Marabou Stork Nightmares (3 page)

Now I can hear that 'Staff has departed leaving me with the simply Devine Patricia. Patricia is possibly an old hound, but I like to think of her as young and lovely. The concept adds quality to my life. Not a lot of things do at the moment. Only I add the quality. As much or as little as I want. If only they'd just fuckin leave ays tae get on with it. I don't need their quality, their world, that fucked-up place which made me the fuckcd-up mess I was. Down here in the comforts of my vegetative state, inside my secret world I can fuck who I want, kill who I please, no no no nane ay that no no no I can do the things I wanted to do, the things I tried to do, up there in the real world. No comeback. Anyway,
this
world's real enough to me and I'll stay down here out of the way, where they can't get to me, at least until I work it all out.

It hasn't been so easy recently. Characters and events have been intruding into my mind, psychic gatecrashers breaking in on my private party. Imposing themselves. Like Jamieson, and now this Lochart Dawson. Somehow, though, this has given me a sense of purpose. I know why I'm in here. I'm here to slay the Stork. Why I have to do this I do not know. I know that I need help, however, and I know that Jamieson and Dawson are my only potential allies in this quest.

This is what I have instead of a life.

I grew up in what was not so much a family as a genetic disaster. While people always seem under the impression that their household is normal, I, from an early age, almost as soon as I was aware, was embarrassed and ashamed of my family.

I suppose this awareness came from being huddled so close to other households in the ugly rabbit hutch we lived in. It was a systems built, 1960s maisonette block of flats, five storeys high, with long landings which were jokingly referred to as 'streets in the sky' but which had no shops or pubs or churches or post offices on them, nothing in fact, except more rabbit hutches. Being so close to those other families, it became impossible for people, as much as they tried, to keep their lives from each other. In stairs, on balconies, in communal drying areas, through dimpled-glass and wire doors, I sensed that there was a general, shared quality kicking around which we seemed to lack. I suppose it was what people would call normality.

All those dull broadsheet newspaper articles on the scheme where we lived tended to focus on how deprived it was. Maybe it was, but I'd always defined the place as less characterised by poverty than by boredom, although the relationship between the two is pretty evident. For me, though, the sterile boredom outside my house was preferable to the chaos inside it.

My old man was a total basket case; completely away with it. The old girl, if anything, was worse. They'd been engaged for yonks but before they were due to get married, she had a sort of mental breakdown, or rather, had her first mental breakdown. She would have these breakdowns intermittently until it got to the stage it's at now, where it's hard to tell when she's
not
having one. Anyway, while she was in the mental hospital she met an Italian male nurse with whom she ran away to Italy. A few years later she returned with two small children, my half-brothers Tony and Bernard.

The old boy, John, had got himself engaged to another woman. This proved that there were at least two crazy females in Granton in the early sixties. They were due to be married when my Ma, Vet (short for Verity), reappeared in the lounge bar of The Anchor public house. As Dad was to remark often: Ah jist looked acroass n met yir Ma's eyes n the auld magic wis still thair.

That was that. Vet told John she'd got the travelling out of her system, that he was the only man she'd ever loved and could they please get married.

John said aye, or words to that effect, and they tied the knot, him taking on the two Italian bambinos whom Vet later confessed were from different guys. I was born about a year after the wedding, followed about a year later by my sister Kim, and my brother Elgin, who arrived a year later again. Elgin got his name from the Highland town where John reckoned he was conceived.

Yes, we were a far from handsome family. I suppose I got off relatively lightly, though I stress relatively. While my own face and body merely suggested what people in the scheme would, whispering, refer to as 'the Strang look', Kim and Elgin completely screamed it. 'The Strang look' was essentially a concave face starting at a prominent, pointed forehead, swinging in at a sharp angle towards large, dulled eyes and a small, squashed nose, down into thin, twisted lips and springing outwards to the tip of a large, jutting chin. A sort of retarded man-in-the-moon face. My additional crosses to bear: two large protruding ears which came from my otherwise normal-looking mother, invisible under her long, black hair.

My older half-brothers were more fortunate. They took after my mother, and, presumably their Italian fathers. Tony looked a little like a darker, swarthier version of the footballer Graeme Souness, though not so ugly; despite being prone to putting on weight. Bernard was fair, slim and gazelle-like, outrageously camp from an early age.

The rest of us took 'the Strang look' from the old man, who, as I've said, was an Al basket case. John Strang's large, striking face was dominated by thickly framed glasses with bottom-of-Coke-bottle lenses. These magnified his intense, blazing eyes further. They had the effect of making him look as if he was coming from very far away then suddenly appearing right in your face. It was scary and disconcerting. If you were in possession of a Harrier Jump-jet, you could have chosen either his chin or forehead as a landing pad. He generally wore a large brown fur coat, under which he carried his shotgun when he patrolled the scheme late at night with Winston, his loyal Alsatian. Winston was a horrible dog and I was glad when he died. He was instantly replaced by an even more vicious beast of the same breed, who also rejoiced in the name Winston.

