A Fucked Up Life in Books (3 page)

In the film Peter is writing a book about dragons, he’s fucking fascinated by them, but he doesn’t know where the book is going or if he’s good enough to finish it, but when he goes into the game and lives amongst the characters he’s made, Carolinus the green wizard takes him to his library of unfinished books, where Peter’s book
The Flight of Dragons
is nestling in amongst classic and well known and loved books of today.

So we watched this film and my brother and I were hooked. We watched it almost every day for fucking ages, and I used to ask my Dad questions about it. The only question that I really wanted an answer to, though, was whether that book that this animated character Peter Dickinson had written was real or not.

Dad didn’t know, and told me that. He said that he wasn’t sure whether it could be real or if it was even finished, because we didn’t see the inside of the book in the film, did we, Carolinus had snapped it shut before we got chance.

Oh well, I could just continue to watch the film and to think about dragons. Maybe one day I could even write a book about dragons myself.

Months later I was rummaging through the shelves in the spare bedroom to pass the time and hidden away, on the second layer of the double layer of books on the shelves I found it.

I ran through to Dad, who was outside in the greenhouse and thrust it in his face.

‘Dad! Look! We’ve got it! He did finish it!’ Dad put down his watering can and looked puzzled.

‘Where did you find that?’ he asked.

‘On the shelves! It was hidden on the shelves!’

He took it in his hands and turned it over and told me that he it wasn’t his. And it wasn’t Mum’s or my brother’s either, it must be there by magic.

He handed it back to me and told me to look after it, that someone must have put it there for me, maybe even the green wizard Carolinus himself! And then he went back to watering the tomatoes.

For years that book was what magic meant to me. And now that I’m older and have spoken to Dad about it I know that he left it there for me, knowing that he couldn’t give it to me himself because that would ruin everything that I believed, it would take that magic away.

And that is why although my Dad has never read a book in his life, he is the best storyteller that I know. Because he made me believe in magic.

About a year before my Mum left, a couple moved in next door. This was really exciting because where we lived no one ever really moved house, and the other houses had old people in them, and when they died their sons or daughters would come and do up their house and live in it themselves, and that wasn’t really exciting because you’d see them around all the time anyway and it wasn’t new or interesting.

But the people who had lived next door had gone, and in their place was a youngish couple. The man had two children from his previous marriage. This was exciting too, there were never any other kids around for us to play with. The children were a fair bit older than my brother and me, but we all became friends and we used to play in the garden when they’d visit every other weekend.

The girl had Down’s Syndrome, so although she was about seven years older than me, she kind of had roughly the same mental age and we liked the same games and books and things like that. She had all of R. L. Stine’s
Goosebumps
books, and she let me borrow them whenever I liked. She was lovely. Once she knocked on the door with a present for me. It was a frog that she’d caught in the pond in her garden. We put it in a bucket and called it Froggy. We were both really upset when it managed to hop out of the bucket and escape the next day.

On New Year’s Eve, in whatever year it was that they moved in, they invited us all round. The kids were there, and while our parents sat in the kitchen drinking and smoking we were all playing in one of the bedrooms. After a lengthy game of ‘turn the lights off and chase each other round the room’ we decided to play hide and seek. Brilliant. I was fucking excellent at hide and seek because I was so small and skinny I could fit into the tiniest of nooks without being discovered, because the other kids would look and think to themselves ‘no one could possibly fit into that tiny gap.’ But I could.

The grown-ups were all outside in the garden when we started hiding. The girl was going to search for us all, so as she counted to one hundred, I snuck quietly into the kitchen and squeezed myself into a gap that I’d spotted earlier between the washing machine and the wall. Best. Hiding. Place. Ever. I was so pleased. No cunt would find me in there.

As the girl began to look for us all, my mum and our neighbour, the man, came back inside and sat at the kitchen table. The woman and my Dad had gone back to our house to find a record or some more wine or something, and after a bit of small talk my Mum started talking about stuff that was a bit weird.

