A Fucked Up Life in Books, Page 2

  Thelwell’s Riding Academy

  I used to be one of those cunts that went to Pony Club. Where I lived there were loads of fields and loads of people with money to spare, and loads of fucking awful children, so it made sense that there was a branch of Pony Club that met a few miles down the road.

  If you’ve never seen a bunch of Pony Club bastards trotting around, then let me tell you it is pretty much exactly as you’d imagine: mums standing around smoking and looking confused as tiny children bomb about on fat ponies that are too big from them, just like the drawings in the Thelwell books.

  The problem that I had with Pony Club is that I didn’t fit in. I was an incredibly awkward child (and I have managed to grow up to be a pretty awkward adult), and by awkward I mean that I didn’t really like talking to other children, and if they did talk to me then I would make my excuses and go and stand next to my Dad/Mum/brother/pony. Somewhere safe that would hopefully make them fuck off and leave me alone.

  The worst bit about Pony Club is that you are expected to have a right old fucking knees up with the other kids. You’re supposed to all talk to each other, and the mums are supposed to all smoke and drink gin together. It was fucking horrible.

  One particular Pony Club camp my Mum made friends with some awful bitch and pushed me towards her daughter so that she and I could get chummy. This girl was something else. I can’t remember her name for the life of me, but I remember that her fucking fat little pony was called Lupin. She said things like, ‘Oh, Lupin and [my pony] will be the best of friends, I just know it!’ And that shit made me feel a little bit sick and want to be as far away from her as possible.

  So one day I was with my pony and my Mum, getting the pony ready to go out as part of a massive group hack to somewhere picturesque and lovely. You have to do a lot to a pony to get it ready to go out, the time spent is much longer than that of your most appearance-conscious friend preceding a massive night out. You have to brush it all over, wipe its nose and eyes and arse, pick out its hooves and put oil on them so they don’t crack, and then you have to put all the gear on it so you can actually ride the fucking creature.

  I was at the head end of my pony, Mum was at the arse end. I do not know exactly what she was doing to my pony, but she said to me, ‘Hold her head’. So I did. And the next thing I knew, the cunt bit me.

  It didn’t hurt, as far as I can remember, and it just looked like a graze. Mum saw half a drop of blood and went mental and dragged me to the ‘medical tent’.

  The medical tent wasn’t a tent, it was a caravan. And the nurses were chain smoking and gossiping when we arrived. Mum chucked me at them and I wondered whether they actually had any medical training at all as they got on with cleaning and bandaging my arm. Not a fucking plaster, a fucking massive bandage that made me look like a comedy extra in a play about people that don’t actually have anything wrong with them.

  The bite scarred, and these days very few people ask me about it, even though it is quite prominent. I think that they worry that it is the result of some kind of self-harm. When someone does ask they are always ever-so careful. ‘What’s that … mark … on your … arm …?’

  When I tell them that a horse bit me it’s 50/50 whether they laugh, or nod ‘knowingly’.

  Flight of Dragons

  As far as I know, my Dad has never read a book in his life. While I grew up reading everything I could get my tiny hands on, he was always there looking after the vegetables and herbs growing in the garden, playing guitar, or watching films. All stuff that I could sit near him doing while I was reading.

  Him not being interested in books didn’t matter to me, for as much excitement as I could get from reading a story, I could get ten times that from my Dad and his storytelling.

  He didn’t read to us at bedtime. Instead, he’d make up some bizarre story. Often these stories would be heavily dependent on things like science and history, but he scrapped all that shit to make them brilliant. Any finer points that we wanted information on he’d just make some more shit up and tell us so matter-of-factly that I believed everything he said.

  His stories were fucking ace. There was one about a voice powered car, which ended up with the car and driver going over a cliff because he forgot the code word for ‘stop’. There was one about how the giraffe got to have such a long neck (he got his head caught in a tree and ran round and round which stretched it out), and once he came and woke us up in the middle of the night to take us outside and show us how the daisies closed their petals inwards which he told us was to keep the pollen warm until the sun came back out. When he lit a match and the petals opened it blew my fucking mind.