I later had cause to be less than pleased at the first Winston's demise; the second one savaged me badly. I was about eight, and watching a Superboy cartoon on the television. I decided that Winston Two was Krypto the Superdog and I tied a towel to his collar to simulate Krypto's cape. The dog freaked out and turned on me, savaging my leg so badly that I needed skin grafts and walk with a slight limp to this day . . . only now I don't walk at all.

I feel a spasm of hurt at that realisation. Remembering hurts.

— Dinnae tell nae cunt it wis Winston, Dad threatened and pleaded. He was terrified in case they took the dog away. I said it was an unprovoked attack by some of the strays which congregated on the wasteland adjacent to our block. It made the local paper and the Tory council, who hated spending the snobby ratepayers' money on anything to do with our scheme, grudgingly sent an environmental health van over to round up the savage pack-beasts for extermination. I spent four months off the school, which was the best part of it.

As a kid I did the normal things kids in the scheme did: played fitba and Japs and commandos, mucked about on bikes, caught bees, hung around stairs bored, battered smaller/weaker kids, got battered by bigger/stronger kids. At nine years old I was charged by the polis for playing football in the street. We were kicking a ball around in a patch of grass outside the block of flats we lived in. There were no NO BALL GAMES signs up, but we should have known, even at that age, that as the scheme was a concentration camp for the poor; this like everything else, was prohibited. We were taken up to court where my mate Brian's dad made a brilliant speech and embarrassed the judge into admonishing us. You could see the polis looking like tits.

— A fuckin common criminal at the age ay nine, my Ma used tae moan. — Common criminal.

It's only in retrospect I realise that she was fucked up because the auld man was away at the time. She used to say that he was working, but Tony told us that he was in the jail. Tony was awright. He battered me a few times, but he also battered anybody who messed with me, unless they were his mates. Bernard I hated; he just stayed in the hoose and played with my wee sister Kim aw the time. Bernard was like Kim; Bernard was a girl.

I loved catching bees in the summer. We'd fill auld Squeezy detergent bottles with water and skoosh the bee as it sucked at the nectar on the flower. The trick was to train a couple of jets on the bee at the same time and blast it to fuck, the water weighing down its wings. We'd then scoop the drenched bees into a jar and then dig little prison cells for them in the softer material between the sections of brick at the ramp at the bottom of our block of flats. We used ice-lolly sticks as the doors. We had a concentration camp, a tiny Scottish housing scheme, for bees.

One of my pals, Pete, had a magnifying glass. It was great getting a shot of it. I used to like to burn the bees' wings, making them easier prisoners. Sometimes I burned their faces. The smell was horrible, the smell of burning bee. I wanted the glass. I swapped Pete an Action Man that had no arms for his magnifying glass. I had earlier swapped the Action Man fae Brian for a truck.

I was embarrassed when any of the other kids came roond to the hoose. Most of them seemed to have better hooses than us, it was like we were scruffs. That's how I knew the old man was in the jail, there was only my Ma's wages for doing the school dinners and the cleaning. Thank fuck my Ma did the dinners at a different school than the one I went to.

Then my Dad came back. He got work in security and started daein the hoose up. We got a new fireplace with plastic coals and twirly things inside a plastic funnel which made it look like heat rising. It was really just an electric bar fire but. My Dad was awright at first; I remember he took me to Easter Road for the fitba. He left me and Tony and Bernard and my cousin Alan in my Uncle Jackie's car ootside a pub. They bought us coke and crisps. When they came out they were pished from drinking beer and they got us pies and Bovril and mair crisps at the fitba. I was bored with the fitba, but I liked getting the pies and crisps. The backs of my legs got sair, like when my Ma took us tae Leith Walk tae the shops.

Then I got a bad battering fae my Dad and had to go to the hospital for stitches. He hit the side of my head and I fell over and split it on the edge of the kitchen table. Six stitches above the eye. It was barry having stitches. The auld man didn't understand that it was only clipshers I put in Kim's hair. — It wis jist clipshers, Dad, I pleaded. — Clipshers dinnae sting.

Kim just gret and gret like fuck. She wouldnae stop. It was only clipshers as well. Just clipshers. It's no as if it was bees. They have these pincers at the back, but they dinnae sting. I think Devil's Coach-Horses or Earwigs were their real names.

