The Life of Lee (9 page)

As I reached the last flight of stairs, just feet away from Nanny Norling’s door, my legs were on fire, my muscles burning from all the stairs I had galloped up. I took a quick glimpse over my shoulder to see Wayne bounding up behind me like a giant antelope. With all my energy, I put in a last, exhausting sprint along the passageway to her door, but Wayne was already on top of me.

We hit the doorway together in a human crash. Wayne popped forward through the unlatched door and into Nanny Norling’s flat. I watched from where I lay and it seemed his upper body was going way too fast for his legs to catch up. The momentum propelled him forward and down on to a metal bucket that had been left in the hall. Crack! Wayne’s nose hit the side of the bucket, splatting in as many directions as a compass.

Wayne rolled over and lay on the floor moaning, clutching what was left of his hooter, as blood oozed out between the gaps in his fingers. It looked like the only place he would be going was A&E.

I couldn’t have cared less; I had my eyes on the prize. This was it, this was my moment, my time to shine, to bask in the sunlight that would lead to the Nanny Norling treasure trove and wealth beyond my wildest dreams. I snapped to my feet and slid quietly past the groaning lump that was Wayne. The treasure was mine.

I went to enter triumphantly through her living-room doorway, but, ‘Nann–aaaargh … bollocks!’

A hand had grabbed my ankle and I was gone, whipped back out of the door without so much as a by-your-leave.
All that Nanny Norling must have seen was some scruffy kid appear, then just as quickly disappear from view. I was gone, sucked back through the door in a flash, like some demented cuckoo clock on the stroke of one.

As I lay sprawling on the floor beside him, Wayne quickly got to his feet, trying desperately to cup the blood now flowing like a river from his nose. I watched as he entered Nanny Norling’s front room, cool as you like, as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and say, quite calmly, ‘Do you need something from the shops, Nanny Norling?’

I entered the room behind him, battered, exhausted and breathing heavily. I was too late. Wayne had secured the lucrative contract.

This was the first time I had been in the famous Nanny Norling flat. It was jam-packed with all sorts of odd artefacts, not unlike the set of
Steptoe and Son
. These objects had clearly seen better days. She had, it appeared, at some point fallen on hard times.

Up against the far wall of the front room was a four-poster bed where Nanny Norling lay. The mattress was thick and high enough above the window sill so that the poor old dear could, as she liked to, constantly stare out of the window. A huge grandfather clock loudly tick-tocked away at the foot of the bed, a cabinet with dusty, faded, black-and-white photos of men in uniform sat on a lace cloth across a chest of drawers, and by the window next to the bed was a stand supporting a bird cage with a small yellow budgie chewing frantically on a cuttlefish.

‘Here,’ she said, quietly holding out a bag of birdseed to me as I stood, crestfallen, after losing out to Wayne yet
again. ‘Feed the bird.’ I fed the bird, gave her back the seed, and she handed me a sweet – one frigging boiled barley sugar was all I got for my troubles! Well, at least it was a whole one and not a shattered fragment.

Deeply disappointed, I followed Wayne down the stairs. His nose was still pouring blood, but what did he care? ‘I got it, I got it!’ he crowed to the others as we passed them on the stairs.

Wayne has that scar on his nose to this day.

But I still have the mental scars.

One year later, Nanny Norling died, or as Dad put it: ‘’Ere, Wayne, you know that bucket you caught your hooter on? Well, Nanny Norling has kicked it.’

I asked if her foot was all right.

When I say she died, she didn’t actually die – well, not the first time anyway.

One of the neighbours called in a panic at our flat. She was crying, because she had gone into Nanny Norling’s flat and found her lying motionless in bed. Mum and Dad and some other neighbours rushed over to Nanny’s flat immediately. A few of us kids followed along too. By the time a few doors had been knocked on the way over there, quite a procession of people had built up.

When I got to Nanny Norling’s flat, I had to squeeze gently under and through the legs of loads of people. The crowd led right down to the second landing. The door was open, with three, maybe four of the neighbours all trying to get a better look inside. I could just hear faint whisperings from the front room as I crept through the small hall, weaving in and out unnoticed by everyone –
they were all too concerned with Nanny Norling. I made it into the front room, and there was Nanny Norling lying completely still on her bed, face white as a ghost as if she had fallen into a bath of talc.

