birth pains

Everybody was going on about JFK dying in Dallas. No one much gave little thought to JOD being born in a small maternal hospital, Braeholm, in Helensburgh. You’re probably thinking how does he remember all of this? The answer, of course, came in Jesus’ promise to Mum. Death pays off all debts, but life orders a son. White-coated doctors said I wasn’t supposed to live, but there was a whole shuck of other things I wasn’t supposed to be able to do.

I convulsed myself with crying, every thought, the grave of new-born heaven, and pined, in advance, for Pauline Moriarty and all the other girls I’d never know. I cried for all the traitorous games of football I’d lose. I cried for the shortening of the sinews, the bald loss of the crown of cow’s lick and old age. I made wailing a virtuous and noble tune. Mum was given a bed in a glass-fronted room away from all the other empty-handed mothers, whose fattened swaddles were plucked from their leaking breasts, by marauding gangs of starched matrons and white slips of nurses, to spend time in forced isolation. I was born to be cherished and a memory that slipped away with a sigh. But I was force fed night and day. I’d no choice but to get stuck on the titillations of life.

Magnolia buds were swelling and seeking the sun when I was set free and pushed around in a shiny black pram, an enormous peanut sized room, with two white-walled rubber wagon wheels at the back and two stumpy-legged wheels at the front. It had a hood to keep out the weather and the climbing tangles of my brother and sister’s flying moon faces. I was a touch-me-not, so that every day was the same. I’d talk to myself a little, mutter, rebuild my voice, try words that bounced and penetrated, as I was bumped up and down tenement stairs and into the freak gusts of fresh air that brought the burping and burning smells of things and then, after a while, brown earth growing, singing with the buzz of colour and groaning into being. I was contented, chuckling, my neck rubberised and flinging my head about like a globe full of damp sand trying to find home.

At night my pram was full of me. The fire banked and burning down in the grate, cast off shadowy heat and soothed the silence of the shape-shifting night. My brothers and sisters were sleeping snug in sardine beds, soft blankets under their chins, close enough to hear their rusty scattered snores and whelps in a deep sea of dreams.

Morning was a scramble of noise, to which I added pumped-up air, giving voice to my discontent. The smell of fag smoke soothed me. Mum came close enough to pull into my universe. I stretched my arms out. She passed me by. I seethed and flung myself around my pram threatening to topple my kingdom. My brother Stephen stood on the front wheel with the blue shirt of his school uniform buttoned to the neck, with buttons in the wrong holes, steadying it, steadying me. He soaked up a vision of my eyes glaring at him and patted me on the head. Our Jo, long and fairish hair falling around her face, stood on the other wheel, balancing out all wrongs.

‘Whit’s wrang with him?’ Stephen sniffed.

‘He’s just been a pest.’ Our Jo twisted her neck to search for Mum and my neck settled long enough to follow her gaze like the sights of a rifle. ‘Mum he’s absolutely minging.’ She screwed up her face. Stephen did the same. The pram rocked with the thunder of them leaving, as they jumped away from me at the same time.

I howled with renewed vigour. I reached for all the things beyond me and battered my body against the side of the pram.

‘In a minute. In a minute.’ Mum was standing near the thin metal guard, beside the fireplace. She’d Phyllis’s wrist and was wagging her finger at her, telling her off, so that her body softened like white dough in water and my big sister joined the sobbing family

Mum watched her slump down into a parcel of hair, picked her up and let her curl into her shoulder as she attended to my cries, shoogling the pram with one hand. My arms shoot out and I bawl a full throated war cry. Phyllis was put down gently on the back of the couch. Mum stroked her face and then pushed her so that she tumbled- her- wilkies backwards onto the dimpled cushions and begun to laugh.

‘Again. Again.’ Phyllis scuttled round the couch and tugged at Mum’s blue apron. Mum reached down and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Not now darling.’

I launched myself at Mum and she laughed.

‘C’mon then.’

I clung onto the smell and taste of Mum’s neck and in the safety of her arms, looking out at my kingdom full of outlaw brothers and sisters that if they don’t do as they’re told they’ll get smacked.

That Christmas I’d my first taste of heaven. It didn’t come in the blinding luminosity of falling snow of the coldest winter since records began, or the ice that made the world brittle, beautiful and good enough to eat. Christmas was a godsend because instead of spoonful’s of yummy salted apple gruel I got high on my first mouthful of yucky-gooey brown-sugar. I shivered and shook and couldn’t wait to get my next hit. Life became unbearable and I had to grow up fast. I could see all the people I trusted and took for granted –Our Jo, Stephen and Phyllis– would lie to me, cheat on me and steal from me. The taste of gruel was never the same afterwards. When Mum started me on solids shortly afterwards my mouth opened and locked into place. Cabbage and potatoes didn’t taste anything like chocolate. I couldn’t content myself. Life was full of endless woes punctuated with artificial highs.