Lucas (41 page)

‘Name?'

‘Martyn Pig.'

‘Pardon?'

‘Martyn Pig.'

‘Pig?'

‘Yes.'

‘Martyn Pig?'

‘Yes. Martyn with a Y, Pig with an I and one G.'

Unless you've got an odd name yourself you wouldn't know what it's like. You wouldn't understand. They say that sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you. Oh yeah? Well, whoever thought that one up was an idiot. An idiot with an ordinary name, probably. Words
hurt
. Porky, Piggy, Pigman, Oink, Bacon, Stinky, Snorter, Porker, Grunt …

I blamed my dad. It was his name. I asked him once if he'd ever thought of changing it.

‘Changing what?' he'd muttered, without looking up from his newspaper.

‘Our name. Pig.'

He reached for his beer and said nothing.

‘Dad?'

‘What?'

‘Nothing. It doesn't matter.'

It took me a long time to realise that the best way to deal with name-calling is to simply ignore it. It's not easy, but I've found that if you let people do or think what they want and don't let your feelings get too mixed up in it, then after a while they usually get bored and leave you alone.

It worked for me, anyway. I still have to put up with
curious looks whenever I give my name. New teachers, librarians, doctors, dentists, newsagents, they all do it: narrow their eyes, frown, look to one side – is he joking? And then the embarrassment when they realise I'm not. But I can cope with that. Like I said, I'm used to it. You can get used to just about anything given enough time.

At least I don't get called Porky any more. Well … not very often.

This – what I'm going to tell you about – it all happened just over a year ago. It was the week before Christmas. Or Xmas, as Dad called it. Exmas. It was the week before Exmas. A Wednesday.

I was in the kitchen filling a plastic bin-liner with empty beer bottles and Dad was leaning in the doorway, smoking a cigarette, watching me through bloodshot eyes.

‘Don't you go takin' 'em to the bottle bank,' he said.

‘No, Dad.'

‘Bloody emviroment this, emviroment that … if anyone wants to use my empty bottles again they'll have to pay for 'em. I don't get 'em for nothing, you know.'

‘No.'

‘Why should I give 'em away? What's the emviroment ever done for me?'

‘Mmm.'

‘Bloody bottle banks …'

He paused to puff on his cigarette. I thought of telling him that there's no such thing as the
emviroment
, but I couldn't be bothered. I filled the bin-liner, tied it, and started on another. Dad was gazing at his reflection in the glass door, rubbing at the bags under his eyes. He could have been quite a handsome man if it wasn't for the drink. Handsome in a short, thuggish kind of way. Five foot seven,
tough-guy mouth, squarish jaw, oily black hair. He could have looked like one of those bad guys in films – the ones the ladies can't help falling in love with, even though they know they're bad – but he didn't. He looked like what he was: a drunk. Fat little belly, florid skin, yellowed eyes, sagging cheeks and a big fat neck. Old and worn out at forty.

He leaned over the sink, coughed, spat, and flicked ash down the plughole. ‘That bloody woman's coming Friday.'

‘That bloody woman' was my Aunty Jean. Dad's older sister. A terrible woman. Think of the worst person you know, then double it, and you'll be halfway to Aunty Jean. I can hardly bear to describe her, to tell you the truth. Furious is the first word that comes to mind. Mad, ugly and furious. An angular woman, cold and hard, with crispy blue hair and a face that makes you shudder. I don't know what colour her eyes are, but they look as if they never close. They have about as much warmth as two depthless pools. Her mouth is thin and pillar-box red, like something drawn by a disturbed child. And she walks faster than most people run. She moves like a huntress, quick and quiet, homing in on her prey. I used to have nightmares about her. I still do.

She always came over the week before Christmas. I don't know what for. All she ever did was sit around moaning about everything for about three hours. And when she wasn't moaning about everything she was swishing around the house running her fingers through the dust, checking in the cupboards, frowning at the state of the windows, tutting at everything.

‘My
God
, William, how can you
live like
this.'

