My Shit Life So Far (4 page)

The standard of football has been pretty terrible for a long time. There have been some great sides but they’re pretty rare. Most of the time the Scottish League is like watching a really gruelling donkey race. Sure, like most people I support one team over another, but it’s getting more and more difficult to care what colour of hat the winning donkey is wearing.

Primary school was great. On the first day I was looking around thinking, ‘There’s no catch…this is genuinely a big, warm room full of toys.’ Now, Little Frankie would have hated it if he knew that one day I was going to gloss over his nursery education, which he absolutely loved. On the other hand, books can only be so long and I’ve got a lot of stories about drug abuse to get to. Let’s just say that Little Frankie pulled the paddling pool off its stand about once a month, soaking himself and having to go home in a pair of huge borrowed shorts.

The great thing about primary education is the positivity and praise the kids get. Probably not the best way to prepare them for the reality of adult life in Scotland, but I like it. I think if we actually focussed on an education system that prepared people for life in Scotland it would be a lot like the Fritzl household. I mean, what gets me about this whole sordid story is Fritzl’s wife saying she didn’t know. Did she not suspect something when her husband came in every week with sixteen bags of shopping, including kids’ clothes and nappies? Who did she think they were for—the dog? ‘I know we treat him like one of the family, but sandals and shorts?’ People have accused Fritzl of neglect, but he was fucking them every day—they probably would have loved a bit of neglect. Even Adolf Hitler must be going, ‘…und
I thought
Ich war ein Cunt!
’ The whole thing is so common in Austria they now sell ‘Hallmark’ cards with ‘Congratulations on escaping from your underground sex hell’. Of course, I shouldn’t joke; Fritzl’s daughter has been through a horrific ordeal. But just wait until she gets all the back payments for child benefit. That’ll cheer her up.

I loved primary and it was so supportive that up until I was about 9 or 10 I still thought I could draw. Teachers had always said,‘Well done’ when I drew or painted something, so I didn’t realise that I couldn’t draw at all—almost to the level of a handicap. This dawned on me when I challenged my friend Charlie to a drawing contest. We were going to draw a space shuttle as it was the first one and the kids were really excited about it. I used a ruler and drew a big rectangle in the middle and two bigger rectangles on either side, for the booster jets. Then I drew triangles on top of the rectangles—turning them into rockets! Sure, the space shuttle that I drew freehand inside the main rectangle (the fuel tank!) was a little shaky and looked a bit like a face, but the overall effect was pretty impressive.

Charlie blinked impassively at my drawing and then produced what seemed to be a black and white photograph of the space shuttle. There were little scientists doing final checks on the scaffolding at the launch base, partially covered by the shadow of the main fuel tank. Did you ever read
Peanuts
when Charlie Brown would be building his shitty little snow fort and
Linus would have built an actual castle with battlements and a flagpole? It was like that. I insisted mine was best and went off to find a judge.

As a kid I was fascinated by space shuttles and by astronauts in general. This was before all the blowing up took the shine off things. Good old NASA. With all their money, could they maybe have a mission where everyone doesn’t nearly die? They should have some honesty and call their next mission ‘Operation Spacegrave’. Remember all the unmanned missions they used to send up in the 1950s and 60s? You know what they did with the monkeys and dogs that piloted them? They poisoned them! All their bodies are still up there. So an alien civilisation’s first contact with earth will be a ring of abandoned spacecraft filled with dead chimps and Alsatians. Approaching earth for some sublimated alien race must be like when the police close in on the house of a serial killer and find an outer perimeter of faeces wrapped in newspaper.

One day on our way to school my friend Gary McRedie and I found a huge porn mag. It was thicker than a dictionary and full of big Seventies bushes—women who looked like they were giving birth to Kevin Keegan. I didn’t really understand what it was (I don’t think), but had to admit it was strangely compelling. Gary suggested that we hide it under a shrub so we could come and look at it whenever we liked. The next day it was gone—someone had found it! I was disappointed but also oddly relieved. It was only years later, as I was telling someone this story, that I realised Gary McCredie had gone back and got it for himself.

There was quite a lot of religious stuff at primary. Every week we’d go down to the church and practise hymns, led by Miss Moat, a spirited big woman who looked like she played centreback for somebody half decent. At least I was lucky enough not to go to a Jesuit school. The Jesuit saying is ‘Give me a boy until he is seven and I will give you the man.’ Usually a sexually confused manic-depressive.

