Dead Lovely (5 page)

My iPod was on full blast and Glasgow was whirring by my window. I’d arranged to meet Sarah and Kyle at Milngavie Station, a thirty-minute train ride from home. I had missed travelling alone. No-one on that train knew who I was; no-one knew I had a recently stitched vagina and a nine-month-old baby. I was just a girl on a train with an iPod. Things were looking up. I was going to be all right. The sun was shining and even the suburbs of Glasgow with their grey pebble-dashed bungalows looked nice.

The music started giving me a headache after a few minutes and I had this sudden fear that Sarah and Kyle wouldn’t show up. I sensed Sarah’s
disapproval of the controlled crying fiasco. She
probably
thought I was a bad, ungrateful mother. She’d refused to leave that night until I’d had a shower, a coffee and two hours to sober up. I’d cried a lot and apologised, so I thought we’d left on good terms, but maybe she hated me.

Surely they would show up. They had to.

Much to my relief, Sarah and Kyle were waiting for me on the platform. They ran towards me, smiling, and we all jumped up and down on the spot a couple of times like schoolchildren, linked arms and danced in a circle, and then got some guy with long matted hair and a grey-blue rucksack to take a photo of us in front of the sign that marked the beginning of the West Highland Way. I hadn’t seen Kyle giggle for years. What a difference! This was going to be the most incredible holiday, I thought to myself.

Which was true in the end.

We walked to the leafy suburb that edged the city and bounced alongside squirrels in a large country park. For several hours we meandered with the lush flat farmland, and then sat by a burn and ate fresh banana cake and drank hot chocolate prepared by Sarah that morning in a whizz-bang thermos. A whisky distillery was beside us, Highland cows were in the fields adjacent, and we felt like we were on the set of a Scottish tourism ad.

Over lunch we traded stories about people Kyle and I had gone to uni with.

‘Chas was so in love with you,’ Kyle said.

‘Rubbish,’ I replied.

‘You knew! He followed you around like a puppy dog!’

‘You’re full of shite, McGibbon.’

After Chas dropped out of medicine and started working and taking drugs, we still lived together and had lots of fun, but working and university seemed like different universes back then. A while later he disappeared to God knows where without even saying goodbye. When he materialised
afterwards
he was a bit weird with me and almost
immediately
ended up in Sandhill Prison.

It was Kyle who broke the news to me.

‘You’ll never guess who got eight years at the Old Bailey!’ he said over the phone one evening.

I don’t normally do things that are a waste of time, like reading joke emails or guessing, but Kyle hounded me. ‘Guess, go on, you never will …’

‘Um, Ewan McGregor.’

‘No.’

‘Your mum.’

‘Nup.’

‘Your dad.’

‘My dad’s dead.’

‘Oh, shit, sorry … (Pause) … He is not dead!’ I remembered.

‘It’s Chas, you dick. Chas!’ said Kyle.

I was gobsmacked. Chas was so gentle he
befriended
ants, and had never so much as stolen a sweetie from the corner shop as far as I knew.

‘Why? What’d he do?’

Kyle didn’t know much. It was attempted murder, he’d heard, something to do with an
incident
at a tube station involving a shopping trolley. Chas had gone mad, what with all the drug-taking, obviously. Rumour had it he’d brandished the trolley proclaiming to know the truth about this and that.

Kyle and I suspected that he may well have known the truth about this and that because Chas was always right about everything. What we couldn’t grasp was how he got a shopping trolley through the turnstile at Angel underground, down two sets of escalators, and what he actually did with the trolley once he was there. Did he ram the passengers? Add them to his basket?

After they transferred Chas from London to Glasgow, I visited him three times. This wasn’t easy, as I couldn’t just show up. Chas had to arrange his own visits, then ring and let his visitors know when to come. But he didn’t ring me or write. I sent him several awkward letters, not wanting to be overly jovial so as to remind him of what he’d lost and send him off the third-floor landing in B Hall, but not wanting to be underly jovial either, so as to remind him of the meaninglessness of life and send him off the third-floor landing in B Hall.

