Surely I cannot suffer this much and it count for nothing. Someone must be keeping score of every time my heart falls out of my chest, like a spasming clock; noting the hogsheads of adrenalin I am soused in – without ever saying a word to anyone. I will learn the lesson of this fear: I will never tell anyone when I feel bad again. I will never confide a weakness. It does not work. It makes things worse.
It’s really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.
In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous or terrifying: the library. The answer will be here, surely – among the 20,000 books, calm and waiting, on the shelves. I go and sit on the floor in the medical section. By the time four books are stacked around me, I learn what this feeling is called: ‘anxiety’.
I am surprised. ‘Anxiety’ is when you wring your hands because the milkman is late. I have used the word ‘anxiety’ in sentences about missing the first minute of Watchdog, or wondering what I will get for Christmas.
However, there are many kinds of anxiety, apparently. My cross-referencing has, over the course of two hours, taken me to a volume called The Courage to Be by theologian Paul Tillich (Yale, 1963).
Tillich characterises anxiety into three categories: ‘ontic anxiety’ is the fear of fate and death. The second is ‘moral anxiety’, from guilt or condemnation. The third is ‘spiritual anxiety’, prompted by an empty life, without direction or meaning.
Identifying my anxiety as mainly ‘moral’, with a side-order of ‘ontic’, I rifle, eagerly, through the pages, to discover the cure for these awful feelings. Right at the end, I find Tillich’s ultimate conclusion about anxiety: to simply accept it. ‘It is part of the human condition,’ he says, calmly.
I lean against the bookshelves, and consider Tillich’s suggestion for a few minutes. I consider accepting feeling like this for the rest of my life. Boiling in this quicksilver, electrocised soup for ever – nerves jangling like the tiny bell over an empty shop door, just after a nuclear explosion has left the shop full of the dead, and me the only one standing.
‘The thing is,’ I say, to Paul Tillich, in my head, ‘the thing is, Paul, that ultimately, I don’t think my anxiety is ontic, moral or spiritual.’
I look at him.
‘At the end of it all, I just need some money, Paul,’ I say.
Paul Tillich nods.
If I were rich, none of this would matter.
I just need some money.
FOUR
Here are the ways you can earn enough money to support a family of seven if you are fourteen years old:
So, yes.
I was a cleaner for one day – I answered an advert in the AdNews for someone to work in a big house on the Penn Road on Saturdays, put on my best hat, tied the dog up outside the house and knocked on their door.
I spent three hours cleaning their kitchen, their bathroom, their black-and-white tiled hallway. She got me to scrub off the limescale on her taps, with a toothbrush, and to bleach the big bins out the front – split teabags covered my arms with tea-leaves, and in their patterns I read my immediate future: to smell quite bad.
At the end of it, she asked me how old I was, and I said, ‘Fourteen,’ and she explained it would be illegal to have me back again, and gave me a tenner, and I left. I think she’d suspected I was underage from the start, but didn’t want to clue me in to the full extent of employment law until her bins were soused.
In American films, kids on the hustle for cash make lemonade – then sell it out the front of their houses, to thirsty passers-by.
I discussed this possibility with Krissi. He just looked at me, and then out of the window, at our street.
‘We haven’t got any lemons,’ Krissi said, finally.
‘When God gives you no lemons – make nonmonade!’ I said, brightly.
I did not sell lemonade outside our house for cash, in the anxious summer of 1990.
In the front room with my parents, as we waited for Catchphrase to come on, I casually raised the subject of what a teenage girl could do to raise money.
‘Get a paper round,’ my mother says. ‘I used to have a paper round. I saved up for a record player. That’s how I bought all my Stones records.’
My mother has the first seven Rolling Stones records, kept separately from all my father’s records. They’re the only band she’s ever liked. Sometimes she puts on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ when she’s mopping the kitchen floor, and shouts along to it, angrily.
‘You always did love a dirty rock ’n’ roller,’ my dad says, now, squeezing her thigh, right at the top, where it definitely starts to be rude. Mum squeezes him back, at the top of his thigh. They stare at each other in a soppy, slightly charged way, and look a bit stupid. I clear my throat, loudly.