About eight people were around the bed, all doing their most convincing over-concerned whispering act and discussing what the best thing to do was. Have you noticed people will always say the same thing in those situations?

‘I think it’s for the best.’

‘Yes, I think that’s what she would have wanted.’

How do they know? She’s dead!

Dad whispered loudly in a mock-respectful, authoritative voice: ‘I think we should tie her mouth up.’

There were gasps from the gathered crowd. ‘Tie her mouth up?’ someone exclaimed.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ remonstrated another.

‘No,’ replied Dad, keen to explain. ‘I saw it on a programme once. If rigor mortis sets in, her mouth will be permanently jammed open like that. So we need to tie it shut.’

A voice piped up from the crowd, ‘There’s a few people round ’ere I’d like to do that to.’

Dad asked if someone would pass him a tea cloth from the kitchen. He took it and, with everyone looking on, he mournfully and carefully closed Nanny Norling’s mouth. He asked another neighbour to hold it shut as he wrapped the tea cloth around her chin and up over her head, where he tied it in a huge bow. She lay there, like a giant rabbit, as everyone bowed their heads and said a little prayer. A couple of women began to cry.

I was sure I even saw a tear appear in the budgie’s little eye.

I was confused. I was too young to understand. I didn’t know what was going on. It was difficult to tell why you might tie a bow around Nanny Norling’s head so she looked like a rabbit. Why was everyone so upset?

I heard the faint siren of an ambulance arrive on the estate. That must have aroused something in her because suddenly, without warning, Nanny Norling sat bolt upright in bed.

A woman fainted on the spot.

The room ignited with screams of terror. An atmosphere that just moments earlier was silent and solemn was now complete mayhem. The budgie fell from its perch, seemingly clutching its tiny heart with its wings.

Everyone stood terrified, dumbfounded, staring at Nanny Norling. It was like she’d awoken from the dead. She made a few odd faces as if she had a wasp flying about her mouth. She had no teeth in, which didn’t help. It made her mouth look all concave. She produced some extraordinary noises that I had only previously heard on nature programmes. Her head jolted from one person to the next, her mad, staring, pea eyes darted about the room. She looked like a pinball caught between two posts as she flailed around in the four-poster bed.

‘She can’t breathe!’ someone cried out.

‘Well, no, she’s dead,’ shouted another.

‘She’s not dead, you idiot! Take that cloth off her head!’

Dad quickly ripped the cloth from Nanny Norling’s head. She took a huge intake of air, paused for a moment and shouted: ‘What are you trying to do? Kill me?’

In fact, not long after that, Nanny Norling did sadly pass on. No one knows if the trauma of that day contributed to it, but in my opinion, it surely couldn’t have helped.

Even though we were so hard up, Nanny Norling managed to brighten up all our lives on the estate with her hand-outs, her exciting shopping expeditions and her exploding hard-boiled sweets.

I dedicate this chapter to the beautiful generosity of Nanny Norling.

8. X-Ray Vision

Despite participating in all these shenanigans on the estate, I still felt walled-off from mainstream society. It was as if all the real action was taking place in some far-off land, light years away from our life of grime on the Lawrence Weston.

As I got older, I started to yearn for something that might make me stand out. I wanted a capability that would command instant respect from others. So I decided that what I needed to mark myself out was a superpower. Then one day I got one. Well, sort of.

Dad was getting a lot more work on the club circuit by now and would often spend weeks away. The estate was getting pretty lively, which made me anxious. It was becoming increasingly rough. I only ever really felt safe when Dad was there. A superpower would stop me feeling so vulnerable. I imagined I could impress people by bending iron bars at will. So I’d lie in bed dreaming of amassing superhuman strength.

Whenever Dad was home, he’d like to go to Bristol town centre and visit a costume and make-up shop to stock up on tape and props, as he was now starting to incorporate impressions into his act.

For me, it was always the most exciting day of the year when I held my dad’s hand and went up the Christmas
Steps, a section of the town centre with second-hand clothes shops, book shops, joke shops and music stores. One of the music shops was owned and run by Trevor, the drummer in the band Dad used to belong to in the old days when he was doing gigs around South Wales and Bristol.

