Paperboy Page 18

  All of this made me a little nervous. When we arrived at Mrs Osborne’s front door, I noticed it had stained-glass windows like in a church. We were welcomed by a friendly receptionist, and there was a woman with a mop bucket, washing all the floors. ‘Your granny used to clean for people in big houses up here, y’know, son,’ my mother explained.

  Being surrounded by such opulence, I expected Mrs Osborne to have a bun in her hair, and I assumed she would put us down with lots of ‘ings’, but when we met her she wasn’t like that at all. Yes, she did talk like a lady on Radio Ulster, but she was very warm and friendly. I was wearing my BRA uniform, and I wondered if that was what made her so nice to me, but she seemed to be so genuine that she might even fix my fangs if she found out I was a paperboy with dirty hands from up the Shankill.

  My mother accompanied me to Mrs Osborne’s palace that day, and, because we were on the Malone Road, she spoke to the orthodontist in her Gloria Hunniford telephone voice. She attempted most of her ‘ings’ in such locations, even though she knew my father would have disapproved. ‘Are you go-ing to be eat-ing some cucumber sandwiches on the lawn in the gard-ing ?!’ Daddy would mock, when he suspected she was getting above her station. ‘No son of mine will ever try to be something he’s not!’ he would say to me at the slightest hint of an emergent middle-class BRA accent.

  The first visit to my orthodontist was all very pleasant and going very well.

  ‘Yes, the boy will need a brace on his upper teeth for about twelve months,’ advised a very professional Mrs Osborne.

  ‘Will he have to wear the brace while he is eat-ing?’ enquired my mother politely.

  ‘No, he can take it out during meals. We will take an imprint of his teeth at the next appointment, but he will have to have two teeth extracted first,’ she continued in a matter-of-fact manner.

  Silence.

  ‘Does he have to have some teeth tak-ing out?’ asked my mother, with an unmistakable look of concern on her face.

  ‘Yes, my dear. These two here,’ replied Mrs Osborne pointing with her sharp steel instrument at my two condemned teeth.

  Another pause.

  I knew what my mother was thinking. I immediately deduced the source of her concern and her next question simply confirmed my conclusion.

  ‘But our Tony has a bad heart, so he does, and Mr Pantridge at the Royal says that if he ever has to get a tooth out, he needs to go into hospital in case, well, just in case,’ she said, while making the strange expression with her eyebrows she sometimes used to indicate to other adults that I wasn’t supposed to be hearing something.

  ‘Will he be all right?’

  ‘This little chap will be just fine,’ replied Mrs Osborne, clearly untroubled by the life-threatening situation she was forcing me into. I had never heard someone who wasn’t English use the word ‘chap’ before. They always talked about ‘chaps’ in The Two Ronnies on BBC 1.

  ‘I will arrange for the extraction to be carried out at the School of Dentistry in the Royal,’ added Mrs Osborne.

  I was in shock. I had lots of questions in my head. Was it a life-threatening operation? What are the average survival rates for boys with bad hearts getting teeth out?

  I found I wanted to ask the question they always asked Dr McCoy in the sickbay in Star Trek in such dire circumstances: ‘What are my chances, Bones?’

  But here I was in a big house up the Malone Road under the authority of a posh lady who you just could never question, and so I didn’t dare articulate my inquiries out loud. I quietly accepted my fate. My mother looked worried, but did not question either. It wasn’t fair. Just when I had begun to accept that I had a future with a fully beating heart, now everything was up in the air again – and all for the sake of having teeth more like an Osmond than a vampire.

  On the day of the operation, I was very nervous. When we arrived at the Royal, and I got my first whiff of disinfectant at the front door, I was more worried than the day of my Eleven Plus or the night I had to do a violin solo at the school concert. I spent what I knew could very well be my final hour sitting in the waiting area, reading an old copy of Look-in I found among a pile of well-thumbed Woman’s Owns. I tried to read an article about why Alvin Stardust always wore a black leather glove on one hand, but I couldn’t really concentrate.