My parents stop being sexual at each other on the sofa, and turn back to me.
‘The trick to getting a paper round is to hit the newsagents in the last quarter,’ my dad says, with a professional air. ‘Autumn. Then you do three months, cash in all the tips at Christmas, and then sack it all off in the New Year, when it gets really cold and miserable. You’re just in there for the jackpot round.’
Unfortunately, when I go down to the newsagents the next day – to activate this brilliant plan – I discover lots of other people know this cunning trick, too: there’s a waiting-list for a paper round until next spring. ‘Unless you want to do The Wordsley,’ the newsagent says, doubtfully.
The Wordsley is the rough estate – three grey tower-blocks in a scrubby wasteland, like a three-pin plug that’s waiting to be plugged back again, and turn back on the dead, surrounding area.
There’s a rumour that someone was crucified on the Wordsley – they nailed his hands to a plank and left him round the back of the clinic. It’s one of the things we ‘know’ about Wolverhampton – like how we ‘know’ the man called The Cowboy, who walks around the town centre dressed like a cowboy, used to live in America; and the beardy tramp who lives in a tent on Penn Roundabout has refused so often to be moved on that the council have run a power-supply to his tent, so he can watch TV and have a fridge.
Wolverhampton is an unexpectedly interesting place to live, if you know where to look.
The summer goes on, and I’m still trying to get rich. My ‘lucky four-leaf clover’ pendants scheme runs into trouble when one of the kids I sell them to takes his apart – it’s a piece of cardboard on a string with a four-leaf clover Sellotaped to it – and realises I’ve just taken a three-leaf clover, and stuck a fourth leaf onto it. I have to refund all (six) of my previous customers.
Then, on one impossibly exciting day, there is a casting call in the Express & Star: ‘Wanted: children for the Grand Theatre’s autumn production of Annie.’
Not only is this an advert specifically offering employment to children – the first time I have seen such a thing outside reproductions of Victorian papers, calling for nimble-fingered lasses to work as bobbin-doffers – but knowing the entire score to Annie is one of the few genuine qualifications I actually have.
I take the Express & Star into the garden.
The kids are busy on our latest project – a snail farm. In an old roasting tray full of grass, earth and daisies, we have over thirty snails, of varying sizes. We can tell the difference between every one. Each one has a unique personality. Each one is named after one of our heroes.
‘This is Archimedes,’ Lupin is saying, of a snail he is bathing in an old tobacco tin full of water. ‘He gives wise council.’
Archimedes looks rather limp. He has been ‘soaking’ in the ‘tub’ for some time.
Krissi, meanwhile, is busy with a pair of scissors.
‘You’ll never guess what I found in the Express & Star!’ I start, waving the page.
Krissi scowls: ‘I’m in the middle of an operation.’
‘Lesbian Dennis and the Duchess of York are poorly,’ L
upin says, pointing at two snails on a plank.
‘They’ve got tangled cancers,’ Krissi says.
I go over to look. Lesbian Dennis and the Duchess of York do, indeed, appear to have ‘tangled cancers’ – they are joined together by two mysterious white tubes. Krissi is angling the scissors between them.
‘They were like this when we found them,’ Lupin says. ‘They’ve been stuck together for three hours. We monitored them.’
Krissi rolls up his sleeves.
‘They can’t get away from each other!’ Lupin says. ‘They’re trapped!’
‘Shhh Lupin,’ Krissi says. ‘I’m going in.’
He snips the white tubes. The snails writhe, quite violently for snails, and retreat into their shells – emitting huge, outraged bubbles. We all sigh, in relief.
‘They’re free! The snails must be so glad,’ Lupin says, taking each one, and putting them on a lilac leaf.
Lupin surrounds them with lilac blossoms, ‘To get better.’
‘So – what you on about?’ Krissi asks – wiping the scissors on his dungarees with a business-like air.
The snails continue to emit billows of agonised foam.
