My Shit Life So Far (3 page)

I had an older brother, John, and a younger sister, Karen. I shared a room with John, and Karen had a room of her own. John was a slightly nervous little boy, always worrying about what our parents would say or what they’d think he should do in any situation. We used to say our prayers every night before bed and then we’d talk a bit as we fell asleep. I always remember him turning to me one night and saying:

‘There’s always one thing that you’re worrying about. You stop worrying about one thing and you worry about something else. It never stops.’

I lay awake. It was the first thing I’d heard that had genuinely worried me.

For years my brother’s school day started before mine and in theory I should have been able to sleep for an extra hour. He hated getting up though and my mum would have to stand over him, shouting his name in a weird trembling soprano while I
buried my head under the covers. He was like a comic-book caricature of a sleepy boy. Crust would form on his eyes and he’d struggle to open them while he pulled apart his breakfast of jam sandwiches. Then he’d climb back into bed with all his clothes in his arms and twitch endlessly under the covers like Harry Houdini before emerging fully clothed.

My brother and sister and I all made friends with the twins in the next back, Thomas and Rosemary Duffy, and there were other kids you’d see as their families moved through the area, or as they came to visit relatives. Wee people had a much more autonomous life then, going out on their own and knowing they had to be back for lunch and dinner.

At any time there’d be seven or eight of us knocking around out in the backs. Rosemary was a sweet lassie who loved to feed and name all the rogue cats. Thomas had a gruesome streak, so we got on tremendously. We’d drop snails from the top of the tenements, seeing whose could survive the longest, like an evil game of conkers. We dug a massive hole in my back and when nobody came to stop us we just kept going. It was right up the far end so the adults couldn’t really see us from their windows. After about three or four days somebody must have noticed we were exhausted, coming home filthy and coughing like miners. I remember a shocked figure looming over us, buried up to our chests and probably heading for the water mains.

Wee Thomas had an inspired idea for the hole. A lesser boy would have pulled a sheet of tarpaulin over it and called it a den. But Thomas staged what he called ‘Insect Disaster Movies’. This
meant that you got down into the hole with a set of binoculars while Thomas laid worms or ants or snails before you. You were to look at them through the binoculars (backwards) while he rolled stones onto them, doing the voices of the fleeing beasties as they screamed their horror and worried aloud which way to run to flee the earthquake.

The Duffys had an enormous Alsatian. Once I went round for them and Rosemary opened the door only to suddenly disappear, this monstrous thing dragging her up the hall by her ankle. Their dad, ‘Old Tom’, was my dad’s drinking partner, although who knows what they talked about. My dad was quiet but Old Tom was almost silent. The few things he did say were delivered in such a low, worried Glasgow burr that it sounded like somebody asking for help through faulty air conditioning. My dad told me that they went to a country and western bar once, one of these unbelievable places in Glasgow where people dress as cowboys. Some guy came up and started showing them his quick-draw skills and gun twirling. ‘I’ve been timed as having a faster draw than John Wayne!’, he told them, just as he dropped the gun. In one of his few recorded utterances, Old Tom looked at him and deadpanned.

‘If John Wayne was here now, you’d be deid.’

One day all of the kids were sitting on the stairs in the Duffys close and the idea got thrown up that we should form a gang. The girls wanted us to call it ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’. The boys had come up with ‘The Bloodsucking Slugs’. Actually, that was my idea. We made my sister cry at the horror of being a
Bloodsucking Slug. That day finished with Rosemary Duffy tying me to a washing pole and saying she was going to kiss me. I struggled with the washing line tied round me but I really wanted her to kiss me. Somehow I got free anyway and ran off, hopping disappointedly over the railings into my own back.