  As the nurse ushered me into the operating room, I was aware my days could be numbered. I said a prayer and did a deal with God: as I had asked Jesus into my heart on the bin at the caravan and been good livin’ for years now, I in return asked if He would look after me and keep me out of Heaven for another wee while yet. But before I could finish the Lord’s Prayer, they had knocked me out with gas.

  Five minutes later, when I awoke, I was alive but minus two teeth. I was very drowsy and a little confused, and was sick once again over my Harrington jacket, but at least my bad heart was still going. I started to cry like a wee boy, and it was all very embarrassing as my mammy comforted me, but at least I had survived. I thought I had been knocked out for hours. It was like when the Russians put a drug in James Bond’s drink and made him have hallucinations, before torturing him for secrets about big atom bombs. The whole day my mother had pretended it was all very routine, but now she also looked very relieved indeed. I would live to deliver the papers another day. And if I was very lucky and splashed on just enough Brut, I might still experience endless snogs with Sharon Burgess at the Westy Disco.

  Now that the two teeth beside my incisors had been removed and it became clear that my bad heart was continuing to beat, I was able to return to Mrs Osborne, so that the process of bringing the rebellious fangs under control could be continued. I thought the trauma was over, but there was more pain and humiliation to come. Mrs Osborne took an imprint of my upper teeth with horrible putty that tasted like mud with toothpaste, and then she made a brace of plastic and wire especially for my mouth. I had looked forward to getting my brace, because it made you look grown-up, but as soon as I inserted it in my mouth for the first time I discovered an unforeseen problem – I couldn’t speak properly! A brace gave you a speech impediment. Every ‘s’ sound became a ‘ssch’.

  ‘How am I sschupposed to sschpeak with thissch thing in?’ I complained to my mother.

  ‘You’ll just have to put up or shut up, love!’ Mammy replied. ‘You don’t want to end up looking like Christopher Lee when you grow up. You’ll never get no girls nor nathin’ if you end up lookin’ like a vampire.’

  I practised hard to enunciate my words properly, but in the end I had to accept that I would never be able to pronounce an ‘s’ normally while wearing my brace. And so I had great difficulty with all the most important words in life, such as ‘SSchowaddywaddy’, ‘sschex’, ‘Protesschtantsschs’ and ‘Catholicssch’.

  This new handicap caused great upset in many different areas of my life. At home, my wee brother had great fun, repeatedly asking me the name of the spaceship in Star Trek. After my third attempt at ‘SSchtarsschip Enterprissch’, I realised he was doing it on purpose.

  At school, after our first performance of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, I overheard our female Huck mimicking me to wee Thomas O’Hara. ‘Hi Tom SSchawyer!’ she said, before bursting into laughter. It was interesting that she never did this in front of me. Huck obviously didn’t have the balls.

  This was all very embarrassing, but when it started to affect my profession it was clearly becoming a much more serious problem. When collecting the paper money on a Friday night, for instance, I had great difficulty in communicating to Mrs Charlton with the Scottish accent who lived in No. 102 that she owed me £1.66. ‘I dinnae ken what yer saying, love,’ she repeated after several vain attempts on my part to communicate the detail of her weekly papers bill. In the end, I had to write it down. It all seemed so inconvenient, and yet I knew that I would have to persist though pain and embarrassment, otherwise I would grow up to look like the undead.

  Sharon Burgess of course didn’t have to get a brace. Her
teeth were perfect. They were white and straight and lovely, like Marie Osmond’s. My sweetheart’s pure teeth just made me want to kiss even more. Big Ruby at the caravan had taught me how to kiss properly in the sand dunes. It was a different type of kiss to any I had ever experienced before – nothing like the sort of kiss you would get from your granny at Christmas or from your Auntie Doris who was a lovely singer in Lambeg. No, this was real kissing. Big Ruby had said it was called a French kiss. I couldn’t for the life of me understand the connection, because Big Ruby was from the Newtownards Road and had never even been to France. But she was very generous nonetheless, taking the chewing gum out of her mouth especially so as to show me how to use my tongue. She also told me that if you ran your fingers through the girl’s hair when you kissed her, it meant you really loved her in your heart. My first real kiss with Big Ruby was pleasant enough, although it was slightly ruined when a cheeky breeze off the Irish Sea blew some sand in my mouth.

