Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (14 page)

Sean was working hard and all seemed fine, although his unpredictable mood swings were getting harder to deal with and he was still getting headaches regularly. One night in our bedroom, he shouted at me for no reason and, as I turned to argue back, he slapped me hard across the side of my head then turned away from me. I lifted our alarm clock and belted him on his back. He fell forward, then turned and jumped at me. I pushed him backwards and tried to punch him in the face. I felt his arms around my back as he wrestled me to the floor and pulled me round and then I saw his ‘mad eyes’. The look in those eyes terrified me. I lay beneath his savage stare and did nothing. I was beaten. I could not believe this man who loved me had hurt me like that; I loved him so much and just wanted to understand why this had happened.

Whenever this happened again – and it did – he would break down in tears afterwards and beg my forgiveness and I always held him tight and promised to love him for ever. After a while, I could predict when his mood would change. He enjoyed the cash side and the organisational side of running the Palaceum bar, but having to communicate with people made him feel awkward. He was never one to socialise, hated people talking to him, hated having to chat in the bar and he would totally ignore customers who tried to start conversations. When someone asked a question he would simply stand me in front of the person and get me to chat to them as he sidled away. If he was confronted by a persistent chatterer, he would march away and later fly into a rage at me.

‘Aye!’ he’d say. ‘Leave
me
with the fucking stupid people talking, will ye?’

I just learned to live with his moods.

* * *

Meanwhile, my brother Mij had got a job near the Palaceum, looking after an off licence owned by an Irish Catholic gangster called Tom. Mij had always loved being involved in anything illegal – it made him feel important. Unfortunately, he was never a good worker and, to cover for him, Mammy started looking after the wee shop part-time, with occasional help from Peter, who was still beating her. I was sick of the way Peter treated Mammy, so decided to get them both very drunk when they were in the off licence. Getting Mammy drunk was easy but Peter – always a clever wee fucker – was very suspicious of my offer of free booze. However, eventually, greed took over and he was soon so pissed he was staggering.

It was Mammy’s job to clear the nightly takings, put them in a safe at the back of the off licence, lock up the shop, then take home the keys. That night, I pretended to put the takings in the safe for her – she saw me apparently do it – but I actually slipped the money into an inside pocket of Peter’s donkey jacket, which was hanging up. Mammy never ever actually stayed overnight at Peter’s house, so they said goodnight in the street. I laughed with them and joined in their drunken singing and watched Peter go into his flat on the other side of Kenmore Street. When Mammy was asleep, I called Tom and explained that Peter had stolen the takings and beaten up my Mammy. I gave him the address of Peter’s flat and left the Irish boys to do their worst. They found the money but, disappointingly for me, Peter got off lightly. Mammy was aghast and came to tell Sean and me.

‘Tom’s mates have broken both Peter’s arms! They said he fucking stole their money – he would never steal!’

‘Did they find any money, Mammy?’ I asked, quietly livid that he was still alive.

‘Well, Tom said all the cash was there, but I cannae understand any of that coz you and I put it all in the safe, didn’t we?’

‘You saw me,’ I answered. ‘He must have stolen it, Mammy.’

Peter never spoke of the incident. When he came up to
Granda
Davy Percy’s house he didn’t even talk to me. I smiled as I asked him how his arms were healing. He knew it was me, but said nothing and just smiled back.

* * *

It was not long before Sean and I outgrew Granda Davy Percy’s house – we had started to buy furniture, a fridge, an electric fire and a bedside unit – and Old George offered us the chance to buy a flat above his pub in the rough Calton area of Glasgow. The neighbourhood was very Catholic and the pub was called the Nationalist Bar, but Old George told his son Philip, who managed the pub:

‘If Rangers fans come in, shout,
Fuck the Pope!
If Celtic fans come in, shout,
Fuck the Queen!
If the Amish come in, wear black and switch off the TV. Just get their money.’

