All Growed Up Page 8

  I was confused, so I was.

  7

  WHEREVER I LAY MY HAT, THAT’S MY HOME

  In my first year at uni I managed to make it home to Belfast every other weekend, or more often if I had no money or extra laundry. I travelled up and down to Belfast on the train so often I got to know which carriages had working heaters and clean seats. One weekend I would be taking long walks along the beach in Portstewart, working out my ideological position on the important political, social and economic issues of the world, and the next I would be at home in Belfast doing some shopping down the Road and watching Doctor Who on the sofa (rather than behind the sofa as the monsters didn’t scare me anymore). I had two homes, two beds and two lives; I even had two libraries. In Coleraine I had to remember to borrow all the best books for my assignments before other keen students borrowed them first, and in Belfast I had to remember to go back to the Shankill Library to renew my loan of War and Peace over and over again. After many months of living between my two homes, it occurred to me that I wasn’t just the spitting image of Paul Young – especially when I used sticky gel from Boots on my hair – his music also reflected my life when he sang ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Home.’

  In Coleraine there was hardly any sign of The Troubles and I was free to be a student, a socialist and an intellectual; back in Belfast there were still bomb scares and shootings and army checkpoints every weekend. It seemed as though nothing ever changed at home, but as the months went by, I began to notice that I wasn’t the only one who was changing.

  My big brother had such a good job in Short’s that he was going to get married and move to Bangor, in spite of the fact that this most desirable of suburbs was miles away from the cricket club and the bookies on the Woodvale Road. He didn’t beat me up for fun anymore and spent most of his time at home in the sitting room with his girlfriend. Meanwhile, my wee brother had continued the family tradition by bucking the trend on the Shankill, passing the eleven-plus and getting into grammar school. On his first day at Belfast Royal Academy the PE teacher asked him if he was like his eldest brother or ‘the other one that did drama’. When my wee brother replied that he was a talented rugby player like his eldest sibling, the PE teacher simply said, ‘Good.’ Although I had no desire to be a great sportsman, when my wee brother reported this conversation to me I abandoned my pacifist principles and imagined I was a cat burglar in a black suit like the Milk Tray man, and in my mind I broke into the school gym and burst every one of the PE teacher’s balls.

  I was noticing changes among the older generation, too. My father was worried about being made redundant because of the stupidity of all his bosses, of which he maintained there were far too many anyway. Worryingly, he was making as many visits to the Wine Lodge for cans of Carlsberg Special as my mother made to the Mace for cans of baked beans, and I began to hate the sight of those gold-coloured beer cans, because the more he drank the more he slabbered. He continued to keep up to date with the latest technology, investing in the newest must-have gadgets – including a Betamax video recorder which he used to record Bonnie Tyler on Top of the Pops – but he seemed to have given up on some of his other hobbies. He was neglecting his Bonsai tree and even missing some Saturday nights DJing at the Westy Disco. At weekends I had regular arguments with him about socialism and feminism and nationalism and religion. Every new concept I had come to terms with at university was challenged by my father at the weekends.

  ‘Your father’s a very clever man, you know,’ my mother would say after he demolished one of my well-constructed intellectual arguments with a common sense retort. When I explained that the pop music he played at the Westy Disco was keeping working-class young people in a stupor of lowbrow culture and strangling their political awareness, he launched an unprovoked attack on the university intelligentsia.

  ‘If any of them boys up there in their ivory towers had done a proper day’s work in their life they wouldn’t be teachin’ you crap like that. For God’s sake, tell them to catch themselves on!’

  I was certain that the tower at university was made of concrete and not ivory, but it was at times like this that I wanted to bring my father to a seminar and set him loose on the most self-satisfied academics, because although they always sympathised with the poor workers of the proletariat, they appeared never to have actually met one.

  On my trips home at weekends I noticed that my mother had taken on additional domestic duties with her parents. Granny and Granda were getting older and needed help to light the fire and make the dinner and wash up. I often accompanied my mother on a visit to my grandparents’ house on a Sunday afternoon before catching the train back to Coleraine. Granda was usually out at the club for a wee stout and Granny was often in full flow about how Ian Paisley was saving us from being sold down the river and why Gerry Adams was a bad oul rip and why yer woman across the street thinks she is something.

