How I Killed Margaret Thatcher Read online

  Why?

  Take it down, Sean.

  Why can’t we put it up, like at nan and grandad’s?

  Nobody’ll see it, Sean. There’s no point.

  Course they’ll see it. Everybody in the street’ll see it.

  It’s not a good idea, darling.

  Why not?

  Sean, I said no.

  Johnny slumps down in a chair and rubs his face; his eyes look tired. All the posters have to come down now. My dad cracks open a bottle of Newcastle Brown for him; they like to drink that together. My nan has kept a plate of chips warm. Johnny has a load of badges on his jacket. He passes them on to me: Steel Pulse, Steve Biko, CND. I pin them to my school parka.

  They tell Johnny the story of how I fell out the window to cheer him up and it’s good to see how my mum and dad turn it into a funny story, even though at the time they thought I might be dead. He starts to laugh and comes over and ruffles my hair.

  What happened to your hand, Dad? Johnny says.

  No one says anything.

  I’ll tell yer later, my mum says to Johnny.

  We turn Margaret Thatcher off.

  Her woh last five minutes, any road. Johnny says, doing a voice like my grandad’s.

  My grandad says not to be so sure. My mum agrees. My dad doesn’t say anything.

  I’m happy because they decide that I’ve done enough moving around for today and I get to spend the night at my nan and grandad’s house. I love staying here, especially when my grandad is off work. He’s just finished a week of nights. His voice is tired and cracked and I think maybe that was why he lost his temper with my uncle Eric and why Margaret Thatcher has got to him so much.

  My dad has to go back to work because a machine breaks down and only he can fix it. He’s got an important job, maintenance at Coopers Steel Stampings, making sure the machines that cut the metal work properly. My mum sleeps in the single bed next to mine in the room I fell out of. I dream of falling and she holds my hand.

  Next morning, my mum eats toast at the kitchen table. She has some shopping to do and wants to get out before it gets too busy, especially now it’s clear that I’m fine. I know that my dad is going to meet her when he’s finished at work and they are going to look at one of those houses in Kingswinford or somewhere else miles away.

  Am yer sure you didn’t bang anything else, sweetheart? my mum asks and holds my shoulders so she can look into my eyes. Yer didn’t bang yer head?

  Just me bum.

  You haven’t got a headache or nothing?

  Just arse-ache!

  Don’t say arse, Sean.

  What else should I call it?

  Yer bottom or yer bum. Yer behind.

  Just bum-ache, then.

  Yer know what you’ll look like when the bruise comes out?

  What?

  A baboon. A baboon with a bright blue bum!

  She does a little dance like a monkey that makes me laugh and kisses me again on the top of my head before she leaves for the shops.

  My grandad sits in his usual seat at the table, dipping toast into a fried egg with his good hand. My nan stands at the window, singing bits of songs and drinking tea.

  What’s Picasso doin today, lyin in bed? My grandad nods upstairs towards my uncle Johnny’s bedroom.

  He wants a rest, my nan says.

  He’s a good lad, my grandad says after a while.

  My nan doesn’t say anything. She’s still angry with my grandad about fighting Uncle Eric. I think she’s angry with him about making Johnny leave college as well, but she keeps quiet about that.

  My grandad has taken the big bandages off his hand even though the hospital said he was meant to leave them on for a week and then go back. He has wrapped one bandage around his hand himself. I can see the tips of his fingers, like sausages, where he holds his knife.

  My nan sings quietly and wipes the draining board with a cloth.

  Mind you, we could do wi some help tekkin that shed down, couldn’t we, mate? My grandad winks at me. Yow’ve onny done half a job, look. We’ll have to finish it off today.

  Doh listen to him, Sean. My nan kisses me on the top of my head in the same way as my mum does. Wim lucky yome okay. Lucky we ay all still dahn the hospital. We should be thankful for what we’ve got. Then she looks at my grandad. I doh know how you think yer can mek light of it now, when it was all yower fault.

