How I Killed Margaret Thatcher (3 page)

My grandad is a strong man. He takes the shed down in about five minutes, even with his bad hand. He's pretending there's nothing wrong with it; maybe because my nan is watching, shaking her head, muttering about the police. He doesn't look it. I mean, he doesn't look like the strong men in my comics: Desperate Dan, Johnny Cougar, Hot Shot Hamish. He's skinny, like a whippet. When he takes his shirt off, when he takes me swimming or at the caravan on holiday, you can see his ribs but also hard knots of muscle up and down his body from all the lifting and twisting he does at work, and the blurry blue tattoos up his arms. He lifts a whole wall of the shed out of its foundation with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

He hasn't said anything since the police left apart from when my nan said, Well, is anything more gonna come of it?

He said, Doh be so saft. Bloody fool him. Yow'd think the police would have better things to do than come drinking tay in our front room on a Saturday morning.

All the stuff that had been in the shed is laid out on the lawn, like there's been an earthquake or a flood. Two bikes, an old rusted pink one with a basket that had been my mum's and an ancient racer that had been my uncle Eric's that I imagine myself riding in a few years' time if we can clean it up; a few tennis rackets with broken strings; deckchairs and a windbreak; Johnny's easel that was broken when he fought the skinheads; a hosepipe; a tool box; a cricket bat; a few golf balls; tennis balls; and the pile of dust sheets that saved my life. There's an old, battered, rusty box with a lock on it as well.

What's in that box? my nan says.

My grandad shrugs and pretends not to know.

There's a gun in the box that I'm not meant to know about. I don't say anything, either. I could've told Ronnie about it, I suppose. He could've used it to shoot the fox.

My grandad used to talk with a cigarette in his mouth and the cigarette would move up and down as he spoke. I liked it when we sat outside in the summer or at the caravans on holiday and you'd see the orange glow of the cigarette moving up and down as it got dark. Years later, when I had my own family, on holiday in Majorca, I walked Josh and Lily back to our cabin during a power cut. In a clump of undergrowth outside the door was a glow-worm. Lily stood transfixed, while I held Josh, a toddler then, to stop him making a grab for it. I found myself looking not at a glow-worm, but at the wobble of a lit cigarette back here in the Black Country dark.

I think my grandad was the only one who had any idea what was coming.

We drive to the tip and listen to a tape of Nat King Cole. My grandad keeps his bandaged hand fixed on the steering wheel. The car is a silvery blue Maxi that he bought from Harry Robertson. Little Ronnie's dad sells cars in the street after he's done them up. My grandad puts the back seat down to fit in the bits of the shed that he hasn't saved for a bonfire and a few other bags of rubbish that he's been waiting to get rid of. I get to sit in the front, which usually is a big deal, but we can't solve the problem of my sitting down. My nan gives me a cushion but it's no use, the minute we start moving and my arse makes contact with the seat, I'm in agony. We have to pull up in the bus stop on Cromwell Green Road for my grandad to arrange my great-granny's mattress in the back. I can smell her on there. It doesn't bother me, though. I've seen her dead, with her arms pulled up into her chest and her mouth a little way open. My mum had shooed me out of the room when I followed her. My great-granny was laid out like the mummies at the museum that I'd seen on telly. She was born in
1887
or
1888
, no one was sure.

We could check. They have records.

Not for the likes o we, my mum said.

I have no idea what she meant.

A few years ago, though, I did check and she was right. There is no sign of us in any of the parish records, at the Catholic churches round and about; at the Church of England, Top or Bottom Churches, at Saint John's on Kates Hill; at the Methodist, the Baptist. Our family moved back and forth between churches over the years. We knew we were here by then, though, drawn to the glow of the town from the dark fields round about, or from Wales even; bringing our anvils and bits of iron with us. There was an afternoon before my great-granny died when she started talking in a language that no one could understand.

Is it Welsh? my grandad had said.

Nonsense, my nan said and shook her head.

My grandad might have been making some sort of joke but the thought stayed with me, that she had gone back to some earlier time and was using language she'd heard her own father or grandfather use. I picture a man looking back to his mountains, following the road to where there was work.

