How to Build a Girl

  ‘Mummy, can I go BACK INSIDE?’ Lupin shouts, pushing his head against my groin, as everyone becomes breathlessly hysterical. The whole thing is so embarrassing that I have forgotten how to swear:

  ‘GET TO … BUGGER,’ I shout. They laugh more.

  A call comes from across the field, from the house. It’s Mum. Our real Mum. The one who actually did have five kids.

  ‘Can somebody find your dad’s trousers?’ she’s yelling from the open bathroom window.

  An hour later, and I’m driving through Wolverhampton town centre, with my dad, who’s now wearing his trousers. We found them under the stairs. The dog was lying on them.

  Wolverhampton, in 1990, looks like something bad happened to it.

  ‘Something bad did happen to it,’ Dad explains, as we go down Cleveland Street. ‘Thatcher.’

  My father has a very personal and visceral loathing of Margaret Thatcher. Growing up, my understanding is that, at some point in the past, she bested my father in a fight which he only just escaped from – and that, next time they meet, it will be a fight to the death. A bit like Gandalf and the Balrog.

  ‘I would fucking kill her – Thatcher,’ he would say, watching the miners’ strike on the news. ‘She has cut the balls off everything I love about this country, and left it bleeding on the ground. It would be self-defence. Maggie Thatcher would walk into this house and take the fucking bread out of your mouths in order to prove her point, kids. The bread out of all of your mouths.’

  And, if we were eating bread at the time, he would take it out of our mouths, to illustrate the point.

  ‘Thatcher,’ he would say, eyes burning, as we cried. ‘Fucking Thatcher. If any of you ever turn up on my doorstep and tell me you’ve voted Tory, you’ll be sailing through the air with my boot-print on your arses before you know what’s hit you. We vote Labour.’

  The town centre is always quiet – as if half the people who should be here had left some time ago. Buddleia grows through the top windows of Victorian blocks. The canal basin is solid with old washing machines. Whole roads of factories have closed down: the ironworks, the steelworks, all the locksmiths, save Chubb. The bicycle factories: Percy Stallard, Marston Sunbeam, Star, Wulfruna and Rudge. The steel jewellery and japanned-ware workshops. The coal merchants. The trolleybus system – once the largest in the world – is just a series of dreamlike veins left on old maps.

  Growing up during the Cold War, and the persistent threat of nuclear apocalypse, I have always vaguely presumed that the nuclear apocalypse had, in fact, already happened – here. Wolverhampton feels like the ruined citadel of Charn in The Magician’s Nephew (C. S. Lewis, Bodley Head, 1958). A city that suffered obvious, massive trauma when I was very small, but to which no one refers now. The city died on their watch, and there is a communal sense of misplaced culpability about it. This is what dying industrial cities smell of: guilt, and fear. The older people silently apologising to their children.

  As Dadda drives into the centre of town, he starts the same rattled monologue he always does.

  ‘When I was a kid, at this time of the day, all you’d hear was the “tramp tramp tramp” of men’s boots as they walked to the factories,’ he says. ‘Every bus would be full, the streets would be seething. People used to come here for work, and get it, the same day. Look at it now.’

  I look around. There really isn’t the ‘tramp tramp tramp’ of men’s boots now. You don’t see any young men until you go past the job centre, by the Molineux, where they suddenly appear in a long, patient line – all in tight, mid-blue market jeans, thin-legged, hair at various lengths, smoking roll-ups.

  As Dad waits at the lights, he rolls down the window, and shouts out to one of the men in the line – he’s about forty, in a faded Simply Red t-shirt.

  ‘Macks! Alright cocker?’

  ‘Cracking on, Pat,’ Macks says, calmly. He’s about twenty away from the head of the queue.

  ‘See you in the Red Lion,’ Dadda says, as the lights change.

  ‘Arr. Save a brasser for me.’

  Into the centre – Queen’s Square. This is the heart of Wolverhampton’s youth scene – our Left Bank, our Haight-Ashbury, our Soho. To the right – five skaters. To the left – three goths, sitting around the Man On ’is ’Oss – a statue of a man, on his horse. This is our sole landmark – Wolverhampton’s equivalent of Lady Liberty.

  My dad winds down the window.

