‘You must never, never forget, when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode. It’s a miracle when someone from a bad postcode gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.’
The feature goes on – Kite proceeds to get, as he always does in interviews, quite drunk, and the mood lightens as he talks about his forthcoming European tour, and his recent adoption of a sloth at Regent’s Park Zoo (‘The physical similarities between us are striking. I would hope, in reversed circumstances, the sloth master race would be as considerate towards me.’)
But in Central Library, I’m trying not to make it obvious I’m crying. This is what it’s like! I am in a bad postcode! I am these words! I love John Kite. He knows about the 11 per cent. I want to leave the twins’ buggy by this table and just run – run to wherever he is and shake his hand, and roll up my sleeve and show him a new tattoo which I would have got, and which would read ‘WV4 – Bad Postcode’.
I want to take this interview with me everywhere, like an introductory document – to the supermarket, to the council offices, to D&ME – and show it to people, saying, ‘This is what it’s like. This is what is happening to me. This is why I am so tired.’
I am so tired. Tired – but so so so wired to the moon.
Because the one thing I haven’t confessed to anyone is how I know all of this is my fault. That our sudden, terrifying, grinding poverty is my fault.
The atmosphere in the house is already terrible – three times I’ve had to herd Lupin and the twins into the bedroom and play Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ really loudly, while Mum and Dad screamed at each other downstairs. These arguments always end with Dad leaving the house to go to the Red Lion, where Johnny Jones gets him pissed – leaving Mum to shuffle and re-shuffle the bills on the dresser; as if each contact with her hand might rub away at the total.
Krissi is, obviously, very deeply depressed. He’d planned to go to university – but now seems like a bad time to discuss something that will involve spending money, and involve upheaval, and so he has become almost totally silent. It’s like he’s temporarily pretending to be dead.
And it’s my fault – all my fault – and the anxiety is killing me. The adrenalin-surges I had whilst sitting at the letter-box, waiting – are nothing compared to these new ones: my hands sometimes go numb. I get the shits. My thoughts are so fast and terrifying that I often think of the bit in Bob Geldof’s autobiography (Is That It?) where, after his mother dies, he finds himself leaning on a nail that protrudes from the wall – pushing the point into his forehead, like an amateur trepanning.
That’s what I’d like to do, I think. Have a long, cool, clean nail, right in the middle of my head. That would calm me. And no one would blame me – a girl with a nail in the centre of her skull. They would put me in a hospital – and, because I would be broken, and ill, I would be safe. If I broke all my bones, no one would hate me. If I was in trouble. If I was at the bottom of the stairs. If I was smashed up. If I died.
If you can’t save yourself from attack by being powerful – and I, palpably, have no power. My hands are empty – then perhaps you can save yourself from attack by being ruined, instead. Blow yourself up before the enemy gets to you.
The reason I’m so scared is that this has all happened before. We have been this poor before – in a house this angry, where Dadda’s eyes went completely cold, and everything seemed to end – when he first stopped working, in 1986.
There is a story about this which I will tell you now – it used to make me sad, but it doesn’t make me sad any more. You can have it.
When it was my eleventh birthday, I wanted a birthday party. I’d never had a party before. This is when I had just made my one friend – Emma Pagett – and I wanted to invite her over.
My mother said that this was possible – my birthday present would be £10, and I was absolutely free to use that money to buy party food, and host my friend.
I made my own cake – I was a cheerful cook. You cream the marge with the sugar, beat in eggs, fold in flour, bake, sandwich together with buttercream, and jam, and then you have cake.
Krissi took a picture of me, when the table was fully laid: cake on a plate covered in tin foil, for festivity, and me in my baker’s boy cap, like John Lennon. I am standing by the table, and showing off the goods with an elegant hand gesture – like Anthea Redfern, drawing attention to the canteen of cutlery on The Generation Game.
But, all the while, Dad stayed in bed. It was one of the days where he just … didn’t get up. Just lay in bed, next to his big, white bottle of medicine, with his eyes almost white.
