My Temporary Life (2 page)

“
Wilson. Malcolm. Look at me. Look ower here. Are you hardly drinking too? Is that what you two get up tae at dinner time? Are ye hardly drinking?” It’s Douglas talking. I know that it’s him, and I know that McGregor will be standing back, looking smug, waiting to join in.

I look around, wondering where Nan McHendry, my 13 year-old angel from 2A is sitting. Is she flicking her long dark hair back, chattering to her friend? Does she condone this? Or, is she looking down somewhere, her shy smile ignoring it all?

I’m used to being alone. I live with a father, who didn’t intend to have a son with no wife, or I spend my summers in Canada, with a mother who forgets that I’m there. This is a different type of alone though. This is an alone where there’s no relief, no escape. I have a decision to make, but in reality, I probably made it as soon as the door slammed shut and McGregor and Douglas turned their attention to me. It’s self preservation and I have no choice. I have no escape. So, I join in. I chant back. I laugh and ridicule and make jokes about Hardly drinking and Hardly being hardly there at all.

There’s a meeting that night with Hardly’s parents, and the principal, and of course Hextall. They suspend him for a week, so it’s not until the following week that he’s back standing by the lamppost at the end of his street, waiting for me, so that we can walk to school together. He’s standing sideways, his face half-turned, smirking, trying to look brave I suppose.

“
I’ve stopped, no more booze. It’s just not worth it.” His voice has its usual shakiness, and as he walks, his short, thin frame doesn’t seem to know how to control putting one foot in front of the other without stumbling. “I mean it. I don’t want to go through that shite ever again.” He pauses, and almost as an afterthought says, “ Fucking Hextall.”

We walk in silence for a few minutes and I don’t know what to say. Just before we reach the main road that takes us straight to school, I realize that he’s stopping every so often not out of clumsiness, but because he’s limping, and favouring one side over the other.

I want him to stop. I want him to stop his nervous walking and tell me what happened to him but I can’t, and I don’t. I’m thirteen and my only priority is getting through as many days as I can without being mocked or beaten because of my wrong clothes or wrong haircut.

“
Math was cancelled while you were gone. Fire alarm had us outside for almost an hour.”

He stops and turns to me, and then I see it. The left side of his face is red under his cheek, and scraped, and his eye is bruised and has turned a sickly, grey colour. As he sees me staring, he turns away and we do what frightened, poor, thirteen year old kids do. We ignore it.

“
That’s brilliant. I wish I’d been there just for that. No Math, that’s almost as tempting as no Science. Fuck.” Then he seems to remember something and says it again, “Fucking Hextall.” He speaks as though he’s in a hurry, and his laugh is forced. He seems to be begging me to not ask. So, I don’t. We just keep moving towards the school, him limping every few steps, and me trying to walk slow, waiting for him.

CHAPTER 2

Gerald’s bruises heal and with the absence of booze he starts to look almost healthy. His skin still has a greasy unwashed look, but his eyes seem different somehow. Instead of their usual dull lifeless appearance they seem more alive now, always nervously searching around as though they’re looking for something. His manner of speaking has changed too. He cocks his head up when he talks to me, and his eyes dart around, looking at me, and then immediately looking everywhere else. He’s like a little soldier in a foxhole, alert and aware, waiting for the next bomb to fall. That’s how we find the tree. We always knew that it was there, of course, but he notices it. It’s his idea.

“
We should take it, claim it as ours.”

I know that he’s talking to me, because there are only the two of us sitting on the grass by the entrance to the dinner hall. It’s impossible though, to know what he’s talking about, because his gaze doesn’t settle on any one thing long enough for me to follow.

“
The tree, Malcolm, the stand-alone tree. Nobody else even kens that it’s there. I can climb it and I know that you can, so why not. Let’s take it.”

He’s right. Nobody else ever seems to notice it. The tree stands by itself on a small green patch of land that sits adjacent to our school. It’s almost as though the busy roads and the school itself have been built around the tree and nobody felt that they had the right to cut it down. So there it stands, tall and alone, a short distance from the back of the school.

“
I don’t know if you can just take a tree, but if you’re talking about climbing it we can certainly try and climb it, Hardly...” The name is out of my mouth before I realize that I’ve said it, and, without looking back, he’s off and running towards the stand-alone tree.

I know that I can catch him, or pass him even, but I don’t. I run behind, letting him lead, wondering if I should be the only one in the school that still calls him “Gerald”.

He’s running so quickly that his short, frail body slams into the bottom part of the trunk, and he bounces backwards. I catch him, and putting his foot on my hand, leverage him upwards, trying to make it appear as though the plan was to work in conjunction all along. With one hoist, I have him up to the first branch, and then, groaning, he pulls himself upwards.

I’m taller than him, and certainly more agile, but it still takes all of my strength to grab the bottom limb, and swing myself up. By the time I reach one of the lower branches, he’s scampered upwards and is sitting above me, peering through the leaves.

“
It’s perfect,” he laughs. “Absolutely perfect.”

I have to agree with him. From our vantage point, we can see the boys running around, chasing the ball on the school field. We can see the girls, pretending not to watch them, and we can even see the Masters pacing back and forth, as they distractedly watch the comings and goings of thedifferent students. And, they can’t see us. The leafy old tree is a perfect camouflage. I don’t think anyone saw us running towards it, and certainly no one is looking up at it now. He’s right. It is perfect.

