Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (24 page)

‘See,’ Ashley would squeal, ‘I knew you could say it, Grandad!’ and she would jump back up to hug him tight.

I tried to bring her up speaking politely. I hated my own East End dialect and accent. So Ashley was taught to pronounce the words ‘head’ and ‘bread’ instead of the local Glaswegian ‘heed’ and ‘breed’. But this just ended up confusing her totally. One afternoon, I held her in my arms as we looked out of our window at the rain – it was Glasgow, after all – and I asked without thinking: ‘Can ye see whit’s oot the windae?’ Then I immediately corrected myself: ‘Sorry, Ashley, the word is
window
not
windae
. Mummy was silly talking like that.’

The next day, as I carried her down the street, her wee woolly hat blew off and I said to her: ‘It’s very windy today.’

‘No, Mummy,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s very
window
.’

Sean adored her, but his behaviour was still erratic. When Ashley was out of the way, he would start picking on me, even throwing an occasional slap at me. I would sit quietly wishing him dead because then I thought all my problems would be solved. When he got angry, he would tell me, ‘Don’t ever take my baby! If you want to leave me, then you go alone! I am telling you, Janey, if you take my daughter away from me, I will hunt you down. Take the money – you can fucking take the lot of it – but don’t you ever take Ashley!’

I knew I could never take her away from him. Not because I was scared, but because she adored him as much as he loved her. I accepted Sean would never be the husband I needed but I knew he would always be the father she wanted. I never wanted to separate them; I remembered vividly being separated from my own father when I was a child. It had broken my heart.

* * *

Locally, I had friends who came round for tea with their own chubby wee kids. Donna was one of them. Her daughter Kara was only a bit older than Ashley. Donna was a heroin addict but a great mother to that wee blonde girl she carried everywhere. She and I would sit just like any other two mothers, chatting and watching their babies play on the floor.

‘Ashley is getting big, Janey,’ Donna told me, smiling happily once as Ashley climbed onto her knee. ‘I’m gonnae get off the smack and be there more for my ain wee wean.’

Soon afterwards, Donna’s mother came round to the Weavers to beg me not to buy any children’s clothes from Donna. ‘I buy everything for wee Kara but Donna tries to sell all the good stuff to buy drugs.’

‘She has never tried to sell me anything,’ I replied honestly.

It didn’t surprise me that Donna sold her child’s clothes to feed her heroin habit, nor that Donna’s mother had come round to plead with me. It was a sad fact of life in the area that, increasingly, young mothers were selling clothes off their own children’s backs and sometimes even selling themselves.

George’s prophecy was coming true:
Drug dealers are fucking bad luck, Janey. Their kids will die, they will die and bad luck will fucking land on all their families
.

One local drug dealer’s wee boy climbed into an abandoned car, which somehow caught fire; he couldn’t get out and was burnt to death. Locals shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘That’s what happens when you sell drugs to weans.’

Two brothers of another local drug dealer died and then his child was killed in a car accident. A third dealer who, unlike most, never took drugs himself, lost his daughter and mother to cancer within weeks of each other. It was as if a vengeful God were striking down the entire families of wrongdoers, as if a list had been kept somewhere by Fate and names were slowly being ticked off one by one.

Even Glasgow crime ‘godfather’ Arthur Thompson’s daughter Margaret died from a drugs overdose. Drug addicts were dying and the count was getting higher. Each death became less of a shock. I half expected my brother Mij to be the next one found dead in some flat somewhere. He would often come over to the Weavers from the Gorbals with exaggerated tales of lost Giro cheques and stolen wallets, in the hope I would bail him out. Heroin addiction makes people the best improvisers in the universe and he was playing out the whole Glasgow drug image thing; he even got two Pit Bull Terriers called Rocky and Tyson.

Sammy was as horrified as I was by what was happening. ‘That fucker,’ he said, naming a local drug baron, ‘drives about in his big BMW, living in a council house; he goes to Spain every other week with his wife and it’s all financed by kids dying in the street.’ Sammy hated heroin. So did I.

