Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing (12 page)

Without really realising it, I’d been ignoring the need to go to the bathroom, the playground for so many of my darkest fears. Switching to autopilot, I swung round on my bunk and leapt down in one movement, landing on my feet with a loud smack from my Coco the Clown boating shoes. Everyone around me looked up at this sudden sound. I stood rooted to the spot as if I had just executed a perfect triple axel with pike at the Texas Olympics. My feet stung from the six-foot leap, and I saw Chief wince then chuckle to himself. Pulling my trousers tightly round my waist, I hesitated about moving towards the bathroom, but my need quickly superseded my fears. With as much dignity as I could muster, I ambled along, my feet stinging and my bladder bursting. I felt like everyone was watching; that a path was clearing for me as I stepped awkwardly towards the bathroom with the gait of sixty-year-old with chronic piles – not the cool confident persona I had imagined myself conveying.

The toilet room had four urinals on the right followed by three stalls, with the sinks lined up on the wall opposite. Each of the stalls had a door, but no lock, and these doors only covered about two feet of the middle section, so you could easily see the inhabitant’s head and feet. There were two Hispanics in there already, seated, and casually talking to each other like they were sitting side by side at a football match. They stopped talking when I shuffled in, and stared at me, adding further to my sense of unease. At the farthest end of the bathroom were some shower stalls. The shower stalls afforded at least a degree of privacy, with separate stalls and shower curtains covering the fronts. Most of the action would take place in there, I figured.

Standing by a middle urinal, I fumbled around for my zipper, before realising it was pointless as I could just pull my trousers straight down. As I did this, two Hispanics appeared either side of me, their skin briefly touching my skin as I froze and stood staring rigidly ahead. They were talking jovially but I didn’t initially even glance at them, just kept staring ahead, panic enveloping me.

I couldn’t pee.

I looked down at my willie then involuntarily to my left where my new roomie was smiling at me.

‘
Hola,
’ he said.

‘
Hola
,
hola
, fucking
hola
!!’ my mind screamed, convinced he’d got me at ‘
hola
’. I thought of simply pulling my trousers back up and leaving, but I realised that would look even worse, so I willed myself to pee once more. I looked to the other side of me, keeping my eyes firmly at head height, only for the second Hispanic man to smile, then, without a hint of embarrassment, to stare directly down at my willie. This was all getting too much and I swivelled around to the left again to see that the first Hispanic was now eyeing my backside which I had inadvertently exposed by lowering my clown pants halfway down my bottom. One hour in and I was already parading my big white arse – at this rate I was in danger of becoming known as ‘Scotland the slut’.

Fortunately this momentary distraction seemed to have eased the mind–bladder deadlock, and the relief I felt as I faced straight ahead again was magical. Confidence restored, I felt like I was reasserting my masculinity and I smiled and gasped, ‘Aaaahhhhhhh!!’ – ridiculously proud of the strong flow I was producing. My two comrades seemed happy as well, so we all stood there smiling, me still looking straight ahead. Yanking my trousers back up to cover my bottom, I turned away from both the Hispanics and began to wash my hands. There were no hand towels or soap, so I quickly rinsed one hand and rubbed it on my trousers instead.

The relief I’d felt after finally relieving myself was dissipating now, and I was getting anxious of making a mistake again, any kind of mistake, so I shuffled out of the bathroom as quickly as I could, ignoring some mumbled entreaties from the two Hispanics to join an altogether different kind of gang. A gang with more bang, I guessed, as I shuffled back to my bunk, relieved at least that I had survived my first visit to the toilets.

7

POLLOK, SCOTLAND

I
F ANY INMATES WERE STILL STARING
at me, I barely noticed. I felt tired and drained as I pulled myself awkwardly back up onto my bunk and started looking out of my little window.

Beyond the bars, I could see the Yard and then the bird house. I watched the birds flying in and out for a while, feeling a little bit less hopeless. The two, bleak slabs of building, Sunrise and Sunset, reminded me of the rows of tenements I’d grown up around in Dormanside Road in Pollok. Dormanside stretched for nearly two miles top to bottom, only occasionally interrupted by side streets. This was where my best friend Joe and I, and my brothers Mark and Michael, would hang out come rain or shine, playing football, or a game called ‘kerby’ which involved throwing the ball against the opposite kerb and trying to catch it on the rebound. The parallels with the landscapes of my childhood made this feel like a designer-made nightmare, full of subtle comparisons and metaphors that even in those first few moments perturbed me.