At 3pm, my mother came into the dining room, where I was sitting, on a chair, reading The Railway Children, waiting until Emma arrived, at 4pm.
‘Your dad’s not feeling well,’ my mother said. ‘He’s gone to bed. He … doesn’t want you to have Emma over, in case he needs to …’ – she thought for a minute – ‘… have a bath.’
I don’t remember how I told Emma, on the phone, that she wasn’t to come over. I wouldn’t have told her about how, sometimes, when your daddy has fallen off a building, he doesn’t like people to come to the house. That he won’t let anyone in, or out.
I suspect I would have said I didn’t feel well – that I had a stomach-ache, and so she shouldn’t come over.
And that was true, in the end – about the stomach-ache. Because I ate everything on the table. I ate my whole birthday.
And then I went to bed.
FOURTEEN
Still, life in Wolverhampton now is not without its excitements. On Thursday, we take Lupin to the dentist, where he has five teeth removed.
Here, perhaps, is the reason he has been crying so much. It’s not that his nature veers instinctively toward the melancholic, and pensive, after all – it’s just that his teeth are riddled with rot. The dentist has to gas him and take out five of them, in an hour-long, brutal, surgical punch in the face.
‘They’re only your milk teeth, son!’ Dadda says, cheerfully, as we drive him home in the van – lying flat out in the back, head on Krissi’s lap. ‘Your starter teeth! Now you’re getting your Man Teeth through! Soon you’ll be biting through bricks – like Jaws!’
Lupin is holding the bag of sweets he’s been given, as a treat. We have no other reward system available to us. He’s been paid for his teeth in Black Jacks, Refreshers and Fruit Salads. And he’s paid for his Black Jacks, Fruit Salads and Refreshers in teeth. In a way, it’s a perfect circular dental system for children.
‘When I was a kid, we all had rotten teeth!’ Dadda says over his shoulder, gleefully. ‘All of us! Every uncle! Your Uncle Jim had one that came through black. Came through. Black. We called it “The Demon Tooth”. Your Fat Nanna had false teeth by the time she was twenty-eight! She used to say she lost a tooth for each child.’
‘It looks like Lupin has, too,’ Krissi says, coldly – looking around the van full of siblings.
None of us can stop staring at Lupin. He’s still groggy – drunk – and when he opens his mouth, it looks like a fifth of his face is missing. Red, wet gaps in his head. He doesn’t have a mouth any more – just a hole.
Krissi silently puts his finger on Lupin’s cheek, pointing something out to me: they’ve split his lip, too, while he was under. His teeth and his lips. All they’ve left is a pulpy mess – with a single incisor left, on the right, like a Martello tower, sitting on an empty shoreline of blood. Poor Lupin.
When we get home, Mum has made the house ultra-tidy – in the way that it usually only is if visitors are coming. Today’s honoured guest is Lupin’s pulped mouth. He’s given the best bit of the sofa – with the most functioning springs in it – and the best blanket over his knees, and, when he comes round fully from the anaesthetic, in order to cheer himself, he gets us all to do increasingly humiliating things in exchange for sweets from his bag.
Krissi has to pretend to be an orang-utan that
’s trapped under the armchair. I have to say that I fancy a series of esca-latingly mortifying people – starting with Mr Bennett, the caretaker from Take Hart, and ending with The Glove from Yellow Submarine – until I start crying, and Mum has to come in, and chide everyone for letting it get out of hand.
We all pretend we’re doing the humiliating things to cheer Lupin up. In reality, it is pretty much for the sweets. Tea is macaroni and boiled white cabbage. We are looking for John Kite’s ‘tiny, hot, cheap treats’. Lupin gets a whole can of rice pudding to himself, with a spoon full of jam in it, because, with no teeth, he can’t eat macaroni and boiled white cabbage.
‘I’ve got the best tea!’ he says. We let him have this victory.