Old George owned the whole big four-storey red sandstone building which stood on the corner of Green Street and the busy main London Road. It comprised the Nationalist Bar at ground level with two empty shops adjacent and then three floors above, three flats on each floor. The pub had survived a mysterious big fire in 1970, exactly ten years ago, and the building was basically sound and solid but badly needed repairs to the internal structure, facing sandstone and rooftop.

The Calton had once been a vibrant and busy area that led directly into Glasgow city centre but that part of the London Road was now a long, barren stretch of emptiness, seedy and run down. The Nationalist Bar’s four storeys were dwarfed by the abandoned but still-standing six-storey Templeton’s Carpet Factory across the London Road. It had been an amazingly beautiful building in its time though, by now, it was crumbling like the rest of the area. One entire side of the building had been built as a perfect replica of the side of the Doges’ Palace in Venice, including tiles, turrets and scooped windows – the shiny gold and blue tiles glinted on those rare occasions when the sun shone on the Calton. Behind Templeton’s was the once-sedate Glasgow Green which was now home to prostitutes, junkies and drunks. The houses of the community on both sides of the London Road had been razed to the ground, all the big majestic tenements had been dragged down and there were acres of wasteground beside Templeton’s on one side of the road and on the other the isolated red sandstone building which housed the Nationalist Bar.

Outside, with the wind in the right direction, you could smell the fumes from the seething, hoppy, chemical mash in the Whisky Bond buildings across the Clyde. Inside, unlike the glittering Palaceum bar and disco, the Nationalist Bar smelled of years of piss and smoke. The old brown wood-panelled walls had ancient pictures of scary animals and the occasional painting of President John F. Kennedy.

‘Why the pictures of Kennedy?’ I asked.

‘He was a Catholic.’

‘OK, but why the scary animals?’

No one had an explanation.

The customers were a mixture of old, hardened drinkers, a few younger guys, ancient bikers and some mad old prostitutes who roamed the Glasgow Green selling their wares. The jukebox had black vinyl records by the Beatles and Elvis Presley, both of whom I hated, and Bobby Darin singing ‘Mack The Knife’, which I loved: it was the one song which had all the old men sitting in the pub singing along like extras out of Michael Jackson’s video for ‘Thriller’. It was a great song for bringing people to life, though it was a song about death.

Sean and I moved into our new flat, on the first floor. The walls were plain brown and the curtains a horrible swirly orange. The fireplace in the living room had built-in wall-to-wall and ceiling-to-floor fake wood panelling. Old George had an obsession with wood panelling which defied logic; at Toad Hall, his hallways were all imitation wood panelling and it looked like a cheap mini bingo hall all the way upstairs. Here in our new flat, the extraordinary fireplace – which must have been specially built by a demented designer – had hideous wood-panelled shelving, and in between each shelf unit was a big leather bull’s head with lights behind it so that the eyes lit up when you switched the fireplace on. These, I was told, were leftovers from a Steakhouse bankrupt sale which Sean’s uncle had used to fit out the flat before we bought it. Old George had a penchant for ‘obtaining’ things at sales – they would first buy a carpet, then steal what they wanted and take it away hidden inside the rolled-up carpet.

The flat had a long hall, which was the norm with these big tenements, and Old George gave us fake leather handbag material to cover the floor, because he had bought it cheap at a sale. The fabric was brown and soon curled up at the edges and cracked all the way along the floor. I spent weeks tacking it down and gluing it. In that flat, my nightmares became worse and, for some reason, louder. Sometimes I lay awake listening to footsteps clomping up and down the hall and, when I got up to investigate, there was no one there but the hall was cold and I could see my breath as I gasped in the chill. There was also a strange smell like old people who had pissed on their clothing, or decomposed bodies – and the lights would flicker. I started to think it was haunted. One night I heard a noise, ran down the hall and, as I ran, the wardrobe doors burst open and piled-up newspapers came cascading out. I freaked. Soon afterwards, I got my brushes out and painted a colourful mural along the whole hallway: it curled round the doors and swept into the living room. It was a beach scene, all blues and greens with birds and flowers which I liked, but it freaked out Sean and his family when they saw it.

