Nipper (2 page)

There’s a silence for about two minutes as he walks into the bathroom with his head in his hands. He sits on the edge of the bath and mutters something along the lines of,
Please no again! Fuck no! Fucking hell!
He turns to me with a confused look on his face.

‘Go back to bed, son, you don’t have to go to school, I’ll ring them and tell them you’re ill. Go on! Everything’s a’right, Charlie, close the door, son.’

I close the door and go back into my bedroom, totally confused at what has just happened. Did he batter me last night, or was it a dream? It’s absolutely freezing, so I’m just glad to get back into the warmth of my bed, avoiding the damp patch where I pissed it with fear the night before.

I lie down, pull the cover over myself and rest my head on the pillow, trying to work out what’s going on.

‘Ouch!’ I have to sit back up, as my head feels as if it’s in a vice when my temples hit the pillow.

I will never forget this pounding in my skull. It’s like having a heartbeat in my head, or in a cartoon when you watch someone hit their thumb with a hammer and it starts throbbing. I can’t sleep even though I am tired, so I climb back out of bed and walk over to the bedroom window to see if the snow is deep enough to build a snowman if I manage to get out later. It has gone off a bit and isn’t beating against the window any more, but it’s really deep, as it has been falling all night. I can see my downstairs neighbour with his mum and dad sliding him down the road with one hand each – on his way to school, I bet.

I really want to be out there and on my way with him, but no such luck. The state my face is in, I’m definitely not going out, as I look like I’ve just gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

I hear Dad on the phone to school, telling them I have sickness and diarrhoea and that I’ll be in as soon as I’m better, then I hear the floorboards creak as he walks back towards my bedroom door. I quickly lie back on the bed and wait for him to come in, praying that he’s actually sorry and not coming back to finish me off.

You see, you never know with Dad. He can change in seconds. But although I’ve always known that he can be really scary after what he did to Mum and Mandy, this is the first time he’s done it to me, the first time he’s battered me. Even though I want to think I dreamt it, I know it really
happened. I’m terrified that it will happen again and I’m now seeing Dad with new eyes. There’s always been something about him when he’s drunk that has frightened me, but he’s never taken it out on me like this before. Overnight my dad has become a scary monster and it’s something I’ll never forget for the rest of my life.

The door opens, then he comes and sits next to me on the bed.

‘I’m really sorry, son, I can’t remember what happened.’ Then he puts his fingers on the side of my head and strokes it softly. ‘That will never happen again, son, I promise.’

‘It’s OK, Dad, I know you didn’t mean it.’

That isn’t what I’m thinking but he doesn’t have to know that.

‘Come on, son. I’ll make your breakfast – come through.’ He stands up and walks out of the bedroom.

I go through into the living room and sit on the couch next to the window, looking around the room. When I think back to it, I can’t imagine how he coped with a hangover looking at that crazy interior car crash of the early Eighties. That’s probably why he ended up as an alcoholic: he couldn’t handle walking into the front room sober, as the décor would have made him vomit.

We live on the middle floor of a grey, unloved three-storey tenement, up pee-stained steps to the front door. There’s a mouldy, dingy smell from the rotten carpet in the bathroom, the cluttered kitchen is further up, then three bedrooms and
the living room at the end of a long corridor which I call the ‘Hall of Imminent Death’. It has cold, creaky floorboards and feels like a dungeon, very dark and grey. The dirty carpet and peeling wallpaper in the living room are flower-patterned but, bizarrely, totally different in colour: the wallpaper’s green and orange while the carpet is yellow and brown.

The living room has a two-bar electric fire with the grid broken off the front and the atmosphere’s always smoky from Dad’s cigarettes and butt-filled ashtrays. He makes new fags out of the butts with Red Rizla cigarette papers when he runs out of his ciggies. The TV in the corner is always on – if the money in the meter on the back of it hasn’t run out.

The L-shaped couch I’m sitting on takes up a fair share of the room. We got it from MFI. It has great big chunky square arms and is covered in some kind of potato sack material with a diagonal plum-coloured stripe, though it’s mainly faded to grey. This couch is where I spend most of my childhood getting battered.

