Dirty Old Man (A True Story) (10 page)

Because I was the only one who went on his trips to the woods with him, it was me that got to go out in the evenings with him on his motorbike. To begin with it was a lot of fun until the novelty wore off. After that, I didn’t enjoy the late nights and having to get up for school the next morning.

At least we didn’t have to walk to the woods anymore now we had transport.

     It wasn’t all bad memories though, we’d sometimes go and sit by the dead tree and he’d take his CB radio with him, throw the antennae up and over a tree to speak to my mum. He’d tell her to put the kettle on and make us some poached egg sandwiches because we were on our way home.

There were the odd few good memories that I owe to my dad, while most of my friends were playing with their dolls, I was learning to shoot his Ripley rifles and crossbows in the back garden and watching him as he made all his own steel moving targets for us to shoot down.

Other times on our outings, he’d leave me alone in the dark woods. He assured me that it was to improve my night vision and sensory skills. I could barely see anything as it was because of my poor eyesight.

     One evening we rode into Leicester city centre because the council had hung up the Diwali lights. It was an amazing experience to be surrounded by so many different twinkling lights travelling at a high speed down the main road.

At around midnight, we stopped in a small village called Quorn and Dad decided that he wanted to drive up to Swithland Reservoir.

We turned down Wood
Lane and rode into the pitch black as we left the street lights behind. It was so dark there that I was concerned he wouldn’t see the sharp bends in time and we’d get thrown off. I envisioned it happening and I must have held my breath for most of the way.

When we reached the Reservoir, we got off and looked at the mist floating eerily across the water. It reminded me of that song by Deep Purple ‘Smoke on the Water.’ Our next door neighbour would wake the whole neighbourhood up with it every weekend as he played it on his electric guitar in his back garden.

     “Me and Derrick came up here in his car one night,” he told me, “we got such a shock when we drove round the corner and saw a body hanging in the trees. We called the police but something like that, you know, kind of scares you doesn’t it? People do it all the time around here. There’s also a headless monk that walks around. Anyway, when we drove past the hanging man, something hit the side of Derrick’s car continuously BANG BANG BANG until we reached the end of the road. We didn’t dare stop to see what it was, but when we got back, the car was covered in dents all over. Spooky eh?”

Then he asked me to stand where I was and not move while he rode off on his motorbike. He wanted me to tell him how bright his lights looked from a distance and to judge how far away he was before he came into view.

Then he rode off until I could no longer see or hear him.

     I wasn’t really afraid of the dark, I never had been one of those children but at that moment I was petrified. I was twelve years old, stood in the pitch black; alone.

There was a hotel down the road that we passed on the way in and I was sure that if I could get there, someone would be willing to help me get home.

I was frozen with fear as thoughts of the hanging man pushed itself to the forefront of my mind. I was scared that if I moved even an inch, I would see him staring at me from the treetops of the wood on the other side of the stone wall. The fear was so real that I could almost feel him behind me blowing the cold air onto my neck.

I concentrated hard on the darkness at the end of the road and willed my dad to come back soon. Then I began to think of Darren and the cause of his death, my good friend that I had only fond memories soon became the object of my terror.

I thought to myself, what if I turn around and see Darren hanging in the tree? What if he smiles and waves at me? Will his eyes be open and glazed over like a fish on a cold slab? The disgusting thoughts make me sick with tears and I hated myself for allowing his memory to be tainted like that.

I blamed my dad, the man who was nowhere to be seen. I wouldn’t have put it past him to leave me there for a lot longer, and I thought about findin
g that hotel. If such a thing as the hanging man did exist, if Darren wanted to creep up and scare the shit out of me; then it would happen regardless. I had nothing to lose. The dead can’t hurt me, I told myself over and over again through my tears, only the living, only my dad.

It was such a large open space but in the darkness, I could hear my own footsteps as they crunched the gravel, and my own shallow breaths. I decided that as long as I looked confident, anything that might have been watching me would leave me alone.

Then out of the blackness came my dad on his stupid motorbike. I had so much adrenaline pumping through my body that I swear I could have kicked him off as he rode past.

     “Yes your lights are very bright,” I snapped at him as
I jumped on the back.

     “Why are you being so mardy?” he asked me, oblivious
to the act of cruelty he’d subjected me to.

    “Because it’s cold.”

     “Because you’re a scaredy cat more like,” he laughed, “you need to toughen up a bit,”

     And toughen up I did
, because he didn’t just ride off and leave me at the reservoir; he’d take me to the cemetery and leave me there too. He’d always park up in the area where Darren’s headstone was, and ride off for what seemed like a lifetime. As my fear lessened, my hatred for him grew a little more each day.

     I have some very fond memories of school trips I’d been on. When I was at primary school, my parent saved up so I could go to the Lake District. There was only room for ten children to go so it was on a first come - first served basis. I’ll always be grateful to my parents for paying for me to have the experiences and adventures I had.

The caretaker that cleaned up my accident on my first day of school would be the responsible adult organizing it all with a couple of other teachers.

I remember how we squeezed into a very small, stuffy minibus, and after a few long hours; we were there.

We stayed in a youth hostel that had some beautiful surrounding gardens with small waterfalls. We were allowed to roam freely on our own outside, and I often wondered if my parents would have let me go if they’d have known the extent of freedom we had. We climbed a mountain called Scafell Pike w
hich had a height of 978 meters, and a mountain called Helvellyn which stood at 950 meters. We also tried abseiling which I really enjoyed.