  He’d tape films off the telly and let me believe that they were real. Two examples stick out to me here, once with Laputa: Castle in The Sky where, when I told him I thought I might be Lusheeta, Toel Ul (true ruler) of the Castle Laputa in the Sky, he agreed. And when by some weird coincidence my Grandma gave me a necklace with a glassy blue stone on it and I fastened it around my neck truly believing that it was Sheeta’s levitation stone, he watched as I climbed up into a little tree to jump out and see if I’d float. Over and over again. And when I didn’t, he said that Grandma had obviously got the wrong stone, and we put it away somewhere safe, just in case all it was waiting for was me to learn the special spells to awaken its magical powers.

  The second one was a bit more special, because it was magic.

  He’d recorded a film off the telly called The Flight of Dragons. He was really excited about it so Dad, my brother and I all sat down to watch it.

  If you haven’t seen it, and I understand that not that many people have, it is about a guy called Peter Dickinson who makes up a board game with characters that he has crafted based on what he knows about fantasy. There are four wizards who represent different shit, a bunch of dragons, a princess, a knight, and all of that kind of gubbins. He ends up in the game with the characters he’s created and at the end fights the evil red wizard Omadon by using science against Omadon’s magic. It is fucking amazing.

  In the film Peter is writing a book about dragons, he’s fucking fascinated by them, but he doesn’t know where the book is going or if he’s good enough to finish it, but when he goes into the game and lives amongst the characters he’s made, Carolinus the green wizard takes him to his library of unfinished books, where Peter’s book The Flight of Dragons is nestling in amongst classic and well known and loved books of today.

  So we watched this film and my brother and I were hooked. We watched it almost every day for fucking ages, and I used to ask my Dad questions about it. The only question that I really wanted an answer to, though, was whether that book that this animated character Peter Dickinson had written was real or not.

  Dad didn’t know, and told me that. He said that he wasn’t sure whether it could be real or if it was even finished, because we didn’t see the inside of the book in the film, did we, Carolinus had snapped it shut before we got chance.

  Oh well, I could just continue to watch the film and to think about dragons. Maybe one day I could even write a book about dragons myself.

  Months later I was rummaging through the shelves in the spare bedroom to pass the time and hidden away, on the second layer of the double layer of books on the shelves I found it.

  I ran through to Dad, who was outside in the greenhouse and thrust it in his face.

  ‘Dad! Look! We’ve got it! He did finish it!’ Dad put down his watering can and looked puzzled.

  ‘Where did you find that?’ he asked.

  ‘On the shelves! It was hidden on the shelves!’

  He took it in his hands and turned it over and told me that he it wasn’t his. And it wasn’t Mum’s or my brother’s either, it must be there by magic.

  He handed it back to me and told me to look after it, that someone must have put it there for me, maybe even the green wizard Carolinus himself! And then he went back to watering the tomatoes.

  For years that book was what magic meant
to me. And now that I’m older and have spoken to Dad about it I know that he left it there for me, knowing that he couldn’t give it to me himself because that would ruin everything that I believed, it would take that magic away.

  And that is why although my Dad has never read a book in his life, he is the best storyteller that I know. Because he made me believe in magic.

  Goosebumps

  About a year before my Mum left, a couple moved in next door. This was really exciting because where we lived no one ever really moved house, and the other houses had old people in them, and when they died their sons or daughters would come and do up their house and live in it themselves, and that wasn’t really exciting because you’d see them around all the time anyway and it wasn’t new or interesting.

  But the people who had lived next door had gone, and in their place was a youngish couple. The man had two children from his previous marriage. This was exciting too, there were never any other kids around for us to play with. The children were a fair bit older than my brother and me, but we all became friends and we used to play in the garden when they’d visit every other weekend.

