Paperboy (10 page)

I strummed ‘This Little Light of Mine' with all my heart and determination, and the choir kept up admirably. A man at the back of the church started to clap his hands in time with the rhythm. If this had happened at home, a fat lady with a tweed beret would have turned around and shushed him, and he would have had to stop. But clapping wasn't a sin in the Church of Scotland, it seemed.

It was all going very well until we came to the final verse, when we cleverly adapted the lyrics: ‘Shine all over Scotland, I'm gonna let it shine.' In the excitement, I overdid it, breaking my ‘E' string and dropping my plectrum. I had to finish using my thumb, because I had bitten all my nails for a recent Chemistry exam. However, when we finished the song, the whole congregation broke out into a spontaneous applause. I had never heard applause in a church before: I had always thought that God didn't do clapping.

Finally, it was time for our most accomplished work, ‘Any Dream Will Do'. It was a song from a musical about Joseph with an amazing Technicolor dreamcoat. There was even a story in the Bible based on it. ‘Any Dream Will Do' always got us the biggest applause. The youth-club choir didn't generally do four-part harmony like the school choir, but we could do quite complicated pieces like ‘Any Dream Will Do', where the boys sang the lines ‘I closed my eyes', and the girls echoed with an ‘Ah-a-ah'. The girls sang their ‘Ah-a-ahs' in a Belfast accent. No one could go up at the end of a sentence better than a Belfast girl. Our audiences usually adored this musical intricacy, so we often sang this song as our final piece and as an encore.

We could feel our Scottish audience's sense of expectation grow as our finale drew close. So, when Uncle Henry raised his hands and smiled, getting us ready for the opening bars of the song, there was a hushed atmosphere in the pews of St Philip's. We smiled back in silent harmony: our smiles reflected a quiet assurance that this was going to be good. Uncle Henry counted us in, and then we were off to a harmonious start. Carried away by the music and the atmosphere, I imagined I was Joseph with a Technicolor Harrington jacket and my own pyramid in the desert because, like him, I was a dreamer too. However, disaster was just around the corner, like Oul' Mac's van had been the day he ran over Mrs Grant's pussy.

Nobody else knew that some of the girls, who normally led the ‘Ah-a-ahs' so beautifully, had smuggled a bottle of Scottish whisky into the girls' dormitory the night before. Nobody knew they had only managed two hours' sleep. Nobody else knew that they were teetering in the twilight zone between still drunk and hungover. Our fate was sealed.

Uncle Henry's smile disappeared as fast as a cat in a hedge being chased by Petra.

‘To see for certain …'

‘Ugh aaa … Aaaaaaah huh' – It was horrible. The girls began to giggle.

‘That was ballicks!' whispered Philip Ferris, much too loudly. The boys began to laugh.

Uncle Henry wasn't laughing. The congregation wasn't laughing. Scotland was not amused. I felt my face go redder and redder. We were rude and disrespectful wee hooligans from Belfast! They had paid for us to come here and sing to them, and we had messed it up with drink as usual! It was humiliating.

I vainly attempted to rescue the next ‘Ah-a-ah', but it was too high for me because my voice was breaking. My big brother gave me a dig in the ribs and whispered ‘Fruit!' much too loudly.

It was too late. We had fallen apart. ‘Any Dream Will Do' had become a nightmare. We had travelled hundreds of miles over land and sea for this performance, and we had fallen on our faces at the last hurdle. The Scottish minister rushed the benediction, bringing the awful embarrassment to a blessed end.

In spite of our collapse, the Scottish Presbyterians were most forgiving: they still cried and gave us big hugs when we were leaving. It was as if we were going back to somewhere terrible, to our certain deaths.

When we finally returned to Belfast after another long journey – which included yet another evacuation of the contents of my stomach into the Irish Sea – I was relieved and glad to be home, so I was. My new Harrington jacket was crumpled and smelly, but I was happy to be back to familiar things, like homework and marbles, army Saracens and my paper round. The eventful trip to Edinburgh had whet my appetite for wider horizons, but it also confirmed to me that no matter what the rest of the world thought about us, there was something I loved about home.