Nobody wrote us down for a long time, not until we mattered, I suppose.

My grandad said he knew where some of his family came from: out near Clent, where they'd had little furnaces in the woods; before the country was called England, when it was called Mercia. Some of us were here even then.

There are seagulls at the tip. Hungry and angry, they circle the pit, where you throw things and they call to each other and sometimes flap down to peck and tear at bags and pieces of sacking. I wonder if they miss the sea. I have only ever been to the tip with my dad before and he makes me stay in the car. There are men in the pit, picking things out like the seagulls.

What they doing, Grandad?

Looking for treasure, he says.

I stand by the open boot and pass things to him.

Charlie Clancey comes over to talk to us. He's at the tip looking for rag and bone. I look for Paul Newman, but Charlie's only got his van today. Charlie pats me on the head and passes me a few coins from his pocket. One of the coins is American, ten cents, a dime.

I kept that coin for years afterwards, for luck. Then I threw it in the canal like Mohammad Ali with his gold medal.
Ain't No Viet Cong ever call me Nigger
. Johnny had that on a poster on his bedroom wall. My grandad used to call Ali Cassius Clay to wind Johnny up.

Charlie smells like the pit. He shakes hands with my grandad, who has to use his left hand. Charlie nods at the bandage and asks him what he's done and my grandad doesn't answer, asks him to help with the mattress instead. We are related to Charlie, somehow, distantly, like he's our cousin's cousin's cousin. We are related to everyone somehow. I see Charlie have a look at the mattress as we pull it out of the car, press his bony hand to it, working out whether it's rag or bone. He shakes his head and they fling it together over the edge.

No sign of Tommy yet, then, Charlie?

No, yer know what he's like.

Charlie's brother is missing. He's a bit like a tramp, comes and goes as he pleases. He looks exactly like Charlie, tall and thin, with skin stretched across knobbly bones, except a bit more beaten up; Tommy wears a blue checked cap and Charlie wears a brown hat with a feather in it. That's a good way to tell them apart.

I've spoken to Tommy a couple of times at the Off Sales hatch at the Freebodies Tavern. Both times Tommy was drunk, sitting on the edge of the pavement, waiting for a customer to come to the bar so they might buy him more beer.

One time I was with my dad when Tommy stepped towards us. My dad said, Yow got a problem, mate? Tommy stepped back and muttered, No problem, no problem, our kid, and looked at me. I doubt he could have fought my dad, but you weren't meant to fight your own family anyway, even distant family, whatever my grandad had done to my uncle Eric.

That was Tommy, I said to my dad as we walked to the car.

I doh care who it was, he said.

The other time I saw him was in exactly the same place but this time I was with my grandad, who gave him some cigarettes.

Ta, Jackie. Ta, me mon, Tommy said to my grandad and patted him on the arm. His hands were all dirty and looked like they'd been bleeding.

Tek it easy, Tommy, for Christ's sake. Goo um now, eh? My grandad had pointed somewhere down the hill, probably towards Charlie's yard. Doh tell yer nan about Tommy, he said to me.

Charlie looks out over the tip.

Yer know what he's like. With the summer coming I probly woh see him till October now, not till the weather gets bad. Yer know what he's like. I heared he'd gone down Stourport again. I had a mate who said he'd sin him, Easter. He'll turn up. Or there'll be a knock at the door one day. Any road.

Charlie shrugs, slaps his hands together again and holds one out for my grandad to shake, his left to make it easier. I get ready to shake hands as well but he just pats me on the shoulder.

Without the mattress, the car shakes me about, rattling my bones as we drive over the gravel road out of the tip. My grandad sings along to Nat King Cole like he does on Sunday nights when he's had a few drinks and I wriggle around and try not to get too shaken up.

