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It’s terrible, I know. But like I said, I blame Carnwadric. It rubs off on you.
Loner
I might have given you the impression that I had all these pals during my primary school years, and we’d go about causing mayhem. But I was quite a loner when I was wee.
There were people I’d sometimes play with in school or on my street or around the back gardens, where everybody would just be dipping in and out of whatever game was being played. But I didn’t really have a best pal, somebody to go on adventures with. I didn’t have a wee group of pals that I always hung about with, like in Stand by Me, but I’m sure a lot of people were like that. I didn’t mind, because I quite liked my own company.
I’d go on adventures. I’d spend summers going for walks, alone, just following my nose. I’d walk for ages. I’d pick blackberries as I’d go. I’d walk to the middle of nowhere, and see some older boys, so I’d hide in a hedge until they went by. Then I’d just stay in there, because it felt good. A wee weirdo.
I’d be alone, but I wouldn’t feel that lonely. Well, I’d sometimes feel lonely. I’d feel a bit lonely when I went down to Millport.
Millport’s this wee island town off the west coast of Scotland, about an hour’s drive west of Glasgow, where my mum and dad would take me during the school holidays. Tons of folk from the west coast would go there, the place would be mobbed, but I’d always be kicking about by myself. I’d go to arcades, play some games, or watch other folk play them. I made pals with some boys there once, a group of boys that already knew each other, who were all staying in the same house. I hung about with them on the beach, playing about for a while, maybe for a day, maybe two. Then one day they had a whisper with each other, and one of them said to me, ‘We don’t want to play with you any more.’
And I wandered off.
That was horrible, that.
It stuck in my mind so much that for the next few years I’d go back to their front door. Not to chap on it and ask if they’d be my pals, but just to look at it, kind of angry. I’d wonder what I could do to it. Maybe scratch it, or spit on it. Or just fucking stare at it, sending bad vibes into the door, hoping that somehow it would make those boys die.
I spent a lot of those holidays in Millport just watching people from afar, watching other boys and lassies in groups, and wondering how I’d become pals with them. But I’d also not want to be pals with them, in case I got told that they then didn’t want to be pals with me any more.
Back home, though, I was happy with my solitary adventures. I fancied going out for some adventures at night, in addition to my daytime ones. My mum and dad wouldn’t let me, obviously, so I’d sneak out.
I’d sneak about Carnwadric, trying to not be spotted by the grown-ups. I’d hide from all the folk coming and going from the pubs, I’d hide in gardens and watch them go by, listening to them all drunk and talking shite.
I climbed up a scaffolding once, where somebody was getting their roof done, and watched the folk walking past below. I chucked wee bits and pieces at them, to see them react. They didn’t know where it was coming from. Fucking idiots.
One night I went out with a knife that I took from the kitchen. Just a wee one, a few inches long, but a sharp one. I sneaked about the gardens, cutting clothes lines. I felt like a ninja. I felt like a dark force. A shadow. There was a football lying in somebody’s garden, and I stabbed it. I went stab, stab, stab, then ran away. Then I sneaked all the way back home, and back to bed.
I liked my own company. I wanted pals, but I grew to like my own company. There was me, and there was all yous. I liked that feeling. I still do.
My Mum, Dad and Brother
I’ve not said much about my brother and my mum and dad, so here’s a bit about what they were like when I was wee. I’ll try and keep it short in case you’re not interested in that sort of thing.
My brother David is about three years older than me, I think. I can’t remember him playing much with me when I was wee, but I remember him telling me stories, making lots of shite up that fascinated me. Like, when we’d get the ferry over to Millport, he’d point down at the foam at the side, caused by the propellers or whatever it was, and he’d say that the foam was caused by sharks biting the water. It’d normally be scary stuff, but it wasn’t to scare me. I’d just be slack-jawed, imagining it all. He probably saw that I was into that type of thing.
But he never played with me much. He’d be playing with older boys, and I think I cramped his style. I didn’t like his pals, though. One of my earliest memories of David is of his pals being pricks to him.