I loved going up the Christmas Steps. About half way up, there was a joke shop that sold rubber masks, make-up glue, false hair and wigs of all colours and lengths. I would stand in the middle of the shop, quietly fascinated by the brightly coloured magic tricks, practical jokes, wigs and costumes, waiting for Dad as he had odd, work-related conversations with the even odder-looking bloke behind the counter. They would talk endlessly about double-sided tape, rubber noses and false facial hair.

As Dad chatted away, my eyes were drawn to a pair of plastic glasses in a bag that hung near the counter. ‘X-Ray Vision’ it said, in big red letters. There was a picture of a man wearing the glasses and looking at a woman. It appeared that he could actually see through the woman’s dress to a skeleton underneath. I immediately snatched them from the rack and put them alongside the pile of stuff Dad had chosen to buy.

As the strange-looking man behind the counter cashed up all Dad’s stuff and plonked it in a bag, I imagined all the things I was going to do with these X-ray specs. Perhaps I might look inside my own body to see how it worked, or peer through buildings. Best of all, I imagined that I would be able to see underneath the dress of every girl that came within my X-ray vision. My eleven-year-old hormones were going ape shit with X-ray excitement.

As soon as we made our way out of the shop and back into the hustle and bustle of the Christmas Steps, I was eager to give my powerful new glasses a field test. Dad was distracted by a shop window, so I delved into the white carrier bag and retrieved the equipment that would endow me with my new superpower. It would enable me first to dominate the school playground, and then the planet. I would be able to watch teachers through thick walls, see what other kids had in their bags and, mostly, view naked girls at my leisure without them even knowing it.

I frantically opened the packet and carefully placed the huge, plastic, super-powered glasses upon my small freckled face. To my dismay, I couldn’t actually see anything. I looked around me at the buildings – nothing but fuzzy images. I took the glasses off and studied them. What was causing these powerful specs not to work?

Upon inspection, I found that they simply consisted of pieces of thin cardboard as lenses with red spirals painted on the front and a small hole in the middle over which a tiny piece of red nylon gauze was stretched and glued in place. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked through your net curtains at home, but things do appear to be fuzzy and kind of X-rayish, I suppose.

But I couldn’t give up. The spectacles had aroused something deep inside me. I no longer wanted to be the twat of the school, the odd boy, the one picked on for making strange noises to myself during class – well, OK, maybe that one. But I needed this new superpower to banish my reputation as the eternal loser. If I had this ability, the other boys who thought of me as merely the
school buffoon would immediately see me in an entirely different light. I shall, I thought, see into their minds, control the school, fight crime, even take over the universe.

I would no longer be viewed as the unwilling volunteer for the latest painful experiments – for example, I can boast that I was the first at my school to test out the agonizing pain of a dead leg from Alan Wilson, and the bumps from the entire Year Three. They swore it was my birthday, but unless I got the date wrong, they were sorely mistaken. Actually, I was sorely, they were just mistaken. No, if these boys knew I had the power of X-ray vision, I would be the most important, sought-after pupil in the school.

I kept the glasses on as we entered the next shop Dad wanted to visit. I looked at everything around me, bumping into every other person – much to the annoyance of Dad, who started to pull me along the pavement once we were back outside. ‘Take those bloody glasses off, you look mad,’ he fumed, before turning to apologize to anyone I bumped into. ‘Lee, look where you’re going.’

But I wanted to keep the glasses on in case somehow they suddenly started working. I persisted with the specs in the hope that the X-ray vision might kick in. I tried desperately to focus through the small pinholes. So determined was I that I refused to remove them for a week, stumbling around the flat in near blindness.

‘Lee, take those bloody glasses off. You can’t see your tea,’ Mum would demand at the table. I’d take them off, but as soon as I was away from the table they were back on and I was crashing into things again.

Trying my luck at school, I’d lurk in the playground next to the girls on the monkey bars, attempting not to
look too suspicious. Then, at the right moment, I’d turn round, bend down, slide my hand into my bag, whip out my X-ray specs and put them on my face. Closing my eyes, I’d pray that they would work. Then I’d slowly, nonchalantly turn round and stare at the girls through these huge black glasses with red spirals painted on the lenses.