Chapter 10
Paper Mum

A
s a good loyal paperboy, I accepted that Oul' Mac could never be questioned. He was in charge, and so he was always right – even when he was wrong. It was the same with doctors, teachers, paramilitaries, ministers and my granny. All of these were above contradiction. The School of Music was also up there in the same incontestable category. The big bosses there lived near Queen's University, could read music and never dropped a single ‘ing' when they were speaking. If they made a decision, it was final.

And so I was presented with a serious dilemma in the second year of my career in Oul' Mac's employ when my School of Music timetable arrived in the post. My new violin-lesson time would clash with my paper round on a Monday night! This was as serious a clash as would ensue in our house when Man United were playing football on BBC 1 at the same time as Elsie Tanner was having an affair on
Coronation Street
on UTV.

The bosses at the School of Music had the power to demote you in the orchestra to an even lower ranking in the second violins. Whereas at Springhill Primary School I had been the leader of the orchestra – the first of the first violins, at the School of Music, I was already languishing so near the back of the second violins that I was almost a third violin. I already had some experience of the humiliation of being a third violin in the BRA school orchestra. This lowly function entailed having to count for twenty bars between short screeches the whole way through a two-hour Gilbert and Sullivan opera, where all the parents with clean hands clapped and laughed at clever jokes by sixth formers acting and singing with English accents. (I preferred Gilbert O'Sullivan anyway.) The big chiefs at the School of Music had in fact so much power that if they were not happy with your performance they could even take your borrowed violin back so that you had to buy a cheap Chinese one that still smelt of smoke from the bomb-damage sale in Crymble's music shop. This would be on a par with Oul' Mac taking your paperbag off you.

The School of Music was across town, in Donegall Pass in South Belfast. This was where my mother had lived in a wee street of terraced houses during the war, except when she was evacuated up the country where Hitler couldn't get her, to live with a posh lady in a big house with a rose garden in Ballykelly. Mammy's old primary school had been turned into the School of Music years ago, and children came to learn music there from all over the city. It was the only school I had ever heard of where Protestants and Catholics were allowed to go together, and nobody ever even tried to stop it.

As far as this present dilemma went, I knew it would be possible to catch a bus from BRA which would take me over to the School of Music in time for my violin lesson there, but I knew I could never get back home again early enough to be able to do my papers, even on a night when the buses weren't being burned. So I was indeed left facing a very difficult choice. This wasn't like my customers choosing between the
TV Times
and the
Radio Times
, or their children deciding between
The Topper
and
The Beano.
No, this was a big decision – like picking your O-Levels or gettin' saved. I would have to choose between my music and my career. I wanted to play the violin like Yehudi Menuhin – or at least get near to the front of the second violins anyway – but I also wanted to have all the benefits of continuous, secure employment with Oul' Mac. It was surely cruel to expect me to choose between the two, but I knew that the violin-lesson timetable was written in stone, and no one would ever dare suggest it be changed.

In spite of all this, I eventually persuaded my mother to ring up the School of Music to try to rearrange the lesson. She was very polite and respectful and used her Gloria Hunniford telephone voice, but there was no question of any change, it seemed, because my new violin teacher was English apparently and ‘a very busy man'.

‘Told ye, love,' Mammy said, back in her own voice again, as she replaced the receiver, ‘You have to learn to fit in with people like that if you want to get on.'

This was without question of course, and so my next problem was my paper round. Who was going to do it? My big brother was the obvious First Division substitute, but he played rugby and sang dirty songs on the minibus up to Mallusk on a Monday, so he was unavailable. My wee brother was still too young to do the papers, because the full bag of
Belfast Telegraphs
was far heavier than him, and he would just have fallen over. Titch McCracken was not an option either, due to the incendiary nature of his relationship with newspapers. The wee ginger boy with National Health glasses that I bullied went to bagpipe lessons in a kilt on a Monday Night. And everyone else I knew was either a girl or already a paperboy or had been sacked at some point by Oul' Mac.

