Nipper (6 page)

Dad’s been taking me to the pub from the age of five. If I go off to the toilet, by the time I’ve come back there’ll be a group of men surrounding him and he’s entertaining them all, telling them stories and laughing, the centre of attention. But he’s lousy at listening to other people. He’ll make a joke out of everything they say, even if it’s a serious conversation.

Having Dad’s sense of humour helps me right through my school years. Even in my first years at school, I get by with quips and practical jokes. Besides, just getting out of the house and away from Dad makes school a holiday. School’s a breeze for me – it’s a lark. I’m aided and abetted in this by my best friend Calum, who makes my time at school – when I do go to school, that is – about the only thing that makes life worth living for me.

Calum Patterson! A kid in exactly the same boat as me but it’s his mum who’s bringing him up alone and using Calum as a punch bag. We never really speak about our home life, but we just know even at a young age what each of us is going through. Calum is a short-arse like me. He’s a right Scottish-looking child, with a ginger bowl-cut hairdo and freckles, and even though he’s just a kid he has a boxer’s nose and bags under his eyes like me. Like me he wears Staypress trousers, and British Home Stores jumper and shirt from the social grant that all people on the dole receive. His tie is always wrapped around his head. When
Karate Kid
comes out Calum thinks that’s him, running past people screaming high-pitched noises like
hiiiyyaa
.

We both walk around school with ripped trousers and scuffed shoes from climbing up the drainpipe onto the school roof. If anyone kicks a ball up there, we’re the monkeys that will go and get it – well, we’re the only two daft and fearless enough for the job. Calum is a lot like me. The way that he always cracks jokes or makes up names for people by using their most noticeable features.

For instance, we call ginger Garry Copper Crutch; fat Paul is Rollo; Alec with the glasses is Specky Ecky; and Peter Humphrey is Bogey, after Humphrey Bogart. Compared with what we both go through at home, our lives in school are fantastic, brilliant – a world away from the torture dens we have to go back to at 3.30 p.m. It is somewhere we can be ourselves, without the pressure of watching every word we say in case we’re mauled.

One day Calum and I are walking along the corridor between classes when we see a girl from the year above us arguing with a boy about how good looking she is. I only catch the end of the conversation. ‘I’m nicer looking than your lass, she’s a pure minger.’

As we walk past, she turns to us. ‘Lads, do you think I’m fit, couldn’t I be a film star?’

‘No, love,’ Calum replies, quick as a flash, ‘you’ve definitely got a face for radio.’

Her face turns purple and she proceeds to chase us down the corridor for the next two minutes so we’re late for the next class.

He has so many one-liners. Like the one he deals out to Claire Clark, a lovely, big girl, who’s always taking the mick out of me and Calum. Claire’s got a really pretty face but she’s a little overweight. She’s told everyone in school that Calum dresses up in his mum’s clothes at the weekend and the whole school has been slagging him off for days, so Calum makes up a rumour that Claire has been hit by a taxi and when the police came, they asked the taxi driver why he hit her. The taxi man replied, ‘I never had enough petrol to go around her!’

He tells this joke in front of about fifty people and I take to my heels before he has a chance to finish, as I know what’s coming. It is hilarious and Claire sees the funny side of it after we both get out of hospital.

I’m joking; we couldn’t offend Claire if we tried, as we’re like the Three Musketeers. She wouldn’t let anyone else talk to her like that, but with Calum and me it’s different. In school the three of us hang around together except when football is being played at lunchtime. She goes with the girls – skipping or swapping photos of Boy George or Duran Duran, or whatever it is they do. Claire’s mum and dad split up when she was young and her mum was an alcoholic like my dad. But Claire’s mum never beats her – she just doesn’t bother to look after her. It’s called neglect. I’m not saying that’s not as bad as what happened to me and Calum – it’s just a different kind of abuse.