Up in Dudley we go to a few shops. My grandad has instructions from my nan about some things he has to get and we have to buy a bag of nails from a man on the market to help grandad build a new shed. He stops and says hello to everyone and because I've been patient and because my arse feels like it's on fire he takes me up to the toy shop and lets me buy a
Star Wars
figure. I choose a Jawa. The Jawas travel around looking for scrap metal in their sandcrawlers. I think about Charlie Clancey and his rag and bone.

My grandad looks at me and says, Am yer sure yer want that little un? He looks at the hooded figure in the packet but it's my choice and I say, Yes.

The brewery is at work on the top of the hill and the wind is blowing down into the town, so you can smell the hops. My mum tells stories about when they all used to go hop-picking, out past Worcester, in the summers when she was a little girl, before Johnny was born. I like the brewery smell, drink it in. I enjoy it when you get to see through the doors of the pubs in the town or when my dad or grandad take me to the Off Sales hatch at the Lion or the Freebodies and you see through into the bar and hear the clack of the dominoes or see the men standing up or sitting and staring into space; like they are thinking really hard about something, or reading the paper, or talking quietly about serious things or telling jokes but not laughing as they tell them; the way you are meant to, when you're a man. Usually, you can't see anything. All the pubs have glass that you can't see through. It makes you want to look more. You can see the men now, though, waiting for the pubs to open. They step from foot to foot and their shadows tremble out into the street. At opening time we cross the road where Stafford Street meets the High Street and I see Ronnie's mum at the door of the pub called the Shrewsbury Arms, which everyone calls the Cow Shed. She's talking to a man wearing a suit. It might be one of her brothers, one of the Woodhouses, going to court, except it's Saturday, so there's no court.

They'm never out of court, I'd heard my nan say. I begin to wave but my grandad pulls on my arm to get me across the road.

Iss Ronnie's mum, Grandad. I point. She must've gone in the pub. We should say hello.

Doh bother her now, he says, which I think is strange because usually he likes leaning on the fence, between the shed and the gate to the allotments and talking to her as she collects the washing in. Sometimes my nan tells him off for pestering her.

There were hundreds of pubs in Dudley. My grandad told me about them all. The Albion and the Gypsies' Tent and the Smiling Man. Further afield: the Hangsman's Tree, the Swan with Two Necks, the Pig on the Wall. You could tell a whole history of a place from its pub names. The first thing I did when I took our pub on was go back to the original name: the Crow Cawing. It's an old place. Roundheads drank in a tavern here, there was badger baiting in the hollow out the back that is now the chemist's uneven car park; they used to read the Chartist newspaper out loud to crowds of men in the front bar. In the rebellion, in
1842
, the people made tiswases in the nail yard that was next door, three nails hammered together to throw under the army horses' hooves. When they got taken to Worcester Assizes the nailers would be asked for their plea and they'd say, I plead starvation, before being led off to the cart that would take them to the boat for Australia.

That Saturday morning we stopped on the corner at the bottom of the High Street. There'd once been a pub here called The Welch Go By, meaning the Welsh. They must have driven their sheep this way to the markets, maybe my great-granny had come with them. Round the corner, where the bus station was, was where both my nan and grandad grew up. They got married at the end of the war. This was after all the houses had been knocked down and everyone moved out to the estates. We stopped outside the television shop. People would stand there to check the cricket scores or wait for the football results on Saturday teatimes. That day, all the screens in the window had Margaret Thatcher's face on them.

All the screens have Margaret Thatcher's face on them. There are hundreds of them. She's giving a speech. Hundreds of screens, faces; she looks down at us. It's like she's telling us all off, but we can't hear her.

Oh, bloody hell, my grandad says, like he's forgotten all about something and remembered it suddenly. He unravels the bandage from his hand and then wraps it back up again.

From then on she was always there, a picture on the television hundreds of times over; sometimes only her voice, nagging away across the allotments and gardens and factories; the meanness of it, her voice, working away at you like rust.

