Nipper (22 page)

I play for the Lawside first team and we’re due to play Morgan High in the final. I’ve scored a few goals in the rounds before and am playing well when we reach the final. The manager of our team is my Maths teacher, a big chubby man with glasses. I’ve always got on quite well with him and his is one of my favourite classes.

Me and a few of the lads get there early as all our families are in the stand at Tannadice, Dundee United’s home pitch, and we get into the dressing room before the rest of the lads. Another lad and me pick up a strip and put a top on, but
when the manager comes in, he puts us on the bench and never plays me at all in the game. Just because we put the top on. We get beaten 4–2 and I’m glad – that idiot has watched me score goals for the whole competition and left me out to make an example of me, for reasons only known to him.

I’ve never imagined another person could ever make me feel as bad as Dad does, but he’s succeeded. I have always sworn that one day I will play at Tannadice because I hate being beaten, and the feeling I have on this day will probably stay with me forever, as this was to be my one chance to prove to Dad that I’m not a useless waste of time that should never have been born, as he reminds me time and time again, and to make him proud of me.

And that Maths teacher has taken that away from me. He did it out of some stupid principle, to discipline me for putting that top on, but it was way out of proportion. The punishment most certainly doesn’t fit the crime and he ruins the biggest day of my life.

I’ll never forgive him for that, ever!

Bonnie has now had her puppies and most of my free time is spent looking after them and her. There are six of them and they are absolutely beautiful. Dad says we should wait until they’re ten weeks, then sell some and give some to people who already have their names down. Well, that’s the plan, but then the fireworks start.

It’s a Saturday night around four. I’m at St Kilda Park playing football with some of the lads. I hear a fire engine coming up the road and then another. They’re coming past the park and turn up towards my street, St Nicholas Place.

Everybody starts chasing it to see where it’s going, so I walk up behind them thinking nothing of it as I want to get back to the game. ‘
Charlie, it’s your hoose!
’ I hear one lad shout.

I take to my heels up the street and as I get there all the windows are blowing out. My first thought is the puppies and Bonnie. The firemen are smashing the front door in and the flames are now licking out of the top of the windows.

‘Where’s my dog?’ I scream in a fireman’s face. ‘Is my dad still in there? Where’s the puppies?’

The next minute I turn around and see Bonnie being held back by one of the neighbours. She’s yelping and trying to run back into the house. Several people are holding different puppies in their hands.

‘Is my dad still in there?’

I am praying that he is
.

‘Just stay back, son,’ the fireman snaps. Then out of the smoke comes Dad with the last of the puppies, covered in black smoke with its little head limp, like it’s dead. The fireman grabs the puppy from Dad.

‘You fucking idiot, you could have been killed.’

Dad’s bent over with his hands on his knees, coughing his lungs up, and the fireman is giving the puppy mouth to
mouth. Then he puts an oxygen mask on it, and the little thing starts coughing.

I’m made up but at the same time secretly disappointed that Dad escaped. He’s gone into that blazing house six times to save these little things! I am shocked. Such a horrible bastard has just done something that only a few people in the world would have done. Risked his own life for a few puppies. I don’t know how chuffed he is later when he finds out it was one of the puppies that knocked the electric fire over to set the house up while he was at the shops.

Everything we own has been destroyed and he blames me later, as he says he’s had to cancel his insurance policy to get some money to buy me school clothes. Forgive me if I don’t shed a tear. I never asked to be brought into his fucked-up world.

After that day Dad is different – or maybe it’s because I’m getting older and don’t pay as much attention to what he says when he’s drunk. We’ve moved back down to St Fillans Road again, but this time it’s another three-bedroom semi. The council says he can move into it until the other one is fixed up again. But when the time comes to move back, he point blank refuses, as he likes where he is now. I think that’s because it’s closer to the shops and nobody has heard any beatings or screaming. It’s a new place to beat me up without rousing suspicion.

We’ve sold or given away all the puppies. We name the last one Smokey as it nearly died of smoke inhalation. He’s a
cracker, but he’s been left with a cough a bit like whooping cough for the rest of his little life, poor thing.