I fought back with, ‘Our floors are covered in fake leather handbag material!’

So Sean let my mural stay. His brother Philip Storrie managed the Nationalist Bar downstairs with wife Mary (Patsy Paton’s sister); and another brother, Dick Storrie, lived in one of the other flats in the building with his girlfriend Maggie, who hated me on sight. I did try to be friendly but hers was an extension of the general Storrie family hatred of me. Dick despised everything I did or said, so Maggie felt she had to join in. Sean’s brother Young George went even further in his hatred and in his attempts to split us up. I was walking down the main road in Shettleston one day, going to see my Mammy, when I was stopped by Mr Roberts, a wee bent-over man with a hacking cough.

‘Janey,’ he told me between coughs, ‘my son Stuart says thanks for the wedding invite but he cannae make it coz he is living in England noo.’

I had been friends with Stuart, but I had no idea what Mr Roberts was talking about. He started coughing his lungs up and walked off waving goodbye with one hand as he held a handkerchief over his mouth with the other. That same day, my Aunt Rita came round to see me at my Mammy’s.

‘Are ye getting married?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Ye never even invited me, did ye!’ she shouted.

My Mammy asked in amazement: ‘Whit’s this aboot, Janey?’

‘I don’t know, Mammy.’

Aunt Rita held out a wee white card to me. It was a wedding invitation sent to Barra, my ex-boyfriend. In fancy, scrolled handwriting, it read:

‘Barra’s sister gave it me,’ my Aunt Rita said. ‘He wanted to let you know he couldn’t make it coz he’s in prison.’

‘I don’t know anything about this,’ I replied, flummoxed.

I took the card home to show Sean.

‘It’s one of ma brothers,’ he said immediately.

‘Which one?’

‘Don’t know, but it’s definitely a Storrie stunt.’

We found out that at least 20 wedding invitations had gone out to various friends and family. Sean and I managed to trace them all and let the intended guests know it was a hoax, but I felt so embarrassed. I remembered what Sean had told me early in our relationship.

‘People will do things, but you’ve got to ignore them.’

The next day I sat with Frances, the barmaid at the Palaceum, a lovely girl, but a bit overwhelmed by Young George and easily influenced. She would iron his shirts and run errands for him in return for a bit of attention. After a few drinks, she told me that Young George had given her cash to get the cards, then traced all my relatives and ex-boyfriends and posted invitations.

‘It’s a good joke,’ he had told Frances. ‘Janey won’t be annoyed.’

I confronted Young George at the bar in front of Old George and Sean. He denied everything, shouting at me and screaming at Sean for accusing him.

‘Young George can be a bastard,’ Old George said. ‘Just ignore him.’

Sean and I did manage to laugh it off and, ironically, it gave us the courage to get married in reality. I can’t remember Sean ever actually proposing to me; I think we just went ahead without him asking and without me agreeing. We set the date as the same one Young George had printed on his fake wedding invitations.

‘I can never thank you enough,’ I smugly told Young George one night in Toad Hall. ‘I will be Janey Storrie and it is all thanks to you.’

‘Ye are Janey Currie!’ Young George started shouting. ‘You’ll never be Janey Storrie!’

‘We are even keeping to the date you set,’ I laughed at him.

‘You’ll never be part of ma family!’ he screamed and then he spat at me. He always spat.

* * *

Sean was still working at the Palaceum in Shettleston and I had just landed a job as chambermaid at a big hotel in the city centre. Moving down to live in the Calton seemed like the new start we needed. I liked the Nationalist Bar even more now. It was a real mix of hard-drinking men with a smattering of drug takers. I had never seen heroin in Shettleston, but it had already arrived here in the Calton. When the Shah of Iran had been deposed in 1979 and replaced by the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, fleeing businessmen couldn’t take their cash out of the country; instead, they converted it into heroin, which flooded into the West, including the streets of Glasgow’s East End. The Nationalist Bar had always been a great place to buy stolen goods – the locals were very industrious thieves – and heroin addiction stoked the need to steal more.