  We know whose fault it was.

  I’m not sure if he means Margaret Thatcher or my uncle Eric.

  There is a knock at the front door. I follow my nan to see who it can be. No one usually comes to the front door; they either come up the entry or along the path from the allotments.

  Oh my God, my nan says and puts her hand up to her mouth when she opens the door. There’s a policeman on the step, filling the doorway, and another one standing out on the pavement.

  Jack, iss the police, she says.

  Well, they better come in then.

  My grandad has followed us and shows the policemen into the front room to sit down even before the first policeman says, We’d like to have a word with you, Mr Marsh.

  No one ever goes in the front room, except on Sundays or Christmas or maybe bank holidays when everyone comes round. The best cups are in there and my great-granny’s sideboard and the good armchairs from Cooks and the telephone. On special occasions my grandad and Uncle Eric phone Australia to speak to their brother, my uncle Freddie, who lives in a place called Wollongong.

  My grandad offers the police the good chairs and says, I spose I can guess what this is about, before closing the door behind them.

  No, they never spoke to each other ever again, my grandad and Uncle Eric, though they’d often see each other in town or at the club and even at the caravans on holiday during a couple of summers; not one word.

  I don’t know how the police came to visit that morning. I can’t really believe Eric called them. Nothing came of it. Well, nothing except a sense of unease and the idea that one morning there might be another knock on the door.

  The police to our door? I remember my nan saying. Three-quarters of an hour they was here. We’ve never had the police to our door.

  She kept shaking her head and saying it over and over. They were to come again, later.

  ‘‌My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.’

  ‌

  My grandad is a strong man. He takes the shed down in about five minutes, even with his bad hand. He’s pretending there’s nothing wrong with it; maybe because my nan is watching, shaking her head, muttering about the police. He doesn’t look it. I mean, he doesn’t look like the strong men in my comics: Desperate Dan, Johnny Cougar, Hot Shot Hamish. He’s skinny, like a whippet. When he takes his shirt off, when he takes me swimming or at the caravan on holiday, you can see his ribs but also hard knots of muscle up and down his body from all the lifting and twisting he does at work, and the blurry blue tattoos up his arms. He lifts a whole wall of the shed out of its foundation with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

  He hasn’t said anything since the police left apart from when my nan said, Well, is anything more gonna come of it?

  He said, Doh be so saft. Bloody fool him. Yow’d think the police would have better things to do than come drinking tay in our front room on a Saturday morning.

  All the stuff that had been in the shed is laid out on the lawn, like there’s been an earthquake or a flood. Two bikes, an old rusted pink one with a basket that had been my mum’s and an ancient racer that had been my uncle Eric’s that I imagine myself riding in a few years’ time if we can clean it up; a few tennis rackets with broken strings; deckchairs and a windbreak; Johnny’s easel that was broken when he fought the skinheads; a hosepipe; a tool box; a cricket bat; a few golf balls; tennis balls; and the pile of dust shee
ts that saved my life. There’s an old, battered, rusty box with a lock on it as well.

  What’s in that box? my nan says.

  My grandad shrugs and pretends not to know.

  There’s a gun in the box that I’m not meant to know about. I don’t say anything, either. I could’ve told Ronnie about it, I suppose. He could’ve used it to shoot the fox.

  My grandad used to talk with a cigarette in his mouth and the cigarette would move up and down as he spoke. I liked it when we sat outside in the summer or at the caravans on holiday and you’d see the orange glow of the cigarette moving up and down as it got dark. Years later, when I had my own family, on holiday in Majorca, I walked Josh and Lily back to our cabin during a power cut. In a clump of undergrowth outside the door was a glow-worm. Lily stood transfixed, while I held Josh, a toddler then, to stop him making a grab for it. I found myself looking not at a glow-worm, but at the wobble of a lit cigarette back here in the Black Country dark.

  I think my grandad was the only one who had any idea what was coming.