I asked one of my Antrim Road friends from BRA if his father would give him a lift over to do my papers on a Monday night, but his Da said no, because he didn't wanted his Rover being hijacked, he said. I was running out of options. It looked as if I was going to have to choose between two of my most favourite things. It was terrible – like having to choose between
Star Trek
and
Lost in Space
. No, it was worse than that even! It was like having to decide between Olivia Newton-John and Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

Everyone said my mother was a very caring woman, because she was always looking after someone. If she wasn't looking after me and my brothers, she was looking after my father or looking after her father and mother (who took a lot of looking after), or looking after four hundred kids at the Westy Disco on a Saturday night. I sometimes made Mammy a cup of tea with a digestive biscuit, because no one seemed to be looking after her. She was always busy shopping at the Co-op, or sending off cheques to the Great Universal Club Book, or making fish fingers and Smash, or sewing dresses late at night for swanky ladies up the Lisburn Road.

Sometimes when Mammy was having a rest for ten minutes, she invited one of the neighbours like Auntie Emma or Auntie Mabel or Auntie Hetty (who was my real auntie and brought me Lucozade when I was sick) in for a cup of tea and a slice of barmbrack loaf. They would chat about who in our street, apart from Mr Grant of course, was in bed with their chest, who was bad with their nerves and who was looking like mutton dressed as lamb. Often the most animated of these exchanges were concluded with the expression, ‘bloody men!'

However, the best parts of these conversations between my mother and her friends were always whispered. I wasn't generally very interested in the noisier chattering, and I sometimes got quite annoyed if they were talking loudly while I was watching John Noakes jumping out of an aeroplane on
Blue Peter
. But when voices were lowered because children were present, I would tune in to listen to the secret stuff.

Sometimes it was all about women's tubes, and I panicked and tuned out again immediately, but on other occasions I gathered fascinating information – such as speculation as to why, if Mrs Piper was that good livin', she had a fancy man from a gospel mission on the Newtownards Road. I also learned that after Trevor Johnston's family had moved to Bangor, his da had been arrested for hijacking a lemonade van for Ulster and was now in prison in the Maze (which was Protestant for Long Kesh).

It was during the time that I was pondering my weighty choice between my career as a paperboy and my future as a virtuoso violinist that, one Saturday afternoon, I found myself privy again to one of these confidential conversations of my mother's. I was to glean a lot of information very pertinent to my situation – and more besides.

Auntie Emma had called in to recommend that my father buy, for that week's upcoming Westy Disco, the new single by Demis Roussos, the big fat Greek man in a dress, which Uncle Henry said was going to go straight to No.1. She was, however, too late with this sage advice, because, as my mother explained, my da was already on his way to Spin-a-Disc to buy The Wurzels and ‘Save Your Kisses for Me' by The Brotherhood of Man. It was clear that the quality of music available around that time was so high that it was proving very hard to choose between singles each week – just like my impossible choice between papers and violin lessons.

‘God love our Tony,' my mother was saying. ‘The poor wee crater has his violin lesson at the same time as his papers for Oul' Mac, and he can't get any of the other wee lads do them for him. His new violin teacher's English and he wouldn't change it, so he wouldn't, and he's a very busy man, so he is, you know.'

‘Och God love him, right enough, Betty,' replied Auntie Emma. ‘I don't know, sure your Tony's quare and good at the fiddle and all, but he'd miss his tips at Christmas for buying his stamps, and, sure, Mrs Mac's awful, awful fond of him, so she is.'

I appreciated the sincerity of the sympathy being expressed, but there had been nothing of great import in the conversation, until, that is, Auntie Emma added mysteriously, ‘… and him with his bad heart and all, the wee crater'.

There it was again. My bad heart. Everyone knew it was bad, except me, it sometimes seemed. How many beats had it left, I wondered? This time I was absolutely determined to find out more, so I helpfully offered to make Mammy and Auntie Emma another cup of tea, so as to give them space to discuss the matter in private in the living room – while I listened at the door, instead of buttering barmbrack in the kitchen, as they thought. I felt like Captain Scarlet on TV using an electronic listening device to spy on the Mysterons.