I was faced with a dilemma when I was there, either spend twenty pence on a phone-call home or spend it on Kendal mint cake. Needless to say, I suffered a sickening guilt after eating all that Kendal mint cake.

In the evenings, the staff would take us to a local pub and shower us with cola and crisps. They gave us money for the jukebox and we spent it all on the tracks from Dirty Dancing. We all danced around in the pub until well into the night as the staff drank their funny coloured drinks and laughed amongst each other. It would be a holiday I’d never forget.

     As I was now in year eight, the school had a trip to Wales planned. We’d be going for a week. Both Alex and Beryl had been on the trip when they attended the same school years before. Our parents were called because Alex had managed to get his leg caught under a roundabout at a park. I felt terribly sorry for him when he arrived home shortly afterwards with an old man’s walking stick that he had to use for a couple of weeks.

My parents found the m
oney to send me on the trip, I was looking forward to spending a week away from the house. At twelve, it was a big deal to be parent free, especially as I had so little freedom at home. When the day finally arrived, I was relieved they would no longer be able to use it as a punishment, threatening me that I wouldn’t be able to go if I didn’t own up to things I hadn’t done - things my siblings blamed on me during ‘gripe night’.

In Wales, we stayed at a mountain centre surrounded by forest. It was exclusive to us that week as I suppose the safety aspects of taking children away had been reassessed by then to a degree.

Again I enjoyed abseiling, and climbed a mountain called Cnicht. We were supposed to be climbing Snowdon but the weather was unpredictable.

     We canoed on a huge lake and I remember the overwhelming sense of freedom being on my own in that wide open space. I was one of a few that didn’t capsize that day. We also went gorge walking and ended the day by jumping into a waterfall. The feeling of the water pushing me down to the bottom of the lake was fantastic. Some of us were a little nervous to begin with but our teachers assured us that it was an opportunity of a lifetime, and we’d regret it if we didn’t take it. It was a marvellous memory.

One of the evenings, we went to Tremadog Bay and played in the sand dunes in the dark. It was almost like being on another planet as the sand glowed whitely and the sky glowed an eerie blue.

We played a form of manhunt in the forest that surrounded our accommodation; it was dark and the teachers used a hut which was to be our headquarters. I can’t remember the actual nature of the game, but I recall we had to hunt for things other than people. My friend lost her shoe in the mud, I remember that much as she hopped back to HQ. I felt free as I ran about that forest in the dark whilst most of the other children stuck together because they were scared. This gave me the upper hand in the game.

     Back in the dormitory, I had one of the top bunk beds that were stacked three high. I shared the dorm with eight other girls, and there was a smaller one for some of the others who didn’t quite fit in.

I don’t know where the cigarettes came from
but one of the girls passed them around, we hung out of the window whilst we took it in turns to fan the smoke alarm with our towels.

One of the girls, Sarah, said that she was going to tell the teacher about our smoking. I couldn’t afford to have them call my parents and I’m ashamed to say that we thought the best way to silence her was through intimidation.

One of the girls told Sarah that she’d slap her if she grassed us up. I made a shadow puppet on the ceiling in the shape of a dog; I was quite good at shadow puppets.

I called the dog Sarah and mimicked her voice, joking that she was going to tell the teachers about our smoking.

She cried and darted across the room to the door and left to tell on us.

A few minutes later, one of the teachers came in and shouted at us all. We were told to bring ou
r suitcases through to the living area, and the teachers searched our items for cigarettes. They didn’t find any as we’d thrown them out the window.

“I’m surprised at you especially,” said the teacher as she looked at me.

I was especially surprised that she said that and I shrugged it off.

Sarah and a couple of the other girls moved into the smaller dormitory w
hich left the ‘bad ones’ in mine.

     I felt a little bad the next morning when Sarah came down to breakfast, her eyes were red and puffy. She was still snivelling as the teachers gathered around her. I complained that she was just attention seeking. She started to become hysterical and then she was sick into her breakfast bowl. I caught a glimpse of one of the teachers rolling their eyes as they tried to calm her down. I was pretty sure Sarah lived a life completely opposite to mine. She received attention every time she clicked her fingers or turned on the tears.

     On the coach on the way home, I listened to Whigfield, ‘Think of You’ and Jam & Spoon, ‘Right in the Night’ on my Walkman, though it wasn’t exactly a Walkman; but a much cheaper brand.

My dad was waiting on his motorbike as the coach pulled up outside the school. He loaded my oversized suitcase onto the back of his bike and secured it with a bungee rope. He rode home slowly shouting at me to keep up with him.

It was back to reality for me.

     Around the time I turned thirteen, I began training at Bernie’s martial arts club. My parents said I was spending far too much time alone in my room and that I was becoming a hermit. I thought my dad was a hypocrite as he rarely went out of the house on his own.

I didn’t
want to go to the classes; I’d already been forced into St. John’s Ambulance which I hated, now this.

All I wanted to do was sit in my room and play my keyboard. My parents had bought me a keyboard for Christmas, and I was becoming quite good. I remember seeing the large wrapped present on the floor that morning.

     “I wonder what that is?” I asked my dad at the time, and he told me that it was probably a coffin.

     I went to my first class with Beth and Lou, it went okay, I don’t know exactly what I was expecting. At least it kept me out the house and out of blames way.

I struggled to take Bernie seriously
, I imagined people who taught these classes were big and covered with rippling muscles, Bernie was around eight stone, looked like a hippy, and bounced when he walked.