Love Story 3

The furrows on my da’s forehead stood like stepping stones to his thoughts. The measured way he lowered the back paged of the Daily Record’s sports pages which separated him and my mother and me from a footballing reality she’s never understand. I’d said a boy, Kieran, at school, was ‘cute’ and he looked to my mum for a naturalistic explanation and translation.

She’d laughed and ruffled my hair. ‘He’s jist started school,’ she told him. ‘An boys that age are cute.’

‘You mollycoddle the boy too much,’ he said. Adjusting the uneven patched legs on his specs and flicking newsprint back into place over his eyes to shield his disgust.

Da wanted me to show ruggedness and readiness to prove I was no mug. A classmate called Zippy because he was strange looking and never knew when to shut up, blaring out the strangest things and even screaming obscenities like ‘Fucking cow’ to our teacher when she tried to give him the belt was more to his liking. When Zippy had punched me and I’d came home greeting, Da pulled me the by the school shirt and marched me outside.

Zippy was stupid that way, waiting by the triangle of grass where older boys sometimes played football. He swung his left foot at a punctured same orange coloured, size-3, dimpled mitre ball, as if hoping they’d come back and let him play, as they once had when they’d been a man short. He didn’t even run away when my da, a grown adult, double his size and three times his bulk, growled at him to ‘Come o’er here’.

I recognised in Zippy’s expression that jigsaw of kinship with the last piece missing. He wanted be liked, or even tolerated.

Da waited until we were toe to toe, twisted his thumb and nodded in his direction. ‘Punch him,’ he said.

Zippy did what he said and punched me in the nose. It was much sorer than my torn lip. I screamed and the high notes shook both of us. It bloodied my favourite two-tone blue and red Bay City Rolller jumper. Da pushed the back of my shoulder, which made me stumble, but didn’t help. My good jumper would be ruined. I turned to run away, but he grabbed my shirt collar and bunched it in a way that it would need ironed, breathing heavily through his nose.

Zippys stood staring at the dog turd that made you move the goalposts to the side. He expected to be hit. That was the way his life worked.

Da left me standing sobbing into my sleeve and trying to catch my breath. The segs on the bottom of his shiny, black leather shoes making a clicking-clacking noise, a skiffled disapproval as he stomped away.  

‘Fucksake,’ he muttered out of the side of his mouth. ‘Spoilt rotten,’ which was in his estimation of most of his children, which mean me. Kids like Zippy, who didn’t have two pennies to rub together were his favourites. He saw himself in that tough-guy mould.  Mum’s pals were ‘timewasters,’ or ‘like treacle, who’d eat thersel’. Men came in simpler form with a swearword attached such as ‘Fucking, aa s prefix. ‘Cunt’ as a post-script. I was a ‘fucksake which was the worst of the prissy bunch.

Ali had become part of our future family. She wasn’t for telling I wasn’t the father of her child. My da had been outraged, but smirked enough to show I’d been man about it. He even took my side against my mum, when she’d been berating me for being so stupid and childish.

‘The well lassie can jist get an abortion,’ he said and chuckled as if he’d poured my manly seed into her and stopped her insides up with a bottle stop. ‘It’s jist wan o’ these things.’

‘She can’t get an abortion,’ I said as one father to another.

‘How no?’ he asked.

I wasn’t blessed with an immediate answer until much later when God revealed it to me, but Da was gone. ‘Babies were good for yeh.’

Mum had said much the same thing, but used different words. She called her ‘a poor soul,’ and hugged her, when we both told her. But said ‘we’d work something out, because she was too young and didn’t want to ruin her life’.

Ali had liked that. Her own mum had given her a good battering for her own good. Told her, ‘She’d made her bed and would lie in it.’ Battered her again because her bed wasn’t made, even though it was never made.

My mum was like fairy godmother to her. One that provided meals and reminders about regular bedtimes—her mum let her stay up all night and was unconcerned about school the next morning—and even slipped her pocket money. I was outraged, because it was my fifty-pence she was getting. Mum had a way of sneaking life lessons into her everyday life.

Pushed onto tiptoes, I was getting beyond myself and out of hand. It wasn’t just the secret smoking, nicking douts from her ashtray, and stealing thirty-pence from her purse to feed my addiction. Nor was it just looking at nearly nude models from her catalogue. The all-consuming hatred of knowing I shouldn’t be touching myself. The throb of anticipation between my legs telling me religion was all baloney anyway. I snibbed the toilet door and sat on the edge of the toilet pan. Nobody would ever find out about me standing on the steps of my own private hell. Cock in hand. Speeding out of control and turning the page from the girls in the catalogue to the boys’ hairless bodies like razor blades with a slight speed bump for a bum. I knew I’d never be like them. They’d never like me. It couldn’t be wrong because it all felt so damned good. I would never tell.

But with jizz in my hand, I’d ate of the forbidden fruit of self-knowing and self-love. I’d somehow contrive to get found out. Like Adam and Eve.

The devil had tempted Adam in the same way. Telling him, ‘Go on mate, go and sleep wae yer incestuous spare rib?’

‘Yeh mean Eve?’

‘Aye, who else would I be talking about? There’s naebody else here. She’s naked and a virgin.’ The devil would have winked like my da. ‘Yeh, know whit I mean?’

‘No really, whit’s a virgin?’

‘Jesus!’

‘Who’s Jesus?’

The devil would have sighed like my mum after finding out my girlfriend who wasn’t my girlfriend in the biblical sense was pregnant and needy. I hadn’t gone for the Immaculate Conception route because only Catholics believed that nonsense. I liked my Da for once being proud of me. Even though I wasn’t being proud of myself.

Even the devil had come to the same Biblical conclusion. ‘There’s nae talking to you Adam. I’m away tae talk tae yer spare rib. Women aren’t as thick as fuck and open tae reason. Forbidden fruit. Yeh couldnae even find your cock.’

The only way I could get through it was getting baptised in the spirit. It would give me a new body. One that didn’t look at other boys’ bodies. Val would need to come with me to meet Colin, join our fellowship, and find herself. We’d join together, hand in hand in bringing an innocent wee baby in to the world. It would be another four years before we could be legally married. But I was willing to wait. I just hoped our baby didn’t look or sound like Val, or me either, when I came to think about it. I prayed the baby would look normal like my mum. I was blessed.