After several weeks of similar letters, I turned to Plan B, which was a devious and cunning plan involving overcoming prison security by infiltrating the agents’ visits area. In other, more prosaic, words, I would tell the prison officers that his social worker was here to see him.

I was sweating like a pig by the time my ID, bag and thumbprint were inspected and I was allowed inside. The guards intimidated me, sure, but not as much as the mutants in the waiting area. It became clear as I glanced around me that Sandhill housed a specific demographic and that the prison was simply
an extension of their patch. They seemed to share expectations. Their sons would inevitably end up here at some point, and the guards would talk to them like pieces of shit. Poor dental hygiene and a unique turn of phrase designed to terrify newcomers were also shared.

Eventually, the locals were ushered into the visits area and I was ushered into agents’.

‘Charles Worthington, Prison No. 15986, B Hall, 3/36.’ I wrote this on my request sheet, having cleverly bypassed prison security and accessed its database (I rang Records and they told me), and then took my place in room seven, a glass box with a table and two chairs.

I waited an eternity underneath the corner cameras in the interview room, worried that they would catch me out. I was not a criminal justice social worker. I was child protection, and I had no place here. I was an intruder and I would surely be caught and hanged in the old hanging cell in D Hall and then buried in an unmarked grave with the others out the back.

Each time a red or green polo-shirted body was uncuffed in the area I wondered if it might be Chas. I hoped to God he didn’t show up with a green polo shirt because I knew these were the shirts worn by the beasts in D Hall.

He wore red, and while he looked skinny and drawn, he still managed to pull off the outfit with
some flair. Larger red polo shirt than the other guys, maybe, that flowed well from his muscular chest then down. And even though his denims were unfashionably even-coloured, they did not appear as tapered as the others. When he saw who it was he tried to turn around and leave, but the uniformed brute at the end of the corridor pushed him back towards me. He reluctantly came over and sat down, his eyes moving downwards and staying there.

I shuffled my papers and began the mock
interview.

‘Hello, Chas, my name is Krissie Donald. I’m a criminal justice social worker and I’ve been asked to complete the Home Background Report. The aim of the report is for the Parole Board to get as much information about you before deciding about early release. First things first, let me check I have the right details. You got eight years. If you’ve been a good boy, you’ll be out in four. Your offence is …?’

Chas did not answer.

‘The crime you committed is …?’ I looked up at the cameras and smiled nervously (did they know I was lying yet?).

He said nothing.

‘Okay, now if you do not cooperate with the report you do realise that this will not look good when it comes to a decision …’

No response for several seconds. My heart was beating so fast and my palms were so sweaty I knew
it was just a matter of time before they burst in the door and yelled, ‘Right, up against the wall, you and you. Don’t say a fucking word, you gobshite pricks!’

But no-one came in. Instead, Chas leant across the table and said, ‘They can’t hear you, they can only see, and only if they’re looking, which they’re usually not.’

‘Jesus, why didn’t you tell me?’ I breathed in for the first time in minutes.

We smiled at each other, but then both our smiles melted into something not so smiley.

‘How are you, Chas?’

‘Great.’

A pause.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Well, each morning I have PE and three
afternoons
a week I study anger management and in the evenings I watch Sky movies with my cell mate Rab, who sometimes meows and sometimes doesn’t.’

With this, he stood up and walked out of the room. I realised I couldn’t yell after him like I would in the normal world. If I did, alarms would ring and the keys of a hundred nearby officers would jingle and Chas would find himself at the bottom of a large pile of blue polyester uniforms. So instead I gathered my papers, my dignity and my powers of deception, and left the way I came.

I tried the same thing again, twice, but he refused to see me.

I rang his parents. They lived in Morningside in Edinburgh and were extremely nice. ‘All we know is he got into a fight, hon. It breaks our hearts that he won’t see us, our lovely boy. You’ve seen him? He looked okay? Oh, thank God, it’s agony. Our little Chas.’

