Mayhem

The school was like a mausoleum to me, like somewhere you came to die five days a week. I didn’t even enjoy the weekends because the Monday loomed like death. I used to be considered clever once upon a time, but school knocked that out of me, like it was decided ‘that just wouldn’t do’.

Actually, there were those that thought me ‘too clever for my own good’. A big, lanky wise-ass with a witty way with words. A future game show host on STV, perhaps. Imagine that: being too clever for school. Picked on by my peers and picked on by my teachers, that was the truth of it. Even the janny disrespected me and tried to win popularity points off the kids who despised him by ridiculing me. Auld McMasters the janny, back in the days when there was some sort of Glasgow education department policy that jannies had to have physical deformities ideally in the leg department. They had to hobble, limp or drag a leg or they didn’t get the job of cleaning the shitty, pissy toilets. And they had to have the shittiest attitudes and most two-faced devious dispositions. I try to imagine the ad in situations vacant.

“Bad-tempered cripple required for cleaning and other duties including sucking up to teachers, watching youngsters do the toilet and picking on the weakest. References required”

It was an old school with ink-wells in the desks. The central area resembled a prison with walkways all the way around on two levels. The railings were ornate and ancient which stopped you from falling to the ground (although there was talk of a ‘suicide net’ after wee Wullie Nesbitt decided one day he didn’t like school too much and leapt over to the world beyond). Speaking of prisons, the whole edifice resembled a block at Barlinnie just up the road and was probably built at about the same time: a Victorian prison-school.

Inside it smells of boy’s farts and girly bubble gum. This used to be considered a good school with an academically impressive alumni, but it has gone downhill big time in recent years. Now it has gang members and pregnant teens on its books. There are fights in the playground and windows get panned in by stray (and not-so stray) footballs. It also employed teachers who gave up on their profession long ago, there only to pick up a wage and see through the years. Or some of them that have been there the whole century and remember ‘the good times’ and now blame the not-so-good times on the present intake who are mostly fodder for the local industries, a brewery, an abattoir and a cigarette manufacturer.

No room for cleverness here. Not, that is, unless you came from the ‘better’ catchment areas. Yer Eastlands and Lower Manse. Bungalow-lands full of blazered youths with hardy school-bags and rosy cheeks. They would be the ones getting the Highers at this school. School prefects they’d be with little badges on lapels. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

I was from ‘the scheme’. The high flats. The school, almost as an entity to itself, is aware of such details. Who is and who isn’t? Are one’s folks of the common hoard or are they all cosy and bungalowed, a social class above? Folk say Scotland is something called a ‘classless society’ at least relative to our big snobby neighbour down south. Those folk are full of shit. Scotland is as class distinction-ridden as anywhere else, maybe even more so. If you have a brass door knocker in Scotland instead of a bell, then you’re one step up from the hoi polloi. The way you speak and the words you employ to express yourself will give you away in an instant.

But I guess we at least try to give the appearance of egalitarianism. The workie can sit down with the Kelvinside lady, but just not on the good chairs.

Honest to God when I look back at that school and my time there, I could easily have ended up like one of those kids in America – Columbine or Sandy something, one of those ghastly happenings. If I’d have had access to some sort of a gun, I could easily have seen me going nuts and shooting a load of folk. Only I would have targeted them. I know exactly who it would have been, and I would have enjoyed every second of shooting them point blank in the head but first I’d have bullied them a little; ridiculed them like they did to me. I could never understand them Columbine boys being so indiscriminate. Surely, they would go for the ’jocks’ who bullied them and not some poor wee lassie that had piss all to do with them. Maybe they were so intimidated by their torturers that even with machine guns they still couldn’t stand up to them? A sort of fucked-up Stockholm Syndrome.

 If I’d been armed like that I’d have taken out Auld McMasters first; had that gimpy auld cunt whimpering like a child and confessing to all sorts of stuff like spying on lassies while they were pishing and wanking off the first years in his wee hut next to the blaise pitch.

I was cursed from the start. I should never have been born into a world like this. I was not ‘built’ for it. I was born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Figure that for bad luck!