‘They’re putting on Annie at the Grand!’ I say, waving the Express & Star. ‘We already know all the words! There’s no one in Wolverhampton who knows Annie better than we do! We should all go to the auditions! You could play the chorus orphans, in the orphanage!’
Krissi regards me keenly.
‘“You” could all play the chorus of orphans?’ he asks. ‘“You”? So who are you going to play, then?’
‘Well.’
I pause.
‘Annie,’ I say.
Krissi becomes instantly hysterical. As he laughs, I feel what the sonic waves of his laughter are breaking against – my huge, round face. The American football-player solidness of my body. Mum’s bra, under my shirt – far too large, which I’ve tried to tighten using blanket-stitch (Young Girl’s Guide To Sewing, 1979). Krissi does not think I could play a semi-starved yet cheerful eight-year-old American orphan, in the Great Depression.
‘Annie,’ I say again, trying to sound firm, and hopeful.
‘Mannie, more like,’ Krissi says. ‘Ham-mie.’
But I know it’s because Krissi secretly wants to play Annie himself. I know that this is why he is laughing.
We spend all morning rehearsing Annie in the garden. I am surprised Krissi joins in, now he’s so old – but he does. Not only is he a great Pepper, but he also does all of Miss Hannigan’s lines on the side. He’s a very convincing Miss Hannigan. Yet again, I feel proud of my older brother. This is a solid morning’s graft. I am determined we will be the best-rehearsed gang of orphans the Grand has ever seen.
We break for lunch – crackers and cheese, eaten sitting up the tree; passing the packet between branches, like a flock of fat, ragged birds.
Then we continue rehearsing right up until 4pm, when I make the phone call to The Grand.
Everyone gathers around the phone.
‘I’m calling about the audition for Annie?’ I say, using my poshest voice – the same one I used when talking to the man who wanted to put an axe in Bianca’s head. This is my ‘talking to people’ voice. I wear it, like a hat to church, whenever I am talking to someone from outside the house.
‘There are five of us. We’re quite a gang! The Morrigan Gang! Between new-born and fifteen! And you wouldn’t need to rehearse us much – because we already know all the words!’
It would be too boring to go into the bit where the lady told us we’d need to have at least a Grade 3 tap-dancing certificate, and extensive experience in amateur productions, and to basically not be a big gang of fat mental kids, and to fuck off.
‘I can assure you – we have a lot of experience in being amateur!’ I say, when she mentions the ‘amateur experience’. She doesn’t laugh. No one ever laughs when I make these kind of jokes. When Bill Murray says shit like this, people completely lose it. I wish I was Bill Murray. I hope everything I’ve read about evolution is wrong, and I eventually evolve into him. It’s one of only three plans I have.
I put the phone down, and look at my siblings. They look back.
‘You know what Annie says about tomorrow. Hang on for it!’ I tell them.
‘I told you this was stupid,’ Krissi says, taking off his Miss Hannigan wig.
The next day, Krissi has to admit that Lesbian Dennis and the Duchess of York have died. They are dried up in their shells, and don’t respond – however much we poke them right in the centre, with sticks, and, then, latterly, pins.
When it’s clear that the Duchess of York is dead, Krissi sticks a needle right through her. He does it with a calm, cold air – as our chief snail surgeon, I guess this is medical research he needs to do.
We sing ‘Tomorrow’ again, as we buried them, and Lupin cries.
But as Mother Superior tells Maria in The Sound of Music, where God closes a door, he opens a window. Two weeks later, in the Express & Star – our sole portal to everything in the world – there is an announcement.
Under the headline ‘Calling Young Wordsworths!’, a competition is launched, inviting ‘budding young Midlands’ poets’ to submit poems, on the theme of ‘Friendship’.
The prize is a cheque for £250, your poem being printed in the Express & Star, and the opportunity to read your poem out on Midlands Weekend – the Midlands’ Friday night magazine TV show, which is watched by everyone in the West Midlands.
‘You should enter that poem competition, Johanna,’ my mother says, as I eat my corned beef hash.
