Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (18 page)

I made tea in the wee kitchen. The old table’s surface was encrusted with islands of white sugar that had hardened over time and turned brown where tea had been spilled over them, reminders of a dead woman’s attempt at making tea while drunk. I looked in the sink and there was her cold half-drunk mug of tea. I lifted up the black-stained floral chipped mug and smelled her smoky taint. She constantly drank tea. She constantly smoked. I stared at the wallpaper. It never changed. It was always beige and splattered with stains and fat.

The room seemed so small now.

I looked at my watch.

It was 9.02 a.m.

No Mammy.

Nothing but silence.

I left my Mammy’s home, hailed a cab and got back to the Nationalist Bar to open its doors at 11.00 a.m.

Sean held me tight.

‘Don’t assume anything … yet,’ he told me.

By this time, my entire family had gathered back at Mammy’s flat in Shettleston and was waiting for news, but I had my customers to serve here in the Nationalist Bar, in theory. In fact, we had no customers. By midday some had arrived. Sean kept telling me to go upstairs and wait for news, but I wanted to work. I put on the radio to distract myself and because one of the guys in the bar had friends in the British Army – he wanted to hear any reports of bad news from the Falklands. People were dying on the other side of the world. The radio newsreader said, ‘The body of a woman from Glasgow has been found in the River Clyde today. It is confirmed she is Annie Currie, aged 47, from Shettleston.’

Minutes later, the phone calls started. They were too late. A Radio Clyde newsreader had already told me my Mammy was dead. The bar spun out of focus. I could hear customers trying to ask Sean what was wrong.

‘Her mum’s just been found dead,’ I heard Sean explain to the bewildered pool players. I ran outside and sat on the stairs by the pub. I didn’t want to go up to Shettleston. I didn’t want to go up to my Mammy’s house. She wasn’t there. She was dead. Sean tried to reason with me and get me to go upstairs to our flat. Instead, I ran alone across the busy London Road, past the Doges’ Palace tiled on the side of the old Templeton’s Carpet Factory, thrashed my way through the long grass, dragged my feet through all the tall spring daffodils and stood watching the River Clyde belt along on its way downstream. The dark bubbling water never stopped. I watched as each leaf and piece of debris floated past me. I had loved that river. On hot summer days, I had sat here. The Clyde had betrayed me. It had killed my Mammy. My head was exploding with anger and pain.
That bastard Peter killed my Mammy!
I sat on the grass and hugged my knees. Everything about that day hurt me. The beautiful smell of the spring flowers blooming all around me. The happy kids playing beside the water. I had no feeling except pain and fear. I walked back to the pub and let Sean take me upstairs. But nothing could take away from inside my head the image of Mammy’s dead body being dragged from the river.
Was she in one piece? Was she dressed? Did she struggle?
Everything ran round and round and round in my head.

The police came to tell me that Peter had admitted he saw Mammy fall into the water, then walked home in the dark on his own.

‘It’s not illegal to watch someone fall in the water and not report it,’ they explained offhandedly to me.

‘He fucking tried to kill her before,’ I tried to argue.

Nothing happened. Peter had given the police his statement. Annie Currie fell into the Clyde and died. End of story. She was an ordinary wee East End woman who meant nothing to them. The week passed in a blur. Her funeral was on the following Monday. I sat in the undertaker’s and stared at her coffin. I was 21. Nothing made any sense to me. My Mammy was gone and my brother was very ill because Peter had stabbed him, yet the police let Peter go free. As far as Sean was concerned, dealing with Peter was not a Storrie problem; it was a Currie problem. Old George would certainly not ‘take care’ of Peter: that was up to my brothers. My Mammy was
their
kin.

When Vid was released from hospital after three days, we all tried to carry on with our lives. I don’t know how the rest of my family dealt with it all. I went back to work. I simply went into the bar each day, poured pints, served customers and carried on with the routine. Sean and Paul rallied round and did their best to help me, but nothing mattered. I simply pretended it had never happened. Each day I got up and worked, sent Paul to school and opened the bar.

