How I Killed Margaret Thatcher (13 page)

Who?

That bastard, Philip.

What?

He had her bumped off. They think we'm all stupid.

Oh, right.

They should get rid on the lot of em. Them, the royal family, the House of Lords, the Tory Party, the City, all on em. They tek us for fools. They know we'm fools. We must be to put up with it all.

All right, Grandad, doh work yerself up now. Try not to worry about it.

Not worry?

He looks around the room blinking. He takes his glasses off and cleans them on the edge of his jacket and looks at the corner of the room; first with his glasses off, then with his glasses on.

They killed her.

He is talking about my mum. He never does. He'll talk about my nan all the time, never mentions my mum; sometimes he even says things like, when yer dad was alive, but he never mentions my mum.

I'll tell yer another thing, son.

What, Grandad?

Yer should've bloody shot her when yer had the chance.

He has never mentioned it before, never made any reference to what happened, or didn't happen in the end, not a word in twenty years or more. Johnny is coming downstairs. He will put my grandad to bed. Michelle asked me to be quick. Lily wants a bedtime story before I go back behind the bar.

Yer know he voted for em, Grandad? Me dad? When her was first elected, me dad voted Tory.

I don't know why I said this, wanted to tell him, after all these years. Confirm his suspicions, I suppose. He nods.

My old man used to vote for em. He got his vote after the war. The first war this is,
1918
. He wouldn't have been allowed afower then. Not all men could vote. Went off to vote Tory wi no shoes on his feet.

Johnny comes down the stairs.

Iss cold in here, Dad, he says as he comes in the room, shivers. We'll get the heating on now the dark nights am here.

Johnny sits on the back step cleaning his boots and putting his keeper's bag ready.

Doh yer wanna come and watch the wedding? my mum says, teasing Johnny. She has got two drinks, a glass of sherry, the same as my nan, and a glass of gin and orange on the kitchen table.

Johnny saved a penalty from Derek Dougan, the old Wolves and Villa player, in the charity shoot-out in the afternoon, and I won the eighty metres sprint. Rodney James tripped at the start and couldn't catch up with me. Derek Dougan gave me a medal. We had a great time. Johnny had too many to drink after playing football all afternoon in the sun. When we got back to the house he walked straight down the entry, out into the back garden and was sick over the back wall into the allotments. He'd let me have a few sips off his pint while he was drinking with some of the Cinderheath players.

They've onny been drinking lager. I doh know whass up with him, my grandad said. Even now, despite being regularly presented with the facts, my grandad believes that lager is not as strong as darker beer, thinks of it more as a soft drink, like Coke, which he also hates.

We'll never hear the last of this bloody penalty, either. My grandad was drunk too. I wouldn't mind but Derek Dougan had had a couple of pints when he took it. I thought it was gonna end up through the clubhouse winders.

It was a great save, Johnny shouted from the garden. What a save! he said.

How about the ones yer let in? Yer day stop that one from Tommy Catesby, he's onny got one leg.

Tom Catesby had played for Wolves but then got injured. My grandad worked with him for a while at Cinderheath. He got him to sign his autograph in Duncan Edwards' book,
Tackle Soccer This Way
. He'd stood and had a drink with him after the five-a-side penalties. My grandad said I could have the book when he died, but that wouldn't be for a good while yet. This was true: it's still there in the bookcase in the hallway, next to the stairlift.

And he was wearing slip-on shoes!

My mum and nan talked about Diana's dress again and my mum said how she looked like a real princess and how the happiest day of her own life had been her wedding day and then she kissed my dad. She was drunk too. My grandad started to sing ‘The Red Flag' out of the bathroom window, his voice drifting out across the allotments and houses and dwindling furnaces. He'd locked the door so my nan couldn't get in there to tell him to shut up.

I wonder if it was a relief at first, for my dad, after the months of arriving home and then having to turn around and go back to work, months of the phone ringing in the middle of the night. At first, it must have felt something like a holiday. He got his colour back, was less grey, sat in the sun with his shirt off, came and met me on the way home from school in the afternoons.

One day, right near the end of term, I was sitting outside the Spar at the top of Crow Street with Michelle. We were sharing an ice lolly that we'd scraped some change together for, one of those fancy ones that came out around then, a pina colada. We were sitting on the milk crates out the front of the shop, in the shade under the awning to stop the lolly melting.

My dad walked from across the road. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back, holding a golf club he must've found in the shed at my nan and grandad's, letting the club head touch the ground softly as he walked. It glinted in the sun, making him look like a gent with a silver cane.

He smiled when he saw us, pointed the golf club at me as he crossed the road.

