Nipper (19 page)

Of course I’m only too aware now of the catastrophic role drink plays – how it turns Dad, sometimes in an instant, from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde – and I’m beginning to realise a few other things too. Although I can never understand why or how you can treat a kid with the same regard a butcher treats a dead carcass, I have started to gather, from a remark or two dropped by Mum, just how badly Dad was treated by his father. But I still think he was lucky to be kicked out of home at the age of twelve. I pray for a quick death or that the house will burn down with both of us in it.

I keep thinking he’s driving Shelly to have a breakdown – ‘
Just kill me!
’ I hear her screaming some nights. But she keeps coming back for more, until finally one night he gives her such a battering that even she’s had enough.

After that night she never comes back.

Later on, when Shelly and her kids are out of his life, I feel too embarrassed to go near them just as I did with Mandy and her family. We’re like fellow hostages or prisoners of war who share the same shameful secrets of our captivity, and the best thing I can do is to keep away from them and let it be. I
don’t want my face to remind them of anything that he’s done.

But I wish I could do what Shelly’s done and simply walk away. To be out of that torture den would be heaven to me.

I
’m now twelve and for the last year, since I was eleven, I’ve been going to secondary school – Lawside Academy. Although it’s called ‘academy’ it’s just a normal school.

At primary school my report cards were terrible. The best of them would say things like, ‘Could do better if he wasn’t trying to make a joke out of it.’ I’d bounce a rubber off the back of a teacher’s head or if somebody made a fart noise I’d be on the floor. Instead of not moving a muscle in case Dad hit me, the battleground in school was a matter of not moving in case I giggled.

While I’m still at primary school I go on a three-day visit to Lawside for a trial period and I nearly get suspended during this visit. We’re in a big group and we’re getting shown around the school – ‘This is Mr So and So, who’ll be your English teacher, and this is Mrs Such and Such, who’ll
be your Maths teacher’ – and I’m getting bored and fed up with it so I decide to wander off and look for my friend Paul – Mandy’s son – while they’re still in the middle of all the ’this is so and so’-ing.

I open a classroom door and the teacher’s standing there teaching a class and I say, being cheeky, ‘Sorry Miss, do you know Paul Campbell?’

‘Are you on the three-day visit?’ she says. ‘Quick, you’d better get back to your group.’

‘Oh shut up, you half-wit,’ I say, and walk out of the classroom.

When they take me to see the Head, he says, ‘We could make sure you do not come near this school,’ and then lectures me for an hour on how I’ll have to buck my ideas up.

But they do let me go to Lawside and I enjoy my first year there. I get to meet a lot of people from different areas of Dundee. There are already gangs – people from different primary schools all coming to secondary school, Catholics and Protestants.

When I get on with a teacher and I’m interested I give it a hundred per cent – as I do for Maths, English, PE and Art. When I’m in art class I’m just left alone to draw or paint, which I love. If someone says do a still life from these objects, or do a drawing from this photo of a Charles Renie Mackintosh chair – I’ll do it and get lost in it. I love drawing and if something interests me then it’s great. The teacher will just pop over every now and again and say, ‘That’s good.’

I love it when I’m left alone with nobody to bug me, especially if I’m encouraged, like in PE when I’m in the middle of a field or bouncing around on a trampoline. I’m using my energy, really enjoying it. I also love English and Maths.

As it has been earlier on in my life, school is a blessed relief, an oasis of freedom for me. I’ve met loads of new mates, and Paul – the eldest son of Dad’s first girlfriend Mandy, who is a year above me – has once again taken me under his wing and looks after me at school. He’s always been like a big brother to me, even though I now also have Tommy and Bobby, my real brothers.

By this time Paul has blanked out a lot of what went on with Dad and Mandy when we all lived together. He knew it happened, as he was dragged down to watch his mother getting drowned in the bath, but I think he chooses to forget, and I can’t blame him. I wish I could forget, but I’m with Dad night and day, and I can only blank so much out of the hours of punishment I receive daily.