All the standing up after my injury makes my legs strong. I can feel them grow, feel the muscles harden. For a few days I drop my trousers at the start of playtime to show everyone the bruise. The first time I do it, it's for Ronnie, who's already seen it on his back step, and Paul and Jermaine, but the next couple of days the whole class crowds round, girls too, which makes me feel a bit funny, especially when Michelle Campbell shouts, I can see his willy, when she can't because I've got my hands over it. She's got a big mouth. I try to be angry with Michelle, but the feeling I get is different from being angry with her. I stand behind her in the classroom and look at the bobbles in her hair and her shiny ear-rings, even though it's against the rules to wear them. I wait for her to turn around and laugh.

Everyone gets bored of my arse as the bruising fades. I have to stop dropping my trousers anyway because Miss Wright gets suspicious of what's happening in the cloakroom and starts to stand at the door at break-times.

Her wants to see yer willy, Michelle whispers.

Someone has been to the boys' toilets two days running and gone all over the floor. Miss Wright gives us a long speech about how it's dirty and how whoever did it might need some help so we have to come straight out and own up or tell her who it was if we knew.

Nobody's telling tales. Nobody knows who it is, anyway.

Jermaine turns to me and says, Is it yow?

I try to do a face like my grandad when he thinks my uncle Johnny has said something stupid. I am worried, though. I think Michelle might go and tell Miss Wright it's me for a laugh. My mum has written a note to allow me to stand up in lessons after my accident. Miss Wright might think the two things are connected.

The toilet stayed a mystery for a long time. We'd go in there at break and there'd be a long brown turd on the tiled floor waiting for us. Miss Wright went frantic. We had an assembly about it. The teachers kept saying that the person doing it might need help, but I remember realizing that what they really meant was whoever was doing it was in big trouble. Then one morning, the word SHIT was smeared on the toilet wall. The S and H were thick and big and the I and T were smeared greasily across the tiles, falling away, like the writer had run out of shit and energy at the same time, as if the weight of it had pulled them earthwards. There was a handprint on one of the white china sinks. Michelle told us we were going to get our fingerprints taken so they could find who it was.

They used their poo as a pen, Jermaine kept saying and couldn't stop laughing. That was it, then; the teachers locked the toilets. If we wanted to go a teacher had to go in there with us.

It was Jermaine, and no one gave him any help. Not long afterwards he got shunted to his real dad's family in Birmingham and we never saw him at school again. Miss Wright made sure we all knew it was Jermaine. He got into trouble, spells in secure units and, later, Winson Green. He came in the pub not long after I first took it on. He'd have been twenty-eight, twenty-nine then, visiting his mum who had gone back to live with her own mum and dad on the Rosland estate somewhere. He wasn't in a good way, probably shouldn't have been drinking with his medication. His face was scratched with tattoos, like a Maori warrior. I asked him if he still did any drawing or anything like that and he just looked at me. It was a stupid question, I know; his left hand shaking and the other holding his pint. He showed me photos of his kids. He didn't see them much; three of them, different mothers, different areas, round and about. He hanged himself on Christmas Day a few years ago in a flat above a row of shops in Darlaston. I'd have gone to the funeral if I'd found out in time.

When that lad said piss artist when I told him about his dad's drawing I swear it took me all my strength not to get the bat from under the bar and give him the hiding he was asking for.

The shit on the toilet floor at school makes me think of that spring of the hunger strikers, although they came a couple of years later, when things started to get really bad. I remember some terrible arguments between Johnny and my grandad.

It's stopping up, Johnny said, from the landing.

An I've tode yer iss comin down.

It ay.

This is my house an I'll decide what gos up on the walls. Iss comin down.

Johnny had a poster of Bobby Sands up on his wall. I knew that Bobby Sands was in prison and on hunger strike. The idea of having nothing to eat or drink on purpose was so extraordinary to me that I'd watch every news bulletin and try to snatch glimpses of the hunger strikers in my grandad's paper. When Johnny told me about the dirty protests, of the prisoners going on the blanket, naked, shitting and pissing in their cells, it created a kind of ghoulish glamour that appealed to an eleven-year-old boy, and made some foreboding echo of Jermaine's behaviour in my head.

My mum told me that I couldn't watch the news, that she wasn't watching it either because it was too horrible, but I'd catch her with my nan, their hands to their mouths, watching updates about the state of the prisoners' health and Margaret Thatcher's voice saying she would let them die before she gave in.