Thass my dad, I said to Michelle.

I thought we was gooin to the park? he says, pointing the golf club towards me and blinking as he reaches the shade. He's still smiling, though. It's not like we've made it a rule, it's just that on the days since we've come back to school after the royal wedding, since he lost his job, he's met me on the way home and we've walked over to the park.

Okay.

Doh get up, there's no rush, enjoy yer lolly, he says, and then he says, Hello, darling, to Michelle.

She says hello and he stands on the shop step for a moment, looking at us.

What yer got? He nods at the lollipop.

A pina colada, we say together. He laughs.

Thass a good un, he says. When he comes back out of the shop he's holding a carrier bag in one hand and a lolly in the other. He hands the new one to Michelle.

Here yam, chick. Doh let Sean ate all yer lolly.

I can feel Michelle looking down the hill after us and smiling as we walk towards the park.

We take turns at hitting the old seven iron from the shed, that my dad has spent the afternoon polishing, until I can get the ball to go in the air and in the same long arc as my dad. I copy the way he links his little fingers on the club shaft.

Head down, he says. Look at the ball.

He says, Look at the ball, whenever we play anything. We go back and forth at the far end of the park. I see the ball hanging in the air in front of the castle and then drop against the green pattern of trees.

Thass it, perfect, my dad says. He says we'll go over the pitch and putt with Johnny one day, maybe even persuade my grandad.

Iss a useful skill, he says, hitting a decent seven iron. Good for business meetings and the like, he says, smiling to himself.

That couple of months he was first off, he'd meet me, or take me over the park, with a ball or a bat, all different sports. So we'd knock the football back and forth across the long grass, or nip through the hole in the fence to the tennis courts. One night he bought a Frisbee along, the next a proper hard, red cricket ball with a raised seam, showed me how to hold it right, with my middle finger on the seam, so I could get it to move when it landed, try to nip it away, he said, side-on more, Sean, use your shoulder, get yer arm high, get side-on as you bowl, thass it, great stuff.

We went straight to my nan and grandad's that night and I remember my dad tossing the ball into my grandad's lap when we got there and my grandad telling me that the first time he met my dad wasn't when my mum brought him home for a Sunday tea of tinned salmon and peaches, which was a story I'd heard a few times, but earlier on that afternoon when he'd been sat in a deckchair with a pint of mild by the Dudley pavilion, watching this young kid come in and bowl fast, thinking he's a good un, this un; then seeing him come through the front door that night, with his hair combed, standing shyly next to my mum with everyone staring at him. My dad stopped playing cricket because of work, to start saving for a house.

He was a good bowler, yer dad, quick.

He'd learned to bowl in Quarry End at the field at the bottom of the farm, before it was swallowed by the quarry. They used to play with stones and bat with branches from the trees, that was what my dad told me, but he was laughing when he said it.

There's a cricket club every morning for a couple of weeks on the school playground. I tear in and bowl fast and the kids shout, Goo on, Sean, as I start my run-up. I'm faster even than Rodney James and can bowl out Michael Campbell and Mani Singh. This is all thanks to my dad showing me how. We keep the club going all summer on our own, a milk crate at one end of the pitch, a set of stumps painted on the wall at the other end. Mani comes in with a pot of white paint one morning and we go over the stumps and paint lines for the creases on the playground concrete.

One afternoon I get home and the garage door is open and I walk through and my dad has set up a barbecue outside. Barbecues are all the rage since the royal wedding. The garden smells of smoke and sausages. My mum sits in the swing, laughing, wearing big sunglasses and a skirt; she has her legs out in the sun. She holds a frothy yellow drink in a pint glass. On the table next to the barbecue my dad has slices of pineapple lined up and a bottle of white rum. He passes me a slice of pineapple; the juice runs down my arms as I eat it, like the way a lolly melts and drips.

Pina colada, my dad says, laughing, and my mum raises her glass.

I think of them together now, trapped in that oblong of sunshine out the back of the house on Elm Drive. I started to like the house more, with us all there together, without the threat of us moving away somewhere soon. There was no talk of that. My dad had to get a job first. When September came things were bound to pick up, that's what people said then.

Not long after that my grandad lost his job. He turned up one morning and instead of a sandwich and cup of tea at breakfast, all the workers got called to a meeting and that was it. He was told to get his stuff and go home.

They'm putting the fire out, he said to me later, trying to explain what was going on.

I knew full well what was going on by then. Cinderheath was closing. All the men had to go home. There were no jobs any more. That was it.