Everyone else called my dad Billy, but Aunty Jean always called him by his full name, pronouncing it with a
wover-wemphasis
on the first syllable –
Will
-yam – that made him flinch whenever she said it. He detested her. Hated her. He
was scared stiff of the woman. What he'd do, he'd hide all his bottles before she came round. Up in the loft, mostly. It took him ages. Up and down the ladder, arms full of clinking bottles, his face getting redder and redder by the minute, muttering under his breath all the time, ‘Bloody woman, bloody woman, bloody woman, bloody woman …'

Normally he didn't care what anyone thought about his drinking, but with Aunty Jean it was different. You see, when Mum left us – this was years ago – Aunty Jean tried to get custody of me. She wanted me to live with her, not with Dad. God knows why, she never liked me. But then she liked Dad even less, blamed him for the divorce and everything, said that he'd driven Mum to the ‘brink of despair' and that she wasn't going to ‘stand by and let him ruin an innocent young boy's life too'. Which was all a load of rubbish. She didn't give a hoot for my innocent life, she just wanted to kick Dad while he was down, kick him where it hurts, leave him with nothing. She despised him as much as he despised her. I don't know why. Some kind of brother/sister thing, I suppose. Anyway, her plan was to expose Dad as a drunkard. She reckoned the authorities would decide in her favour once they knew of Dad's wicked, drunken ways. They'd never allow me to live with a boozer. But she reckoned without Dad. His need for me was greater than hers. Without me, he was just a drunk. But with me, he was a drunk with responsibilities, a drunk with child benefit, a drunk with someone to clear up the sick.

After he was given notice that Aunty Jean had applied for custody he didn't so much as look at a bottle for two months or more. Not a drop. Not a sniff. It was remarkable. He shaved, washed, wore a suit, he even smiled now and then. I almost grew to like him. Aunty Jean's custody case was dead in the water. She didn't stand a chance. As far as
the rest of the world was concerned, Mr William Pig was the
ideal father
.

The day I was officially assigned to Dad's loving care, he went out drinking and didn't come back for three days. When he did come back – unshaven, white-eyed, stinking – he slouched into the kitchen where I was making some tea, leaned down at me, grinning like a madman, and slurred right into my face: ‘Remember me?'

Then he stumbled over to the sink and threw up.

So that's why he hid the bottles. He didn't want to give Aunty Jean any excuse for re-opening the custody debate. It wasn't so much the thought of losing me that worried him, it was the thought of staying off the drink for another two months.

‘Bloody woman,' he muttered again as I started on the empty beer cans, stamping them down into flattened discs, filling up another bin-liner. ‘She's coming at four,' he went on, ‘day after tomorrow, so make sure the place is cleaned up.'

‘Yeah,' I said, wiping stale beer from the palms of my hands and reaching for another black bag. Dad watched for a while longer, then turned and slouched off into the front room.

Christmas meant nothing to us. It was just a couple of weeks off school for me and a good excuse for Dad to drink, not that he ever needed one. There was no festive spirit, no goodwill to all men, no robins, no holly – just cold, rainy days with nothing much to do.

I spent most of that Wednesday afternoon in town. Dad had given me some money – four dirty fivers – and told me to ‘get some stuff in for Exmas: turkey, spuds, presents …
sprouts, stuff like that'. It was too early to get the food in, Christmas was still a week away, but I wasn't going to argue. If he wanted me to go shopping, I'd go shopping. It gave me something to do.

Halfway down the street I heard a shout – ‘
Mar'n!'
– and turned to see Dad leaning out of the bedroom window, bare-chested, a cigarette dangling from his lip.

‘Don't forget the bloody whasnames,' he yelled, making a yanking movement with both hands, tugging on two invisible ropes.

‘What?' I called back.

He took the cigarette from his mouth, gazed blankly into the distance for a moment, then blurted out, ‘Crackers! Get some bloody Exmas crackers. Big ones, mind, not them tiny buggers.'

In town, outside Sainsbury's, the scariest Father Christmas I'd ever seen was slumped in the back of a plywood sleigh. He was thin and short. So thin that his big black Santa's belt wound twice around his waist. Stiff black stubble showed on his chin beneath an ill-fitting, off-white Santa beard and – strangest of all, I thought – a pair of brand new trainers gleamed on his feet. When he
Ho-ho-ho'd
he sounded like a serial killer. Six plywood reindeer pulled his plywood sleigh. They were painted a shiny chocolate brown, with glittery red eyes and coat-hanger antlers entwined with plastic holly.

