Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (2 page)

Dad would spend all of the next day with a big box of television valves and a soldering iron weakly smiling his apologies to me as I helped him repair the big brown box. I loved the smell of the solder and the burning flex and the valves looked like big science-fiction bombs wrapped in tissue. I was fascinated that electricity could go into the set along thin wires and make a picture of the real world. My insistent questions about television tubes and electricity must have driven him mad – not a very good thing for a man who was usually nursing a raging hangover.

The Waverley pub where he spent so much time intrigued me. On Fridays and Saturdays, I used to peep in and breathe the warm, beer-smelly cigarette-smoky glow. I had no interest in alcohol or cigarettes; I just wanted to be in there and figure out why adults were so obsessed with the place. My eyes would scan the long thin room and see all my friends’ dads standing around in their best suits, spending their hard-earned cash on long boozing sessions. The biggest dare we local kids had was to run into the Waverley bar through one door and skip out the other end without getting caught; but I was always too scared to do this in case Dad got hold of me. Whenever he even caught me standing at the door, I would get such a blast of his anger that his disappointment in me worried my soul. But I knew he would never hit me. I was his favourite. I could do most things and get away with it by making him laugh. When he was not drunk he was a really good Dad and he did love my Mammy; I would often catch them in the kitchen kissing and hugging each other and I would run over.

‘Let go of her, Dad! Tell me it’s only me you love!’

My Mammy had had a difficult life. When she was a teenager her own mammy had died, leaving her to bring up a wee brother aged six and a sister aged eight because her father, my Granda Davy Percy, was a useless bastard. Another sister, only slightly younger than she was, did not want any of the responsibility and left to work in England. So my Mammy became, in effect, a mother to her own family, then became pregnant by my father when she was 19 and by the time I was born – her fourth child – she was 26 and must have been emotionally frayed. She would talk to me with real fondness about her own mother who had died so young but, when I listened to these rose-tinted tales of her childhood, I just felt she had had a better deal than we were getting now. The way she told it, she had lived in a beautiful Sally of Sunshine Street land. The way she told it, her mammy was a clean woman, a good woman who made great dumplings and held glamorous dances for soldiers during the Second World War. It was as if her mammy had been a rock who held the family together by sheer personal strength. I dreamed in my childish imagination that my dead grandmother would come back and take me to her lovely clean home and hold
my
family together.

My Mammy told me wistful tales of how she used to swim in the clear blue Firth of Clyde off Saltcoats, a seaside town just down the coast from Largs in Ayrshire, and how she once saved a man’s life.

‘A prisoner escaped from jail and fell into the sea off Saltcoats and I rescued him,’ she told me.

Sometimes, after telling me these tales of her sunny childhood and the clear blue Scottish seas, she would lean over our dirty window-sill, stick her head out of our grey stone flat and chat to the neighbours downstairs.

Directly beneath us lived Mr Woods, a deaf mute who owned a moped. He made loud noises when he tried to communicate: ‘Bpheergh!’ he would go, as if you had just stood on a dog’s back leg. ‘Pheerch! Bweett!’ He never actually said words, just whooping noises and yelping sounds. Many of the local kids were scared of him but I was not because, by listening carefully to him and watching his hands, I learned to understand what he was trying to say. After a few years, I taught myself sign language so I could run errands for him, the incentive being that he always gave me a decent tip – threepence or sixpence. Sometimes he would even give me a short trip on his pale blue moped and I loved it. Zooming around the local streets on his buzzing bike was great fun for a wee kid who had never been in a car.

My best pal Rachel lived upstairs with her gran and uncle, her home an exact replica of ours except it was very clean, smelled lovely and they had a dark red carpet and a telephone. She had a loving, caring family who enjoyed being with her and her uncle would often take both of us out to nearby Tollcross Park or to a museum. The trip I remember most was the day he took us to the People’s Palace right by the River Clyde, a big red building with sweeping staircases and giant columns – it was like going into a fairytale castle.