Mum – who’d always had a thing for Chas – said maybe he had his reasons, that he was a good friend and a good person and maybe he just needed some time. And time he got.

As Sarah, Kyle and I packed our lunch away we talked about Kyle’s other pals from uni, who were now zillionaire plastic surgeons or award-winning world savers. I felt like I was chatting to Kyle for the first time in years – wee soul, he obviously felt as plagued with self-loathing and disappointment as the rest of us. He always looked a bit out of place alongside his medical friends, I thought. They were doctors from birth. They had plans. They wanted to save patients and live in mansions and give withering looks to frivolous people. I always thought Kyle should have been one of the frivolous, like me. He worked hard, but when he took time off, he played even harder, as though he was making up for lost time. During the summer he’d smoke dope with Chas, watch crap television, and read Lonely Planet guides over and over, as if backpacking by osmosis.
I believed that medicine dragged him down and gave him a frown that he never should have had.

Aware that Sarah might be feeling left out, I started chatting to her about old friends, when the lad with the matted hair who took our photograph on the train platform walked by. We asked him to join us but he said he couldn’t, as he was going to head up a hill. He was doing an extra climb every second day because the ninety-six-mile walk from Glasgow was not painful enough, apparently. Funnily, the man with the matted hair was called Matt.

He said he’d love to see us that night, though, and he wrote his mobile number on a piece of paper and gave it to Sarah before smiling at me and
walking
into the distance with an inordinately good bum.

Sarah said it was déjà vu.

We were good Catholic schoolgirls, Sarah and I. Our parents had gone to great lengths to ensure our tickets to heaven, sending us to a nun-run private school. When we graduated to secondary, we got the train home together and talked about boys. Before long we had graduated to talking
to
boys.

We used to change trains at Glasgow Central, so Sarah and I would wait for our connection in Burger King. The boys from St Aloysius would sit at Burger King too, and relationships developed which went like this:

Boy would give Boy’s Best Friend a note, and Boy’s Best Friend would give it to my Best Friend
(Sarah), and the note would read: ‘Will you count bricks with me?’ My Best Friend would read the note to me and I would smile in full view and coyly write ‘yes’ and she would return the note to the Boy’s Best Friend who would pass it on to the Boy.

I would then make my way to the low-level train platform and stand with my back against the wall and wait for the Boy to waltz towards me, put his hands against the wall, do an
open-mouth-no-tongues
kiss, and this was us counting bricks.

Sarah never counted bricks. She was too pretty and had no intention of wasting time on wee neds in Burger King. So instead of counting bricks, Sarah would listen to them placing bets about whether or not I’d let their mate get a Cap’n Birdseye.

Even then she remained pretty protective of me. In fact, when she went to nursing school, and I went off with my rucksack, I really noticed the difference. There was no-one to stop me, so I went hell for leather, and now should anyone ask, I’d have to round my tally down to the nearest ten.

All these years later and Sarah was still looking out for me the way she had at Central Station. The only difference was that at sixteen I didn’t let anyone get past second base, but at thirty-three a home run was pretty much guaranteed.

My sexual awakening had occurred between the ages of fifteen and nineteen in seedy low-level train platforms (as above), in rusty sheds, in back lanes
and in scout hall bathrooms. In each venue I would be a quivering mess, as I stopped the hand from going
there,
slapped the hand as it tried to go there, let the hand go a little bit nearer to there … Oh God!

I would pray in church afterwards, saying
thirty-three
or so Hail Marys, and later worrying that I should have rounded it off to an even number or added the odd Our Father. And this wasn’t even
full-blown
sex! These prayers were for ‘tweaking’ and ‘fingering’ – the first term referring to the rubbing of nipples to the point of rash, the second to the relentless prodding of teenage digits in all the wrong places. God knows, if I’d done the whole caboodle, I’d have been praying all day.