We made our first confession when we were seven years old and had to really rack our brains for sins. I said that I’d stolen something, which I hadn’t, and that I’d lied, which I had—about stealing something. An old man listening to a child’s sins while they’re both locked in a wooden box? If I was a sexual pervert I would definitely join the priesthood. Although clearly the sexualpervert community is way ahead of me on that one. Earlier this year the Pope met victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. If I’d been fingered by a priest the last person I’d like to meet is the ultra priest 9,000. It’s like fighting the endof—level boss in a video game. First confession at the age of seven must be incredibly boring for the priest. Imagine having to listen for hours on end about stealing conkers and farting during school assembly. This is why so many priests like to help out by giving the poor kid something to really confess about next time around.

First holy communion was the big one—all the girls dressing up in terrifying tiny bridal outfits to trot up the aisle and ‘marry God’. It was a whole community doing this. If one guy had made a kid do that in his basement he’d have been locked up for life. I lost both my front teeth during the week of my first communion
so my smile in the photos is the tight-lipped smirk of an unrepentant murder suspect. I always remember the present I was given for making my first communion. It was the biography of a terminally Christian boy with cerebral palsy. It was called
I Won’t Be Crippled When I See Jesus
. I put
Emil and the Detectives
to one side and read it every night with a sense of numb horror.

I’ve always found it weird that people in our community could reconcile the opulence of the Church (even our little church was disgracefully beautiful compared with the houses people lived in) with the generally held socialism that most folk seemed to believe in. I remember a visiting priest giving an angry sermon about communism and lots of men getting up and quietly walking out. Often priests will give a homily about the evils of greed in a room with more gold and gems than Dale Winton’s bathroom. At least I was old enough to miss hearing Mass in Latin. In my parents’ day the Church believed so much in the mystery of God they revealed it in a language no one could understand. If you wanted to know how much Jesus loved you, you had to take along Linguaphone tapes.

The depressing thing about religious people is their sheer bloody-mindedness. A Christian coalition recently organised an advertising campaign to be shown on the side of buses in response to an atheist campaign. Personally, I’m in favour of any religious war carried out on buses that doesn’t involve blowing me up. If people aren’t swayed by the Pope, the Bible, the Koran, Jesus and four thousand years of organised religion, I’m not sure the number 16 to Larkhall is going to cut it. The message reads,
‘There definitely is a God.’ Yeah, tell that to the poor sod who drives the bus and gets spat on ten times a day for the minimum wage. It might be more accurate if the message was printed on the inside of the bus and read, ‘There definitely is a God. And he hates you.’

I have a theory about the Pope. You know how he fought for the Nazis? Well if Nazi scientists did manage to save Hitler’s brain then maybe they kept it alive in a jar for years waiting to implant it into someone with power on the world stage. That someone would need to wear a very big hat to hide all the stitching left by a brain transplant. They probably thought about putting his brain into an NFL quarterback but held out for the Pope. The Pope has said that condoms don’t help prevent the spread of AIDS. Someone ought to tell His Holiness that he must be putting them on wrong. You’d have though the Pope would have been well up for using condoms. It would have scuppered the court cases of many of his priests if there was no DNA evidence. In Africa AIDS has killed 25 million people in three decades. That’s a lot of funerals. I can see why the Pope doesn’t want to lose the work.

There was a thing at primary called ‘The Black Babies’. It was a hugely misguided charitable effort they used to drop on us in Catholic schools. You sponsored an African baby and, I think, sometimes got to name them. At least, that’s what I’m told by my African friends Wolf Tone and Murdo McCloud. Anyway, there was always some daft kid who misunderstood and thought that they’d actually get the baby for a bit. They were too young to
realise that there are a thousand good reasons why a little African baby shouldn’t be shipped off to another country and that human beings should never be exchanged for money. I think that Madonna basically has the emotional development of one of those kids. She can pay for a little black baby, so why shouldn’t she get to keep it? She’s probably been drawn in by the advertising—if you get an African kid it costs £2 a month to feed and if it gets cataracts they’re only a pound to fix. Actually, I feel really sorry for little David Banda. The only black role models he’ll have growing up will be homosexual backing dancers. Madonna is said to have had his nursery painted like a jungle, to make him feel at home. Hopefully the kitchen’s done out like the inside of a UN helicopter.