As well as Rachel upstairs, at the bottom of our street I also vaguely knew a very pretty girl called Sandra who was wee, blonde and all the adults said she had cute dimples. She was a Catholic and normally my Mammy used to warn me: ‘Don’t play with Fenians!’ I wasn’t allowed to play with the boys who lived across the street because they were Catholics. But my Mammy got on well with Sandra’s mammy so we were allowed to talk. Sandra had lots of brothers and some sisters and they all looked exactly the same: they all had blond hair and intense, staring blue eyes like the alien children in the movie
Children of the Damned
. She used to play with a little blond boy called Barra and his six blond brothers, who were also Catholics.

There were lots of children in the neighbourhood and soon we had a new dog too. It was at some drunken friend’s party that my Dad first saw a wee black German Alsatian which was being neglected by his owner. He felt sorry for the poor wee puppy, so picked it up and brought it home. The dog had smooth black and brown fur and big brown eyes with white dots above each eyebrow. Unfortunately, because he had been abused, he was a biting, vicious, angry dog and aggressive to everyone except me. My mother took to telling him: ‘Don’t play with Fenian dogs!’ We called him Major and he became my eternal hero, my pal and, sometimes, my protector because I had a secret that I couldn’t tell anyone else. I could only tell my dog friend, because Major would listen and not tell any human being the damning truth about me.

I don’t really know when it started but I do know I feared my Mammy’s brother from when I was very small. He lived minutes away, one block from our house. His name was David Percy, named after his father, my Granda Davy Percy. Everyone commented on how good my Uncle David was with children and especially with me. At family parties, he would sing
Baby face! You got the cutest little baby face!
And he would call me Sweet Pea:

‘Sweet Pea, go an’ get me a glass for ma beer … Sweet Pea, c’mon here an’ jump up on ma knee …’

He was around twelve years older than me and would wait for my Mammy and my Dad to go out, then take me into my bedroom. I kept my head down but I knew the drill. He sat me on the bed and I can still smell the cigarette smoke on his hands as he stroked my face. The long, brown-stained fingers would slowly pull up my skirt. My legs would go stiff. I tried my hardest to will them never to open again, never to spread my knees apart for him, but I did what he told me.

‘Lie down, Sweet Pea.’

My body goes like a plank of wood. He leans over me and starts to open his trousers. I turn my head to the wall.
I
can hear the zip go down. He lifts the hem of my skirt and puts it right up to my chest. His smelly fingers hook inside the top of my knickers and he pulls them down. He digs those fingers inside me as his other big hand grabs my small hand and puts it inside his open flies. He rasps words through his smoky breath. I know how to rub him up and down. He has shown me. I keep my face away from him and stare at the wall. My sister Ann has stuck a picture of TV’s David Cassidy and The Partridge Family on the wall. I focus on the Partridge mother’s face, smiling and gentle, her arms around her family. I shut my brain down and pretend I am in Disneyland, that perfect place I have seen on TV with the big magic castle. When thinking of Disneyland does not distance me enough from the pain between my legs, I rub him harder and link letters to numbers in my head … a = 1 and b = 2 and c = 3 … I like codes and can think in numbers.

‘You like it when I touch ye?’ His fingernails scratch bits of my inner flesh I had not known were there.

‘495,’ I tell him quietly.

‘Whit?’ He looks confused. ‘Just keep rubbing it hard!’

I know he will never get the code.

I LOVED LEARNING
and was eager to get to school. At home, Dad had always played competitive number and spelling games and anagrams with the family and had made no concession for the fact I was the youngest. He was always banging on about how education was important. So my first teacher Miss Cubie was amazed that, at the age of five, I could read and write long words from the school’s word boxes like

ENTHUSIASM

Some children are scared of big words but, at home, I was used to making words out of other words for anagrams, so I knew how to break words down in my head:

EN – THU – SI – ASM

As soon as I met any new teacher, I made an anagram of her name. I thought of Miss Cubie as Miss Bue-ic. Janice Malone was my pal and I made her surname into ‘a lemon’. Miss Cubie let me go round my class with the chalk board on which I had written ENTHUSIASM and she even took me into an older classroom.