  We drive to the tip and listen to a tape of Nat King Cole. My grandad keeps his bandaged hand fixed on the steering wheel. The car is a silvery blue Maxi that he bought from Harry Robertson. Little Ronnie’s dad sells cars in the street after he’s done them up. My grandad puts the back seat down to fit in the bits of the shed that he hasn’t saved for a bonfire and a few other bags of rubbish that he’s been waiting to get rid of. I get to sit in the front, which usually is a big deal, but we can’t solve the problem of my sitting down. My nan gives me a cushion but it’s no use, the minute we start moving and my arse makes contact with the seat, I’m in agony. We have to pull up in the bus stop on Cromwell Green Road for my grandad to arrange my great-granny’s mattress in the back. I can smell her on there. It doesn’t bother me, though. I’ve seen her dead, with her arms pulled up into her chest and her mouth a little way open. My mum had shooed me out of the room when I followed her. My great-granny was laid out like the mummies at the museum that I’d seen on telly. She was born in 1887 or 1888, no one was sure.

  We could check. They have records.

  Not for the likes o we, my mum said.

  I have no idea what she meant.

  A few years ago, though, I did check and she was right. There is no sign of us in any of the parish records, at the Catholic churches round and about; at the Church of England, Top or Bottom Churches, at Saint John’s on Kates Hill; at the Methodist, the Baptist. Our family moved back and forth between churches over the years. We knew we were here by then, though, drawn to the glow of the town from the dark fields round about, or from Wales even; bringing our anvils and bits of iron with us. There was an afternoon before my great-granny died when she started talking in a language that no one could understand.

  Is it Welsh? my grandad had said.

  Nonsense, my nan said and shook her head.

  My grandad might have been making some sort of joke but the thought stayed with me, that she had gone back to some earlier time and was using language she’d heard her own father or grandfather use. I picture a man looking back to his mountains, following the road to where there was work.

  Nobody wrote us down for a long time, not until we mattered, I suppose.

  My grandad said he knew where some of his family came from: out near Clent, where they’d had little furnaces in the woods; before the country was called England, when it was called Mercia. Some of us were here even then.

  There are seagulls at the tip. Hungry and angry, they circle the pit, where you throw things and they call to each other and sometimes flap down to peck and tear at bags and pieces of sacking. I wonder if they miss the sea. I have only ever been to the tip with my dad before and he makes me stay in the car. There are men in the pit, picking things out like the seagulls.

  What they doing, Grandad?

  Looking for treasure, he says.

  I stand by the open boot and pass things to him.

  Charlie Clancey comes over to talk to us. He’s at the tip looking for rag and bone. I look for Paul Newman, but Charlie’s only got his van today. Charlie pats me on the head and passes me a few coins from his pocket. One of the coins is American, ten cents, a dime.

  I kept that coin for years afterwards, for luck. Then I threw it in the canal like Mohammad Ali with his gold medal. Ain’t No Viet Cong ever call me Nigger. Johnny had that on a poster on his bedroom wall. My grandad used to call Ali Cassius Clay to wind Johnny up.

  Charlie smells like the pit. He shakes hands with my grandad, who has to use his left hand. Charlie nods at the bandage and asks him what he’s done and my grandad doesn’t answer, asks him to help with the mattress instead. We are related to Charlie, somehow, distantly, like he’s our cousin’s cousin’s cousin. We are related to everyone somehow. I see Charlie have a look at the mattress as we pull it out of the car, press his bony hand to it, working out whether it’s rag or bone. He shakes his head and they fling it together over the edge.

  No sign of Tommy yet, then, Charlie?

  No, yer know what he’s like.

  Charlie’s brother is missing. He’s a bit like a tramp, comes and goes as he pleases. He looks exactly like Charlie, tall and thin, with skin stretched across knobbly bones, except a bit more beaten up; Tommy wears a blue checked cap and Charlie wears a brown hat with a feather in it. That’s a good way to tell them apart.