The people in my year are all cut from the same cloth – well, my classes anyway. They are all mental, but in a good way. In six out of my ten subjects my desk ends up outside the door. In my primary school I learnt how to use comedy to cover up how I really felt and to get by, and because I’ve always loved a good joke, and now I’ve become a master at it. If someone does something and the whole class is sniggering I often find myself laughing more at them trying to hold
their laughs in. It’s like when you’re in church and you’re not supposed to giggle. Or that scene in
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
.

There are two or three guards and Pontius Pilate who has a lisp (the character played by Michael Palin can’t say his Rs) is about two inches from their faces shouting about some bloke called Biggus Dickus and his wife Incontinentia Buttocks – and the guards mustn’t laugh. My classmates are like those guards, the sides of their mouths twitching, shoulders shaking from the inside, trying not to laugh and making these little muffled mouse squeaks.

When I watch that film I can’t control myself any more than I can in class. It’s the thought of not being allowed to do something that sets me off. In a very weird way, it’s like not being allowed to move a muscle on the couch in case Dad beats me. Except it’s the opposite: instead of the pain of not being allowed to cry, not being allowed to laugh only makes me want to laugh more.

I do well in some subjects – normally if the teacher has a sense of humour. If he or she is a misery arse then that means a fail for me.

My favourite teachers are Mr White, the geography teacher, and Mrs Macdonald, who teaches English. I like them for totally different reasons; Mr White is an out and out nutter but a very intelligent man who knows people better than they know themselves, whereas Mrs Macdonald is
helpful and very patient with people who don’t pick things up as quickly as others.

I’m in Mr White’s class one day, sitting at the back talking to Calum (yeah, Calum Patterson is in my year and class again – I can’t get rid of him).

‘Have you seen wa United have signed?’ says Calum.

‘No, wha is it?’ I ask.

‘
Right boys
! Stand up.’ He has caught us talking.

‘Sorry, sir, I was just—’

‘No, no, Charlie don’t tell me, you and Calum stand up and tell the class.’

Calum loves it. He springs up out of his chair. ‘Come on partner.’

Oh oh! Calum normally comes out with some wisecrack and I’ll start laughing my head off, then it will be the old desk outside treatment.

‘OK lads, fire away,’ says Mr White.

‘I’ll take this one, Charlie. Right class, cheers for coming along the day.’

‘Get on with it, smart arse.’

‘Dinna rush me sir, this is important info.’

I’m starting to snigger, as just looking at his mad face is enough to get me going anyway.

‘What were you talking about then, Calum?’

‘Well, sir, Charlie wiz asking me if I died and could come back as sumin’, what wid it be?’

I look at him in amazement. ‘What are you goin’ on aboot?’

‘No, Charlie, I have to tell them.’ The whole class is engrossed in this utter crap story that he’s making up as he goes along.

‘That’s no what we’re sayin, sir,’ I protest.

‘No, Charlie, let him finish, I’m on the edge of my seat here.’

‘As I was saying folks,’ Calum spins back around towards the class, ‘I was telling me amigo Charlieo that there is two things I canna choose between.’

‘Come on, get on with it.’

I can’t believe Mr White is letting this farce continue.

‘Number One, I would like to come back as a cat, because they come and go as they please, lay about all day and don’t listen to a thing anyone says.’

‘And Number Two, and hurrying it up,’ Mr White prompts. The class are starting to laugh, staring at us both standing there like the Two Ronnies. I don’t think anyone’s prepared for what Calum says next.

‘Number Two, sir. I want to come back as a woman’s bike seat!’

The class collapses in laughter.

I look straight at Mr White trying not to laugh. ‘He’s full o’ crap, sir!’

‘Right go ’n site doon the two o’ yis!’ He has a massive smirk on his face as he knows it’s just Calum being his usual crazy self. If it had been any other teacher Calum’s feet wouldn’t have touched the floor.

Mrs Macdonald’s class is the complete opposite. She’s calm and helpful. You can ask her anything at any time in class if you’re stuck with something. She’s in her early thirties, blonde bobbed hair, a real stunner, and she looks a bit like Michelle Pfeiffer. I think she’s my first love.