‘So,’ she asked the man neighbour. ‘Your divorce, in total, how long did it take to have everything, you know, sorted out. All the loose ends tied up and so on?’

‘Probably a year,’ replied the man, ‘a bit longer maybe, because of custody of the kids, but roughly a year.’

I could see them at the table. My Mum took a sip of her wine and a drag of her fag and looked thoughtful.

‘So if I were to pack up and leave tomorrow, a year from now everything would probably be okay,’ she said. She wasn’t asking a question, she was thinking out loud.

The man laughed. ‘Well, yeah. I suppose.’

My Mum turned to the man. ‘The truth is,’ she said, ‘I don’t want my husband and I don’t want my kids. I just want my freedom.’

The man looked at her but didn’t say anything. My Mum didn’t say anything. I sat in the gap between the washing machine and the door wondering if this was a joke, and she’d seen me on the way in and was trying to get me to reveal my hiding place. Could they hear me breathing? My heart beating out of my chest? They didn’t seem to know I was there.

The man continued to look at my Mum. He looked very serious.

‘I’m going outside for some air,’ he said.

‘Yeah, yeah I’ll come with you,’ she said, finishing her wine and grinding her fag out in the ashtray on the table.

And they both walked out of the patio doors and went through the garden into our garden next door to go and find my Dad and the woman.

The girl stumbled into the kitchen looking for me. I wriggled out of the gap.

‘You’re supposed to HIDE!’ she screamed at me. ‘You’ve ruined my go!’

I apologised. I didn’t feel much like playing anymore. I went and got my brother and took him back to our house. Dad tucked us into bed and I wanted to tell him what I’d heard but I didn’t really understand it. I didn’t want to fuck everything up. Maybe if I just kept my mouth shut it would all go away.

A year later, in court, my Mum was battling my Dad for custody of us, and I told them that I wouldn’t go with her because she didn’t want us. I repeated her words: ‘She doesn’t want her husband, she doesn’t want her kids, she just wants her freedom.’

We stayed with my Dad.

Years later still, when my Mum was having one of her trademark freak-outs and said how much she loved my brother and I, I told her what I’d heard that night while I was hiding in the kitchen. She stopped crying and shouting and looked at me for a long time.

‘You misheard,’ she told me seriously.

‘I did not,’ I said back, just as seriously.

She looked at me for a long time and then laughed. ‘Oh, well, you know it all don’t you? Get the fuck out of my house.’

And so I went.

It wasn’t the first time I left her house, and it wasn’t the last time I let her fuck my head up. It’s just another chapter in the ‘why my Mum is a fucking cunt’ saga.

My Mum used to work nights. In the evenings before she left she would tuck my brother and me up in our beds in our shared bedroom and put on a storybook cassette for us to listen to before we went to sleep. The content that she supplied was sometimes questionable: where we could easily drift off to sleep listening to some old dear tell us fairy tales written by Enid Blyton, it was much more difficult when she put in the cassette of some mad bastard reading
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
.

When it was a Grimms’ night, as soon as she’d left the room my brother and I would leap out of bed and play, because we were fucking terrified of the dark stories pumping out of the little speaker on top of the chest of drawers.

One night we were particularly restless, so while we played quietly with the stories still on in the background, I decided that I would do a magic trick that would knock his fucking socks off.

Earlier in the day, Mum had given us both a shiny new ten pence piece each. We’d never seen one before, but the old ones were big and fat and dull, and these were all beautiful and sparkly and new. I told my brother that that with the new ten pence piece you could do magic far more easily, because they had loads more magic in them.

He didn’t believe me, so I had to prove it.

I popped the ten pence piece into my mouth and told him that when I opened my mouth it would have disappeared. I closed my mouth and moved my tongue to try and push the coin to the floor of my mouth to conceal it, apart from I fucked it up and accidentally swallowed the coin.

I started crying.

‘Has it gone?’ my brother asked innocently.

