Duckin day

I don’t know if it was the crackling from the frying pan, or the smell of ham, which prised my eyes open and made me think about food.

‘Four sugars, young fella?’ Dad handed Uncle John a mug of tea.

Dad called Uncle John young, but he was really old. He sounded Irish, like Uncle John, when he spent some time with him, even although Uncle John lived in the next close. They didn’t have any real fags, so they broke the filters off mum’s Embassy Regal, which she had left unopened on the mantelpiece. They belched out more smoke than the coal fire behind the grate, as they passed one fag after another to each other, like a seesaw, until the pack, and Radio Athlone, was finished, telling us the market price for pigs.

I yanked the covers around my ears and tried to tuck in the last bit of warmth from sleep. But Stephen grabbed back the covers I had won and ran his big toenail, razor-like, up and down the inside of my leg, to remind me who the big brother was. I didn’t need to sit up to know he’d be grinning his evil grin at me. We could feel upside down Josephine, whose legs divided the two of us, sit up.

‘Stop that!’ Josephine spat out from the bottom of the bed, which was the top of the bed, for her.

Josephine looked different in the morning; bigger, with her brown hair tousled like a mane. She scrunched up her skelly eyes, like Clarence the Cross Eyed Lion. I felt the echo on the blankets as she reinforced her words with a sharp kick, which bounced back and forth, from one to the other. We knew better than to drag our covert warfare, from the bed behind the couch, into the same room where dad was making a meal of cooking for him and Uncle John.

I didn’t need to turn around. I knew that Phyllis, alone in her truckle bed, would be waiting to ask me if I needed to go. It was her job to help me find my black slip on sannies from the pungent pyramid of sand encrusted plastic sandals, damp rubber wellies and less than shining black school shoes that had spawned at the front door since mum had gone on holiday to hospital. I was to help Phyllis by pushing my bare foot into the right and left feet of the shoes she shoved over to me. I took her hand when we rushed outside, like two convicts chained together with our striped jammies, down the cold tenement stairs, to the landing toilet. Phyllis was to make sure she kept the lavy key safe. It was hung on a nail by the front door with the same kind of brown shoelace that acted as a necklace for my dummy tit. She was to turn the big brass key in the lock. But she didn’t need to come in with me; I could do the toilet myself.

I pulled my shorts on, but couldn’t find a shirt, so just put a jumper on. There was only one sock, I had lost the other, so I put that on. Josephine ran the hot water tap, which was really the cold water tap, and tried to wash away the lash of the cow’s lick from my hair, to make me the same square cut as Stephen’s Frankenstein head. Phyllis put a bright yellow ribbon in her long silky hair. But me and Josephine were the same. No sticky Brylcream, spit, or decoration, could change our curly tangled mass. Stephen was supposed to put on the same kind of grey shorts as me, but he had fooled us, putting on his long trousers, which were meant to be kept good, for starting school.

We were hovering about, as dad would say, waiting to see if we could avoid him making us breakfast. He liked to use up all the old milk that had turned buttery in the bottom of the bottle and make us eat his grey puddle of porridge oats, which congealed like lumpy glue in your mouth, that everybody- apart from Phyllis who didn’t like porridge- had to finish, no matter what.

The whistle of the kettle on the gas stove meant there was tea. And there was sugar on the table. And there was a bottle of milk that had just been opened. Josephine dished out the breakfast bowls, like playing cards. We practically poured Kellogg’s Cornflakes, coated in sugar and soaked in milk, down our throats, without chewing, before dad caught us.

‘Where are your glasses?’ said dad to Josephine, picking her out from us, as if she had just came into focus.

I needed to go to the toilet again. I slipped my hand into Josephine’s and tugged at her arm, pulling her towards the door. Josephine’s round black NHS glasses were in two bits. Stephen sawed through the wire bridge when he decided to experiment with a double giant magnifying glass that would burn through not only paper and wood, but brick too. It initially hadn’t worked because the sun wasn’t warm enough on the ground. He had climbed up the drainpipe and onto the roof of the old washhouses, but he was only able to make paper smoulder there. To make brick burn he planned to get onto the tenement roof.

When we got back upstairs Josephine handed dad her glasses. Uncle John hiccupped laughter that was contagious. We all started laughing. Even dad. Uncle John was funny. He reached out and pulled Josephine towards him and onto his lap. Then, like an orang-utan wearing Brute aftershave, his hairy arms swept me onto his lap and then Stephen. He captured all three of us and kept up a barrage of kisses, on the exposed skin of our faces and necks, as we tried, although not very hard, to squirm away from his firm monkey grasp.