With my newfound, anxious belligerence, I don’t tell Mum I’ve already got two-thirds of the poem written. I like to keep as many secrets as possible, these days – by way of trying to undo the big, fatal one I let get away. It’s how I know I’m growing up. By keeping secrets.
But for the last two days, I have, quietly, been doubling-up in my efforts to save the family: as I sit guarding over the letterbox, 7am–12pm, for any attempted delivery of our doom, I am also writing pages and pages of poetry, in my notebook. I have carefully counted them, and I have already written over 2,200 words towards this poem. I have even managed to rhyme ‘friendships’ with ‘lends chips’, which I think is pretty epic.
If anyone in the West Midlands is going to earn money by writing this year, it’s going to be me. It’s really, totally going to be me. I’m having that £250.
And I do! It is me. I win. A letter arrives, and everyone screams, and Mum immediately frets about what I’m going to wear to be on television – ‘You’ll have to wear your dad’s jeans – you’re too fat for your old ones’ – and Dad rings up Uncle Jim to borrow £40 for petrol, ‘To get our kidder to Birmingham,’ and puts £10 in the tank, then spends the rest on new shoes for Lupin, and getting fish ’n’ chips, to celebrate, which is fair enough.
And I spend a week in nerves, and then Friday wearing Dad’s jeans – sitting on a chair, staring at the clock; literally doing nothing other than staring at the clock – until it’s finally 5pm, and time to drive to Birmingham, with my poem in a folder marked: ‘Johanna’s Folder: POEM’.
Halfway up Brierley Hill, he turns off Brothers In Arms, and points to the quiet, street-lit valley below. All empty industrial estates, and small, coiled ribbons of housing.
‘When I was a kid, you’d come up this hill, and all of that –’ and he gestures to the valley in front of us ‘– was on fire. The foundries and the forges and the ironworks. The potteries. The whole place glowed – sheets of sparks, fifty foot high. The fires never went out. It looked like hell. Mordor. That’s what your Lord of the Rings is about. Tolkien was from round here. He was writing about how the Industrial Revolution turned the Midlands from Hobbiton into Mordor.’
A man who’d spent all day in a forge, or a mine, he said, would go into a pub and drink fourteen pints – ‘And he wouldn’t get drunk. It would just be replacing the sweat. You’d sweat that hard.’
&nbs
p; You’d see men sitting in corners with one foot gone – one hand crushed. Or an empty chair. It was brutal work – humans as tiny columns of meat amongst hammering, burning and explosions.
As he told these stories of his father’s work, and his father’s friends, he spoke as if he wasn’t sure if it was a bad thing or a good thing that men no longer stood in the centre of fires, and sweated.
Like so many of the men I knew, he was in two minds about Britain’s industrial decline. I guess it was like the death of an unstable, punitive mother. She was an unstable, punitive mother. But at least you had a mother. Everybody needs a mother. Perhaps.
‘If you’re working class, and you want to get out of here, you either become a boxer, or a footballer, or a popstar,’ he says, finally. ‘That’s your only way out. Obviously, I chose being a popstar.’
There is a small pause here, as we both consider his career, so far, as a popstar.
‘But you,’ he continues. ‘You’ve got your writing.’
‘It’s only one poem, Da.’
‘If you can write one good thing, you can write anything,’ Dad says, firmly. ‘You practise every day, and you’ll get so good you’ll be able to write 1,000 words about … a light bulb. Or … my arse.’
‘Your arse.’
‘Or your arse. You’ve found another way out, kidder!’ Dad says, banging the steering-wheel with the palm of his hand. ‘Another way out of the shit. £250 for a fucking poem. Good blag. Well done.’
I writhe with happiness – the way cats do, when a stranger bends and touches their face, in the street.
At the Midlands Weekend studio, everything is white lights, and hustle. Going from our dimly lit, purposeless house to this … hive … is disconcerting. Everyone is smartly dressed, with new shoes, and has a general air that they have pay-cheques, and go to restaurants, and then have sex.
I have never been in a building with people who go to restaurants, and have sex. I have never been to a place, or done a thing. It is intoxicating. Things get done here.