Every summer we went to stay at my gran’s place in Ireland. She lived in a really remote part of Donegal, which is beautiful and bleak. I’d say maybe a little of the bleakness seeps into the people. The bit we lived in wasn’t so much quiet as empty. If someone wanted to film a movie there that was set after a nuclear apocalypse they would have had to bus people in.

My gran lived with my granddad, my great-uncle and my uncle James in a little whitewashed farmhouse. My brother and I would sleep in a small room with both uncles, my great-uncle often getting himself off to sleep with a long, tongue-in-cheek monologue about how we were going to Hell, and listing all the torments that would be waiting for us. I always enjoyed it as a
sort of grim joke, but it worried John and afterwards you could hear him muttering his prayers hard even over all the snoring.

They were all very religious. My uncle got a new car and nobody would get into it until a priest had been out to bless the thing. A priest came out and got paid to tell the story of the Good Samaritan and throw holy water over the bonnet. My granny prayed a lot, for everybody. I sometimes wonder if I’m not still just working through the goodwill she built up with for me with God. One day soon I’m going to run out of her Hail Marys and both my legs will drop off.

Everybody was obsessed with death in that household. They’d talk about it a lot. Once we were all getting on the bus as we left at the end of summer and I said ‘See you next year!’ to my granddad. ‘I’ll be dead next year,’ he replied, without sadness. That’s Catholicism; it’s a great big death cult. Look around a church at all the golden crucifixes, the big marble statues of Jesus dying. The nativity, the only part of the story that’s about life, is just a temporary thing they throw up for a few weeks. It’s generally focussed round a £5.99 Tiny Tears doll—one year our church had a rocking horse for the donkey. It had‘I’m a cowboy’ written on it.

My granddad was a difficult guy. Joyless, to the point where he found other people’s laughter upsetting. He’d often scold us for laughing, as would my mum. They thought that laughter was infantile. I thought the idea of somebody hating children’s laughter was really funny, like an ogre in a fairytale. My granddad had a very hard life. He grew up in poverty I
can’t imagine at a time when children were hired out to farms as rural labour. He had to work in Scotland to support his brothers and sisters, and ended up burying most of them when they were still young. Now his health was gone and he was in constant pain. I knew all this, but I was a child so I hated him for being a grumpy old cunt.

Boredom was a huge part of our lives there. It’s the rainiest county in Ireland. Which is a bit like saying you’re the Dirtiest Woman in Dundee—a lot of competition and little prestige. Often we’d be stuck indoors listening to fiddle music on a crackling radio. Everybody spoke Irish so you’d have to entertain yourself. I read loads of books there on my top bunk, the days ticking by slowly. I’d always run out of actual kids’ books and have to dive into my granddad’s stack of masculine adventure novels. There was a real lurch trying to get into a story of a mercenary on the run from the East German police when you’d just finished a book about a boy who had magic shoes.

They farmed sheep there and occasionally we’d have to help out, acting as auxiliary sheepdogs when the sheep were being herded, or taking lunch out to the shearers when they clipped them in a nearby pit. There were actual dogs as well and we’d be so bored we’d dote on them to a degree they found exasperating. These creatures had to have a complex skillset—able to run after sheep on a hill but also to put up with little children who wanted to make them wear a blouse.

The highlight of every week was the arrival of the baker’s van. This guy drove around the middle of nowhere selling cakes
and sweets and stuff, and we would clean him out. We’d be sitting on rocks with nothing but fields for miles eating these bright purple or luminous yellow cakes. Every Sunday a wee bus came to take everybody to Mass in the local town of Dungloe. Mass was crushingly dull and sometimes in Irish, but afterwards you were in town till the bus left. A proper town with sweets and penknives and toy guns and footballs.

Dungloe was famous in Ireland for its annual summer beauty contest called ‘Mary from Dungloe’. Irish communities from all over the globe would contribute fresh and conventional-looking examples of their gene pool. You’d have a Chicago Mary and a Glasgow Mary; who knows what their real names were? The whole thing was exactly like Father Ted’s ‘Lovely Girl’s Contest’ and everyone for miles around seemed obsessed with the thing. One year a local girl won—Moia McCole, the Donegal Mary. She lived at the bottom of our hill and everybody was really excited. They drove about at night honking on their car horns and there were big bonfires and parties. The
Sunday World
printed a photo of her where she was leaning forward a little too far and you could see her nipple. I cut it out and had a wank behind a big rock.