Thomas Duffy and I both joined the Cubs, which we loved. I think we’d exaggerated the subs to our folks so we could buy Slush Puppies on the way home. Our parents never caught on, even though we’d always come back with bright blue or purple mouths and crippling headaches. The Cubs was run by a lovely lady who lived round the corner from us. I don’t think she knew a single thing about the Cubs or the Scouting movement; she just started it up in the church hall to give us something to do. There were none of the awkward formal greetings and knot tying of the proper Cubs. If you wanted a badge you just told her and she’d set you a totally arbitrary task. I got my sports badge for running round the hall. There was a great fancy-dress competition every Halloween. Once I went as the Hulk—painted from head to foot in watercolours that dried on me in such a way that I seemed to be walking around in a huge scab. Thomas, quite brilliantly, painted an enormous cardboard box and went as an Oxo cube. He made his dad walk us to the hall as he had a real paranoia that a passing lunatic might set fire to him.

The Cub leader’s brother would come to the meetings a lot to help out; he was maybe in his twenties. The last 20 minutes of most meetings involved him tying an enormous running shoe to a big bit of rope and making us jump as he swung it round faster
and faster. Who knows what was going on in this guy’s life that he’d turn up every week to blast wee boys into the side of a public building with an enormous shoe, but we were really glad that he did. I even won one week! I was encouraged to stage a high-jump competition at some railings near our house, hurting my balls quite badly.

Our outfit or unit or whatever (not having been in the proper Cubs, who knows what the term is) went to a real Scout camp once and it was absolute chaos. There’s always been something suspect about Scoutmasters to me. Middle-aged men taking young boys into the woods to practise tying knots is clearly not good. If you’re going to get felt up in a tent by the Scoutmaster then the very least you should get is a badge that you can use to cover the hole in the back of your shorts.

There was also some weird sectarian thing going on with the guy who was leading the trip. I was too young to decode what was going on but when the kids started singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ on the bus he went absolutely tonto, making the driver pull into a lay-by and giving a truly crazy, bulging-eyed speech about the Queen. That’s a real thing with sectarians—they always assume that people are interested in the shite they talk. He was literally foaming at the mouth about the Act of Union, in front of a bunch of 9-year-olds who were thinking about when they might get a hotdog. Of course one must avoid generalisations but that man was definitely a paedophile.

At camp, we were no more prepared to set up tents and light fires than a tribe of monkeys. In fact, one of our guys (a
real wingnut who seemed much too tall and old to be a Cub) immediately climbed a tree and started screaming like a monkey, breaking off branches and throwing them into the camp. Another got off the bus and just ran straight down towards the river bank, crashing straight into the river. The real Scouts looked shell-shocked as the monkey guy leapt down from the tree and tried to engage them in swordfights with an enormous stick. Clearly, all pretence of being a real outfit, unit or possibly troop had been blown.

The Scouts sent an observer to one of our meetings. I missed it but apparently he stood around slack-jawed watching boys get pelted into stacks of chairs with a big training shoe. We were all made to attend a real Cubs meet in a better part of town. The Cubs had to line up and do a little salute at the start! The leader was called Akela! The gymnastics badge didn’t simply require jumping two-footed over a chair! Their leader called out a boy to give a mad little speech about the history of Scouting. He had an enormous gum boil, easily half the size of his face, and spoke in a wet mumble like the Elephant Man Jr. The meetings must have been bad because our Cubs got shut down and there was fuck all to do again.

In a way crime makes perfect sense in those nothing-to-do places. A teenager came up to us once on a moped he’d stolen and said he’d give us rides on the back of it. I was too scared but some of the kids got on for a backie. I still have this vivid picture of him shooting off across the waste ground at the end. He might have been the last truly free individual I ever met and is no doubt dead.

I had a rich fantasy life as a kid, honed on the dullness of my surroundings. I read
The Hobbit
when I was little and after that every magic-type kids’ book that I could find. I loved Alan Garner and Diana Wynne-Jones, and just read that stuff all the time.