  ‘Our Tony’s sharing a room with that wee Aaron Ward fella from BRA and his daddy’s a dentist, you know,’ explained my mother.

  ‘Well, here, dear! Excuse me, I’m me and who’s like me?’ commented Granny, widening her eyes in my direction.

  One Sunday afternoon I decided to introduce my grandmother to my theory that the reason she preferred Coronation Street to Dynasty was because British soap operas better represented strong matriarchal working-class women like Ena Sharples, whereas in American soap operas the women were decorative sex objects created by misogynistic script writers.

  ‘Stop talkin’ all swanky and stick thon kettle on for your granny, love,’ she replied.

  I dutifully obeyed, and when I returned from the working kitchen to serve Granny a mug of tea and a heavily-buttered iced finger, she was discussing my intellectual development with my mother.

  ‘Our Tony’s no dozer, so he’s not,’ she was saying proudly.

  While my mother lit the fire and made the dinner and brushed the carpet and did the ironing, Big Isobel complained that nobody cared about her or did anything for her even though she was on her last legs. She also made regular enquiries about the state of my love life.

  ‘Have you got yourself a nice wee girl up there yet, love? Ye know, one of your wee good livin’ friends?’

  She made me laugh even when she was describing the intimate details of her latest medical condition.

  ‘My innards are ruined and my tubes are bluttered!’

  Sometimes it seemed as if my granny and Orange Lil, the Belfast woman in a headscarf played by Jimmy Young on the TV, were the same person. Now that I was a grown man, I was beginning to understand why Granda spent so much time in the club having a wee stout. I could tell that all of this extra work was causing my mother a lot of stress, and when Auntie Emma called into our house for a wee cuppa tea and a chat she always started by asking Mammy about her nerves. It seemed as if my mother had to cope with almost as many family problems as Sheila Grant in Brookside, the gritty new soap opera on Channel 4, though I was obviously no bother.

  Even the Westy Disco was changing. Uncle Henry had filled in an application form and got a grant to replace the old wooden floor, which was covered in spat-out chewing gum from thousands of Saturday nights. The new floor was made of a space-age material that was supposed to have been used on the Apollo spaceships, but the chewing gum still stuck to it just the same. A lot of the older members from the Bay City Rollers and Saturday Night Fever era had moved on to work or marriage or prison, and there was no sign of Titch McCracken. Lyn McQuiston said Titch had joined ‘one of the organisations’, but I refused to believe this. Yes, he would steal the eyes out of your head, but he wouldn’t kill anyone. Irene Maxwell was still there on the rare Saturday nights I could make a visit to the Westy. She had moved on from her roller-disco phase and was now resplendent in knitted legwarmers like a Kid from Fame. When my da played a request for ‘Starmaker’ by The Kids From Fame everyone held hands in a circle and sang along. I joined in and found it strangely emotional. I hadn’t witnessed such synchron
ized handholding in the Westy Disco since ‘Seasons in the Sun’ by Terry Jacks in 1974. It was strange to feel that I still belonged here while at the same time feeling like everything was changing and it was time to move on.

  On one of my last visits to the Westy Disco I offered to act as assistant DJ to my father. As I filtered through piles of requests for Duran Duran, I was shocked to stumble upon a can of Carlsberg Special hidden behind a Madness LP. If it had not been for a request for ‘Baggy Trousers’ this secret would never have been revealed. I was shocked. This was not appropriate behaviour for a DJ. If Jimmy Saville had been caught doing anything bad like this on Top of the Pops he would have been sacked immediately! I advised my father that it was inappropriate for a youth leader to be drinking alcohol while performing DJ duties in a church hall, and though it was difficult to hear his response over the music, I could make out the words ‘own business’, ‘sanctimonious’ and ‘wee bastard’ between chants of ‘Baggy Trousers.’ I could tell from the expression on his face that my time as assistant DJ was at an end and I walked off, throwing down my headphones so hard that the record jumped and everyone booed and my father had to fade up Boy George prematurely.