 My mother and father were both fine people, dressed well, always spotless, polite to a fault, liked a laugh but both of them were damaged by their own childhoods. My mother was emotionally abused inside and outside of the home. My father suffered the neglect of obsessively aspirant parents and was bullied at school for being the ‘posh boy’. They were loving parents but, as the poem has it they ‘Gave you all the faults they had, and add a little extra just for you'. From early days I seemed to adopt the role of ‘innocent victim’ as though it was a birthright.

This is me in the very early noughties and working as a ‘Decision Maker’ with the Benefits Agency in Liscard on The Wirral. Previous to this I had been on the academic staff at Liverpool John Moores University pretending to be a history tutor but more on that later. I’m in the staff toilets this day hunched over a toilet bowl trying to vomit. I am unable to do this satisfactorily, but I manage to have a steaming shit. The smell is rancid. Two scouse lads come in and comment upon the stench.

 “Fookin’ ‘ell, laar. Somebody has fookin’ died in ‘ere”.

 I remain in the cubicle until they leave then sneak back downstairs to my desk. I am unsuited to this work and hate the idea of working for ‘the SS’. I have left-wing credentials and believe I am betraying them. Also, I don’t appreciate the potentially confrontational side of the job.

 However, I do get on well with the other staff. They are mainly women and I enjoy making them laugh. They are my audience, and I am once again ‘the class clown’.

My ‘appalling attendance record’ started on my very first day. I’d been binge drinking for days and had walked the three miles from Birkenhead only to tell my new manager on arrival that I ‘wasn’t very well’ and needed to go home.

 I was both a secret drinker and a not-so-secret drinker. Those that knew me knew I liked to drink to excess but not many were aware of the long binges on my own and at home which were followed by some days of very vomity recovery. This would all be passed off as food poisoning or a very bad flu.

 Why did I do this? Complacency, perhaps? Even some sort of conceit. Definitely a quest for oblivion; an escape. A slow form of suicide. There were times that I got so depressed and maudlin during these binges that I took ‘too many’ pills. Partly in an attempt to sleep (one’s sleeping pattern gets kind of messed up during a week-long binge), sometimes to make myself be sick and be unable to drink on but there would be suicidal thoughts in their too: a little risk taken with one’s existence but never the ‘bottle’, excuse the pun, to take a sure sufficiency, maybe eight, maybe ten, maybe twelve pills, maybe even more, it’s hard to remember any of these precise details. Whatever enjoyment there is in this behaviour can only ever be at the start before it develops into a miserable drudge and dependency before, thankfully, will not allow another drink to pass your lips and that’s when expelling every last ounce of bile from one’s stomach commences (I swear there was one time when what appeared like tire rubber came up. It burned my lips on it’s way).

Boredom, too, has set me on the road to alcoholic onanism. The thought of me, a bottle, a pouch of baccy and a few films to watch has tested my weak character many times and come off best. But, the real demon that has had me scurrying to the bottle the most is ‘hurt’. Maybe a confrontation or a falling out or a slight of some sort. For nearly all of my life I have proven defenceless against those type of things.

This where my feelings of self-worth come into play and perhaps the environment I grew up in. My mother and father were not drinkers in any real sense. Perhaps they would share a bottle of Commandary St John sherry-wine in their young married life and my father had enjoyed a pint of Guinness before his stomach problems prevented this. No, what I mean is how drink was viewed in Scottish society. 

This was a society where not taking a drink was a bigger social faux pas than being seen staggering home after getting blootered in the pub with maybe a black eye for good measure. In the pre-touchy-feely days, drink was how you solved your problems not what was seen to cause them. There was an old cartoon in the Evening Citizen that made my dad laugh. It was a bloke on a psychiatrist’s couch droning on about his problems and the bored shrink says to him stone-facedly “Huv ye no’ tried just huvin’ a good bucket?”, meaning away oot and get wellied and you’ll feel better. The Scottish cure-all.

It was therefore acceptable to abuse alcohol. I’m not blaming this for my own personal woes, I’m just saying it was a cultural norm.