Some days after we had left the Home and Mum was bringing us up in Dormanside Road, I would hear her crying. She was always so strong for us boys; always giving us a strong moral grounding, making sure we all sat down for a family meal together every evening, no matter how sparse. She worked two jobs and I could see how exhausted she often was, but still she encouraged us and loved us. We had so little money, but what we had she spent on us. She seldom went out on her own and seldom had adult company other than her brothers, my Uncle Martin and Uncle John. Everything was dedicated to keeping us out of trouble and to teaching us to be ‘good boys’. Somewhat ironically, she used to worry that if she didn’t keep a tight rein on us, we would end up in prison like so many others from Dormanside Road. I guess she never envisaged I would take such an exotic route, however.

Mum was a strict disciplinarian and we had a daily rota on the wall to cover all the housework when we came home from school. She would usually be back by 6 p.m., but two or three nights a week she would go straight back out to her ‘second job’, singing at a few clubs in Glasgow. She had a wonderful voice – but she can’t have wanted to head out to perform after a hard day’s work, leaving the warmth of the home to go back into the city.

On those few occasions I found her crying alone in her bedroom, she would quickly gather herself together and say it was nothing. There was no unburdening herself on her youngest son, no attempt to help herself – just a continuation of her role as the ‘strong one’, the glue that kept the family together.

Despite being the brightest of three children, Mum had left school at fifteen to look after her terminally ill mother and to take care of the household. My grandmother had passed away from tuberculosis – a big killer in the smog-filled Glasgow of the late fifties – when my mum was only seventeen. By twenty-one, my mother had already met my father, married, and had her third son. By twenty-two she was separated, and ostracised by a strict Catholic family who believed she should stay with my father no matter how obvious his indiscretions. Only her brothers took her side. Even the local priest tried to advise her that my dad was just being ‘a young man, stretching his wings’. But he had wrapped his wings round one too many birds for my mum’s liking, and when I was just three months old he was gone. I didn’t meet him again until I was a teenager.

We moved to Spain for a few years, then came back to Glasgow when my father’s bankruptcy stopped any maintenance payments. With my Uncle Martin serving in the Navy and Uncle John having moved to London, my Mum began to really struggle with three boys under the age of six. In the early 1960s, particularly in Glasgow, being a single mother was a shameful thing for working-class Catholics. My mother’s parents turned their backs not only on her, but on her children as well.

After staying in a friend’s spare bedroom – an impossible set-up for one adult and three kids – we were initially separated and placed into foster care. I have a vague memory of that, though I was only three years old. I do remember a taxi ride, my mum anxious and Mark and I crying; Michael (the eldest) was resolute as always. I remember going into an office, then my mum saying goodbye and crying, then a blur of people trying to be kind to me – an older couple with a big gas fire that they let me sit in front of. They kept offering me food, but I had it fixed in my head that if I took it, even though I was hungry, I wouldn’t see Mark and Michael or my mum again. I didn’t take it.

I also didn’t speak, just wrapped my arms round my legs and rocked myself back and forward in front of the fire. Michael was at another house trying to achieve the same result, but by a different method. He had smashed a glass and a plate and thrown his food against the wall. When the man of the house had tried to calm him down, he’d bitten him and tried to punch him, then he told his wife to ‘fuck off’. Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports had Mark at a house nearby tucking into egg and chips with his feet up on the couch and watching
Joe 90
on the telly. Mark was always the most pragmatic of the three of us.

With two out of three of us not settling, the decision was made to move us three Catholic boys into the all-Protestant children’s Quarriers Homes – an orphanage ten miles outside of Glasgow, which was a significant decision in a still very sectarian city. The Home had been founded in the 1850s by William Quarrier ‘for the abandoned or orphaned children of Glasgow and beyond’ and even in the 1960s it was enjoying a roaring trade. We were labelled as short-termers, but ended up spending over two years there. I hated it. All my first concrete memories came from that Home, and the enduring recollection was of counting the days until we could get out. But at least it kept the three of us together. Michael continuously ran away – on two occasions he was found only a few miles outside Glasgow – and he would often be in trouble for fighting. I was quiet and insular, talking only to Mark and Michael or Donald, my best friend then, and the only ‘coloured’ boy in a home of 1,500. Mark loved it.