  ‘Cheer up! It might never happen!’ he shouts at the goths, doing 40mph in a 20mph zone.

  ‘Alright, Pat!’ the smallest goth shouts back. ‘Your clutch is sounding fucking well bandy.’

  Dadda drives on, chuckling. I am astonished.

  ‘You know her?’ I ask. I didn’t think goths knew anyone on this existential plane. You don’t think of goths having, say, neighbours.

  ‘It’s your cousin, Ali,’ Dad says, winding his window up, and driving on.

  ‘Really?’ I ask, craning round to look at the little goth receding in the rear-view mirror. I didn’t recognise her.

  ‘Yeah. She gone goth last year. Tell you what – you aye gonna run out of freaky cousins in this town any time soon, kidder.’

  We drive on. Even though my father has nine siblings, and twenty-seven nephews and nieces of sundry persuasion, vibe and intellect (cousin Adam, famously, once ate a very small light bulb during a party), I had no idea we had a cousin who’d gone counter-cultural. We never really see Uncle Aled, as he lives in Gosnell, and once screwed my father over on a deal with a second-hand tropical fish tank.

  This is unexpectedly exotic – to have a goth cousin. All the cousins I’ve met so far wear pink dungarees, and love Rick Astley.

  Today Dadda is, as he said before, re-auditioning for his greatest role yet: that of Pat Morrigan, abject cripple. He is actually disabled – some weeks, he can’t get out of bed – but, as he says, you can never be too disabled. People have different perceptions of what disability is. His job is to present his disability in such a way that there will never be a particularly picky invigilator who orders further tests, while suspending our benefits for six months – leaving five children and two parents destined for the poorhouse.

  ‘I’m here to eradicate doubt,’ he says, parking the van up on the kerb outside the Civic Centre.

  Today he’s being assessed to see if he’s due another twelve months on his Disabled Badge. The badge – bright orange, with a picture of a stick man in a wheelchair on it – allows him to park nearly anywhere. Yellow lines, pavements, personalised parking bays with people’s names on them. It’s like being royal, or famous, or a superhero. We see our father’s disability as a distinct bonus. We are proud of it.

  He limps, carefully, across the plaza – ‘You never know if they’re watching you,’ he says, nodding to the windows above. ‘Picking you off in their sights, like The Day of the Jackal. Gotta keep The Limp turned all the way up to eleven’ – and into the Civic Centre.

  The Civic Centre is, essentially, the centre of all begging in Wolvo. Rent, benefits, general council hassle – this is where it gets resolved. Everyone who approaches this building is trying to get something out of someone who works in this building.

  As a consequence, the building gives off the vibe of a medieval castle in the middle of a particularly listless, passive-aggressive siege. Instead of pouring boiling oil on the approaching locals, there will be the presenting of impenetrable paperwork, instead. Or ‘referrals’. The promise of an outcome in the post within fourteen days. Infinite soft delays. I’m often reminded of Graham Greene’s advice, in Travels With My Aunt (Bodley Head, 1969), where Aunt Agatha instructs him to always greet any bill with a letter beginning, ‘In reference to my letter dated 17th July …’ There is, of course, no letter dated ‘17th July’. But such a letter causes crucial, almost-infinite, confusion in the enemy.

  Dad greets everyone he comes into contact with here with a cheerful, showbizzy familiarity – ‘Alright Barb. Alright, Roy. Nice one, Pamela!’ –
which, looking back now, he clearly copied off Joey Boswell in Bread.

  Wherever he got it from, his attitude is in marked contrast to nearly every other claimant in the building. Their poses range from ‘servile’ and ‘broken’, to ‘furious’ and ‘at end of my tether, threatening to leave my children here and go on the game if the housing benefit doesn’t come through’ – punctuated by the odd, confused pensioner, or Care in the Community client, silently crying in a chair.

  My father, meanwhile, has a calm, Zen, lordly air about him. He smiles at everyone. He enters like a king.

  ‘Those people behind their desks wouldn’t have a job if it weren’t for people like me,’ he says. ‘In a way, I am their employer.’

  As I am currently reading about causality – I’ve got to the ‘Philosophy’ section in the library – I have a brief debate with him about the timeline of this logic.