  The news on the portable TV in the tuck shop said that Mr Brezhnev with the eyebrows had died in Russia. I used this opportunity to introduce the first ever political debate on the Cold War in the Westy Disco. I explained to Philip Ferris that the capitalist Western media was feeding us propaganda about the Soviet Union and I assured him the Communists were actually dead on. I thought Philip would appreciate my socialist ideology because he had been a punk for years and punks loved anarchy in the UK. Philip loved U2, a new band from Dublin with a lead singer called Bono, which sounded like the name of a dog biscuit to me. Philip assured me that U2 were going to be even bigger than The Boomtown Rats but I wasn’t convinced.

  To everyone’s surprise Philip had found a girlfriend. They had met at one of the regular gatherings of punk rockers outside the City Hall. She had spiky black hair and safety pins in all the same places as Philip apart from her deliberately ripped black tights. Philip never introduced her or said her name and she didn’t speak, but she held onto Philip’s arm and sneered at you as if every single word that came out of your mouth was completely stupid. In spite of this, I was certain that there would be some meeting of minds between anarchists and Christian socialists.

  ‘Are you thinkin’ of goin’ to university yourself, Philip?’ I enquired.

  ‘Nah,’ he replied.

  At that moment my father put on ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and Sammy Reeves jumped up on the dance floor doing a strange mixture of pogo dancing and shadow boxing. Sammy thought he was Rocky, but he looked more like Sylvester the Cat than Sylvester Stallone.

  ‘I think you’d like university, so I do.’ I told Philip. ‘If you did the same course as me you’d learn all about how the media influences the working of major social institutions and brainwashes the masses … except for punks and anarchists, like.’

  Philip and his punk girlfriend looked at me thoughtfully for a few seconds.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked hopefully. ‘Are yousens goin’ to go to university too?’

  ‘Ballicks!’ they replied in unison.

  Towards the end of my first semester at university I decided that I needed some new clothes. Now that I was an intellectual I felt the desire to transform my wardrobe as well – and besides, my old Wrangler jeans and bomber jacket now had so many holes they let the rain in. I was determined that my new wardrobe would reflect my personality and my individuality; my days of wearing the best-value clothes from the Great Universal Club Book were over. On a Saturday afternoon in Belfast I took a black taxi down the road and, for the benefit of the small animals on sale, managed to resist a visit to the pet shop in Gresham Street. I joined a long queue of shoppers at the security gates in Royal Avenue for a body search. This was to make sure I wasn’t a terrorist planning carnage rather than a New Romantic on a fashion mission. After a disappointing visit to Man at C&A I ended up back in John Frazer’s, the preferred fashion supplier of the men of the Shankill. This was where I had bought my Bay City Rollers platforms, my Harrington Jacket and my Peter Storm anorak. After nearly an hour perusing the bomb-damage-sale stock, I emerged with a brand new Wrangler jacket, a pair of combat trousers, a pair of leg warmers and a pair of Simon La Bon suede ankle boots. I couldn’t wait to get home and try on my new clothes. While the rest of my family were out at the Westy Disco I stayed at home to try on my new outfit. I completed the look by using extra gel to make my hair look really big, like Bono from U2.

  The next day, I decided to put on my new clothes before catching the train back to Coleraine. My father had agreed to give me a lift to Central Station in the green Simca and was waiting with my family in the living room where everyone’s attention was on the snooker. When I walked into the room, my parents and brothers scanned me from head to toe. My hair was gelled up as big as Tina Turner’s, with the longer bits at the back forming a mullet against the upturned collar of my new Wrangler jacket. Their eyes widened as they surveyed rest of my apparel, from my khaki combat trousers down to the black knitted leg warmers over my suede ankle boots. My wee brother started to giggle as if he had just heard a dirty joke on The Young Ones on BBC2.

  ‘No son of mine is goin’ out dressed like that!’ said my father.

  ‘Poof in Boots!’ laughed my big brother.

  ‘Och, don’t you listen to themuns, you’re a quare smasher, son,’ said my mother.

