'll live in a house like that one day. My mum smiles.

My mum's not even that bothered herself. I heard them talking. I wasn't meant to have.

I'll live anywhere, Francis, really. I doh care. As long as we'm all together. To keep wanting more's no good. It just goes on and on.

Yome just saying that. If I took yer there and said here, we can live here in this house, yow'd love it.

Maybe.

Or dyer wanna stop in places like the flat or yer mum and dad's all yer life?

Well, iss better here, obviously.

Course it is, and there's places that am better again. We'll keep gooin and gooin. Why not? Why shouldn't we? The people that live there am no better than we am, they got more money, thass all.

I know that, my mum says. I ay the one that needs convincing of that.

They talk about this a lot: houses and where we might end up living. My grandad says our house is already more trouble than it's worth. I wasn't meant to have heard him. He said it under his breath. He said it when my mum was making some curtains with my nan. I agree with him.

When we got that work given back at school, the comment on mine said, Very unimaginative and not up to your usual high standards. Ronnie got called out the front of the class and his work got put on the wall, a mess of felt pen and my family's ambitions.

Where there is discord, she said, on the glowing television set while everyone ate their fish and chips. Where there is doubt. There was a picture of Saint Francis up above the telly, next to the family photos. My nan ended up taking the picture down out of shame, so Saint Francis didn't have to look. You could see the outline of the frame for years afterwards. Where there is despair.

We used to visit Saint Francis's Church on the other side of the town to see the stained-glass windows of Duncan Edwards. There's a window with him in his England shirt and another in his Man United one. I took my own boy, Joshua, to show him. I remember how proud we were that the world's best footballer had come from Dudley, like it said something important about all of us. I liked the way the sun came through the windows and the gentle red light that the United shirt cast on the floor.
Though there are many numbers
, the window said,
yet there is one body
. We knew that it meant you had to stick together. We used to tell each other how, even though he had such terrible injuries, he'd lived for fifteen days after the crash and that the doctors had never seen anyone as strong and brave. That was what you had to be like if you were from Dudley. I remember thinking that if I had died and gone to heaven, I'd have got to play football with him, probably. My ambition then was to get the older boys to let me play in the game on the big playground at school.

I thought Saint Francis was from Dudley too, for a time, because it was my dad's name maybe, or because of these visits to the church. I thought that Assisi was another area like, say, the Wren's Nest or Sledmere or Kates Hill. I used to imagine him talking to Jennie Lee, the budgie; or to Caesar the Alsatian that padded up and down behind the gate at the Ash Tree and used to wait for me and Ronnie to come and run sticks along the railings to send him into a child-eating frenzy; or to the giraffes at the zoo. It was a while later, when I chose to do a school project on Saint Francis, to the delight of my nan and Sister Marie Antoinette, that I found out that Assisi was in Italy. We had to do all the work in a scrapbook, with pictures and cut-outs and different writing exercises. I kept my projects for years afterwards: The Life of Saint Francis, Dudley Zoo, Fossils of Dudley, A History of the Ashes Series, The Gunpowder Plot. Most of the other kids used to pick cars or horses, that kind of thing, so usually I'd win a prize, although one year Paul and Jermaine did a complete cartoon strip of that match that finished Man United
3
–West Brom
5
, so they won.

I remember reading their comic open-mouthed it was so good, almost as good as Johnny's paintings, like I was turning the pages of a holy book. I can see one page even now, with GOAL! written in thick black lettering and Laurie Cunningham bursting from the letter O like he would run off the page and across your lap, Man United defenders lying at his feet.

I wonder what happens to these relics; imagine civilizations piecing together shards of the stained-glass windows and scraps of Jermaine's illustrated manuscript ages in the future. One of Jermaine's sons used to come into the pub for a while. I told him his dad was a good artist once and he just laughed and said, Piss artist. Jermaine moved to Birmingham and I stopped speaking to Paul Hill after he put me in hospital. But all this came years later. Me and Little Ronnie tried to do a comic strip of Alex Higgins knocking in a century break, but neither of us could draw that well and Alex Higgins looked like a monkey holding a long banana.

My uncle Johnny arrives home as we eat fish and chips. I want to be like him. He had to do overtime tonight to make up for not doing it earlier in the week because he's been going out and working on the election. He even made a poster that some people have put up in their windows. It says
DUDLEY EAST, VOTE LABOUR, VOTE DR JOHN GILBERT
, in red letters. Jim Bayliss, who's in the Labour Party, and who Johnny's been delivering leaflets for, got them printed up. The original, which Johnny painted on cardboard on the kitchen table on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago, is on the wall of his bedroom next to Peter Shilton and David Bowie and
Wheatfield with Crows
. My grandad put the poster up in the front-room window. I've seen them up in people's houses on the way to school. I tried to put one up at our house. My mum told me to take it down.

Why?

Take it down, Sean.

Why can't we put it up, like at nan and grandad's?

Nobody'll see it, Sean. There's no point.

Course they'll see it. Everybody in the street'll see it.

