Nipper (10 page)

He then shoves me against the wall and turns and throws the frying pan at the dog. She lets out another yelp, even though it never hits her. She is shaking like a leaf and moaning, lifting one of her paws out from under her to show me what he has done. I’ve never seen a dog so scared.

He storms out of the house after that shouting, ‘I’ll have to go and borrow some money so yi two can eat, shan’t I.
Bastards!
’ Then the door slams. I dive on the ground with a cloth and try to stop the blood coming from her face, and her jaw keeps twitching. He must have hit one of her nerves, and it never ever goes away – from this time on there is always a twitch in Bonnie’s jaw.

The next day I come home from school and I can hear
clang! clang! clang!
in the kitchen again. I panic and run in,
but the dog is alone – she has the pressure cooker tied around her neck with a big thick wire.

At first I’m very confused: is this another one of his torture games? Apparently one of the neighbours has told him that if a dog chews a slipper or a shoe you should tie it around its neck, which would teach it not to do it again. I think the brutal hiding she got yesterday was warning enough, don’t you?

I go into the living room where Dad is sitting and I don’t say a word about the dog situation in the kitchen. I just say hello and go to get changed. A bit later we sit down in the living room and have something to eat. I think it’s fish fingers, chips and beans.

I hate any kind of fish as my Granddad told me a story about when you go to the toilet and do your business, it all goes through sewage pipes to the ocean or sea and fish swim past shouting on their mate Bob in front, Bob! Bob! Bob! And all our shit ends up in their bellies. For years after hearing this I can’t look at people eating fish as it makes me heave. I still don’t eat it now!

Back in the living room it’s quiet, everything is peaceful, Dad’s not that drunk yet and it’s fairly calm – and then all of a sudden, I hear the front door opening and a shout, ‘Uncle Jock, Charlie, it’s me.’

Oh shit, it’s my cousin Shane. As you know, Shane always says exactly whatever happens to be on his mind. He just can’t keep it in.

Clang! Clang! Clang!
I can hear coming from the kitchen. Bonnie knows Shane and wants to see him, but I’m praying to God that Shane just walks past the kitchen door and comes straight to the living room.

‘Come in, Shane,’ Dad shouts, but I hear the kitchen door opening and very faintly, ‘Hiya, Bonnie’, then a pause and then the kitchen door being closed, then the living-room door opens.

‘Aright, Shane, what you up to?’

I’m trying to stare at him and tell him not to say anything about the dog. He sits down on the couch next to me.

‘Hi, Uncle Jock.’

‘Hi son, how’s yir mum.’

That’s Dad’s sister, Aunt Molly. She’s got dark hair and she’s really pretty and bubbly.

‘Yeah she’s fine, the whole family are alright.’

Then it goes silent. We’re watching
Countdown
. Richard Whiteley’s wearing one of his deckchair jackets and a tie you’d need to wear massive Electra French sunglasses to cut down on the glare. Dad’s trying to make words out of consonants and vowels. Meanwhile I’m sitting there praying that Shane has forgot about Bonnie, when these words I just do not want to hear come flowing out of Shane’s mouth.

‘Uncle Jock.’

‘Yeah what is it?’

‘Did you know your dog’s got a pot tied around its neck?’

Well, I collapse, I simply fall apart. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I want the ground to swallow me up, and I can’t control the contortions I go into. Then Shane starts giggling with little short sniggers.

‘
Aghaa, teehee
.’

Well, that really finishes me off. The tears are running down my face, my cheekbones feel like they’re poking through my skin, and my sides are more painful than after any beating I have ever had.

As always I’m looking to Dad to see what his reaction’s going to be. Whatever happens, I look to Dad.

His face is impassive. I don’t know which way he’s going to go. Then suddenly he bursts out laughing.

‘Yi’re fucking mental,’ he roars, ‘there’s definitely something not right aboot yi.’

‘But Uncle Jock, there’s a pot on her neck!’

I have to go out of the living room as I’m about to keel over. I have never laughed that much in my life, and at one point I even think I’m going to die from laughing as I can’t breathe. I just never thought I would go that way.