  The girl had Down’s Syndrome, so although she was about seven years older than me, she kind of had roughly the same mental age and we liked the same games and books and things like that. She had all of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books, and she let me borrow them whenever I liked. She was lovely. Once she knocked on the door with a present for me. It was a frog that she’d caught in the pond in her garden. We put it in a bucket and called it Froggy. We were both really upset when it managed to hop out of the bucket and escape the next day.

  On New Year’s Eve, in whatever year it was that they moved in, they invited us all round. The kids were there, and while our parents sat in the kitchen drinking and smoking we were all playing in one of the bedrooms. After a lengthy game of ‘turn the lights off and chase each other round the room’ we decided to play hide and seek. Brilliant. I was fucking excellent at hide and seek because I was so small and skinny I could fit into the tiniest of nooks without being discovered, because the other kids would look and think to themselves ‘no one could possibly fit into that tiny gap.’ But I could.

  The grown-ups were all outside in the garden when we started hiding. The girl was going to search for us all, so as she counted to one hundred, I snuck quietly into the kitchen and squeezed myself into a gap that I’d spotted earlier between the washing machine and the wall. Best. Hiding. Place. Ever. I was so pleased. No cunt would find me in there.

  As the girl began to look for us all, my mum and our neighbour, the man, came back inside and sat at the kitchen table. The woman and my Dad had gone back to our house to find a record or some more wine or something, and after a bit of small talk my Mum started talking about stuff that was a bit weird.

  ‘So,’ she asked the man neighbour. ‘Your divorce, in total, how long did it take to have everything, you know, sorted out. All the loose ends tied up and so on?’

  ‘Probably a year,’ replied the man, ‘a bit longer maybe, because of custody of the kids, but roughly a year.’

  I could see them at the table. My Mum took a sip of her wine and a drag of her fag and looked thoughtful.

  ‘So if I were to pack up and leave tomorrow, a year from now everything would probably be okay,’ she said. She wasn’t asking a question, she was thinking out loud.

  The man laughed. ‘Well, yeah. I suppose.’

  My Mum turned to the man. ‘The truth is,’ she said, ‘I don’t want my husband and I don’t want my kids. I just want my freedom.’

  The man looked at her but didn’t say anything. My Mum didn’t say anything. I sat in the gap between the washing machine and the door wondering if this was a joke, and she’d seen me on the way in and was trying to get me to reveal my hiding place. Could they hear me breathing? My heart beating out of my chest? They didn’t seem to know I was there.

  The man continued to look at my Mum. He looked very serious.

  ‘I’m going outside for some air,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah I’ll come with you,’ she said, finishing her wine and grinding her fag out in the ashtray on the table.

  And they both walked out of the patio doors and went through the garden into our garden next door to go and find my Dad and the woman.

  The girl stumbled into the kitchen looking for me. I wriggled out of the gap.

  ‘You’re supposed to HIDE!’ she screamed at me. ‘You’ve ruined my go!’

  I apologised. I didn’t feel much like playing anymore. I went and got my brother and took him back to our house. Dad tucked us into bed and I wanted to tell him what I’d heard but I didn’t really understand it. I didn’t want to fuck everything up. Maybe if I just kept my mouth shut it would all go away.

  A year later, in court, my Mum was battling my Dad for custody of us, and I told them that I wouldn’t go with her because she didn’t want us. I repeated her words: ‘She doesn’t want her husband, she doesn’t want her kids, she just wants her freedom.’

  We stayed with my Dad.

  Years later still, when my Mum was having one of her trademark freak-outs and said how much she loved my brother and I, I told her what I’d heard that night while I was hiding in the kitchen. She stopped crying and shouting and looked at me for a long time.

  ‘You misheard,’ she told me seriously.

  ‘I did not,’ I said back, just as seriously.

