Nipper (28 page)

The first time Sophie and I went away again, which was on our honeymoon, I was anxious and apprehensive that I would repeat the disastrous fiasco of our eight months in Spain. But the honeymoon turned out to be perfect, and after the Maldives we’ve had other holidays together, with no problems.

I have passed my driving test at the fifth attempt; though I failed four times in England, I went back to Dundee to see
if I knew the roads any better and it worked! I now own my own business, and Sophie and I are expecting our first child. I can’t wait to see his or her little face when he or she comes into the world. One thing I know for certain: I will never treat my children the way Dad treated me.

Now that we’re going to have a kid and I’ve felt the baby kicking through Sophie’s belly and can feel its hand running across my hand through her stomach, I just do not, and never will in a million years, understand how Dad could have done what he did to me and a four-foot-tall woman and my dog Bonnie.

You’d have to be pretty sick in the head to think that I deserved all the punishment he gave me because I was a naughty boy. If I heard a little kid saying
please please please
for hours I would smash the door down, phone the police, do anything in my power to stop it, but people back then just seemed to accept it.

Somebody said to me once, he must have had a hard time on his own bringing me up. Bringing me up? He didn’t bring me up. He dragged me up. He beat me up, he smashed me up. I do not get it and I never will. All I can say is that I think there must be a bad gene, a cut-off switch that’s gone, a chemical imbalance. Maybe it’s the mixture of Scottish and Irish:
that
, as a good friend of mine once said,
will do it!

My granddad had it and my dad had it. But thank God I don’t have it. If I ever lifted my hand to a woman or child – which I’ve never done – I’d wake up the next day and I’d leave.

While Sophie and I were on our honeymoon, I received a phone call from my cousin, telling me that Dad had died. I didn’t know what to feel. I felt numb. Maybe I felt nothing, or maybe I felt everything, I just don’t know. Sophie suggested going home, but left it for me to decide. I felt that we both needed the break and should try to enjoy the rest of our honeymoon after everything we had been through.

On returning from the Maldives I received a telephone call from Tommy who was in prison at the time. After Dad’s death his house was about to be repossessed by the council. As Tommy had some belongings in there he asked if I could go to Dundee and collect them and take them over to a friend’s house. While I was there, collecting Tommy’s things, I found a single sheet of paper, face down on a hi-fi speaker. I don’t know why but I turned it over to read it. In what seemed to be drunken, squiggly handwriting it simply said:

All I can say at this point is: what a waste of a life. When he was sober he couldn’t face the person he was and the things he had done so he, literally, bottled out.

I miss the good times with him, when we went camping, and went to see Dundee United and when he told jokes, because sober he was hilarious. I miss the person he was when other people were around or when he wasn’t drinking or
hitting me. I miss the Good Jock who died many years ago – years before the shell of a man that remained of my father drank himself to death. When I think about him now I think he did love me, but that he was twisted, so any love he showed me quickly turned to hate, probably because he hated himself.

The common attitude of those who knew Dad casually – or thought they knew him well – like the men who came into contact with him in the pubs of Dundee, was ‘Good old Jock, he’s got a bit of a drink problem, but he’s alright.’ And they loved him because he could be one of the funniest guys in the world. But he couldn’t talk to anyone without turning it into a joke. I was like that too. I couldn’t hold a conversation with anyone without taking the mick. Lots of people used to say it to me. I think Sophie has helped me to listen more.

Uncle Danny died the year before, also with liver failure from drinking, aged fifty. Danny had a kid by this woman in a place outside Dundee who eventually went off with the kid. She hadn’t seen any of the family for twenty-five years and I went four or five years ago up to this place in the hills of Scotland and knocked on her door and found her and introduced her back into the family.

I discovered later that when Dad used to say I wasn’t his son, but Danny’s, he was just saying it to be malicious. He said it to get in my head and when I told Mum about it she laughed, and said, ‘Jesus Christ, I must have slept with Danny twice because you and Tommy are identical!’ And
she’s right of course. Physically Tommy and I could be twins!