I finally remove the pressure cooker from Bonnie’s neck at two in the morning when Dad has fallen asleep. It must have driven her mad as it’s huge.

Shane is a character and a half. His mum walked into the bathroom when he was young to see why he was taking so long washing his hair. When she looked at him she could see that he had emptied a whole bottle of shampoo on his
head with no water. She asked him what the hell he was doing, and his reply was, ‘It said on the bottle, “For dry hair only”.’

He’s the funniest kid on the planet, which he’s proved on many occasions.

One morning I’m walking to school and I spot Shane walking up the path towards me with his head down. He is always tired as he does a paper round and a milk round before he comes to school. As he gets closer I look at his shoes, as one is brown and the other’s black. When I point it out to him, he just keeps walking.

‘I ken, I’ve got another pair like that in the hoose.’

I can’t tell whether or not he really knows the absurdity of this, but I fall apart laughing.

Shane’s one of those very rare nice kids. He never gets into fights, and when he gets older he never smokes, and hardly drinks, and always has a smile on his face.

One time we are throwing a football around in the living room in my house and Dad is in the bath. Shane knocks the plant pot off the windowsill. It lands upside down on the floor, soil everywhere.

Shane decides to shout through the bathroom door, ‘Uncle Jock, the earth’s fell oot the plant pot.’

‘What did you fuckin’ say?’

‘The earth’s fell oot the plant pot.’

‘You wait until I get out this bath, I’m gonna smack your arse.’

The bathroom door opens and Dad is standing in a towel ready to kick some ass.

‘What did you just say, Shane?’

‘The earth’s fell oot of the plant pot.’

‘Oh! The earth, I thought you said erse.’

That’s a Dundee word for arse. It’s a close shave for Shane.

‘Your dad’s fuckin’ mental, eh,’ he says.

‘Yip,’ I say.

Winter has arrived again and I’m searching through some local back gardens near St Fillans Road for a shovel. I have devised a plan to get some fast cash to feed my empty belly through the winter months. I’ve seen some of the older lads getting paid for cleaning the snow away from people’s front doors and paths and I want a piece of it.

Some mornings the snow will be so deep that it covers the bottom half of the door and old people who live alone end up stuck inside. I start on the first house and you can only see the top of my head, then clumps of snow flying up in the air at an alarming pace. My nose, ears and fingertips are numb but I don’t care as the thought of a chip butty from the St Giles chip shop is making me fly like the wind.

When I finish, the old man pays me one pound and I sprint down towards the shops, dragging my new work tool behind me. I take my chip butty outside and sit on the cold metal fence where I lean my shovel. The butter from the chip roll has now melted and is pouring down my chin as I try to cram
the whole thing in my mouth in case anyone asks for a bite. Then as the heat of the chips starts to warm my insides, I get ready to resume phase two of my split shift.

I go back and forward for the next couple of hours until my belly can’t take any more. I’m now standing outside the chippy again with a huge smile on my face, only this time I’m leaning on the fence trying to keep down what I have just devoured. This is a serious case of eyes being bigger than belly. It’s times like this when I wish I were a hamster. Most people I know hate the feeling of being stuffed with food but not me; the feelings of hunger I have some nights make this seem heavenly.

Cleaning snow from doors is only one of my money making survival schemes. I have another easy tax-free way to fill my boots. I think I’m a bit like a meerkat with this one; I go foraging at the back of shops and the supermarket for empty glass bottles. I take a bin liner and collect all the bottles to take down the local shop and cash them in for ten pence each. This is easy money as I find around twenty, then it’s back to the chippy for a Wallace pie – my Holy Grail. Nothing on the planet can ever get near the taste of a Wallace pie, it feels like a little part of heaven is here on earth.

The grease is dripping down my chin onto my hand and when I finish I spend a few minutes licking the salt and vinegar from the paper until it is all gone. Now I can head home and take a beating with a full belly. At least now it won’t feel as bad.

The final money-spinner for me as a nine year old is Operation Spondoolies. If I’m unsuccessful with foraging for bottles or if last night’s rain has washed away the snow, I have an alternative method of collecting cash. Dundee is full of red, Tardis-like telephone boxes as hardly anyone can afford a house phone, so armed only with a cardboard box I set off on a mission to stuff and block every hole that the money is returned from with bits of card.