I lean back on my lower branch, and watch him as he cautiously moves from limb to limb, trying to find the perfect vantage point. His face is different now, more relaxed, mischievous even, and his eyes aren’t darting around as much anymore, waiting for those bombs to land. Hardly and I have found a safe place.

The old tree becomes our refuge and nobody seems to mind, or if they do, they don’t say anything. Hardly still gets teased and mocked, and Stuart Douglas or Gordon McGregor routinely bump their shoulders into him sending him sideways, as he walks down the hallways, but now he has something. We have something. Morning and afternoon breaks don’t quite leave us enough time to get to it and get settled without anyone seeing us, but dinner time is different.

We quickly eat our school dinner of watery powdered potatoes and ground up mincemeat, or tatties and mince as they’re known, and then as cautiously as we can, we run to our tree.

Some days we see nothing. Bored kids run aimlessly around the fields, while others congregate in little groups, cherishing the fact they have somewhere they belong, somewhere they feel safe. Other days there are things happening. There is activity, arguments, shouting. And there are fights. There are always fights.

The main objective when it comes to fighting at Kilmarnock Secondary School is to grab your opponent’s hair and pull their head down, so you can kick at it. Then, get as many kicks in as you can, before the master pulls the two of you apart. This usually involves an initial kick to the groin or the knee to unsteady your adversary and then a clutch for their hair. The crowd of children circle around of course, hoping that the fight gets to the head kicking part before the master who is on patrol, can intervene.

The teachers have different methods of separating the fighters. Mr McRae, the Physical Education Master, athletically pounces in and gets between the two before any harm can be done. Others manage to intervene before the grab for the hair, and separate the two. Hextall is different though. He waits until one fighter has over-powered the other, has his opponent’s scalp firmly in hand and has applied a kick or two, before moving in and breaking it up. I’m not quite sure if he wants to see the blood or if he’s just afraid of being hurt himself in the scuffle.

It’s a day without fights, when we can see little activity from our vantage point, that Hardly starts asking me questions.

“
Why are you here anyways? Why aren’t you in Canada with your mother or somewhere other than here? Why would anybody want to be here?” He tries to spit, but the saliva slips from his mouth and dribbles down his chin. He’s gesturing towards the school grounds, looking over the playing fields at the faded grey walls of the building with disgust.

I pause before saying it, although I know the answer, and think about it every day of my life. “She didn’t want me. We got to Canada and she decided that she didn’t want me. So, she sent me back here to my Dad.”

I don’t look up at him as he sits on his higher branch, but I know that he hasn’t moved. I know that my answer hasn’t really answered him at all. “It’s complicated. It’s not easy to explain. They split up. She was never really happy here I guess, always wanted to go back to Canada, that’s where she’s from. I’m half-Canadian.”

He sniggers sarcastically. “Mine is easy, not complicated at all. Neither of them want me and they remind me of that every day, actually, probably more like every minute.”

I resist the urge to look up, and I let him continue talking.

“
My old man is just an angry old fucker, hits, hits, hits. Hits everything. That’s his answer. Just hit till the noise all stops. And her, my ma, she takes it, and then hits me to show him that she agrees with him. And then they send me to this shit hole five days a week, one big, happy fucking family.”

He’s still staring at the old building that looms in front of us. “You should have stayed in Canada, Malcolm. You should have found a way to stay there. Look at this place. I mean it’s supposed to be 1976 not 1936. Anything’s gotta be better than this.”

He isn’t just talking about school of course. He’s talking about all of the things that make up our lives. He’s talking about the things that eat us up inside and make us run and hide in a big, safe old tree every opportunity we get.

Living with my father is living with silences. It’s living with a shared sadness at being left. I get my height from my Dad, but where I am thin and boney; he’s broad and strong with the muscles that come from building other people’s houses year after year. We’re a strange pair, I suppose, this big, strong, quiet man and a scared, passive, almost-man living together and apart at the same time.

“
My Dad’s okay. He just doesn’t say anything. My mother though, she’s different. She talks. She talks to everybody.”

He wants more. I can tell from his silence, so I give it to him.

“
She moved us into a motel, in Vancouver. That’s in Canada. That’s where she used to be from. There was one big bed, and we shared it.” I wonder if he’s sniggering again. “I was ten then. I wouldn’t do it now. I was just a kid,” I say, underlining that fact that I’m 13, three long years from being a ten year old.

“
There were sparkly things on the ceiling. They were embedded right into the plaster on the ceiling, and they’d shine even in the dark. They were amazing; they looked like little diamonds that someone had left there. I got this idea that if I could pry those diamonds out of the ceiling, I could sell them and get back to Scotland.”

This time he does laugh, just a small, short snicker.

“
I was ten, remember.” I almost laugh myself and it helps me for a moment to forget how much pain there had been that day.

“
She was out in the hallway, talking to a man from another room. She was complaining about my Dad, about Scotland, telling him things that I didn’t remember, things that just didn’t make sense. The other man was laughing and being nice to her. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them. I could hear everything.”

“
So did you get the diamonds? Is that how you got back here?” He’s laughing now but it’s a kinder laugh, the type that invites you to join in.

“
I suppose in a way I did, yes.” I stop to think about that day again, and I can remember the look on my mother’s face as she came back into the room to find me unsteadily teetering on a chair, trying to reach the ceiling.