I am sitting watching Barbara Castle flit around her cage while reading my
Roy of the Rovers Summer Special
when my grandad appears at the back door, not at three o'clock in the afternoon, but at half past ten in the morning.

My grandad says, Where's yer nan, Sean? as he walks through the kitchen.

Upstairs, putting new sheets on the bed, I say, I'd helped her get them in from the line, and I can see something is badly wrong because he keeps walking straight through in his boots that he always leaves by the back door before having a wash in the sink when he comes home from work.

After he's told my nan what's happened, he has to tell Harry, who rattles the back door because he's seen my grandad come home early. Then my mum comes back from cleaning, so he tells her too. My grandad gives my mum a hug and says it doesn't matter, he'll be retired now, he's fifty-nine and who'd give him a job? They'd have more sense than that.

I've got more time to work on the garden and the allotment, he says. After he's had two cups of tea and a glass of whisky he says that he worked there for forty-two years and they'd said get yer stuff, that's it, don't come back ever again. There's been rumours, he says, rumours, gossip, that's all he thought it was, even though it's been happening everywhere else. Later, still sitting at the kitchen table, he raises his glass of whisky to Johnny, who comes in from work with the paper where there is a picture of the Cinderheath gantry on the front page and
THE END
written in big letters. My grandad does a toast to being retired.

Yow can keep me in the manner to which I've become accustomed, he says to Johnny.

I think you've had enough now, Dad, eh? my mum says, when he pours another glass and starts dozing off in his chair and he nods, which he never does normally. On a Sunday he usually says I've onny had a drop, when you can see he's drunk from the way he's standing all leaned over to one side. Then he goes to make a cup of tea and then my nan takes over and he goes off to bed.

Nice new sheets, my nan says to him, stirring the milk in his tea.

The next day he smashed the carriage clock that he'd been given for twenty-five years' service on the back step. It used to stand on the mantelpiece in the front room. Not even my dad was able to put it back together again when my nan showed it to him that afternoon. My grandad went down to the allotment. My dad took out two little springs and put them in his pocket.

Put it in the bin, he said.

My dad has a clever idea for getting work. It's Charlie Clancey's idea, really. He gets a message to my dad through my grandad, stops by at the house on his round. With all the works closed down there are big machines left in all the empty factories. Some of the machines are being taken apart and used for scrap, which is where Charlie comes in, or they're being shipped off to other countries that might use them in the future. There's other stuff as well, like copper pipes and steel cable, but my dad's new job, if he wants it, is to take the big machines apart, the ones that aren't moving all in one piece. Charlie wants my grandad to work with him too.

Yow woh get another job at yower age, Jack, not with the way things am.

All right, steady on, I ay that ode, Charlie, but I'll tell yer summat, I'm too ode for that sort of carry-on. I am retired, thanks very much. I would pass on yer offer to Francis but I'd tell him to tell yer where to goo, I'm telling yer that now. If yow want to speak to him yerself, well, thass between yow an him.

When Charlie leaves they shake hands as normal, but my grandad looks at the space where Charlie had sat and where he left through the back door for a long time; he sits there staring.

Charlie says, Think abaht it, Jack, through the kitchen window as he walks down the path. My grandad keeps staring.

He's not really retired. He can't get his pension until he's sixty-five but retired is what he calls himself. I think he does it so he doesn't have to say he's unemployed. I can tell that my grandad is upset about it all, he reads the paper from cover to cover, and swears at the television. He even agrees with Johnny more.

Thass great news, about Charlie wanting my dad to do some work for him, I say.

My grandad doesn't say anything.

Out the back of my nan and grandad's house things began to change. You didn't see smoke coming out of the works' chimneys any more. The chimneys sat there getting rained on, and over time they took some of them down. The same with the gantry at Cinderheath; it stayed there with crows sitting on it and everything getting rusted in the rain. Things started slipping into the old workings. They put scaffolding up at the top end of Crow Street to hold the houses up. No one was allowed onto the allotments.

My nan and grandad's next door neighbours, the Blowers, died within a few days of each other while all this was going on. I remember because Geraldine came banging on the back door on the morning of her mother's funeral to say she didn't think her dad was breathing. My dad went round there to check and my mum followed with Geraldine, holding her hand.

Thass the way to go, though, I spose, my grandad said later and my nan nodded.

They had a joint funeral in the end, with a horse and carriage that pulled its way up the hill with two coffins. All the curtains on the street were pulled tight across and even the people not going to the funeral stood on their front steps with their heads bowed.