  ‘The poor will always be with us, Johanna,’ he explains, breezily. ‘Before Nye Bevan, my mother raised nine kids on parish hand outs, and all the villagers got so depressed seeing her begging for bread they voted for the Welfare State the minute the Second World War ended. It demeans a society to rely on random acts of mercy, Johanna. Imagine if we had to go and knock on Mrs Forsyth’s door every week, asking her for … ham.’

  Mrs Forsyth is our formidable over-the-road neighbour – a martinet of a woman with a perm, and house-slippers for housework. She was the first in our street to buy her council house under the Right to Buy scheme, and immediately tarmacked the entire front garden – a great pity, as it had the best, most scrump-able raspberry bush on the estate.

  My father is absolutely right. Mrs Forsyth would be very angry if we kept turning up on her doorstep, requesting baked goods, and loo roll.

  ‘The bottom line is, Johanna, no one wants to have their trip to the corner shop spreckled with crying orphans with only one fucking eye left. It’s a societal pisser. The suffering poor have always been here. The Welfare State paid for that problem to go away. No more frozen kids in shop doorways any more. Much more cheerful. You’ve read your Charles Dickens, haven’t you?’

  ‘I’ve seen Disney’s Mickey’s Christmas Carol,’ I reply, dubiously.

  ‘Aye. Well then. There you go,’ he replies. ‘It’s been established that the correct thing to do is to give the poor the biggest turkey in the butcher’s window. That’s what decent people do. And I’m gonna go get my turkey.’

  Whilst he’s in the medical assessment room, being assessed, I sit in the waiting area, looking at each person in turn, and working out a) which celebrity they most look like and b) whether I would, on that basis, have sex with them.

  To me, the matter of losing my virginity is far more pressing than Wolverhampton’s industrial decline. It has gone beyond urgent: it is essentially dragging the whole family down. I’ve got it into my head I should have sex for the first time whilst I’m still under-age – it feels like … cheating to wait until it’s legal. Anyone could have sex when they’re sixteen. Try doing it when you’re fourteen, hang out only with your brothers and wear your mum’s bra. Not even Challenge Anneka would have a go on that.

  I run my ‘Sex Test’ on the other men in the room. There’s a man in a body-warmer who looks like Mark Curry off Treasure Houses – no. Man in tasselled shoes who looks like Radio One DJ Mike Read – no. Man with hair coming out of his nose who looks like a Spike Milligan cartoon – no.

  I count five men who look like Freddie Mercury. In 1990, in Wolverhampton, a moustache and leather jacket is still an avowedly heterosexual look. I wouldn’t have sex with any of them. Well, I probably would, to be honest, if they asked me. But it’s unlikely.

  Today, like every other day, I’m going to go to bed still a fat virgin who writes their diary in a series of imaginary letters to sexy Gilbert Blythe from Anne of Green Gables.

  I’m still thinking of Gilbert when, much later in the day, I take the dog for a walk. Bianca is a nervous Alsatian who, unlike our previous dog, will not tolerate being dressed up in children’s clothing or having toys tied to her back in the manner of small, stuffed jockeys – but whom I love, nonetheless.

  ‘We have a bond, don’t we?’ I ask Bianca, as we go down Marten Road.

  In many of the nineteenth-century novels I read, young women adopt wild animals – such as a wolf, fox or kestrel – with whom they enjoy a psychic bond.

  So as we cross the road, I communicate with Bianca in the usual way – using only my mind.

  ‘I can’t wait until we live in London,’ I tell Bianca, who is quivering in the gutter, doing her business. I turn away, to give her some privacy. She is quite a private dog, I think. ‘When I get to London, that is when I will start being me.’

  Quite what that is, I have no idea. There isn’t a word for what I want to be yet. There isn’t a thing I can gun for. The thing I want to be hasn’t been invented.

  Obviously, I know some of what I want to be: primarily, I want to move to London, and be hot. I imagine London being like a very large room, into which I will walk, whereupon the entire city will go ‘COR! BLIMEY! YOU DON’T GET MANY OF THEM TO THE PAHND!’ like Sid James in the Carry On films. I want that. I want everyone – men, women, Minotaurs – I read a lot of Greek mythology, and I’m out for whatever I can get – to want to have absolute, total sex with me, right in my sex-places, in the most sexual way possible. Sexually. This is my most urgent mission. My hormones are rioting like a zoo on fire. There’s a mandrill with its head ablaze unlocking other animals’ cages and screaming, ‘OH MY GOD – FREAK OUT!’ I’m in the middle of a sexmergency. I’m wanking my hands down to the bone.