It was raining.

I watched the skinny Santa for a while – thirty seconds and a Lucky Bag per kid – then headed off towards the other end of town. As I walked I got to thinking about the whole Father Christmas thing. I was trying to remember if I'd ever really believed that a fat man in a fat red suit could squeeze down a million different chimneys all in one night. I
suppose I must have believed it at some point. I have a very vague memory of sitting on a Santa's knee when I was about three or four years old. I can still remember the nasty, scratchy feel of his red nylon trousers, the stickiness of his beard, and a strange fruity smell. When I asked him where he lived a familiar slurred voice answered, ‘Poland … uh … North Poland … in an underground igloo with twenty-two dwarves –
hic
– and a sleigh-deer.'

It was still raining when I got to The Bargain Bin. It's one of those cheap shops that sell all kinds of rubbishy stuff – cups, towels, bean bags, pencil cases. Upstairs, there's a toy department full of weedy footballs and plastic machine guns that make noises. You can test them. There's an arrow pointing to the trigger that says Press and when you pull the trigger they go
kakakakakakaka
or
dugga-dugga-dugga-dugga-peow-peow
. Ricochets. I was just looking around, looking at the racks of little toys – plastic animals, cows, sheep, crocodiles, rubber snakes, water pistols. I thought I might find something there for Alex, a present. Nothing serious, just a little something, you know, a token. The year before I'd bought her a box of plastic ants. I don't remember what she gave me.

Anyway, I was just standing there staring at the toys on the wall, trying to find something I thought she'd like, something I could afford, when I suddenly realised that I wasn't really looking at anything at all. I was looking, but not seeing. It was the noise. I couldn't concentrate because of the noise. Horrible tinny Christmas musak blaring out from speakers in the ceiling, synthesised sleigh bells and chirpy pianos, groany old singers trying too hard to be happy – it was unbearable. A great swirling mess of sound searing its way into my head. I tried to ignore it, but it just seemed to get louder and louder. And it was too hot in there, too. It
was boiling. There was no air. I couldn't breathe. The sound was paralysing – chattering machine guns, talking animals, wailing police car sirens,
dee-dur dee-dur dee-dur
, parents shouting at their kids, whacking them on the arm, the kids screaming and crying, the constant
beep beep beep
of the tills, the music … it was like something out of a nightmare.

I had to get out.

I went and sat in the square for a while. The rain had stopped but the air was moist and cold. The sweat running down my neck felt clammy and foreign. I sat on a low brick wall and watched limping pigeons peck at food scabs while the slurred whine of a beardy old busker drifted across from the nearby shopping arcade. He's always there, always playing the same depressing song.
When I'm old with only one eye, I'll do nothing but look at the sky
… Two screaming children clutching bits of bread were chasing pigeons across the square, and in the background I could hear the constant sound of thousands of people shuffling around the crowded streets, all talking, jabbering away, yammering rubbish to each other –
scuffle scuffle scuffle, blah blah blah, scuffle scuffle scuffle
. From distant streets the discordant sounds of other buskers mingled awkwardly with the hubbub – a hurdy-gurdy, the plink-plonk of a banjo, Peruvian pipes, the screaming whistle of a flute …

It all sounded like madness to me. Too many people, too many buildings, too much noise, too much everything.

It's there all the time, the sound of too much everything, but no one ever listens to it. Because once you start to listen, you can never stop, and in the end it'll drive you crazy.

A wild-haired loony munching a greasy pasty sat down next to me and grinned in my direction. Bits of wet potato clung to his teeth. I decided to move on. My bum was cold and wet from sitting on the damp wall and it was starting to
rain again. I walked up through the backstreets then cut down through the multi-storey car park, across the road bridge, then down past the library to the street market where dodgy-looking men in long nylon overcoats and fingerless gloves were standing at their stalls drinking steaming coffee from styrofoam cups. More noise – crappy rock 'n' roll music, loud Christmas carols, marketmen shouting out above the clamour:
Getchur luvverly turkeys 'ere! … Plenny a luvverly turkeys! … Wrappin' papah! Ten sheets a paand! … Getchur luvverly wrappin' papah 'ere!