  But I didn’t care what anyone thought. I was an adult now, and I could dress whatever way I wanted. I could express my individuality by wearing the same clothes as all the other students. I was a New Romantic, so I was.

  8

  DON’T YOU WANT ME, BABY

  ‘Dum dum da dum-dum, dum dum dum dum!’

  ‘Tickatickaticka.’

  ‘Dum dum da dum-dum, dum dum dum dum!’

  ‘Tickatickaticka.’

  Aaron Ward was driving us the three miles to the university in his new car and we were singing along to the intro to Human League’s greatest hit on Radio 1. We always performed this routine when ‘Don’t You Want Me’ came on the radio, although we tended to stop when the female vocalist started singing about working as a waitress in a cocktail bar because that didn’t sound very manly. Some mornings as we travelled to a 9.15 a.m. lecture, I imagined we were Bodie and Doyle in The Professionals acting on a tip off from Mr Hudson in CI5 and were on our way to stop international terrorists (or freedom fighters) from blowing up an oil refinery and killing the entire population of Coleraine. Since Aaron’s parents had presented him with the gift of a Toyota my travels to and from the university had become much more bearable. The unremitting Atlantic wind and salty rain had been hard to bear while standing at the bus stop in the mornings and hitching a lift home in the evenings.

  ‘When are you going to start givin’ me some money for petrol, miser?’ Aaron asked, not for the first time.

  I had already had several arguments with Aaron since he accused me of not contributing to the petrol costs. Aaron and I argued quite a lot but we never fell out. Mrs Flood’s daughter said we were like an old married couple.

  ‘Oh, it’s easy for you, so it is,’ I said. ‘We’re not all loaded, ya know.’

  I was broke most of the time, so I used my newly-acquired knowledge of class politics to accuse him of oppressing me with his middle-class values.

  ‘Sometimes you are just so middle class!’ I complained, aware that this was a particularly devastating put-down for any undergraduate.

  Aaron said I was just jealous because I couldn’t afford a car – which was true – but I denied this with all the fervour of Karl Marx himself.

  I had been adept at the use of public transport in Belfast from an exceptionally young age; even when the buses were hijacked and burned in the middle of the road, I usually knew where to find a black taxi to take me up the Shankill. However, transpo
rt to and from university was turning out to be much more challenging even without the inconvenience of regular bomb scares. One Sunday night on the train, I was so engrossed in my Sony Walkman that I missed the stop for Coleraine. I was trying to figure out the meaning of the lyrics of Spandau Ballet’s ‘True’, and when I casually opened my eyes I noticed the university campus on the far side of the River Bann. I ran to the conductor for help, and he stroked his chin and explained that we were now en route to Londonderry where I had never been before. The only person I knew up there was Marty Mullen, but he was in Coleraine and he still didn’t like me even though I now wore a Wrangler jacket just like him. What if I ended up in the Bogside? What would happen to a wee Prod from up the Shankill if he inadvertently entered Free Derry? I would have as much chance as a Time Lord accidently landing his TARDIS on Skaro! The conductor sniffed deeply and attempted to reassure me by explaining that I had made an all-too-common mistake.

  ‘Buck eejits do this all the time, son,’ he said.

  He clarified that the next stop was Castlerock, which was about five miles from Coleraine, and if I disembarked there I could catch a bus back into the town and everything would be grand, so it would. Little did he know that I had no money left after paying my train fare and buying a packet of Tayto cheese and onion and a Caramac in Central Station in Belfast. I jumped off the train in Castlerock and found myself standing alone, in darkness, on the station’s single platform. It was like the video for ‘The Day Before You Came’ but with no Agnetha, which was as bad as watching 10 without Bo Derek. When I left the tiny station I spotted a public telephone box and wished it was a TARDIS even harder than I usually did, because I had no coins to make a call.

  ‘If only I were The Doctor,’ I thought. ‘I could be transported back in time and arrive in Coleraine before I had even left Belfast – as long as I didn’t press the wrong button and end up on the Planet Skaro about to be exterminated by a million angry Daleks instead.’