My Dad, of course, was devastated. He would phone me and try his best to come see me each week. He was still sober and remained off the drink despite the terrible time we were all going through. I never spoke to my brothers or sister about it; I never asked any more questions, I changed the records in the jukebox and told myself Mammy was still living in Shettleston and I would go see her soon. It was a comforting, good daydream.

My nightmares got worse and, in them, I started to run down hundreds and hundreds of spiral stairs as if I were looking for someone but couldn’t find them. Down and down and down I would run, never getting to the bottom, never finding anyone, sometimes waking up feeling suffocated, gasping, barely able to breathe.

My nightmares might be understandable but the totally unexpected element was that, in the weeks after my Mammy’s funeral, Sean fell apart. He threw temper tantrums and verbally attacked me; he screamed into my face and told me to leave. I could not even begin to make sense of it all. I was still fucked mentally after Mammy’s death. In the middle of one night, I simply took my coat and walked out. I walked through the streets, just pacing with my head down. I didn’t try to understand his mood, I just walked. It must have been about three hours later that I stopped and lifted my head up. I found I was actually way past the city centre. I had walked about six or seven miles. I was standing in the early hours of dawn, facing the River Clyde down at the old abandoned shipyards of Govan, where they had built the Queen Mary.

I sat on an old rusty dockside and rested. I was so tired. There were two old men sitting near me – old drunks who slept rough. The smell of piss was awful but I sat tight. They looked at me with sidelong glances but never spoke a word. I stayed there for hour upon hour, just sitting, thinking and trying to calm the noises and images in my head. Arguments, shouting, angry faces, my Mammy’s coffin being slid into the black hearse, Sean ranting at me. It was like all these scenes were on film but they were all playing at once. Fear and anger and shouting and swearing all travelling through my head. It must have been late afternoon by the time I walked back to the Nationalist Bar. I don’t know what I expected to say or what I expected to face but, when I stepped into the bar, Sean held me tight and pleaded his apologies to me.

I never spoke; I smiled at him and poured myself a Coca-Cola.

He was so upset.

‘Seeing your Mammy’s coffin brought it all back to me,’ he said. ‘My mammy dying. How I stopped speaking after she died.’

I stood looking down at him sitting there explaining how worried he had been, how he hated himself, and I sat down to let him hold my hand. He apologised. I accepted and, in my head, I wondered if Mammy was sitting in her wee pub drinking a beer and laughing.

The next day, I carried on serving drinks, looking after Paul and getting ready for our boating holiday in Norfolk. Paul was so excited. I personally didn’t want to go anywhere near a river but we had it all booked and organised and Sean’s brother Stephen and his wife Jackie were set to join us halfway through the holiday.

We travelled overnight on a sleeper train and arrived in Norwich early the next day. Paul scrambled into the wee boat and unpacked his bag quickly, sussing out the boat immediately. I was terrified of stepping on board. The sight of water made me uneasy, but I did not tell Sean or Paul. I stared into the water, imagining my Mammy sinking slowly beneath the murky surface. The image would not leave my head. Half the week I imagined she was still in Shettleston and the other half I watched the weeds for movement. The Norfolk Broads were awesome; the peacefulness was good for my soul. I spent loads of time painting the trees and views. After four days, Stephen and Jackie arrived with their little yappy dog in tow. We took the boat all the way across open Broads to Great Yarmouth and Paul spent the day at the funfair and on the beach. I read Voltaire’s
Candide
which amazed me – Candide just got fucked at every turn. Everything was fucked and the philosopher-teacher said
Well, whatever is meant to be is meant to be
– I thought
Get fucked! Surely every single tragedy in your life isn’t just meant to show you light at the end of some tunnel
. What a pile of trite shite!

Sean alternated between behaving like a bereaved son-in-law and a moody arsehole. I couldn’t be bothered with either. It was a relief to get back to Glasgow the following week. At least I could concentrate on something that took my mind away from the pain. The pub kept Sean busy and out of my face for a while, though his sleeping patterns were getting worse and he sometimes never slept through the night: instead, he would stay awake and keep me awake too – arguing. It was OK for him – he would sleep all the next morning – but I had to open the bar. I resented his moodiness and almost every day would make plans to leave him.