  I’ve spoken to Tommy a couple of times at the Off Sales hatch at the Freebodies Tavern. Both times Tommy was drunk, sitting on the edge of the pavement, waiting for a customer to come to the bar so they might buy him more beer.

  One time I was with my dad when Tommy stepped towards us. My dad said, Yow got a problem, mate? Tommy stepped back and muttered, No problem, no problem, our kid, and looked at me. I doubt he could have fought my dad, but you weren’t meant to fight your own family anyway, even distant family, whatever my grandad had done to my uncle Eric.

  That was Tommy, I said to my dad as we walked to the car.

  I doh care who it was, he said.

  The other time I saw him was in exactly the same place but this time I was with my grandad, who gave him some cigarettes.

  Ta, Jackie. Ta, me mon, Tommy said to my grandad and patted him on the arm. His hands were all dirty and looked like they’d been bleeding.

  Tek it easy, Tommy, for Christ’s sake. Goo um now, eh? My grandad had pointed somewhere down the hill, probably towards Charlie’s yard. Doh tell yer nan about Tommy, he said to me.

  Charlie looks out over the tip.

  Yer know what he’s like. With the summer coming I probly woh see him till October now, not till the weather gets bad. Yer know what he’s like. I heared he’d gone down Stourport again. I had a mate who said he’d sin him, Easter. He’ll turn up. Or there’ll be a knock at the door one day. Any road.

  Charlie shrugs, slaps his hands together again and holds one out for my grandad to shake, his left to make it easier. I get ready to shake hands as well but he just pats me on the shoulder.

  Without the mattress, the car shakes me about, rattling my bones as we drive over the gravel road out of the tip. My grandad sings along to Nat King Cole like he does on Sunday nights when he’s had a few drinks and I wriggle around and try not to get too shaken up.

  Up in Dudley we go to a few shops. My grandad has instructions from my nan about some things he has to get and we have to buy a bag of nails from a man on the market to help grandad build a new shed. He stops and says hello to everyone and because I’ve been patient and because my arse feels like it’s on fire he takes me up to the toy shop and lets me buy a Star Wars figure. I choose a Jawa. The Jawas travel around looking for scrap metal in their sandcrawlers. I think about Charlie Clancey and his rag and bone.

  My grandad looks at me and says, Am yer sure yer want that little un? He looks at the hooded figure in the packet but it’s my choice and I say, Yes.

  The brewery is at work on the top of the hill and the wind is blowing down into the town, so you can
smell the hops. My mum tells stories about when they all used to go hop-picking, out past Worcester, in the summers when she was a little girl, before Johnny was born. I like the brewery smell, drink it in. I enjoy it when you get to see through the doors of the pubs in the town or when my dad or grandad take me to the Off Sales hatch at the Lion or the Freebodies and you see through into the bar and hear the clack of the dominoes or see the men standing up or sitting and staring into space; like they are thinking really hard about something, or reading the paper, or talking quietly about serious things or telling jokes but not laughing as they tell them; the way you are meant to, when you’re a man. Usually, you can’t see anything. All the pubs have glass that you can’t see through. It makes you want to look more. You can see the men now, though, waiting for the pubs to open. They step from foot to foot and their shadows tremble out into the street. At opening time we cross the road where Stafford Street meets the High Street and I see Ronnie’s mum at the door of the pub called the Shrewsbury Arms, which everyone calls the Cow Shed. She’s talking to a man wearing a suit. It might be one of her brothers, one of the Woodhouses, going to court, except it’s Saturday, so there’s no court.

  They’m never out of court, I’d heard my nan say. I begin to wave but my grandad pulls on my arm to get me across the road.

  Iss Ronnie’s mum, Grandad. I point. She must’ve gone in the pub. We should say hello.

  Doh bother her now, he says, which I think is strange because usually he likes leaning on the fence, between the shed and the gate to the allotments and talking to her as she collects the washing in. Sometimes my nan tells him off for pestering her.