Late in the evening I go back round and collect the loot that was stuck inside by reaching my skinny fingers up inside. Some nights I can make up to ten quid. I exchange all the coins for a ten pound note at the shop and hide it in my sock before I go home – I don’t want Dad, to find it, do I?

I wonder if my real family are actually called Trotter, not Mitchell. We do have similar homes and décor, after all.

O
ne night during the school summer holidays while I’m still living at St Fillans Road, Dad and his brother, Uncle Danny, are having a bevy in the house after the pubs have closed and the babysitter has gone home and I’m tucked up in bed.

Danny’s a really nice guy and I always get on well on with him – he’s a very funny man. But Dad and Danny hate each other and fight all the time. I think they fight over what Dad is doing to me. One night I hear Danny shout, ‘You fucking animal,’ and it’s definitely about me.

But I love it when Dad has parties and has people around because I won’t get touched. Instead he always ends up fighting with people in the house. I’m fine though because me and Bonnie are safe. We just sleep through it.

They’ve been drinking all night and finally I hear the front door close about eight in the morning and then
silence. I get up to investigate but there’s no one there, not even Dad. I switch on the TV and go in the kitchen to get some toast and milk for breakfast, and open a can of corned beef for Bonnie and put it in her bowl. Then I go into the living room to watch cartoons until 8.30. The house is peaceful and everything is calm, then like a whirlwind Dad and Danny come crashing up the hall and into the living room where I’m sitting. They’re both covered in blood.

‘If the polis come, we’ve been sleepin’. Yi tell them we’ve been here all night.’

‘OK, Dad.’ I run and get a quilt from the bedroom to throw over them.

Two minutes later, four policemen come crashing through the front door. I’m now standing at the living-room door with my hands on each part of the frame.

‘What are you doing, mister?’ I ask the police.

‘Where’s yir dad and his mate?’

‘They’re in there sleeping. They’ve been here all night having a party.’

They push me out of the way and walk into the lounge as I hang on the tallest one’s leg trying to protect my patch. They walk over to the couch and pull the quilt back. Dad and Uncle Danny are both covered in blood, pretending they’re asleep. ‘Jock, you can stop pretending. We seen you run away from the car and come up here, and you’re gonna need a few stitches for that head.’

Uncle Danny is still pretending he’s out cold and Dad’s saying, ‘What, eh, what’s going on? I’ve just woke up.’

I can see the coppers laughing at the fact that they’re still trying to say it wasn’t them. They had taken the car to go and get some fags from the garage but they were that drunk that on the way back they drove it into a lamppost at the bottom of St Fillans Road and nearly smashed someone’s house wall down. They didn’t even have seat belts on. I just wish that Dad had been going faster and Uncle Danny had had his belt on.

They are taken away by the police and social services come up to look after me, but one of the neighbours says they’ll look after me until Dad gets back out later in the day.

This happens a few times: police will come to the door for Dad and Uncle Danny or looking for some of his other mates. I’m dying to tell them that he’s torturing me every time they come, but I know he won’t be done for it, as he always seems to slither his way out of it, using me as an excuse. And when someone tells you they’ll kill you, you kind of learn to keep your trap shut.

Sometimes Dad goes for a party at different mates’ houses and I have to go with him if he has no babysitter. He always takes the car with him, even though he’s banned and is obviously going to get drunk.

It’s a couple of days before New Year’s Eve and his mate Hatchy is having a shindig at his house in Ardler. There’s a big long row of flats behind the shops – I think everyone I
know lives in flats behind shops. Hatchy lives bottom left in the middle one. His house is quite smart for an Eighties’ pad – it’s clean, shall we say.

The good thing about being a nipper with an alcoholic dad is that when you’re dragged to some house party, you can wander about doing what you like, as the grown-ups are that hammered that they don’t give a shit.

The party’s going fine for the first few hours, then the usual riots start.

‘Yi owe me a tennar frae last week,’ says Dad.

‘I gave that back on Tuesday or Wednesday,’ replies Hatchy.

‘No yi fuckin never.’