— Look at hur! Look what yuv fuckin well done tae yir sister ya silly wee cunt! He gestured tae Kim, whose already distorted face twisted further in contrived terror. The auld man thumped me then.

I had to tell everyone at the casualty that I was mucking aboot wi Tony and I fell. I had headaches for a long time eftir that.

I remember once watching my Ma, Vet, scrubbing the tartan nameplate on the door of our maisonette flat. Somebody had added an 'E' to our name. Dad and my Uncle Jackie went around the stair cross-examining terrified neighbours. Dad was always threatening to shoot anybody who complained about us. Other parents therefore always told their kids not to play with us, and all but the craziest ones complied.

If the neighbours were terrified of my Dad and Uncle Jackie, who was really just Dad's mate but we called him 'Uncle', they were also pretty wary of my Ma. Her father or grandfather, I could never remember which one, had been a prisoner-of-war in a Japanese camp and he had gone slightly loopy; a direct result, Vet claimed, of his cruel incarceration. She grew up indoctrinated with tales of Jap atrocities and had once read this book which contended that the orientals would take over the world by the turn of the century. She would scrutinise the eyes of my few friends, proclaiming them unsuitable if they had what she considered to be 'Jap blood'.

I think I was about nine or ten when I first heard the auld man mention South Africa. It seemed that no sooner than he mentioned it, we were there.

— See us, Vet? Meant fir better things. Me wi aw they security joabs. Nae prospects. Like ah sais, meant fir better things. This country's gaun tae the dogs. Aw they strikes; cannae even git yir fuckin bucket emptied. They trade union cunts: hudin the country tae ransom. Sooth Efrikay, that's the place. Like ah sais, Sooth Efrikay. Ah ken thuv goat problems in Sooth Efrikay n aw, but at least thuv no goat this fuckin Labour Governmint. Ah'm gaunny see aboot gittin us ower thair. Oor Gordon wid pit us up, nae danger. Ah'll take us oot thair, Vet. Fuckin well sure'n ah will. Think ah'll no? Ah'm askin ye! Think ah'll no?

— Nae Japs . . .

— Aye, bit git this though, Vet. Thir's nae Japs in Sooth Efrikay. Nane. That's cause it's a white man's country, like ah sais, a white man's country. White is right oot thair, ah kid ye not. Like ah sais: Sooth Efrikay, white is right, Dad sang, all high and animated. His large flat tongue licked at a stamp which he stuck on a letter. It was probably a letter of complaint to somebody. He always wrote letters of complaint.

—Jist as long is thir's nae Japs . . .

—Naw bit this is Sooth Efrikay. Sooth Fuckin Efrikay Vet, if yi'll pardon ma ps n qs.

— Somewhair ah kin git tae dry clathes . . . they Pearsons . . . eywis in the dryin green . . .

— Eh! Ah fuckin telt that cow! Ah fuckin telt hur! Ah sais tae hur, nixt time ah fuckin see your washin in that fuckin dryin green whin ma wife's tryin tae wash, the whole fuckin loat's gaun doon the fuckin shute intae the rubbish! Fuckin ignorant, some people, like ah sais, fuckin ignorant. Bit see in Sooth Efrikay Vet, we'd huv a big hoose like Gordon's. Dry oor clathes in the sun, in a real fuckin gairdin, no in some concrete boax wi holes in it.

Gordon was John's brother who had left to go to South Africa years ago. Possibly John's closeness to 'Uncle'Jackie was due to him seeing Jackie as a brother substitute. Certainly at the drunken parties he frequently hosted, when squads of guys and couples would pack into our egg-box after closing time, he seemed at his happiest telling old stories of himself, Gordon and the Jubilee Gang, as he and his hippy-beating Teddy Boy mates used to call themselves.

— It wid be nice tae huv a real back gairdin . . . I remember Ma saying that. I remember that clearly.

It was decided. Dad's word generally went in our family. We were making plans to go off to South Africa.

I didnae really ken whether or no I wanted to go. It was just eftir that that I lit my first really big fire. I'd always liked fires. Boney nights were the best nights of the year in the scheme, Guy Fawkes because you got fireworks, but Victoria Day n aw. We'd go doon the beach tae get wood or find other boneys in the scheme and raid them. Sometimes, though, we got raided ourselves. You would get cudgels and stanes and try to defend your bonfire against raiders. There was always fights with stanes in the scheme. The first thing I learned tae dae was tae fling a stane. That was what you did as a kid in Muirhoose, you flung stanes; flung them at radges, at windaes, at buses.

It was something to do.

The fire, though, that was something else. It was eftir the boney. I had a lighted torch and I put it doon the rubbish chute. It ignited the rubbish in the big bucket in the budget room at the bottom of the building. Two fire engines came. Ma mate Brian made ays shite masel.