At school it’s an amazing adventure just walking from one class to another, people tripping each other up and hitting each other with water balloons, but it’s not like at home –
there’s never any violence. In class we play pranks on each other. The one I like best is tying people’s rucksacks to those all-in-one tables and chairs. They’re made out of metal and wood, and the chair and desk are welded together so that if you tie someone’s bag straps around the metal bar when they have their backpack on, they’ll stand up and end up in a heap on the floor, entangled in the furniture. I don’t know why I find it so funny or even why I do it, but that’s my party piece. Everyone has their own, and that’s mine.

One of the effects of the nightly torture sessions – the beatings and interrogations that go on into the early hours of the morning – is that I fall asleep a lot when I’m at school. I don’t pay attention – it’s not important to me compared with what’s going on at home, and as the teachers are quite strict I often get into trouble. I’m always messing around. But I have to be careful at school not to cross the line – if I get expelled or excluded I’ll be in for it at home.

As for my bruises, a couple of teachers do ask, ‘What happened to yir face?’

‘Oh, I was playing on the monkey bars and fell off.’

I’m a great liar as Dad has taught me to lie. I’ve become an expert through having to tell stories to the debt collectors and anyone else who comes to the door.

‘Just get rid of them,’ Dad would say.

I’m never bulled at school and I never bully anyone else either. I hate bullies as that’s what my dad is, and any kind of
bullying behaviour makes me see red. I do play practical jokes on other kids though.

It can be quite dangerous messing about in school, as there’s a fine line between getting the cane or belt from a teacher and Dad being called in. I had to learn very quickly what I could get away with and what’s over the line. When Dad’s been called up to the school, it always ends in near death experiences, so when the headmaster calls him up on this occasion I’m not looking forward to it one bit.

I have been arguing with the Janitor constantly about who’s best – Dundee United or Dundee. Obviously it’s Dundee United but the Janny is a Dundee fan and can’t handle the fact that a seven year old knows so much about football and I don’t think it helps that the headmaster walks past and hears me tell him, ‘Dundee have never won anything, they are shite.’

That’s only one of the words I’ve picked up from Dad over the last few years. I go home that day expecting to be kicked around the house for the next few hours. Sitting in my room getting changed out of my school clothes I think, he’s just told the headmaster he will deal with me at home, I’m in for it now!

But a calm voice comes from the living room. ‘Charlie, can yi come through here, son?’

That doesn’t sound like the normal tone.
What’s going on?
I’m feeling very confused as I walk down the Hall of Imminent Death, the dark corridor that leads to the living
room. I often think of it as my long walk of fear to the execution chamber, at the end of which is the Electric Chair. That’s the chair I have to sit on in the living room while Dad interrogates me for hour after hour until I can’t think any more and I feel like I’m going mad. I call it the Electric Chair because after four or five hours of questioning my head often feels like it has been fried.

‘Don’t worry aboot what happened the day.’

Wait a minute!
I think,
where’s the camera?
Surely Jeremy Beadle’s going to jump out in a minute and then they’ll both kick the shit out of me.

‘That blue nose cunt disnay hey a clue, never let dickheads like that tell yi that Dundee are better than United, but if I ever catch you swearing like that again I’ll rattle yir arse!’

I’m standing in front of him waiting for the punchline, then the punch, but nothing happens. I think it must be another one of his mind games to see if I’ll bite but I get off scot-free.
YEEHAA!

Brilliant!
I think, if I ever get in trouble again, I’ll tell Dad that they’ve been slagging off Dundee United and I’ve had to defend them. Then he’ll fly downstairs in his steel toecap boots, and kick lumps out of anybody who says a wrong word.

What a strange, strange man. He doesn’t even tell me off, let alone batter or torture me. Maybe he’s been smoking something funny and has forgotten what I actually did. Or maybe the sicko just loves Dundee United that much. As he’s
always telling me, my grandfather used to play for them and Dad could have signed too, but he passed up on the offer because he didn’t want any help from my granddad to become a professional footballer. I suspect it was more down to the fact that he was too violent on the pitch. I believe he went for trials with Norwich and some other English clubs but his temper always got the better of him, and managers don’t like smart arses with bad attitudes.

Whatever the reason for his leniency, I’m off the hook for today. I have to count myself lucky, but then again, whoever deals out the lucky cards seems to be ignoring me most days of my childhood.