‘These are amazing,’ Krissi says, later. We’re in the bedroom – all the kids, in a circle, on the floor. We’re all playing with Lupin’s teeth. Krissi has got a pin, and is carefully scraping out the soft rottenness in a molar.
‘Does it have a smell? A rotten smell?’ Lupin asks.
Krissi sniffs it, carefully.
‘Nah.’
There is a bad smell in the room anyway. Ten minutes earlier, Krissi had taken a match and held it to a tooth – to burn off a shred of gum that was still stuck to it.
‘Like human bacon,’ he’d said, striking the match.
It gave off an odour like burning hair – but then, maybe that was the tooth itself. There are now black scorch-marks on the side of it. Who knew you could have so much fun with teeth!
I am using three of the teeth to cast my I Ching. My hexagram is forty-four – ‘Coming To Meet.’
I look through the book of the I Ching, to see what it means.
‘“We see a female who is bold and strong”,’ I read. ‘That must be me! I will marry John Kite!’
I do double thumbs-up to the whole room. I whoop myself. I punch the air.
I read on.
‘“It will not be good to marry such a female.”’
Everyone does an ‘I told you so’ look.
I look down at Lupin’s teeth.
‘I’m going to cast again,’ I said.
I once recast my I Ching nine times in a row – until it came out good. I keep redoing it until it says that I will move to London, and live in a flat on Rosebery Avenue, and get married to John Kite, with Stephen Fry as our minister. Sometimes, getting that future right takes all night. But I have time enough on my hands now.
The Book of The I Ching is being used a lot, at the moment. As the investigation into our benefits grinds on, we all become obsessed with fortune-telling. We’re trying to regain some sense of control, however trifling, over what will happen next.
For some reason, Mum decides that Krissi has ‘The Sight’, and gets him to do everyone’s fortunes, every couple of days – infinitely pressing ‘refresh’ on our future, until we get one we like.
‘It’s going to be exactly the same as yesterday,’ Krissi snaps, shaking the divining coins onto the floor.
With time pressing, however, the main focus of our fortunetelling sessions is, still, Dadda.
Knowing he’s now on a deadline – world fame or the poorhouse! Double or quits! – Dadda has been redoubling his efforts to return to this Elysian land of rock and honey. By familial consent, he’s taken £10 out of the weekly food budget to send twelve, newly finished demos down to record companies in London. Finally finding a use for the surreally impractical calligraphy pen I was given for Christmas, I write the addresses on the Jiffy bags – Virgin Records, Island Records, WEA – and send them the latest version of ‘Dropping Bombs’, which has now been re-worked as a ‘baggy’ classic, in the style of the Happy Mondays.
Dadda’s recent adoption of modern music has come as some surprise to me. When he came into the front room as I was watching Top of The Pops, I absolutely expected him to launch into a classic ex-hippy’s rant about how rubbish all modern music is. Not only was I braced for this – I was looking forward to it. I would be able to argue with him, indignantly, on behalf of my generation, and feel deathlessly, furiously teenage.
Instead, he stood there for a minute, in the doorway, watching the Mondays doing ‘Step On’, clearly off their faces, and said, appreciatively, ‘They’ve got some balls on them. Look at them! Twatted!’
He added the last almost … lovingly.
So now, when these baggy-filled Jiffy bags are posted, Krissi – instructed by Mum – casts Dadda’s fortune. Again.
‘So – when am I getting my first million, then?’ he asks, coming into the front room, rubbing his hands together.
We all gather round, to hear the news – Dadda lying on his side, on the floor, after the first few minutes, as his knees can’t bear his weight.
The coins say we may have to wait a little longer than we ideally hoped for our wealth – ‘Fucking hell – I hope not past March. The MOT’s due, and it’s your Chris’s wedding, in fucking Hull’ – but our fortune is, most assuredly, coming. It is in the I Ching.
At the end of the reading, we all give Krissi a round of applause. Everyone is cheerful.