What's the point, though? I asked Johnny.

Well, the point is, they'm taking a stand, they'm shaming Margaret Thatcher.

Her's got no shame, that's what Grandad says.

Well, I agree with him, for once, but the point is her will be shamed because either they'll die, and her'll have let them die, or her'll have to back down.

And what is it they want to happen?

They want to be not treated like criminals. They'm political prisoners. That means they're in prison because of what they think not because of what they've done.

Did Margaret Thatcher put them in prison?

Well, yeah, she wants them in prison, yeah.

For what they think?

Yeah.

What about you?

What?

Will you get in prison for what you think?

I expected him to say, No, doh be so saft, like my grandad would, or, No, that kind of thing doesn't happen here. Instead, he said, Well, if I was, I'd be proud.

Johnny was my hero for a long time. We'd all lived together when I was a baby and then again during the long, hot summer of my sixth birthday when Johnny was seventeen, while our house got finished, after we'd moved out of the flats. He'd done a year's work after leaving school, sweeping up in a factory, and had finally persuaded my grandad he should go to college, so he packed in his job and had August at home watching England and the West Indies play cricket on the telly and filling a paddling pool for me and Ronnie and his sisters to jump in and out of in the back garden. He'd sit and supervise us in my grandad's deckchair, reading the
Daily Mirror
with his shirt off, wearing a floppy hat like Clive Lloyd, the West Indies captain; tensing the muscles he'd grown from sweeping bits of metal across a factory floor; sketching, and drinking the odd bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. Afternoons, we emptied the pool and he'd wander across the allotments to water the dying plants. There was a hosepipe ban and the men would give him silver coins for the water. Sometimes he'd get Natalie Robertson to walk down one of the paths with him. I saw them kissing once, leaned against some fence panelling that faced towards West Brom. She went off with someone else when the weather broke. There was a pile of drawings he'd done of her naked in his sock drawer. At night he'd play David Bowie LPs over and over on the record player in his room until my mum or dad would bang on the wall to get him to turn the volume down.

What do they think, Bobby Sands and that?

Well, they want Ireland, all of Ireland, to be a separate country. They don't want the English soldiers to be there or for Ireland to be divided into two, like it is now with a British bit and an Irish bit. It's called a war of liberation. Liberation means freedom. They'm trying to free theerselves.

Why doh they fight the soldiers to make em leave?

They do, but the soldiers am very powerful, they've got the whole British army, and the rebels ay got much, so they have to work out different ways to fight them. It's what always happens when powerful countries invade less powerful ones.

Like bullying.

Exactly, it's exactly like bullying. It's a way of fighting against the bullies even if you cor beat em in a fight.

I remember thinking even then that the easiest way to fight a bully was to bully them right back, to fight fire with fire, like Johnny had with the skinheads. He told me that when they broke his easel he went for them, even though there was twenty, thirty of them. He kung-fued one of them into the canal. He told me he thought he might have killed one of them. I said I hoped he had. Now, I realize that could not be true, not in the way he told it, anyway, but I still wish he had. There must have been some yearning in the way he told me about it, with his black eye and his cracked ribs, some dream of fighting back, fighting fire with fire, that took hold of me.

I knew Margaret Thatcher would let Bobby Sands die, it was obvious. He wasn't hurting her.

The poster didn't come down. It stayed up in Johnny's room. He's probably still got it somewhere; he keeps everything. He moved it from the door as some sort of compromise. He put him up next to Peter Shilton. Johnny played in goal for a while at Cinderheath. After Shilton made that mistake to let the Wolves win the cup he liked him even more.

My grandad stayed angry. On the night of the argument he got up halfway through his chips and walked outside. While we finished eating I could see that he'd gone over the road and was standing next to one of Harry Robertson's old bangers, pretending to have a cigarette in the spring air, checking you couldn't see the Bobby Sands poster from the street.

Thass all we need, I heard him saying to my nan later, a bloody brick though the winder.