Mammy and Auntie Emma were whispering, but I could hear every single word.

‘What does the doctor say about his wee heart now, love?' Auntie Emma was asking.

‘Well, Mr Pantridge says there's nothing to worry about and our Tony should do all the same things as a normal boy, as long as he goes to get it checked up at the Royal every year,' replied my mother.

I was offended by the suggestion I was not a normal boy, but I still breathed a huge sigh of relief to hear that, contrary to all my fears, I was in no imminent danger of a cardiac arrest. I was going to live! I had a future! I would probably live long enough to go to Spain and maybe America. And have sex like Clint Eastwood in the movies and do A-Levels. And learn to drive and maybe even go to the moon for my holidays in the year 2000! However, my speculation about my plans for the rest of my life was interrupted almost immediately by further revelations.

‘It was when he had pneumonia, when he was a wee baby and we nearly lost him, that done it til his wee heart,' added my mother.

I dropped the butter knife on the formica kitchen table. When Mammy said they had nearly lost me, I knew she wasn't talking about the time I wandered off on my own into the meat store at the Co-op and the butcher found me playing in the sawdust. I had, it seemed, nearly died as a baby! This was unbelievable. I had nearly been a tragedy. I almost hadn't lived long enough to pass my Eleven Plus or smell Brut or kiss Sharon Burgess or get a ticket to see the Bay City Rollers!

‘Mr Pantridge says lots of people with a heart murmur live normal lives, but that if wee Tony needs to get any teeth out, he has to get them done in the Royal instead of the dentist, just in case,' my mother added, showing off her detailed medical knowledge of my condition to her best pal.

‘Och, God love the wee dote,' repeated Auntie Emma.

A few minutes later, as I came in with the fresh cups of tea and buttered barmbrack on a patterned faux-brass tray, Auntie Emma commented:

‘You must be freezing, love – your wee hands are shakin', so they are.'

‘Och he's a good boy, so he is,' said my mother. ‘I'm just going to have to do his papers on a Monday night for him.'

I was shocked. This solution had never even crossed my mind. Girls didn't do papers, never mind mothers! Yet when I thought about it for a while, I knew it was the perfect solution. My mother would never be late and would never nick paper money or give cheek to the pensioners. No wee hoods or robbers from down the Road would dare try to rob a mum, and so she would never need to hide any money down her suede boots.

‘Will ye really?' I asked in disbelief.

‘Aye, of course I will, love,' Mammy answered warmly. I gave her a big hug, and I didn't even blush when Auntie Emma felt compelled to offer the sentimental commentary: ‘Och God love the wee man, he's all grown up nigh, but he still loves his mammy, so he does.'

And so, every Monday night for three months, my mother delivered forty-eight
Belfast Telegraphs
in the darkness, while her son scratched scales and plucked pathetic
pizzicato
in the same building on the Donegall Road around which she had skipped as a wee girl in the war. She never complained once, even in the hailstones.

Oul' Mac knew about the arrangement and had no complaints either. He already regarded my parents and Auntie Emma and Uncle Henry as near-saints for running the Westy Disco and ‘keeping all them cheeky wee shites off the streets on a Saturday night'. Mammy even kept going after Big Aggie, the resident gossip queen of our street, cheekily asked her one Monday night if she was not making enough money from her sewing to look after her kids properly.

It all came to an abrupt end when my new violin teacher refused to teach me any more because I didn't practise enough. In fact, he was to soon stop teaching altogether because he said we were ‘all f**king lazy little bastards in this godforsaken country'. Fortunately, I ended up with a nice new violin teacher at a more convenient hour. I took up the reins of my paper round again on Monday nights, and my mother looked relieved: this was one less thing for her to look after.

I never forgot how Mammy saved my job, how she had prevented my career from being needlessly cut short when it had barely begun. I gave her less cheek for months, and a bottle of Charlie perfume for Mother's Day (which was twenty weeks at 10p from the Club Book). Sometimes I even helped her with the dishes, and we laughed when I pretended to be the wee lad in the Fairy Liquid advert, asking her in an English accent, ‘Mummy, why are your hands so soft?'