And then there’s Bonnie – my Bonnie. It happens very suddenly, one summer’s day.

We’re up in this idyllic place in the mountains of Perthshire called Cloonie Loch. We’ve pitched the tent in a secluded spot and there’s a twenty-foot square of gravel leading into the water. I’m standing waist high in the water watching shoals of perch swim around my legs and marvelling at being free of the war zone of home. The sun is gleaming in the water and all is peaceful.

Bonnie’s in season again. It’s really hot and she’s been lying under a tree to keep out of the sun. This guy’s kid grabs her by the ears and I tell the man that she’s in season, and to get his daughter away. As you know, when Bonnie’s in season you have to be careful of her and I can see she’s getting annoyed, but neither the man nor Dad takes the warning. They’re both sitting drinking their beers and chewing the fat and don’t pay any attention.

Bonnie never actually bites the girl; she just grabs her face with her big jaws as a warning to go away, as she did with my backside that day, only grazing the skin on her chin and forehead. But when the man leaves, Dad decides to batter her with a tree branch as she runs around yelping. Then he turns on me.

‘That fucking mutt o’ yours is getting put doon when we git hame.’

I spend the night in the tent praying that this is just one more of his idle threats.

It’s the third week in July 1990 and school’s nearly over for the year. The next day I’ve forgotten all about what Dad said he’d do to Bonnie – until the moment when I come home from school a few days later and let myself in the house.

There’s an odd kind of silence when I walk in. Usually Bonnie bounds up, jumping up and licking me as she comes to greet me. I know she’s still on heat so she may not be as affectionate as she usually is, but where is she? I search the house and then go out into the street shouting out, ‘Bonnie, come here, girl!’

But she doesn’t come and when Dad comes home I think he’s looking shifty; when I ask him where Bonnie is he slurs and mutters something about giving her to a farmer while I was at school, because she bit the little girl.

The blood rushes up from my toes to the tips of my hair. As I stare at him swaying in his chair with that smirk on his face, I’m devastated, inconsolable, seething with rage. I run into my room and crash onto my the bed and burst into tears.

Tonight for once Dad leaves me alone. But all I can think of is Bonnie, my dog, my closest friend, the only creature who has ever shown me love, and now she’s gone.

The next day is Saturday, the weekend, and the house seems so quiet. I cannot get used to the fact that Bonnie’s not with me. The weekend drags on slowly, painfully, and over the next few weeks I have a strong feeling that there was no
farmer and that the evil bastard has probably killed her and buried her somewhere. I have no way of proving it but a remark he makes a few months later seems to confirm that suspicion.

‘That mutt finally got what she deserved,’ I hear him mumble one drunken night.

The day Dad gives Bonnie away is, for me, the last day of my childhood. He has taken away my best friend, my companion and protector, who was always there for me through the long dark nights of torment. I try to imagine that if Bonnie is alive she’s happy and free, and at least safe from any more of Dad’s beatings. But in my heart I know she’s gone, and I also know that the time for payback has arrived. And it’s not long in coming.

I
’ve arrived back at about two minutes past eight and Dad is drinking again, hammered, really, really drunk.

‘Where have yi been?’ he starts questioning me. ‘What have yi been doing?’

This goes on until three in the morning. He’s getting drunker and drunker, drinking more and more vodka. I’m falling asleep, trying to keep myself on the ball in case he suddenly attacks, but he never does this particular night. It’s strange, he never does anything. He just sits there and sits there and eventually dozes off, still holding his vodka.

I wait ten, fifteen minutes to make sure he’s out, then finally go to bed and fall asleep.

The next minute I wake up and my head feels like it’s being blown apart. As I start to come round it dawns on me that it’s Dad – he’s stamping on my face. My head is getting
shoved into the bed and when I look up I can see him stamping on my face with both feet – he’s wearing green and white trainers and I can see blood on the front of them – and he’s shouting ‘
Raaaaaaghhh!
’ – really loud. He keeps slipping off me and falling and then getting up and doing it again.

And then I come to myself as I’m just out of sleep and he says, ‘Just checking yi were awake, son!’ and then walks back out of the room, leaving me there with blood pissing out of my nose.

