hated them. I must have only been about five, but I fucking hated them. I remember one of them emailed me when I was in my 20s, when my website Limmy.com was doing the rounds. He emailed to say he liked my stuff, and asked if I remembered him. I said, ‘Aye, I remember you were a prick to my brother, mate, right in front of me.’ He didn’t reply.
I think David then started hanging about with these other pals. Bad boys. I’d want to hang about with him, but he’d always tell me to beat it. He told me years later that it was because him and these bad boys used to get up to trouble, and he didn’t want me joining them.
It sounds like he was on a tragic path, but by the time I got to secondary school David had a reputation as somebody you didn’t want to fuck with. Which is a happy ending, depending on how you look at it.
Anyway, my mum …
My mum was a volunteer in the Carnwadric Community Flat, which was a kind of citizens’ advice bureau. Folk would come round to ask advice about a leak or some other thing wrong with their council house, and my mum would get the council to sort it. Other than that, my mum would spend her time in our house, looking after me and my brother, or watching the telly. She was just like most mums where I lived.
But she had this photo album that I used to look through. She was from Glasgow, a working-class area in Glasgow, but in this photo album she had these pictures of when she used to live in New York, when she was younger. She’d moved there during the 60s when she was 20-something, and I always thought that was amazing. My mum used to live in New York, like on Cagney & Lacey.
There were photos of her wearing all these 60s clothes, with skyscrapers in the background, or in an office, or on a train with all these people going to a party. She never looked like a tourist. She was never just standing still in front of a landmark. She always looked like she was doing something, like talking or having a laugh or just getting ready to cross the road. She looked like somebody living their life there.
There was a man that kept appearing in the photies, a guy who looked a bit like Clark Kent. Sometimes the pictures were just of him, doing things like fixing a motor. I asked my mum who he was. She said it was her husband. She’d got married over there to this guy. Then, for whatever reason, the marriage didn’t work out, and she moved back to Glasgow about a year later, where she met my dad.
She just looked like anybody’s mum, but the photo album and everything else gave me a feeling that I wasn’t just talking to my mum. She was this person who’d been places and done things, she had this whole other life before me, she’d even been married to another man before my dad. She wasn’t just my mum.
But what you really want to know is, ‘Did she give you enough cuddles, Brian? Did your mammy never tell you that she loved you?’
No, she didn’t, now that you mention it. I don’t remember her ever telling me she loved me or her giving me a kiss or cuddle or any of that. It’s not that she neglected me or treated me badly. We’d talk about things and she was funny. We’d watch films together. Her favourite film was Calamity Jane, this camp Western musical from the 50s. We watched it over and over. She loved it, and so did I. My dad didn’t love it, my brother didn’t love it, but me and my mum did. But she never told me that she loved me, and I didn’t tell her. I didn’t really notice, and I didn’t care. But I think I must have, because I tell my son I love him. I tell him all the time. He sometimes says, ‘I know, you’ve told me a million times.’ And I’m very glad to hear it. That way he won’t grow up wondering if his dad ever loved him.
My dad never told me he loved me.
Thank fuck. Imagine it. Your smelly fucking da telling you he loves you.
My dad was kind of like my mum. He was from some working-class area in Glasgow as well, and he was funny. Him and my mum were always having a laugh, I never heard them have an argument once. And like my mum, he also seemed a bit different to everybody else.
On one hand, he had an ordinary job. He was a joiner, he’d go away for the day and come back smelling of sawdust. But he was also an artist. He went to the Glasgow School of Art when he was younger. He’d do oil paintings and pastels and silhouettes, he’d do portraits and landscapes. We’d have them hanging up in the house, and he’d get asked to do them for other folk. I think that was a bit different for Carnwadric, it was a bit middle class for back then, and my dad wasn’t like that. He was a bit of a hard cunt, actually, which makes the artist thing seem so unusual. He wasn’t aggressive, but he could handle himself. I saw him in this fight once.
I was coming home from primary school, which was just across the road from my house. As I started walking to my street, I could hear shouting and screaming, and there was my dad outside my house with blood on his face. And there was this hardman cunt, a big angry guy that lived a couple of doors down. He was a debt collector for the local moneylenders, an evil bastard. I stood far away, watching. I don’t remember seeing any punches, but I remember this other guy’s wife screaming something like ‘Hit him with your shoe!’ But then the fight was over. The guy had battered my dad.
My dad didn’t want to leave it, so he started training. He hung a punchbag up in this lock-up garage that he’d rented, and he’d punch fuck out of it. Then, when the time was right, he squared up to this cunt, and punched fuck out of him. I didn’t see it, so I had to ask my dad the other day for the story. He said he was kicking into the guy’s face and everything.
When my dad finished telling the story, he said it brought back a lot of happy memories. I was happy to hear it. We hated the cunt.
Barry
Right, things have got a bit dark, with me talking about all these bad things. So let me lighten things up. Here’s a cheery one for you.
There was this boy in my class, called Barry. He was one of these pupils that just appeared in your class one day, a few years into primary school. And then, not long after that, he was gone. And I don’t know if it was something to do with me.
He appears, this new boy, and right away I didn’t like him. I think it was because of his face. He looked hard. There were a few boys in school like that, ones that would punch your jaw for next to nothing. I remember there was a boy called James White, who also appeared in my school for a short while before leaving. When he told me his name, I remembered a song to use for people with names that rhymed with white. I sang this:
James White
Did a shite
In the middle of the night
Saw a ghost
Eating toast
Halfway up the lamppost.
But I got as far as ‘James White, did a shite, in the middle …’, before he hooked my jaw. We were only seven or eight. He punched me in the fucking jaw. My face felt numb, like I’d been to the dentist.
Well, this Barry looked like one of them. He had a big square jaw, he was pale with freckles, and this straight-as-fuck fringe. My hair’s like that when I haven’t put any stuff in it to stick it up. When I see myself in the mirror like that, I’m reminded of this cunt.
Anyway, what happened was this.
One day, the class had come in from playtime or lunch, and it was a rainy day. A couple of lassies put their hands up to get the attention of the teacher. The teacher