It's not a good idea, darling.

Why not?

Sean, I said no.

Johnny slumps down in a chair and rubs his face; his eyes look tired. All the posters have to come down now. My dad cracks open a bottle of Newcastle Brown for him; they like to drink that together. My nan has kept a plate of chips warm. Johnny has a load of badges on his jacket. He passes them on to me: Steel Pulse, Steve Biko, CND. I pin them to my school parka.

They tell Johnny the story of how I fell out the window to cheer him up and it's good to see how my mum and dad turn it into a funny story, even though at the time they thought I might be dead. He starts to laugh and comes over and ruffles my hair.

What happened to your hand, Dad? Johnny says.

No one says anything.

I'll tell yer later, my mum says to Johnny.

We turn Margaret Thatcher off.

Her woh last five minutes, any road. Johnny says, doing a voice like my grandad's.

My grandad says not to be so sure. My mum agrees. My dad doesn't say anything.

I'm happy because they decide that I've done enough moving around for today and I get to spend the night at my nan and grandad's house. I love staying here, especially when my grandad is off work. He's just finished a week of nights. His voice is tired and cracked and I think maybe that was why he lost his temper with my uncle Eric and why Margaret Thatcher has got to him so much.

My dad has to go back to work because a machine breaks down and only he can fix it. He's got an important job, maintenance at Coopers Steel Stampings, making sure the machines that cut the metal work properly. My mum sleeps in the single bed next to mine in the room I fell out of. I dream of falling and she holds my hand.

Next morning, my mum eats toast at the kitchen table. She has some shopping to do and wants to get out before it gets too busy, especially now it's clear that I'm fine. I know that my dad is going to meet her when he's finished at work and they are going to look at one of those houses in Kingswinford or somewhere else miles away.

Am yer sure you didn't bang anything else, sweetheart? my mum asks and holds my shoulders so she can look into my eyes. Yer didn't bang yer head?

Just me bum.

You haven't got a headache or nothing?

Just arse-ache!

Don't say arse, Sean.

What else should I call it?

Yer bottom or yer bum. Yer behind.

Just bum-ache, then.

Yer know what you'll look like when the bruise comes out?

What?

A baboon. A baboon with a bright blue bum!

She does a little dance like a monkey that makes me laugh and kisses me again on the top of my head before she leaves for the shops.

My grandad sits in his usual seat at the table, dipping toast into a fried egg with his good hand. My nan stands at the window, singing bits of songs and drinking tea.

What's Picasso doin today, lyin in bed? My grandad nods upstairs towards my uncle Johnny's bedroom.

He wants a rest, my nan says.

He's a good lad, my grandad says after a while.

My nan doesn't say anything. She's still angry with my grandad about fighting Uncle Eric. I think she's angry with him about making Johnny leave college as well, but she keeps quiet about that.

My grandad has taken the big bandages off his hand even though the hospital said he was meant to leave them on for a week and then go back. He has wrapped one bandage around his hand himself. I can see the tips of his fingers, like sausages, where he holds his knife.

My nan sings quietly and wipes the draining board with a cloth.

Mind you, we could do wi some help tekkin that shed down, couldn't we, mate? My grandad winks at me. Yow've onny done half a job, look. We'll have to finish it off today.

Doh listen to him, Sean. My nan kisses me on the top of my head in the same way as my mum does. Wim lucky yome okay. Lucky we ay all still dahn the hospital. We should be thankful for what we've got. Then she looks at my grandad. I doh know how you think yer can mek light of it now, when it was all yower fault.

We know whose fault it was.

I'm not sure if he means Margaret Thatcher or my uncle Eric.

There is a knock at the front door. I follow my nan to see who it can be. No one usually comes to the front door; they either come up the entry or along the path from the allotments.

Oh my God, my nan says and puts her hand up to her mouth when she opens the door. There's a policeman on the step, filling the doorway, and another one standing out on the pavement.

Jack, iss the police, she says.

Well, they better come in then.

My grandad has followed us and shows the policemen into the front room to sit down even before the first policeman says, We'd like to have a word with you, Mr Marsh.

No one ever goes in the front room, except on Sundays or Christmas or maybe bank holidays when everyone comes round. The best cups are in there and my great-granny's sideboard and the good armchairs from Cooks and the telephone. On special occasions my grandad and Uncle Eric phone Australia to speak to their brother, my uncle Freddie, who lives in a place called Wollongong.

My grandad offers the police the good chairs and says, I spose I can guess what this is about, before closing the door behind them.

No, they never spoke to each other ever again, my grandad and Uncle Eric, though they'd often see each other in town or at the club and even at the caravans on holiday during a couple of summers; not one word.

I don't know how the police came to visit that morning. I can't really believe Eric called them. Nothing came of it. Well, nothing except a sense of unease and the idea that one morning there might be another knock on the door.

The police to our door? I remember my nan saying. Three-quarters of an hour they was here. We've never had the police to our door.

She kept shaking her head and saying it over and over. They were to come again, later.