In her classroom the desks have chairs on both sides, so some people have their backs to her and some are facing her. Calum sits directly across the desk from me. He will ask me to shout her over and ask her a question, as when she’s talking to you, she’ll lean over your shoulder to look close at your work. She sometimes wears a white blouse with the top two buttons undone in the summer when it’s hot. Calum’s a fly man, he has a peek down her top as she leans over my shoulder. He’s off his rocker, but I’m sure she plays up to it – at least she seems to fall for it every time which makes me think she’s doing it deliberately and that she’s loving it really.

High school is a great escape for me as no matter what’s going on at home I always have friends and teachers I can have a laugh with and so blank out all the badness in my life. Through school I am meeting more and more kids from different areas and backgrounds, and most of them have a story to tell. Some are picked on by other family members, some of their dads or mums are in jail, some have eating disorders and one has been sexually abused by their uncle. When I was younger we didn’t talk about these things, but now we’re verging on teenagers, we’re prepared to be more open about what goes on at home.

I am a little relieved that other people are in the same boat as me, as when I was younger I always thought I deserved it and it was my fault that Mum left, then Mandy. But looking at the people I’m now friends with, I know it’s Dad that is sick and twisted and it’s his fault. These kids are good people, just looking for a bit of normality away from the torture dens we have become accustomed to.

A
s I move into my teenage years, I’m starting to develop a split personality just like Dad. Most of the time at school, for instance, I’m cheerful and put on a happy front. I love jokes and clowning around and making other kids laugh.

But there’s this other side to me: an explosive anger which has been brewing for years and it’s starting to erupt on odd occasions. My life seems to be more up and down than a fiddler’s elbow, with joy one minute and misery the next.

Back in school, I have been kicked out of yet another class, with my desk in the corridor. It’s the French class. Teaching you a lot of crap about ‘
La pomme est sur la table
’. If you went on holiday to France and said that to someone they’d call the nearest mental hospital and have you picked up within minutes.

I hate it when people talk down to me but the nicer someone is to me the more they’ll get out of me.

So I’m in the corridor with my head on the desk, trying to have a kip as it’s a double period. I’ve been kicked out for saying ‘Haw, hee, haw’ in a French accent. It’s something Big Geoff likes to say if a foreign girl walks past when we’re on a campsite. I don’t know what it means but Mr Henry never liked me from day one, so it’s probably nothing.

I’m out cold, fast asleep at my desk in the corridor, when I feel a thud on the back of my head and suddenly I’m soaked with water. I jump out of the chair and clock out of the corner of my eye the ladies’ toilet door slowly closing.

I let out a loud yelp when the water hits me, as it’s freezing. Instantly the classroom door opens.

‘What are you doing, boy? What is this noise for?’

‘Someone’s hit me with a water bomb, sir.’

‘Do not distract my class again, there is no one here.’

This loony thinks I’ve soaked myself with water to get his attention and make the class laugh at me.

‘But sir, I—’

‘No buts! Just keep quiet.’

I hate people stopping me mid-sentence, but I can’t say anything, as I would be off to the Head’s office, Mr Gleeson. He’s a big tall man about six foot four, with a great purple whisky nose and a reputation for excluding or expelling people who disrupt his school. So I decide to bite my tongue.

But when Frenchy goes back in and closes the door I hear someone laughing in the girls’ toilet so I head into the boys’ loo and fill a metal paper-towel holder with water, then wait outside the ladies.

Two heads pop out and look right up the corridor to where I was sitting earlier. Unfortunately for them I’m to the left of the door.

Splash!
Straight over both their heads. It’s Natalie and Kelly, a couple of girls who come from Kirkton, about ten minutes from St Mary’s. They’re a right pair of nutters, always up for a laugh, but the joke’s on them this time. I cover their pretty little red heads and then run back to my desk, put my head down and pretend I haven’t moved. The screams they make when I soak them cause three different teachers to come out of their classrooms to find out what’s going on.

‘What the hell was that noise, Charlie?’

‘Two girls ran out of that door, sir, chasing each other.’

‘Idiots!’

‘I know, sir, some people are just mad.’

‘Get back to your work.’