Dad rummaged in the drawer beside the sink and flung one thing after another back until he settled on what he needed. Then, like John Noakes of Blue Peter, he cut down and across the Cornflake’s box with the small sharp potato knife, made a cardboard bridge by folding the red insignia cockerel head and joined the two lenses of Josephine’s specs together with sticky black tape. He took off his own specs to look through the lenses in her specs. Satisfied, he brought them over and placed them gently on Josephine’s face, positioning them like a marksman, making minute adjustments to one side then the other.

‘They’ll do,’ he said when he was finished.

‘Aye, that’ll do right enough Dessy.’ said Uncle John smiling.

Dad and Uncle John laughed together as if one of them had told a joke, but with Uncle John holding us we didn’t feel left out. Josephine took off her homemade specs.

‘Ah, ah ah,’ said dad, shaking his head and hitting his forefinger against the bridge of his own specs, until Josephine, put hers back on.

Josephine’s upright ironing board body grew taller and straighter. In one movement, she unravelled herself from us. She seemed, like a princess, with a patterned red dress, from a fairy tale.

I don’t know who first suggested that we should go to Dalmuir Park. Soon there was an all round clamour. We all wanted to go. It was free, so dad also thought it was a good idea.

Coming up the Crescent stairs and coming onto busy Duntocher Road we had to stop. I had to hold Uncle John and Phyllis’s hand and she had to hold Josephine’s hand. My dad had Stephen’s hand, because there was just no telling what he would do next.

We had to go through the tunnel underneath the park. Stephen told me the drip, drip, drip of water from the rivets in the roof to the concrete below sounded like blood to vampires. This was the place where they congregated at night, because they felt at home with the smell of damp green death from the walls. During the day, the bent and buckled beams supported a train track that was liable to dump a train on you at any time.

Stephen was very brave running unbridled into the darkness and shouting away fear. I was too wee and scared to be the same as him. I heard a train thumping along hitting every rivet on the roof above us. Although my dummy was dirty, dirty and for babies, not big boys, somehow it found its way into my mouth. With one hand gripping Uncle John’s and the other supporting the curtain of water running down the wall, I felt my way through the tunnel to sunlight, green grass and normal people sitting on park benches and towels. I didn’t even know that I was sobbing.

‘Jesus Christ. What’s the matter with him?’ said dad to Josephine, nodding at me, waiting for her to unravel the mystery.

‘Do you need the toilet?’ Dad demanded an answer.

I simply nodded. He grabbed me by the hand and dragged me, in his wake, back down the hill into the tunnel. Just as brusquely he pulled down my pants and trousers to my ankles.

‘Pee,’ he said, pointing to the gutter, which ran the whole length of the tunnel into a drain.

I didn’t think I needed, but I did. I scrambled to catch up with dad, as he walked ahead of me whistling, before I had time to pull up my shorts up.

We were going to see the ducks. I’d never seen them before, but I’d heard all about them. They were as big as Sandy, the dog, and if you didn’t feed them mouldy blue bread they’d come after you and bite you bad and it’d really hurt and you’d need to go to hospital in an ambulance with the sirens sounding and the blue lights flashing.

I was no longer scared. The ducks were funny. But when the bread was finished Stephen threw the bread wrapper at them. Then the ducks squacked and squacked and got all annoyed with him and more and more of them kept coming from everywhere. Some of them were flying towards me, really fast, and you could see their big white fangs. I was scared now. I made a run for it.

Dad was too quick. He caught me and held me upside down by the feet, over the fence, which kept the ducks in. My hair was almost touching the water. ‘Since we’ve no bread left,’ and he was laughing as he said it, ‘we’ll need to feed you to the ducks’. My brothers and sisters thought that this was better than telly. I had my eyes closed. I wasn’t going to cry and get called a crybaby. But dad was only kidding. He flipped me over onto the footpath before the ducks could get me

Josephine made me blow my snottery nose on my sleeve. Josephine had on mum’s old cardigan. Mum was to bring us back a little baby. But I didn’t want a new brother or sister. I wanted a dog. I would train it to catch sticks and bring newspapers in its mouth and roll over and play dead and do all sorts of things. I’d treat it really well. I’d let other people pat it, except for dad, who didn’t like me bringing special dogs home with me, when they were cold and hungry. You needed to give them a digestive biscuit, because they didn’t like chocolate biscuits. So I'd need to eat them for the dog. And I'd give it a drink of water from a soup plate. But I missed mum. She would make everything all right. I wanted to go home.