What the fuck was that?
I think.

This happens a few times. He usually kicks me once in the face and walks out – but on this particular occasion he jumps all over my head. I think he’s less prepared to attack me when I’m up and awake and dressed, as by now I’m fifteen years old and I’m bigger and stronger, especially since I’ve been doing the kick boxing. Jumping on my head while I’m in bed is a much safer bet.

Maybe he knows the day’s fast approaching when the tables will turn, when he’ll get back from me what he’s deserved all these years, and he’s having a final fling while he has the strength to do it.

If so, his instincts are correct.

It’s about four months away from my sixteenth birthday. I’m always looking forward to being sixteen as that is the day Dad will have no more control over me.

On this particular night I have been around at a place called Brackens Park. It’s just another play park where we all go to light fires and have a few cans of beer.

I’ve started having a couple of cans in the evening with my mates as I’m now fifteen, and my age group and friends drink regularly, evenings and weekends. But I am never a big drinker as I’ve seen what it can do to you first hand – and I don’t want to end up like Dad.

I’m always the joke-teller, the one with all the funny stories, even though in my head I’m a bomb waiting to go off. I now have to be home by ten – Dad’s curfew has increased by an hour, probably so he can get smashed in peace a bit longer before he tries to smash into me – but I’ve drunk more than usual, three cans of Carlsberg and two bottles of Beck’s. Even so, although I’m a bit tipsy, I’m not pissed like everyone else.

I look at my watch at 10.05 and remember that it’s about a seven-minute walk back to St Fillans Road so I say my goodbyes and head home, thinking of what he’s going to say when I get back in. But I’m no longer scared. I think Dutch courage has taken over.

I walk in and Dad’s sitting swaying in his normal position with a voddy in his hand, playing Extreme’s ‘More than Words’ on the stereo and singing along to it as he often does. I can’t believe that this man is my father. I’m now at the age where I should be meeting girls, and having friends coming to the house, but this scar-faced drunk gives them abuse or cries to crap songs in front of them. He’s always listening to
sentimental pop songs and singing at the top of his voice, sometimes dancing if he’s mega pissed.

I sit down on the settee as he doesn’t even see me come in. Then he turns around and looks at me with that stare I’ve seen for the past fifteen years. He then looks at his watch, stands up and turns the music off and then sits back on his two-seater, taking another drink of his hooligan soup – that’s voddy to you and me.

‘War the fuck iv you been?’ he says.

I can feel my blood come up from the tips of my toes, right through my body and up my neck into my hair. ‘What time di yi call this?’ he slurs again.

I keep watching the red light on the stereo, not looking at him, as I know I’m about to flip.

‘Ohy bastard,’ I reply, using language and a tone he’s never heard before. ‘HALF FUCKIN’ TEN! That’s what time it is.’

‘What did yi say?’

‘You heard, you prick!’

I keep looking at the red light on the stereo, waiting for it to go green so I can erupt like a volcano.

‘Did you jist fuckin’ swear?’ he says, standing up.

I never look at him, just the red light on the stereo.

‘If you fucking touch me the night,’ I say, ‘it’ll be the last time you touch anybody.’

I then turn and look at him, straight in the eyes, and stand up really quick. Even though he’s drunk, I think he can see
that I’m not joking. His expression has changed from aggression to friendly, as he puts his hand out as if to shake mine.

‘Sorry, son,’ he says. ‘No hard feelings.’

I know what he’s up to, so I play his little game.

‘Nae bather, Dad.’

I put my right hand in his then
swing
, he tries to punch me with his other hand, but I move my head back then pull his hand that I’ve now locked mine into towards me, smashing my head into his face.

‘Aggrr yi bastard! How does it feel, yi prick!’ I roar as he falls backwards onto the two-seater sofa where I now start my ten-minute assault.

I’m shouting things at him as I stamp on his face with both feet. ‘Do you remember biting me, tough guy? Do you remember bursting my ear drum?’

I slap him in the ear to try and burst his eardrum, as he did to me a few years ago. He’s screaming like a woman, ‘
I can’t hear! I can’t hear!
’