But I had no moral problems about running a pub. Alcohol and spirits were legal, therefore I was doing nothing wrong but sometimes I wondered if maybe watching all these people slowly destroy their lives with the booze I sold them made me as bad as the drug dealers. I used to watch the women in the Weavers letting themselves go wild on booze. Some very respectable, professional, married woman would start getting loud and falling about or, in some cases, get pissed-drunk and end up shagging Sammy. There was a hidden corner of the bar which I could only see because of a well-placed security mirror and sometimes I’d see Sammy snogging some local woman or getting her tits out. One woman I liked worked at the Stock Exchange in Glasgow and she would arrive in her business suit, stay all night and, by the end of the evening, she’d be so pissed-drunk she would pee down her tights, slide off her chair and have to be carried home. ‘Ooh! Whit?’ she’d slur, slightly surprised.

I never understood why people wanted to drink vodka late at night in a bar, but then I never drank and never fancied getting drunk. Alcohol to me was only a method of losing control and I hated the thought of losing control. I had watched my Dad and my Mammy lose control – him falling all over the house, looking nothing like the man I admired, her banging her head and incapable of even fighting Peter off as she, in my mind’s eye, struggled with him that horrible night on the bank of the River Clyde. They found high levels of alcohol in her system when they checked the dead body; maybe if she had been sober she would still be alive. So I hated booze, but didn’t mind selling it. And it had the advantage of attracting eccentric and interesting clientele.

One couple were very keen on listening to Country and Western music. ‘Wild Bill’ was a thin, tall man in his late sixties with a middle-class Glasgow accent and grey-white shoulder-length hair. He always wore a Wild West stetson hat and dressed in full, black cowboy gear – not just in our bar but in his everyday life. He actually had a ‘Red Indian’ squaw who called herself Sioux. Well, she wasn’t a real Red Indian. She spoke with a Glasgow council-estate accent and wore traditional Sioux clothes around the streets in her daily life – loose-fitting animal-hide clothes with Indian beads round her neck. It always amazed me how this man who liked to dress up as a cowboy had found a woman in Glasgow who, just by luck, liked to dress up as an Indian. She was maybe a wee bit retarded: she looked like she’d maybe made baskets as a teenager or had a gene missing and she had the strangest mouth I’d ever seen. She had inexplicable teeth. When she smiled, her lips parted and her gums looked as if they were made of dark yellow plastic while her teeth had layers of lighter yellow plaque on them. She had jet-black hair plaited into Red Indian pony-tails with big ribbons on them and she also had a slight black moustache, which was quite disconcerting.

You couldn’t hold a conversation with her. I’d say, ‘That’s a lovely dress you’ve got on.’

She’d reply, ‘Uhwhuhehe,’ and just laugh and I’d think
Right. Wild Bill has found a backward Indian called Sioux. In Glasgow
. I wondered if she might actually live in a wigwam somewhere in Maryhill, near where my Dad had bought a flat.

In 1891 and 1904, the real Buffalo Bill Cody had come to Glasgow with his Wild West Show featuring 100 Red Indians plus cowboys, Mexicans, Bedouins, Cossacks, Argentinian gauchos, Japanese cavalry, buffalo, elk, horses, a group of African tribesmen, six performing Burmese elephants, Annie Oakley wearing tartan and a man on a bicycle who did stunts. They were all based in the big army barracks at Maryhill and about seven or eight of Wild Bill’s Sioux Indians stayed on in Glasgow and married Scottish women. In my childhood, we had sung the local nursery rhyme:

Buffalo Bill from Maryhill

Disnae work and never will

It seemed that, perhaps, their descendants still roamed the streets of Glasgow.

WHEN ASHLEY TURNED
three, Sean developed various worrying ailments, like flu, food poisoning and the migraine headaches he’d had all his life but much worse. He got very thin and weak. Lots of people thought he had AIDS; this was, after all, the East End of Glasgow in 1989. It was really hard on me, as I had to work double shifts to make up his hours; I became exhausted trying to do everything in the Weavers and looking after the flats day to day. Ashley was juggled between my Dad and my sister Ann. Eventually, after months of worsening illness, Sean went into hospital for a lumbar puncture to drain spinal fluid and he also had a brain scan. The hospital tested him and assured him he did not have AIDS, but the scan revealed he had had a brain haemorrhage. I felt terribly guilty; I had wished him dead so many times.