  But I didn’t fancy Big Ruby, so kissing her wasn’t the real thing. It was a bit like learning how to score a goal in a football match on your big brother’s Subbuteo set on the living-room floor, instead of scoring a real goal for Man United in the FA Cup Final at Wembley. My first real kiss had been with Sharon Burgess at the Westy Disco. I had persuaded my DJ dad to put on a slow song at just the right moment, after I had got Sharon up on the dance floor to do the Bump with me. As my father carefully faded the music into Donny Osmond, Sharon stayed up on the dance floor with me to slow dance to ‘Puppy Love’. My bad heart fluttered a little as she put her arms around me and we danced. I ran my fingers through her hair, so I did.

  As Sharon closed her eyes and held me tight around the waist that first time, I hoped that she was thinking of me and not Donny. But these days, after the disturbing revelations of the jumble sale, my greatest fear was that it was actually my big brother she longed to embrace on the dance floor of the Westy Disco.

  Chapter 17

  Musical Distractions

  B-A-Y,

  B-A-Y,

  B-A-Y-C-I-T-Y,

  With a R-O-L-L-E-R-S –

  Bay City Rollers are the best!

  Our day had come, so it had. We were a gaggle of excited teenagers in high-waisted parallels assembled at our neighbourhood bus stop at the top of the Shankill. Together we were waiting for a black taxi to take us down the Road into the much-abused city centre, so as to see the Bay City Rollers concert in the Ulster Hall. Bedecked in tartan from the berets on our heads to the Doc Martens on our toes, we were chanting Rollers’ classics non-stop. It was unreal, like a dream come true.

  In the excitement of getting all our tartan regalia in place, we had missed the bus into town and the next one wasn’t due for ages – if it wasn’t hijacked in the meantime. As the only pacifist paperboy in West Belfast, I had certain moral difficulties with using an illegal black taxi instead of the bus, because the taxi money would go to the paramilitaries – but this was an emergency. I justified my actions on this occasion with the thought that once the taxi driver had taken out a percentage for petrol and cigarettes from my 10p fare, there probably wouldn’t be enough left to buy a whole bomb. I had waited for this day for months, and nothing, not even being a blessed peacemaker, was going to stop me from getting to the Ulster Hall in time to see the Scottish superstars perform their greatest hits right there in front of me.

  I have to admit that I had rushed my paper round that day. I had been careless with too many gates and had leapt over a number of fences and hedges that were not approved for jumping. Even the fear of disciplinary procedures from Oul’ Mac could not hold me back on this occasion. Every second was vital, and so I had to cut corners. I had intentionally skipped the final crucial stage of fully pushing the newspapers into expectant homes. Half the houses on the street had newspapers hanging out of their letterboxes. The semi-posted Belfast Telegraphs looked all droopy and forlorn, like Petra’s tail when she ran away up the street after you kicked her for trying to have sex with your leg like a boy dog.

  All the gang was there. My big brother was the leader of the pack, in black parallels and with only a subtle hint of tartan in the lining of his black Harrington jacket. He was a fan, but he was determined not to express too much adoration of the Rollers, in case it made him sound homo – and he was careful not to overdo it with the tartan accessories. If any of us got too enthusiastic, he would command us to ‘Wise a bap!’ and we would dutifully obey.

  If my big brother was the godfather of the gang, then Heather Mateer was the godmother. Heather was the most mature: she was sixteen, with breasts, and leaving school soon. She had feathered hair, done at His n’ Hers beside the Shankill graveyard, and she was wearing a long tweed coat over her white parallels with a tartan stripe up the side. (The same ones that had ripped at Corrymeela and which her ma had sewn back together again.) Heather was wearing the tweed coat just in case she got overexcited, because she knew if her parallels split again and we saw her knickers once more, we would laugh our heads off and she would be scundered in front of the whole of the Ulster Hall. She was also sporting five tartan scarves tied together which she had wrapped around her neck and flung over her shoulder: she looked like a tartan girl Doctor Who.

