A Fucked Up Life in Books (2 page)

Little cunt.

He was angrier and quicker than me, but he was also shorter. He got to the wall of the house, reached up his hand to destroy my hard work and I came up behind him, snatched my flowers away, and smashed his head against the brick wall of the house.

I don’t know why at the age of four my first instinct was to smash his head against the wall rather than just take the flowers and run. I wonder now why my brain had managed to make my first instinct so violent.

He screamed. He screamed so fucking loud that it scared me. I ran to the bottom of the garden and climbed up a tree. I couldn’t see him any more, but I could hear my Mum shriek as she found him. I waited in the tree for what felt like forever until my Dad came and found me and told me to come inside, my brother had gone to accident and emergency with mum and that we were having pizza for dinner.

When I got to the patio before going through the back door I noticed some splashes of blood on the tiles. No one had told me off though. If anyone asked then I’d just say he tripped.

Mum came home with my brother. He was not talking to me. He’d had to have stitches in his forehead. We all ate pizza for dinner and I didn’t get told off. I don’t think at the time that he had told anyone what happened. As I got older I felt guilty that no one knew what I’d done.

Almost a year ago to the day my brother visited my flat in London and stayed over because he was working nearby the next day. He pulled out of his bag a package wrapped in dinosaur wrapping paper and told me that it was my birthday present. I could open it now or later. It didn’t matter.

My birthday wasn’t for another six weeks, so I chose later. That evening I sat in my flat with my brother and we drank some wine and watched some TV, just what we do any time he visits. And when I left for work in the morning I said bye without saying thanks for my birthday present, which sat at the foot of my bookshelves waiting to be opened.

Six weeks after he visited it was my birthday. I sat in my flat with my boyfriend opening my presents. I’d left the one from my brother until last.

I tore off the dinosaur wrapping paper, and the masses of bubble wrap underneath and found this:

It’s a poem that he wrote for me, in a clip frame. A poem about that day when I smashed his head against the wall, and about our childhood together and about some of the shit that has happened between then and now. And it’s fucking wonderful, and as much as I’d like to write it all down for you to show you I won’t, because it’s mine. But I’ll give you the last two lines.

‘… Of each other’s part we played alongside the games those childhood ways the times we’d play,
Hide away all night and day from our important lives.’

Now, have a closer look.

I was in reception when I met my first love. He was in year one so we didn’t share a classroom, but we used to see each other in the playground and would poke around at the worms on the concrete together, or make aliens out of the grass cuttings on the field. He was the most handsome boy in school, and all of my friends were well jealous.

At the end of one day, the school sent letters home with us about helping to litter pick on the field at lunchtime the following day. Mum asked me if I wanted to do it, and I did. She packed some gloves into my schoolbag so that I didn’t scratch my hands on the bushes and didn’t touch anything unsavoury.

The day of the litter pick our teacher was reading us
Burglar Bill
before our morning break. She was one of those teachers that fucking loved reading out to us, and after reading out each page she would turn the book around and sweep it slowly in front of us all sitting on the carpet so that we could see the pictures. Then we went out for break.

I found him waiting by the water fountain. He asked what story we’d had and I told him it was
Burglar Bill
. Then he told me that we weren’t allowed to play on the field at lunchtime. I told him I was allowed to go on the field because I was going to litter pick. He looked at me a bit funny.

‘Why do you want to litter pick, I thought we were going to play?’ he said.

‘Because my Mum asked me and I said yes. She’s packed my gloves. I think it will be fun, did your Mum forget to pack your gloves?’ I asked.

He scrunched up his face at me.

‘I don’t want to litter pick, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid game and the stupid teachers are doing it.’ He said.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I’d told my Mum I wanted to do it and she’d packed my gloves. I’d given my little slip with her signature on it to the teacher saying that I was going to help out. There was no way out.

‘Maybe if I pick up all the litter really fast it will all be gone and then I can come and play!’ I told him.

He looked really, really grumpy.

‘No you won’t. We won’t get to play. I don’t think I love you anymore.’

Fucking hell. Heartbreak.

‘But I thought you were my boyfriend?’ I said.

‘Well if you go and pick litter then we won’t get to play and you won’t be my girlfriend any more,’ he said.

‘But I have to pick litter!’ I shouted.

He shrugged and walked away from me.

At lunchtime I headed out with the other volunteers and picked crisp packets and other shit out of the thorny bushes. I looked over at the playground and there he was, poking at the worms with my best friend. Traitor. Cunt.

We didn’t talk at school anymore after that. And when I went into year six he went to a secondary school. And when I went to secondary school it was a different one to him.

I saw him a few years later when I was about fifteen and out playing and called him a fucking bastard. He said that he was sorry. I got off with him for a bit, but he wasn’t very handsome anymore so I sacked him off after a couple of weeks. We didn’t want the same things, anyway. I still wanted to pick litter and he still wanted to flirt with my mates. Young love, eh?

I used to be one of those cunts that went to Pony Club. Where I lived there were loads of fields and loads of people with money to spare, and loads of fucking awful children, so it made sense that there was a branch of Pony Club that met a few miles down the road.