But where would I go? Mammy wasn’t there to go back to any more. Should I admit defeat and stay at my sister Ann’s? Should I just kill him and hope I could get away with it?
No, that was stupid
. But what if he got really violent and killed me? It did happen. If anyone knew that it was me.
Men did kill their partners
.

I would sit in the bar and write everything down in a wee book I kept. One day, I poured out everything I felt about my Mammy’s death, about all the injustice, all the fear, all the anger I kept hidden inside me. Sean’s brother Philip found it under the till and read it aloud to the rest of the Storrie family. They all laughed.

Old George teased me: ‘You gonnae kill Peter, are ye? You’re gonnae write to the Prime Minister aboot yer wee Mammy? We all read it in yer book, Janey. Maybe Peter never killed her, coz I think he is a nice wee guy. Maybe I
should
get him to dig ma garden. I heard he wiz good with gardens.’

Old George seemed to enjoy torturing me. He behaved the same to his sons. If he found a weakness, he would pick at it like a scab until it bled. Old George had lost his wife; his sons had lost their own mother; but they were not averse to hurting me and laughing about my Mammy’s death.

THAT SAME SUMMER
of 1982, Glasgow Council was cleaning parks and planning parties because Pope John Paul II was coming to the city. It was supposed to be a celebration, but it divided the city on vicious sectarian lines. Local pastor Jack Glass led protests against the arrival of the ‘Antichrist’ from Rome, proclaiming that the man had ‘no right to set foot on a Protestant island’. I wanted to go to Bellahouston Park to see the Pope; I felt it was a great piece of history I could actually witness taking place. But I had to work that day as Old George had organised one of his regular trips to a sale and Sean had to go with him. Any sale was a big event in Old George’s diary and I hated them as he often brought back hideous furniture or carpets and declared them cheap quality and worth putting in the bar. Even worse, they were often installed by the Storrie family’s handyman, a skinny man not unlike an orang-utan, who was known only as The Gow. He was bald, with tufts of red hair on the side of his head and had thick curly red hair escaping out the top of his shirt. Everything he built had a tendency to fall apart, to the point that ‘Gow-built’ became a euphemism for rickety.

I had to watch the Pope on TV in the Nationalist Bar. All the Catholic customers wept as they watched the wrinkled wee white-robed man bless Glasgow. Sean came home late that night, filthy and carrying the brightest, cheapest orange carpet I had ever seen.

The new houses across the road from the Nationalist Bar were finally coming together and we had decided to revamp the pub in preparation for the new community that was about to descend on us. A plan was drawn up and Old George’s mates were hauled in to start the work. One of George’s mottoes wa
s Never pay a contractor – instead hire someone who is family or who spent time in prison with you
. We did not close the pub; George’s mates merely built, painted and hammered around us, filling the place with sawdust, paint fumes and odd blokes fitting mirrors. George was clever. He paid them, then got the money back in booze bought over the bar.

Wee shrivelled Angus who came to reupholster our couches was 86 and looked 106. His body and gnarled hands were bent over his wee bag, his trousers kept falling down and I could not imagine a man who did not understand the concept of a belt being able to cover all our wall seating.

‘I was the guy who upholstered the Queen Mary,’ he mumbled while pulling up old pants and tweed trousers. ‘You ask anybody up in Govan an’ they will tell ye it wiz me.’ He put a big handful of nails into his mouth and leaned onto the wooden backs of the seats as he stretched fake leather burgundy material (the same stuff we had on our bedroom floor) and deftly hammered in a perfect straight row of nails that he spat from his lips to his cracked palm as he went. He was agile and fit while he was working but, the minute he stopped, he lay on the floor and slept for 20 minutes at a time.

‘I think that old man is gonnae die, Sean,’ I whispered.

‘It’s the work that keeps him going.’

The job was finished in three days, the pale split beige plastic replaced by studded burgundy fake leather, all gleaming and new, and we changed the name of the pub from
T
HE
N
ATIONALIST
B
AR
to
T
HE
W
EAVERS
I
NN
. The new estate across the London Road was to be called Weavers Court and our pub would be the perfect cosy bar that added to that new community of would-be Yuppies. We had, though, to make a big decision about our current clientele, because some were either mad drunks or crazy fighting boys. This would not fare well with the new would-be Yuppies.