‘Look at this wee girl,’ she said. ‘She’s only in the First Class but she can write a big word like this.’

I loved the attention and I remember other teachers saying ‘Wow!’ and I thought
Fantastic! Get me more of that attention!

I loved everything about school from Day One. It had an order and structure which contrasted with the chaos of my life at home. At school, you had a lunchtime when you actually got fed a proper lunch rather than just an Oxo cube. Before teatime I would sometimes go to Shettleston Public Library and look at the big books with maps of the world and imagine where I could go when I was older. The library smelled of polished oak and had a silent stillness – there were no dogs barking, no children with squinty-eyes fighting and screaming in the stairwell, no adults shouting at each other and you could sit and read books in complete silence.

At school, I also found my gift was storytelling – I was the funny girl, the one who always managed to tell a story to deflect the pain I felt inside. I wanted to be the wee girl with the bright bows in her hair wearing clean socks and pants, but I wasn’t. There
were
kids in my class who did not live in poverty. They had lovely clean homes with a garden. They had mums and dads who smelled nice and did not shout. Sometimes I would walk up roads where my school-friends lived and see clean teddy bears sitting on clean window-sills; I used to imagine what it would be like to live in those houses, with clean sheets on my clean bed and lots of tasty food which I could eat off clean plates. I didn’t want to live in a smelly house with an uncle who did things to me.

Sometimes one of my friends would invite me to her home and I would see the look on her mother’s face when she met her little girl’s best friend. The mother would smile yet flinch at this skinny, scruffy waif who was introduced to her, but I always won these mothers over by smiling happily and talking about school and homework and everything they wanted to hear. This also avoided any probing questions about my family. In reality, these people were just ordinary, hard-working Glasgow folk but, in my mind, they were very, very lucky, special people. I was more comfortable going round to little, blonde Sandra’s house which had that familiar, sweet, sickly smell of beds wet with children’s piss. I didn’t like girls’ dolls. I destroyed them quite a lot when they seemed to be too clean and pretty; I felt they needed to be dirtied. I broke dolls’ arms and legs and drew on their faces. I preferred playing football.

I was a plucky child and one that – to the outside world – seemed to survive most situations but, in the middle of the freezing winter of 1966, I stripped down to my vest and underpants and stood beneath a gushing chilly gutter flood to enjoy a ‘wee shower’. Within hours I had collapsed on the living-room floor with a raging fever and became delirious. That week, I almost died of pneumonia and my Mammy had to be sedated as I drifted in and out of consciousness. They told her I was very close indeed to death but, slowly, I managed to pull through. Prior to that illness, I had had frequent urinary infections and kidney problems and, in light of the pneumonia and the bruises which they found on my body, I had more doctors’ attention from then on. I was only five years old. My GP suggested prescribing the drug Valium.

‘She has behavioural problems,’ he told my parents.

It was around this time that I got the nickname ‘Shakey Cakey’ coz I trembled so much but no one ever thought to ask
why
such a small child would shake so much. I also had a tendency to harm myself. But no one ever thought to ask me
why
. After the illness, I just continued with my life as usual and getting back to my beloved school was very important to me although, by now, I seemed to annoy many of the teachers just by my very presence. They would ask me haughtily:

‘Does
no one
in your family own a hairbrush?’

‘Do you not own a
single
clean dress?’

I annoyed them even more because, although I was right-handed, I had taken to using my left hand for writing. Several teachers tried to stop me continuing this strange ritual, but I could never truthfully explain to them why I did it: I hated the fact that my Uncle made me touch him with my right hand. In art class – my favourite – I started drawing pictures with my left hand while trying to paint them in, at the same time, using my right hand.

‘Stop using both your hands!’ the teacher would tell me and hit me on the back of my knuckles with a ruler. ‘Just use your right hand!’

I felt I needed to get everything done quickly. I used to paint at home and would not do anything else until I had completed the whole painting. At school, my teacher would say: ‘The lesson is over. You can come back next week to finish the painting,’ but I would scream and scream until I was allowed to finish it there and then.