My own fantasies were a whole lot weirder than anything in the books. I had this baroque story that I thought about for years. I’d go off and play on my own, thinking about it and acting out the scenes. I was a magician who travelled from town to town in some Middle Earth-type world with his travelling companion who—get this—was an enormous guy that he had created from mud. My companion, whose name escapes me, was always falling to pieces and I’d have to redo the spells. He had rubies for eyes—not any old rubies, but magic rubies that I stored powerful fire spells in. The stories largely involved the two of us rocking up to town and not getting any respect from the local king or whoever. He’d generally try to put us in jail or set his men on us. That’s when my good buddy would unleash all the pent-up rage in his fiery eye, often burning not just the king and his men but the whole town that had disrespected us.

But here’s the best bit. I had a sword that would cut whoever it touched and give them a wound that would never heal. I think I must have read about that somewhere. In some versions of the story, I had cut myself with the sword, all down one arm, so my arm was hidden and bandaged in my cloak and I was often weak. The story regularly revolved around me trying to rest up while we were in prison or being chased. My fiery friend would stand guard over me while I summoned up enough energy to
destroy our enemies. Later on in life, this made my national standup tour feel pretty familiar.

My brother and sister and I were allowed to get one comic each a week. We’d get
The Victor
and
The Dandy
and sometimes others. I was never one for savouring the artwork; I just loved the stories. My favourite in
The Victor
was a thing called‘Deathwish’. It was about a racing driver and sometime stuntman who had been horribly disfigured in a crash. He wore a mask to cover his injuries and basically longed for death. Each week he’d try to do something in the race or stunt he was working on to kill himself. It always backfired and helped him win his race or do an amazing stunt, much to his disappointment. There was a brilliant panel once of him coming to in his hospital bed to the sound of popping champagne corks, just lying there looking disgusted.

I’d plough through our comics quickly and read my sister’s
Bunty
when nobody was looking. It had a lot of weird stuff.‘Susan the Sham’ was great: a girl who’d been in a traffic accident and had an evil uncle who was making her pretend to be deaf for compensation reasons. Every week she’d overhear something she really ought to tell somebody about but couldn’t. One of the main stories—did I dream this?—was about a lassie who lived a pretty much normal life except for one thing. She was trapped inside an enormous energy ball. She’d go to school in it and have to deal with a certain amount of hassle but when it got too much she could always just shoot off into the sky in this fiery orb. I once tried to make a sketch about this for a pilot I was
doing. The producer read the script and then said one of my favourite-ever sentences:

‘Do you know how much of our budget it would take to create an energy ball?’

That’s the great thing about television. Sometimes, you just feel that anything could happen. The guy didn’t say it was impossible. He was just thinking of the repercussions of sticking an actress in a big, glowing energy ball!

A new comic came out that was an absolute mindblower.
The Buddy
it was called. Cheery title but a clue to its disturbing nature was in the human-skull jacket pin given away with the first issue and the lead story of ‘They Saved Hitler’s Brain!’ They had Limpalong Leslie, an international footballer with one leg shorter than the other. His footballing brain always had to be working overtime as he was essentially crippled. He’d leap over tackles saying, ‘Ho ho! He telegraphed that one!’ It was still less weird than Tuffy, the story of a homeless goalkeeper. He could never find a house, even during the couple of seasons he played for Spurs.

I felt outside of the stuff the other kids were into, like the whole football thing. I support Celtic but as I got older I struggled to see those clubs as anything other than big businesses making money out of some of the poorest people in society. You go to those grounds and they’re these giant chrome fortresses rising out of blighted, deprived communities. Celtic won the European Cup in 1967 with a team all born within five miles of the ground. If they tried that now they couldn’t find eleven guys who still had two
legs. I find it difficult to believe that people can care about whether some millionaire pervert has got a thigh strain or not. That’s another thing about football—it’s a bit gay. Guys fretting over some lad’s calf or hamstring—they might as well all fuck each other in the centre circle.

Both of the Old Firm clubs have profited massively from sectarianism. Personally, I think everyone involved over the years has shown that they don’t have Northern Ireland’s best interests at heart and it should now be given to a third party, like Spain. Imagine how little the average Belfast citizen would care for the problems of religion if he could just get a nice bit of tapas on the Falls Road. And it wasn’t fucking raining all the time. And he still had knees.