  She looked at me for a long time and then laughed. ‘Oh, well, you know it all don’t you? Get the fuck out of my house.’

  And so I went.

  It wasn’t the first time I left her house, and it wasn’t the last time I let her fuck my head up. It’s just another chapter in the ‘why my Mum is a fucking cunt’ saga.

  Grimms’ Fairytales

  My Mum used to work nights. In the evenings before she left she would tuck my brother and me up in our beds in our shared bedroom and put on a storybook cassette for us to listen to before we went to sleep. The content that she supplied was sometimes questionable: where we could easily drift off to sleep listening to some old dear tell us fairy tales written by Enid Blyton, it was much more difficult when she put in the cassette of some mad bastard reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

  When it was a Grimms’ night, as soon as she’d left the room my brother and I would leap out of bed and play, because we were fucking terrified of the dark stories pumping out of the little speaker on top of the chest of drawers.

  One night we were particularly restless, so while we played quietly with the stories still on in the background, I decided that I would do a magic trick that would knock his fucking socks off.

  Earlier in the day, Mum had given us both a shiny new ten pence piece each. We’d never seen one before, but the old ones were big and fat and dull, and these were all beautiful and sparkly and new. I told my brother that that with the new ten pence piece you could do magic far more easily, because they had loads more magic in them.

  He didn’t believe me, so I had to prove it.

  I popped the ten pence piece into my mouth and told him that when I opened my mouth it would have disappeared. I closed my mouth and moved my tongue to try and push the coin to the floor of my mouth to conceal it, apart from I fucked it up and accidentally swallowed the coin.

  I started crying.

  ‘Has it gone?’ my brother asked innocently.

  I ran out of the bedroom and into the living room where Dad was sat with a fag on watching Red Dwarf.

  ‘DADISWALLOWEDTENPEE!’ I cryscreamed at him.

  He asked me why and after a lengthy discussion he realised that I was an idiot and chucked both my brother and I into the car for a trip to accident and emergency.

  ‘DADAMIGOINGTODIE?’ I cryscreamed at him all the way there.

  He told me of course I wasn’t going to die.

  We got to accident and emergency and the doctor told me off for trying to be magic and I was x-rayed and stuck in a bed to be monitored.

 
Now, I don’t know the technical medical term for it, but this fucking coin was hovering somewhere in my throat. The doctor was worried that it would go into my lung and if the shiny little shit didn’t move the right way (into my tummy) then there would be problems.

  I stayed in hospital for fucking ages waiting for it to move.

  It did move, eventually, and it moved the right way. Down into my tummy. I got sent home and my Mum was given loads of those cardboard sick/shit holders and some lollypop sticks. I had to shit in a cardboard pot for the next three days until one day my poo had a shiny bit in it and I was free.

  Needless to say when I got back to school I was a fucking legend. I was the girl who shat out the new ten pence piece.

  The Silver Brumby

  If I told you where I was brought up you’d laugh your fucking heads off. The village has such a fucking twee name that as soon as I tell anyone they dissolve into crazy laughter.

  The place was full of people who were middle class. We were never middle class. My Mum and my Dad both worked hard at vocational jobs though, so we did have enough money for me to fulfil my Mum’s childhood dream of having a pony.

  We kept my pony at an old farm. The farmer who owned the farm was the father of the man who my Mum would eventually leave me, my Dad and my brother and our home for. But not yet.

  Mum was, and maybe still is, a care worker. That’s one of those people who go round to old people’s houses and tuck them in at night and chat to them a bit and wipe them down when they shit themselves. One of the people that she cared for was the old farmer that owned the farm that we kept the pony at.

  I didn’t like the old farmer. After school and on weekends when I was down at the stables I could see him sitting in his chair by the window in his front room looking out at me and my Mum. I’d always ignore him, but Mum would wave, and sometimes, before we’d go home, she’d make us both go in to his house to ‘check he was doing okay.’