‘That’s that sorted, then,’ Dadda says, slowly getting off the floor. ‘Argh! Knee! Johanna – it’s time for us to strike, now. While the auspices are good.’
‘Yes!’ I say, because there isn’t anything else to say. There’s a pause. ‘How?’
‘We can take London together,’ Dadda says. ‘You should talk to some of these people at the record companies. Get a bit of a buzz going about me. Hype me up.’
‘Yes!’ I say again. And then: ‘How?’
‘I dunno,’ Dadda says. ‘What do bands do these days to get publicity? Maybe we should ask the I Ching again,’ he says.
‘The I Ching is tired now,’ Krissi says, firmly. ‘You have to let it … regenerate for a while.’
‘Me and you should put our heads together,’ Dadda says, to me. ‘Come up with some plan. Get all P. T. Barnum on this. Me and Johanna will think of something.’
I am pretty sure I can think of nothing.
Later that night, Krissi lies in bed, in his bunk, staring up at the ceiling. Lupin is asleep in the bottom bunk. I can tell he wants to say something. Finally:
‘It’s all bollocks, you know,’ he says. ‘Every single one I’ve done is bollocks. I haven’t even read the book.’
He keeps staring up at the ceiling.
‘What?’
‘I can’t read the future. I can’t do the I Ching. It’s all bollocks. Of course it’s bollocks, Johanna.’
‘But – but you said I’d have a boyfriend by Christmas!’ I wail.
I’m sitting on the edge of my double bed, dressed in Dadda’s old thermal long johns, and am wearing a face-pack made of oats, which I read about in The Brownie Guide Handbook. Apparently it’s good for spots – which I am gaining rapidly since we started living on a diet that is 90 per cent boiled white cabbage and chapattis with margarine.
Krissi looks at me for a minute. Sometimes, he looks at me with something that is almost – almost – pity. That is what he is doing now.
‘Oh, yeah. That’ll definitely happen,’ he says, eventually, turning over, and pulling the duvet up over his head.
I wait until everyone’s asleep, and then put my hand to my fur. My sexual fantasies have become quite medieval recently – as an extension of all the fortune-telling books we’ve been getting out of the library, I’ve branched out into the rest of the ‘Supernatural’ section, and have been reading a lot about witchcraft.
The books on witchcraft are full of pornography, I’ve discovered, to my surprise. Obviously they don’t say its pornography – they are simply historical reports from women, often nuns, who have had sex with the Devil.
History, it seems, is full of nuns who’ve had it off with Satan. If the Devil fucks you in the missionary position, he is an incubus. If you straddle him, he is a succubus. There is a lot of technical detail to learn about fucking the Devil.
‘The young neophyte, seemingly drugged, is
pushed into the midst of the assemblage, and made to stand naked in front of the coven,’ one account reads. ‘“Young neophyte!” the High Priest calls. “You have served me well! Stand up and join these assembled here so that they may look upon you, and do as they desire!” She is submitted to the carnal desire of any member of the coven who request her, and will assist in mass perversions.’
Anyway. Yadda yadda yadda. The bottom line is, I wank a lot thinking about medieval demons.
Stressed after the day we’ve had, I start thinking about being laid out on an altar, and being forced into ‘conjurations of lust’ with a succession of demons and horny priests. The wheat fields are parched, and failing, and unless they fuck a virgin in a Black Mass, everyone in the village will starve.
Imagine having sex with someone being useful. Everyone needing you. Or else the crops would fail. It’s so hot. Mass perversions. Mmmmmm. It’s either thinking about this, or John Kite, and every time I think about him, I cry. So I think about the Black Mass, instead.
‘Johanna.’
Silence.
‘Johanna, what are you doing?’
It’s Krissi. He’s awake.
‘Er … I’m just a bit … itchy. Having a scratch.’
Silence.
‘You’ve been itchy quite a lot, recently. Late at night.’
Another silence.
‘You’re very itchy, Johanna.’
A very long pause. Eventually:
‘I think I have … nits.’