Sean became even more ill, so weak that he could hardly walk or talk at all; it was as if he were turning into a vegetable. Ashley understood what was happening and was stricken with fear. She was a real daddy’s girl and did not want him to stay in hospital. She once refused to leave his bedside and screamed as she was dragged off by the nurses. My Dad visited Sean daily. Old George never went once; I explained what was wrong with Sean by phone and he never asked again, not even for any progress reports. As I did not drive, while Sean was ill, Sammy drove me to the cash-and-carry warehouse to buy goods for the Weavers. But, one night, Sean’s brother Stephen drove me because he wanted to borrow Sean’s car afterwards. When we got to the till, I pulled out Old George’s cheque book and signed a cheque for the alcohol and food.

‘Is that my da’s cheque book?’ Stephen asked me suspiciously.

‘Aye,’ I said irritably. ‘It’s the same cheque book I’ve been signing for the last seven years. Why?’

‘Does my da know you sign his cheques?’ Stephen asked, even more suspicious.

‘Aye he fucking knows!’ I snapped back. ‘OK? It is his pub. I have worked there for the last nine years. We use his cheque book. We give him the books to check. What is your fucking problem? D’ye think if I wanted to steal with your da’s cheque book I would buy booze and fags when I don’t drink or smoke? Oh and, by the way, booze and fags happen to be what we sell in the fucking pub. Ye think that’s a coincidence?’

The till girl carried on putting goods in bags without looking at us; she knew me because I came in and signed a cheque every other week.

Sean had just come out of hospital two days before and was lying at home in bed, trying to do all the books and deal with the cashflow while he struggled with his brain and lung disorders. His speech was slow and he felt constantly confused.

The next afternoon, Old George came to see him at the Weavers, although he had never visited him in hospital. Sean dragged himself out of bed and went downstairs with me. There were just the three of us plus Sammy and Paul and a few old men down the far end of the bar.

‘Why is she using my cheque book?’ Old George snapped at Sean.

‘Janey always signs the cheques, Da. She’s always done the cash-and-carry run with Sammy. Who d’ye think runs this place? I’ve been away for six weeks.’

‘I don’t like it!’ Old George snarled back.

‘Well, big fucking deal,’ replied Sean. ‘Here – I’ll tell ye whit, Da, why don’t ye give the cheque book to your junkie sons and I’ll take the thieving wife away? That’s it. Here – take the fucking pub keys!’ He slammed the keys onto the bar. ‘Sammy, Paul, Janey – upstairs!’ Sean boomed. ‘I need you to bring doon all my da’s paperwork and all of the fucking accounts and any other shite that belongs to him.’

Old George stood firm; he was as white as a sheet and gritted his teeth so loud they could almost hear it at the other end of the bar. He always literally gritted his teeth when he was angry. Sammy, Paul and I bolted out of the door and ran upstairs. Sean followed us slowly.

‘Sean,’ I tried to placate him when we were all upstairs. ‘Be careful. Old George is angry.’

‘Well, fuck him!’ Sean screamed as he packed files and folders into a big box. ‘This is all shite, Janey! You have been helping with his paperwork for years, running his fucking bar, counting all the cash in the machines, dealing with licences and – suddenly – you are stealing by using a cheque book at the fucking cash and carry?’ He slowly walked downstairs again and dramatically slammed the bar door open, carrying a big cardboard whisky box. Old George had not moved. Bemused customers were patiently standing at the bar waiting to be served. I walked in slowly behind Sean.

‘I will go serve the —’ I started to say as I stepped behind the bar.

‘No!’ Sean shouted at me. ‘Don’t fucking serve anyone! You are a thief, remember? Let
him
fucking serve
his
customers!’ Sean banged the box down in front of his dad. ‘Here you are – all your accounts for the flats above, the bank details, the council reports Janey got for the grant we are trying to get for the building, the takings from the Weavers and any other shite I have that we do for you. Take these and yer pub keys and don’t fucking ever even speak to me again!’ Sean walked straight back out of the door and went upstairs again. I was left in the bar, rooted to the spot. The customers just looked at me as if to say
Are we ever going to get served?

Old George stood there, rock solid, like one of those faces on Mount Rushmore, and stared at me with that chilling look in his eyes which used to freak me out – like he just didn’t care what happened to me or to himself. I knew Old George would do anything; he’d be willing to throw everything away; it was the sort of stare a cat gives a mouse or a bird just before it jumps.

Eventually, after a terrifyingly long silence, Old George spoke: ‘This is all your fault!’ he growled.