Mum and I are like best friends now, catching up on all the years we missed out on together. We’re very close and more alike than anyone in the family. She still looks the same, a little more tanned nowadays, but young at heart and she still goes out to clubs. She’s still energetic: she’s always worked and continues to this day. Physically I take after her and everyone says they can see me in my mum and vice versa – personality and looks.

Tommy went back to Dundee to live, and ended up spending more time in prison than he was out. He’s living in another country now – Barbados or Brazil, he moves around a lot – but he’s chilled out for the first time in his life.

Bobby is married and has a little boy with a lovely wife, but is serving a prison sentence at the moment for police assault; you may not think it but he has calmed down a lot, apart from this one hiccup in the past five years.

Calum Patterson is a drummer in a band at weekends and has a window-cleaning business. Both Dad’s long-term girlfriends have now married good men and their kids now have kids of their own.

Life is too short to be holding grudges or thinking about the past, and anyone from any walk of life can turn things around if they want it badly enough. Or meet the right woman.

This book is not a plea for sympathy; it’s an apology to everyone who had the misfortune to meet me at that time of my life, and to ask that you think before you choose your life path. Don’t make your upbringing an excuse to ruin other people’s lives. Don’t abuse women and children, don’t take drugs, don’t get that drunk that you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t let things fester inside you.

Never give up. Always remember who your friends are, and family. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Choose football, choose shopping, choose a house in the quiet countryside, choose lying on the beach drinking cocktails in the sun, choose love. Because whatever you choose in life, the choices will affect the next generation of little people we bring into the world, and your future.

Luckily for me Sophie chose her heart instead of her head. I think fate chose me.

I
would like to thank Sir Alex Ferguson, Manager of Manchester United. If it wasn’t for him I probably would never have written this book.

I was flying back from the Scotland versus Ukraine match recently (when Scotland whipped them, may I add). I was still feeling a bit rough on the flight from the night before, sitting against the window in one of two seats, the other one being empty. I was leaning with my head on my hand waiting for take-off when someone sat down beside me, and nudged my arm off the arm rest.

When I turned my head, to my amazement, Sir Alex Ferguson was sitting there right next to me. I didn’t speak to him straightaway as I didn’t want to pester him, as most people probably do. So I put my head back against the window and tried to get some sleep. It just wasn’t
happening, as my head was banging from the party the night before.

It was about ten minutes into the flight when I looked down and saw that Alex was reading a book, I think it was called
Stalingrad
, or something like that. He was nodding off and I thought to myself, let me borrow it as it’s obviously helping you get to sleep. The trolley dolly was on her rounds and approaching us fast.

‘Tea, coffee anyone?’

‘Yea love,’ I said, as she got to our row, ‘can I have a chicken and stuffing sandwich and a coffee please?’ Then I nudged Alex in the arm. ‘Do ya want a brew, Alex?’

‘No I’m alright son,’ he said opening his eyes, probably thinking I was some kind of nut.

We got chatting after that about the game and horses and stuff. He was an absolute gentleman, really down to earth and normal. I still threw in a few of my comical comments like ‘if Tevez or Rooney get injured he should give me a call’, as I was top scorer in most of the crap amateur teams that I had played for. I think that probably confirmed what he was thinking.

We had now got on to the subject of books. He had asked me if I read them and explained a little bit about the one he was reading. I wanted to say yes, as I didn’t want him to think I was an idiot, but I couldn’t lie to him, as he might have asked me which ones I’d read, then I would have to lock myself in the toilet with embarrassment for the rest of the flight. He
advised me to try and read books on something I was interested in, as I have suffered from insomnia for many years now, and find it impossible to sleep at night.

That night when I arrived home I told Sophie about meeting him and what he had said about reading books.

‘I’ve been telling you that for years, but you never listened to me.’

She had, but I have never really had the patience to read. The only book I had ever even attempted to read was Billy Connolly’s life story, and I only managed to get half way through that.

I have always been interested in real life, hearing about actual things that have happened, so I read a book that my wife was reading called
The Kid
.

When I had finished it, it took me back to my childhood and how intense and horrifying compared to most people’s it was. And how eventful it was for a thirty-two-year-old man.

So I would like to say thank you to you, Alex, for inspiring me to read, as I would never have written this book if we had never met.