If you’ve never seen a bunch of Pony Club bastards trotting around, then let me tell you it is pretty much exactly as you’d imagine: mums standing around smoking and looking confused as tiny children bomb about on fat ponies that are too big from them, just like the drawings in the
Thelwell
books.

The problem that I had with Pony Club is that I didn’t fit in. I was an incredibly awkward child (and I have managed to grow up to be a pretty awkward adult), and by awkward I mean that I didn’t really like talking to other children, and if they did talk to me then I would make my excuses and go and stand next to my Dad/Mum/brother/pony. Somewhere safe that would hopefully make them fuck off and leave me alone.

The worst bit about Pony Club is that you are expected to have a right old fucking knees up with the other kids. You’re supposed to all talk to each other, and the mums are supposed to all smoke and drink gin together. It was fucking horrible.

One particular Pony Club camp my Mum made friends with some awful bitch and pushed me towards her daughter so that she and I could get chummy. This girl was something else. I can’t remember her name for the life of me, but I remember that her fucking fat little pony was called Lupin. She said things like, ‘Oh, Lupin and [my pony] will be the best of friends, I just know it!’ And that shit made me feel a little bit sick and want to be as far away from her as possible.

So one day I was with my pony and my Mum, getting the pony ready to go out as part of a massive group hack to somewhere picturesque and lovely. You have to do a lot to a pony to get it ready to go out, the time spent is much longer than that of your most appearance-conscious friend preceding a massive night out. You have to brush it all over, wipe its nose and eyes and arse, pick out its hooves and put oil on them so they don’t crack, and then you have to put all the gear on it so you can actually ride the fucking creature.

I was at the head end of my pony, Mum was at the arse end. I do not know exactly what she was doing to my pony, but she said to me, ‘Hold her head’. So I did. And the next thing I knew, the cunt bit me.

It didn’t hurt, as far as I can remember, and it just looked like a graze. Mum saw half a drop of blood and went mental and dragged me to the ‘medical tent’.

The medical tent wasn’t a tent, it was a caravan. And the nurses were chain smoking and gossiping when we arrived. Mum chucked me at them and I wondered whether they actually had any medical training at all as they got on with cleaning and bandaging my arm. Not a fucking plaster, a fucking massive bandage that made me look like a comedy extra in a play about people that don’t actually have anything wrong with them.

The bite scarred, and these days very few people ask me about it, even though it is quite prominent. I think that they worry that it is the result of some kind of self-harm. When someone does ask they are always ever-so careful. ‘What’s that … mark … on your … arm …?’

When I tell them that a horse bit me it’s 50/50 whether they laugh, or nod ‘knowingly’.

As far as I know, my Dad has never read a book in his life. While I grew up reading everything I could get my tiny hands on, he was always there looking after the vegetables and herbs growing in the garden, playing guitar, or watching films. All stuff that I could sit near him doing while I was reading.

Him not being interested in books didn’t matter to me, for as much excitement as I could get from reading a story, I could get ten times that from my Dad and his storytelling.

He didn’t read to us at bedtime. Instead, he’d make up some bizarre story. Often these stories would be heavily dependent on things like science and history, but he scrapped all that shit to make them brilliant. Any finer points that we wanted information on he’d just make some more shit up and tell us so matter-of-factly that I believed everything he said.

His stories were fucking ace. There was one about a voice powered car, which ended up with the car and driver going over a cliff because he forgot the code word for ‘stop’. There was one about how the giraffe got to have such a long neck (he got his head caught in a tree and ran round and round which stretched it out), and once he came and woke us up in the middle of the night to take us outside and show us how the daisies closed their petals inwards which he told us was to keep the pollen warm until the sun came back out. When he lit a match and the petals opened it blew my fucking mind.

He’d tape films off the telly and let me believe that they were real. Two examples stick out to me here, once with
Laputa: Castle in The Sky
where, when I told him I thought I might be Lusheeta, Toel Ul (true ruler) of the Castle Laputa in the Sky, he agreed. And when by some weird coincidence my Grandma gave me a necklace with a glassy blue stone on it and I fastened it around my neck truly believing that it was Sheeta’s levitation stone, he watched as I climbed up into a little tree to jump out and see if I’d float. Over and over again. And when I didn’t, he said that Grandma had obviously got the wrong stone, and we put it away somewhere safe, just in case all it was waiting for was me to learn the special spells to awaken its magical powers.

The second one was a bit more special, because it was magic.

He’d recorded a film off the telly called
The Flight of Dragons
. He was really excited about it so Dad, my brother and I all sat down to watch it.

If you haven’t seen it, and I understand that not that many people have, it is about a guy called Peter Dickinson who makes up a board game with characters that he has crafted based on what he knows about fantasy. There are four wizards who represent different shit, a bunch of dragons, a princess, a knight, and all of that kind of gubbins. He ends up in the game with the characters he’s created and at the end fights the evil red wizard Omadon by using science against Omadon’s magic. It is fucking amazing.