No one could find Albert the tortoise. I wanted him, was sure I'd be allowed to look after him if we could find him, but he was gone, vanished. We thought he'd crept into the abandoned allotments. I stood at the fence one afternoon, daring myself to sneak through and search for him, imagining he'd found lettuce growing wild on one of the overgrown plots or that he'd crawled his way down into the caves somehow. There was no sign and my nerve went. My mum had told me over and over since they put the fences up that if I went in there the earth would swallow me up. The Robertsons' cat, Cleopatra, went the same way, slinked through the fence to look for mice and never came back; perhaps she thought it wasn't worth it, not without Ronnie to look after her.

I thought maybe we could have the Blowers' house, now it was empty, but there was no talk of that. A young couple were moved in, called Trevor and Julie. I thought he was all right; he used to put his thumb up to me when he was out in the garden and say, All right, our kid, but he knocked her around. The police had to come a couple of times. My grandad went round there once when we could hear her screaming. My nan got upset and said that it used to be a nice road and that our row used to be the best of them all. Trevor and Julie got moved out. A bloke called Martin, who worked for my uncle Eric, lived there with his wife Kerry, then bought the house off the council when they got the chance, put a new porch on the front, had the windows replaced. Their daughter lived there afterwards. They rent it out now. My grandad says there are all sorts of comings and goings in the middle of the night. Johnny tells him not to worry about it, not to get involved.

My mum doesn't want my dad working with Charlie.

Yow'll get arrested, she says.

I woh get arrested. Wim being careful.

By working for Charlie! Everybody in Dudley knows what a rogue he is; yow've onny got to mention his name. I'm surprised yow ay bin stopped already.

It ull be okay.

Yer keep saying that.

Well, it will. Wim being careful.

And it's dangerous, places yer doh know, without the proper equipment.

What would you rather I do? Tell him to keep his money? He's helpin us out.

Helpin hisself. It ay even that much, Francis, not really. I bet Charlie's mekkin a fortune somehow.

Arr, cos he looks like a man with a fortune stashed away.

I know that my dad is being sarcastic because of the way that Charlie always has the same clothes on, that hat with the feather in it and a check jacket, with his trousers held up with string, or a leather belt tied in a knot, not fastened with a buckle, and the way he smells, like the day I saw him at the tip, of all the rubbish and rag and bone. He lives in a broken-down shed on his scrapyard down by the canal. His horses live out behind it.

Doh believe what he looks like. Me mother says he's worth a fortune.

What?

He's got it buried under the house. That's what my mother told me.

They are laughing now. I can hear them. That's better.

I cor believe it's come to this, my mum is saying.

Yow've done a good shift today, son, yome a good worker. My dad is doing an impersonation of Charlie now. My mum and dad have both had a bit to drink. Yow tek care o that lovely wench o yowers.

Now he's gone back to his own voice. A good day's work, I ask yer! Charlie Clancey! Yome right about what it's come to.

I'm glad they're happy now. Every morning my dad goes out to work as normal. I know that he leaves the car somewhere different every day, so that it can't be traced by government agents, like the SAS. He walks to get picked up somewhere by Charlie in the van. Each night Charlie phones to say where the next day's pick-up point is, like the end of Cromwell Green Road, or the entrance to Buffery Park, or at the front of the Lion, and my dad works out where to leave the car or whether to walk to the pick-up. I'm worried that the phone is tapped, though. That's when the government records any conversations you have on the telephone and comes to arrest you. Johnny told me all about it. In the book he's reading a man got arrested by the police and then put on trial, but he didn't know what crime he'd been charged with, so he had to stand up in the court to defend himself not knowing what he'd done wrong.

Some days my dad has to drive to wherever they're working and then hide the car there. On those days he has to pick up the other workers too because Charlie likes to use the horse and cart. Charlie gives him a bit extra for that. If the work for Charlie stopped we'd have to sell the car anyway; the house would be next. I'm not meant to know that.

On the days when my dad drives, my mum stands behind the front door or walks into the dining room and pulls back the net curtain to look out at the street. Sometimes she stands there for ages, just looking; then sometimes she goes and pours a glass of gin.

So if anyone asks yer at school, Sean?

I say he ay got a job.

He hasn't, say he hasn't, not he ay.

All right, he hasn't got a job.

Exactly. Because he hasn't, but he'll get one again soon. He's just doing a few favours for Charlie while he's not at work.

The work for Charlie is such a big secret because it's against the law, to work and get dole, except the law's stupid and anyway the laws are being made by Margaret Thatcher, so it's probably better to break them. It's against the law to take the machines if they don't belong to you, as well. There are people in our road that my mum is worried might phone the government if they think my dad is working and claiming dole. If anyone does that and we know who it is I'm going to make a petrol bomb and sneak out and set fire to their house.