  But, on the other hand, away from my genitals, I also wish to be … Noble. Profoundly noble. I wish to devote myself to a cause. I want to be part of something. I want to swing into action, like a one-woman army. An arm-me. As soon as I actually find something to believe in, I’m going to believe in it more than anyone else ever has ever believed in anything, ever. I am going to be devout.

  But I don’t want to be noble and committed like most women in history were – which invariably seems to involve being burned at the stake, dying of sadness or being bricked up in a tower by an earl. I don’t want to sacrifice myself for something. I don’t want to die for something. I don’t even want to walk in the rain up a hill in a skirt that’s sticking to my thighs for something. I want to live for something, instead – as men do. I want to have fun. The most fun ever. I want to start partying like it’s 1999 – nine years early. I want a rapturous quest. I want to sacrifice myself to glee. I want to make the world better, in some way.

  After I’ve walked into the room of London and everyone’s gone ‘COR! BLIMEY!’, I then want them to burst into applause, as they do to Oscar Wilde when he walks into a restaurant on the opening night of another daring play. I have visions of all the people I admire – Douglas Adams, Dorothy Parker, French & Saunders and Tony Benn – coming up to me, and murmuring, ‘I don’t know how you do it, darling.’

  Right now I don’t know how I do it, either. I have no idea what I should pour all of this itchy, fidgety feeling into. But if it’s something that requires telling anecdotes that make a circle of cigarette-smoking bon viveurs helpless with laughter (Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, wiping tears from their eyes: ‘You really are precious. Are there more in Wolverhampton like you? Is it some cauldron of delight?’ Me: ‘No, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. It was just me. The boys at school used to call me “A fat gyppo”.’ Stephen Fry: ‘Mere duffel-headed lollygaggers, dear heart. Eschew them. More champagne?’), then I’m ready for it.

  So far, the only plan I’ve come up with is writing. I can write, because writing – unlike choreography, architecture or conquering kingdoms – is a thing you can do when you’re lonely and poor, and have no infrastructure, ie: a ballet troupe, or some cannons. Poor people can write. It’s one of the few things poverty, and lack of connections, cannot stop you doing.

  I am currently writing a book, in the endle
ss, empty hours of the day. It’s about a very fat girl who rides a dragon around the world and through time, doing good deeds. The first chapter is about her going back to 1939, and making Hitler see the error of his ways, via a very impassioned speech, and making him cry.

  There’s also a huge bit about the Black Death, which I prevent by introducing stringent quarantine conditions on merchant ships sailing into major British ports. I’m very into the idea of sorting things out through superior paperwork. This is my favourite transformatory power.

  Three days ago, I wrote a love scene with the girl and a young, hot wizard that I was very proud of – until I found that Krissi had obviously discovered the manuscript, and written ‘Lordy do, wench,’ in the margin. Krissi is both a harsh and unwanted editor.

  ‘Anyway, I reckon we’re going to leave Wolverhampton by the time I’m sixteen, tops,’ I continue, confidently, to Bianca. ‘By then, I will have absorbed all the life-lessons that poverty and ignominy are kindly teaching me, and will have a refreshing perspective other people at the Oscars won’t have. They will be charmed by my cheerful nobleness – and that will, undoubtedly, lead to sex.’

  My sexy, noble reverie is broken by a call of ‘OI!’

  I ignore it, and keep walking. No good comes of ‘OI!’ One thing Dadda has taught us is to always walk away from ‘OI!’

  ‘OI!’ it comes again. ‘You BITCH!’

  I look around. A very angry man in a Wolves top is standing in his front garden.

  ‘YOUR DOG!’

  I look around for Bianca. I can’t see her.

  ‘YOUR DOG’S IN MY FUCKING GARDEN!’

  Shit. I’ve broken the psychic connection with Bianca by thinking about fucking. Where is she? I whistle, and she comes bolting out of the shouting man’s back garden.

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ I say. My voice is high. I know it will antago-nise him, as I have my mother’s voice – middle-class, with the words more cut-glass than usual; sharpened by nerves.