Mum was allowed to visit us once a month, on a Saturday, and would walk the three miles from Bridge of Weir to Quarriers in all weathers just to see us for an hour or so. She would write to us every week, always including three sixpences Sellotaped into the letter. The Cottage Mother – reasonably enough – would take the sixpences for the ‘kitty’ for all the children, most of whom had no parents. Mum’s letters always spoke of when we would be home, a dream we all three held on to. But the weeks became months, and months became years, and we stayed in Quarriers Homes, never even leaving the grounds of the Home. My life consisting of either being in our cottage, number 21, with thirty other children, or walking the short distance to school each day. Still, the letters and visits from my mother and the fact I had my brothers with me made me feel lucky – I was, after all, surrounded by orphans.

I was quite bright at school and by six years old I’d figured out it was exactly 157 steps to walk to school, although I could make it as much as 212, and once as few as 124. Counting the steps was an enduring memory for me. On Sundays we would march down holding hands in twos in our second-hand Sunday ‘best’ to the church for Sunday Service (between 265 and 322 steps, depending upon who was my partner), then all the way back again to the cottage where I would spend the rest of the day either in the garden or in the house. We were set chores for each day, and with only one Cottage Mother for each cottage, the discipline was severe – the lady in charge of our house preferring to lock you in the garage for an unspecified period if you’d done something to offend her. There were hundreds of kids, but it was a lonely existence. We had no visitors other than Mum, and sometimes long periods would pass without seeing anyone from the outside world at all.

In those days a single mother would be near the bottom of a council list, not the top. So Mum worked and saved, worked and saved, and eventually we got a flat in Dormanside Road in Pollok. A row of tenements that stretched for as far as I could imagine, Dormanside Road was pretty bad, even by Glasgow standards. Gangs, muggings, stabbings, ‘chibbings’ (permanently marking someone’s face with a razor, knife or screwdriver) were commonplace. But I was overjoyed when we left Quarriers and moved there. There were no real gardens so we played on the street all day. There were no shops, so you would get your ‘messages’ (shopping) from a double-decker bus that parked halfway down the road. The guy that ran it was friendly, a large ginger fellow called Alex, with two front teeth missing. He sold the usual staples of working-class life then – lard by the ton, potatoes by the hundredweight, sugar, bread, tea, sausages, eggs and, when you were feeling exotic, fish fingers or long spaghetti. Mark used to joke that he was eighteen before he discovered that spaghetti bolognaise had meat in it. To us this ‘exotic’ meal was served with a knob of butter and lashings of tomato ketchup.

Usually I played football with Mark and Michael and up to ten other kids from the street, including my best friend Joe. Joe was a great player then, a standout, and went on to play for Clydebank in the old Scottish First Division, but chucked it in at twenty-three to concentrate on plumbing, where he could make much more money with overtime. Changed days indeed. Joe and I had a number of part-time jobs together, including selling bread rolls through the ‘closes’ (the entrance to the tenements), selling football coupons and a paper run. Like me, Joe had to earn money for the household, so we always worked. His mum would make us ‘pieces and jam’ to eat as we worked our way through our round, which would usually take about an hour and a half and stretched the length of Dormanside. Other than Fridays, when we collected the money, we would do alternate nights for the paper run, but quickly got that mixed up so people were getting two papers one night and none the next. This didn’t bode well for our future careers together.

Our biggest challenge was collecting the cash and keeping it, which always made Fridays our toughest night. Joe was always strong and well built – I was tall, scrawny and geeky looking. We would cut through the back gardens collecting the money, one ‘keeping the edgy’ at the front of the close in case someone tried to take our weekly takings, while the other, usually Joe, tried to charm his way to a decent tip. It was noticeable that Joe always got more tips than me and although this had remained unspoken between us, I eventually broached the subject with him.