The windows are black inside and out from never being cleaned, but it doesn’t really matter as there’s not much to see out of them – just the main road and a couple of semi-detached houses opposite.

Dad hoovers now and again but it’s rarely clean or tidy and there are always rings on the table from coffee cups. Even when Mandy stays, he does most of the cooking. We mainly eat chips, fish fingers and beans on toast, which is my favourite. (‘We had toast
and
beans, how posh are we?’)

I don’t have a bedtime. He doesn’t care what time I get to bed. Most nights when he’s drunk I want to go to bed but daren’t ask.

He’ll be sitting there dozing off with the telly on and then it will turn into that high-pitched whistle, or sometimes I’ll sit with him not daring to move, watching the Test Card with the girl holding the stuffed clown for hour after hour. We stick a quid in the meter and when that runs out he’ll just sit there swearing like a trooper for hours, but as always I don’t dare move.

However drunk he is, he never spills his drink. His head may be touching the floor but the hooligan soup – his vodka – will be intact.

Even if he’s hammered he’ll be on his best behaviour if I have friends over, but if they go to the toilet he’ll give me that snide look once they’re out of the room and will start swearing nastily. He’s able to control it though, and that’s why I know it isn’t just the drink that makes him do all the things he does to me.

Dad comes through from the kitchen with my toast and beans and a glass of water. There’s a fuzzy half-screen cartoon on the telly.

‘Here you are, son. I’ll be back shortly, I’m just nipping to the shops for milk.’

That means vodka – I’m not that daft.

‘See yi in a minute, Dad.’

The door closes and I start the difficult task of eating toast with lips like Mick Jagger’s. My jaw’s aching as well but nothing is going to stop me wolfing it down, as you can be sure that food is never spilling out of the cupboards in our house. You have to eat while you can, as you never know when it will be there again. It takes a few days for the swelling to go down and bruising to turn yellow and descend towards my cheeks, but I don’t care as I just want it to go, so I can get out into the snow and start school. Anything to get me out of this hellhole. I’m sure it’s colder in here than outside. The joys of living in a council flat.

My dad Jock is a big stout bloke in his early thirties, with dark curly hair and a squashed nose from getting it broken seven times. He’s always had a beard and moustache; sometimes it’s just stubble, but he’s never clean-shaven. His front teeth are like fangs, as he has broken his jaw three or four times and had it wired up with these strange-looking disc things that look like shirt buttons. He has a scar on his left cheek where one of his mates smashed a pint glass in it during a punch-up in the local pub (the Pheasant, I think it was called). He has big hands with great thick fingernails and massive footballer’s legs, and there’s a huge scar on his thigh where he had to have pins put in because someone ran him over after he had tried to run Mum over when she was seven months pregnant.

He’s a Jekyll and Hyde character, my dad. One minute he’s happy, asking me if I want to go camping, then in a flash
he’s snapping about dishes not being done, or my bed not being made. Literally before he has taken a breath. It’s very confusing for me as a kid, as I have to adjust my thinking to cope with two different people, even though I only live with one. I don’t understand why he changes so quickly and there’s no one to help me deal with it. I’m on my own with him and I’m always scared of him.

Everyone who knows him says he’s one of the funniest blokes they’ve ever met, but a lot of them don’t know how mean and scary he really is behind closed doors. I, on the other hand, am a little short arse with fair mousy brown hair, and freckles on my cheeks and nose. Three foot nothing, built like the gable end of a pound note, with a home-made haircut that Worzel Gummidge’s idiot child would complain about and dressed in naff clothes that Dad buys me in jumble sales and bargain stores. Eighties tat.

Today I’m wearing a maroon jumper with patches on the elbows, Farah’s Stay-Press trousers with itchy wool, shoes that are at least one size too big from British Home Stores. Most of the time I wear hand-me-downs from Dad’s friends’ kids or from my Aunt Molly’s kids or from Barnardo’s, the charity shop in Reform Street. He gets a grant from the social to buy clothes – he sells it on sometimes for drink but will always make sure I have clothes for the start of the year – like today was going to be. He never takes me out shopping – he just gets the clothes on his own, which is why they’re always too big or too small. He mostly gets them bigger and says I’ll
grow into them. It doesn’t matter to him that my shoes look like hand-me-downs from Coco the Clown.