  Heather had a bad Belfast habit of starting every sentence with the word ‘like’ for no apparent reason.

  ‘Like, when’s this bloody black taxi comin’?’ she asked.

  ‘Like, I hope my ma sewed these parallels tight enough,’ she fretted.

  ‘Like, I can’t wait to see that lovely Les McKeown in the flesh!’ she drooled.

  Most of us talked this way at times, but Heather did it in every sentence. I noticed that fewer people at BRA began their sentences with ‘like’, so to fit in there, I had successfully tried to reduce my usage of the word. Like, I didn’t want to sound as if I came from up the Shankill or anything.

  Heather Mateer’s best friend, Lynn McQuiston with the buck teeth, was there too. Lynn was the biggest Bay City Rollers fan in the world. She had all their singles, and her bedroom wall was covered with so many Rollers posters that you couldn’t even see the woodchip. Lynn was obsessed with the lead singer, Les McKeown. ‘I just love Les, so I do,’ she kept repeating as she gazed at a card with a picture of her idol which she had got free from a bubble-gum pack. Lynn knew his birthday and his height and the colour of his eyes and his favourite animal and everything. She wanted us to go straight to the stage door at the back of the Ulster Hall, where, she dreamed, she would meet Les and their relationship would begin: they would get married, and she would go on tour with him if he didn’t want to come and live in the Shankill because of the Troubles and all. At least Lynn had thought things through.

  Titch McCracken was there at the bus stop too, of course. He was wearing an old pair of white parallels almost up to his knees which he had clearly grown out of – even though he hadn’t grown very much at all. I thought they looked disturbingly tight around the region of his jimmy joe. ‘Like, them trousers must be cuttin’ the willy off ye, wee lad!’ said Heather Mateer sympathetically. Heather had a beautiful way with words.

  Titch’s mother must have put the said trousers in the wash with his purple jumper, because they were also slightly pink. ‘What are ye doing in pink parallels, ya wee fruit?’ my big brother felt compelled to ask.

  Titch also had a tartan scarf attached to his wrist, but as he had tied it round his smoking hand, he kept getting ash on his tartan, leading me to fear that his scarf would meet the same sad fate as his cindered paperbag in the telephone box. He was sharing drags of his cigarettes with Philip Ferris, who didn’t deserve to be there at all, in my view. He had made no effort whatsoever: there was not so much as a splash of tartan on the brown duffle coat he was wearing. Even I knew a duffle coat was not appropriate attire for a rock concert! Philip was more interested in playing five-a-side football with the Boys’ Brigade than anything remotely musical.

  ‘Like, could you not have borrowed a tartan scarf
for the night?’ inquired Heather Mateer.

  ‘Bay City ballicks!’ Philip grunted in response.

  Irene Maxwell was there too, smothered in every tartan accessory she had ever seen in Jackie. This included a denim and tartan Donny Osmond style beret, purple parallels with tartan stripes and tartan waistband and tartan pocket flaps and tartan turn-ups, as well as tartan scarves attached to most of her limbs. Irene was also wearing an Eric Faulkner T-shirt and a host of badges proclaiming ‘I love Eric’. Her brazen infidelity to David Cassidy that day was shocking.

  ‘I wonder if Big Jaunty will be there the night?’ she asked, irritatingly.

  ‘He liked the Bay City Rollers before he moved to Bangor and he was lovely, so he was, and he looked like David Cassidy, so he did,’ she gushed.

  I had to tune her out or she would potentially spoil the whole evening.

  The presence of Sharon Burgess, however, ensured that the evening could not be spoiled. She wore a brown tank top over a brown blouse with a big round brown collar, and brown parallels with a tartan stripe down the side. Sharon was a vision in brown. Of all the girls, her parallels went closest to her ankles, which only went to prove that she was the nicest girl there. She had got her mother to flick her brown hair like Farrah Fawcett-Majors especially for the occasion. She was lovely with her brown eyes, and she was my angel. She let me hold her hand at the bus stop without so much as a ‘wise up, wee lad!’ My big brother was paying no attention to her thus far, and it seemed to me that Sharon was most interested in Eric Faulkner anyway.