There are a few exceptions, though; I do have the occasional good times with Dad and with my family, which shine out like a beacon in the darkness of my miserable childhood.

A
t Christmas I’ll get a few presents, like a tracksuit or a football. If Dad has a girlfriend we go to hers for dinner. But some Christmases I’ve been battered so badly the night before that when I wake up in the morning I’ve found that Dad has torn the wrapping paper and the presents to shreds.

This doesn’t just happen once but on two or three occasions and each time I’m devastated. From all the excitement of Christmas Eve, peeping at the presents sitting under the plastic tree glowing with little red, yellow and blue lights, I haven’t been able to believe my eyes the next morning to find them hacked to bits. I often wonder if he does it deliberately so that he can watch the expression on my face change from the joy of anticipation to misery and disappointment.

And to add to my ever-growing confusion, I can never predict from one Christmas morning to the next whether I
will find him crying and penitent, trying to put them back together again, or whether he will be sitting amongst the torn wrapping paper with a glass of vodka in his hand, waiting patiently to see the look on my face so that he can really twist the Xmas knife.

There’s only one really good Christmas and that’s when I’m seven. Dad says to me, ‘I’ll gi’ yi thirty-quid for clothes or I’ll get yi a bike, which is it?’

I’d love a bike but the thought of all that money for clothes, or anything else, is just too tempting so I pick clothes. By Christmas Eve I’ve picked the clothes I want – a light blue tracksuit from the Barnardo’s charity shop in Reform Street – and even have a bit of cash left over to spend on Mars bars and comics.

My favourite comic is the
Dandy
because it’s got Desperate Dan. My mouth always waters looking at his favourite food, cow pies. I also like football sticker albums, and will stand at the local shop swapping stickers with other kids trying to fill the book. So I buy a
Beano
and
Dandy
and a sticker album and
The Observers Book of Wild Animals
which I get from Barnardo’s for a pound. I love any wildlife books and I’m in love with white tigers even though I’ve never seen a real one.

On Christmas morning Dad gets me up. ‘Go and make me a cup of tea,’ he says.

I go into the kitchen and I can’t believe my eyes – there’s a brand new shiny red Raleigh bike – he’s got me both! And
what’s more, we get through the day without him giving me a beating.

The longest I go without a beating is two days so the next day, Boxing Day, when I go out and play football and get grass on my new clothes he’s back on form, battering and torturing me for hours, asking me questions – sometimes the same one – over and over again.

And another thing: he confiscates the bike. I even think he only gave me it so he could take it away again. Once again I feel torn up, like those bits of wrapping paper he’s shredded. I’m shaking with fury and frustration yet I can’t show it to him so I go out and kick trees and lampposts, or if I’m playing football I smash the ball at anyone I’m playing with so hard they stare at me in surprise, but I don’t care. A few days later I get the bike back though. That’s when he’s feeling guilty the morning after he’s given me another battering.

The mental torture is always worse, I can take the physical punishment – he can smash a baseball bat over my head and it won’t hurt as much as if he’s got me in a corner, mentally torturing me. It’s hard to explain this except to say that bruises and cuts can heal, and it’s sometimes hard even to remember what the physical pain felt like a few days later when I’m at school. But the constant questions are like a corkscrew into my brain and my mind and my soul. They haunt me for days, weeks, sometimes months and even years, and I will hear his voice in my sleep, I can never seem to escape it. And then there’s the fear and frustration of not
knowing what’s the best thing to do or say, to find the words that will make him stop, or at least not say something that will make him spin out the questioning for hour after hour.

I think Dad should have joined the army as he would have been the most persistent interrogation officer on the planet. One night with him and even Shergar would have come out of hiding, handed himself in, given himself up. OK, Jock, he’d say. You win. It’s like you said, I just did it for the publicity.

Once a year on New Year’s Eve, which is Hogmanay, my Gran and Granddad, Dad’s parents, have a family get-together at their house.

They live in Hilltown in Dundee in a semi-detached three-bedroom council house. Gran is small, with dark permed hair and very smooth clear skin; she’s always cooking in the kitchen and calling all her grandchildren the wrong name.