I’ve also got some other footwear – some sand shoes like plimsoles and a pair of monkey boots, shaped like a meat pastie in front, with stitching like an Eskimo had got his hands on them.

People I know go snowdropping – that’s nicking off other people’s washing lines – but they leave clothes on our washing line. I remember one of Dad’s mates saying, ‘Jock, if your house was burgled they’d probably leave you a fiver and their shoes.’

It isn’t just us that are skint though: everyone’s in the same boat. They joke about it bitterly in the pub. Dad sometimes takes me in there with him.

‘What will the nipper have?’ one of his drinking pals will say.

‘Charlie will have what I have,’ he replies, but then gives a broad wink.

I sip a Coca Cola while he drinks his vodka and I listen to them all trading hard luck stories and generally having a moan. One of Dad’s friends says that when he has a bath he’s so poor he has to wash the dishes in there with him to save on water, with all the bacon and eggs floating around in his lukewarm bathwater.

The men in the pub drink their pints and moan and groan about the English and the state of the world. The English they call bloody animals, the police are bastards, the vatman’s
a pig, the taxman’s a cunt – as if any of them have ever paid tax or VAT in their lives. All Dad’s friends spend all day in the pub and most of that time is spent talking about the English, but I don’t think they’ve ever even met an Englishman. They seem to have it in for the English, though, mainly because of a woman called Maggie Thatcher.

Dad blames everything on Maggie Thatcher. I used to think she was the old witch at number 47, the one with the moustache who stabs every ball that goes in her garden. But now I know who she really is. She’s a burglar from another rough area, who comes out at night and steals everyone’s worldly belongings.

B
efore I say what happens next, I need to tell you how all this began. I still don’t understand most of what went on when I was two years old, but I’ve managed to piece together what happened from my mum and from other people who knew how it was.

The story began around 1972 in Dundee on the east coast of Scotland, when a sixteen-year-old girl called Sarah (my mum) – who had just left school – met a twenty-one-year-old lad called Jock (my dad) from St Mary’s in Dundee. Mum was beautiful with blue eyes, a pale freckled face and long blonde hair which she wore in a fringe. She came from a decent family and was the middle of six children – with four brothers and one sister.

He was a strong, handsome lad, of average height and powerfully built. He also had blue eyes, dark curly hair and
tanned skin from time spent outdoors. He was a promising footballer – his father had played for Dundee United – and he had three sisters and one brother.

They had been introduced to each other by mutual friends at a house party and hit it off straight away. He was a live wire, always cracking jokes, never serious for a minute. He was instantly drawn to her: she was very pretty, warm and bubbly – she loved to laugh and to make other people laugh. They were quite similar people back then, and at first they looked like a match made in heaven.

In the late Sixties, early Seventies, Dundee was a very poor city. Everyone seemed to be unemployed and there wasn’t a lot of things to do. Money was scarce. But they never thought about problems like that as they had found true love. They dated for a couple of years and things were going fantastically. He was always the life and soul of the party, and she loved her life with him, as he always had her in fits of laughter with his childish antics.

They decided to move in together as they were both happy and life was a breeze. They got married quite quickly and moved to a derelict flat up a back alley off Hilltown, a big road that goes right through Dundee. The street – Arkly Street – was a row of terraced houses like Coronation Street, with a welder’s yard and scrapyard at the end. The roofs were crooked and had sunk over the years.

They stayed there for twelve months. The odd argument occurred, but as my Uncle Danny used to say (that’s my dad’s
younger brother), ‘Show me a couple that doesn’t argue and I’ll buy you a pint – and that’s a lot coming from a Scotsman.’

Then Mum fell pregnant in March 1973 with her first child, Tommy, born in December 1973, and again two years later in late January 1975 with her second, Charlie – that’s me. I was born in November of that year.

In between those two years Mum started to notice a big change in Dad. He was getting more aggressive and argumentative towards her. He would get jealous for no reason at all, and had even taken to locking her in when he went out to the pub. She had seen him fighting with men in town some nights, but that was normal in Dundee at this time. Men sorted everything out with a punch-up at the end of the night if they had a grievance. That’s just the way it was.