I ran out of the bedroom and into the living room where Dad was sat with a fag on watching
Red Dwarf
.

‘DADISWALLOWEDTENPEE!’ I cryscreamed at him.

He asked me why and after a lengthy discussion he realised that I was an idiot and chucked both my brother and I into the car for a trip to accident and emergency.

‘DADAMIGOINGTODIE?’ I cryscreamed at him all the way there.

He told me of course I wasn’t going to die.

We got to accident and emergency and the doctor told me off for trying to be magic and I was x-rayed and stuck in a bed to be monitored.

Now, I don’t know the technical medical term for it, but this fucking coin was hovering somewhere in my throat. The doctor was worried that it would go into my lung and if the shiny little shit didn’t move the right way (into my tummy) then there would be problems.

I stayed in hospital for fucking ages waiting for it to move.

It did move, eventually, and it moved the right way. Down into my tummy. I got sent home and my Mum was given loads of those cardboard sick/shit holders and some lollypop sticks. I had to shit in a cardboard pot for the next three days until one day my poo had a shiny bit in it and I was free.

Needless to say when I got back to school I was a fucking legend. I was the girl who shat out the new ten pence piece.

If I told you where I was brought up you’d laugh your fucking heads off. The village has such a fucking twee name that as soon as I tell anyone they dissolve into crazy laughter.

The place was full of people who were middle class. We were never middle class. My Mum and my Dad both worked hard at vocational jobs though, so we did have enough money for me to fulfil my Mum’s childhood dream of having a pony.

We kept my pony at an old farm. The farmer who owned the farm was the father of the man who my Mum would eventually leave me, my Dad and my brother and our home for. But not yet.

Mum was, and maybe still is, a care worker. That’s one of those people who go round to old people’s houses and tuck them in at night and chat to them a bit and wipe them down when they shit themselves. One of the people that she cared for was the old farmer that owned the farm that we kept the pony at.

I didn’t like the old farmer. After school and on weekends when I was down at the stables I could see him sitting in his chair by the window in his front room looking out at me and my Mum. I’d always ignore him, but Mum would wave, and sometimes, before we’d go home, she’d make us both go in to his house to ‘check he was doing okay.’

When I wasn’t reading Enid Blyton, I was reading stories about ponies.
Silver Brumby
was one that I read over and over and I’d keep in the car as an excuse not to go into that old bastard’s house. Sometimes I’d sit in the car for an hour after I’d finished riding, reading
Silver Brumby
and waiting for Mum to come out of the house.

One day, after we’d finished cleaning up the horse’s shit and piss and fed her and tucked her in for the night, Mum told me that she was going to check on the Old Man. I went to the car and tried the door but it was locked. Mum told me that I had to go with her this time, he’d been asking why I hadn’t been in to see him in so long.

She took the spare key from under the pot in the back porch and we let ourselves in. His house always smelt the same: of tobacco and fried eggs and dust. We walked through to the kitchen, across the hallway and into the living room, where he was sat on his big leather armchair in front of the window, as usual.

He drank a lot. Sometimes my Mum would have to dash to the shop for him to buy him more booze when he ran out. It was always Bell’s whisky, about a bottle each day. By his chair there was a bottle with a couple of inches left in it, and in his hand was a glass. He turned to greet us and put his glass down on the table at his side.

‘You haven’t been to see me for quite some time, young lady,’ he said to me.

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.

The room was fucking filthy. Fag ends and empty bottles everywhere and mud ground into the carpet. There was a single bed in his living room because in the winter he couldn’t make it up the stairs to his bedroom and so slept there.

He turned to my Mum.

‘Hello, my darling,’ he said.

‘Hello, ___,’ said my Mum. ‘She wanted to stay in the car and read again, she’s always reading, but it’s about time she came to say hello, isn’t it?’

She turned round and smiled at me. Told me to sit down.
Where?
I wondered. Everything was covered in shit. I remained standing.

‘Come here, ___’ the Old Man said to my Mum.

She walked over and sat on his lap.