They did this thing called the Heil Hitler. They held him down on the ground, while another boy stood with his feet at each side of David’s head. Then the boy would click his heels like a Nazi, and say, ‘Heil Hitler!’
It wasn’t dummy fighting. It looked like it hurt, and nobody else got it done to them. They just did it to him. But he still hung about with them. That was the worst thing of all, that these were his pals.
I hated them. I must have only been about five, but I fucking hated them. I remember one of them emailed me when I was in my 20s, when my website Limmy.com was doing the rounds. He emailed to say he liked my stuff, and asked if I remembered him. I said, ‘Aye, I remember you were a prick to my brother, mate, right in front of me.’ He didn’t reply.
I think David then started hanging about with these other pals. Bad boys. I’d want to hang about with him, but he’d always tell me to beat it. He told me years later that it was because him and these bad boys used to get up to trouble, and he didn’t want me joining them.
It sounds like he was on a tragic path, but by the time I got to secondary school David had a reputation as somebody you didn’t want to fuck with. Which is a happy ending, depending on how you look at it.
Anyway, my mum …
My mum was a volunteer in the Carnwadric Community Flat, which was a kind of citizens’ advice bureau. Folk would come round to ask advice about a leak or some other thing wrong with their council house, and my mum would get the council to sort it. Other than that, my mum would spend her time in our house, looking after me and my brother, or watching the telly. She was just like most mums where I lived.
But she had this photo album that I used to look through. She was from Glasgow, a working-class area in Glasgow, but in this photo album she had these pictures of when she used to live in New York, when she was younger. She’d moved there during the 60s when she was 20-something, and I always thought that was amazing. My mum used to live in New York, like on Cagney & Lacey.
There were photos of her wearing all these 60s clothes, with skyscrapers in the background, or in an office, or on a train with all these people going to a party. She never looked like a tourist. She was never just standing still in front of a landmark. She always looked like she was doing something, like talking or having a laugh or just getting ready to cross the road. She looked like somebody living their life there.
There was a man that kept appearing in the photies, a guy who looked a bit like Clark Kent. Sometimes the pictures were just of him, doing things like fixing a motor. I asked my mum who he was. She said it was her husband. She’d got married over there to this guy. Then, for whatever reason, the marriage didn’t work out, and she moved back to Glasgow about a year later, where she met my dad.
She just looked like anybody’s mum, but the photo album and everything else gave me a feeling that I wasn’t just talking to my mum. She was this person who’d been places and done things, she had this whole other life before me, she’d even been married to another man before my dad. She wasn’t just my mum.
But what you really want to know is, ‘Did she give you enough cuddles, Brian? Did your mammy never tell you that she loved you?’
No, she didn’t, now that you mention it. I don’t remember her ever telling me she loved me or her giving me a kiss or cuddle or any of that. It’s not that she neglected me or treated me badly. We’d talk about things and she was funny. We’d watch films together. Her favourite film was Calamity Jane, this camp Western musical from the 50s. We watched it over and over. She loved it, and so did I. My dad didn’t love it, my brother didn’t love it, but me and my mum did. But she never told me that she loved me, and I didn’t tell her. I didn’t really notice, and I didn’t care. But I think I must have, because I tell my son I love him. I tell him all the time. He sometimes says, ‘I know, you’ve told me a million times.’ And I’m very glad to hear it. That way he won’t grow up wondering if his dad ever loved him.
My dad never told me he loved me.
Thank fuck. Imagine it. Your smelly fucking da telling you he loves you.
My dad was kind of like my mum. He was from some working-class area in Glasgow as well, and he was funny. Him and my mum were always having a laugh, I never heard them have an argument once. And like my mum, he also seemed a bit different to everybody else.
On one hand, he had an ordinary job. He was a joiner, he’d go away for the day and come back smelling of sawdust. But he was also an artist. He went to the Glasgow School of Art when he was younger. He’d do oil paintings and pastels and silhouettes, he’d do portraits and landscapes. We’d have them hanging up in the house, and he’d get asked to do them for other folk. I think that was a bit different for Carnwadric, it was a bit middle class for back then, and my dad wasn’t like that. He was a bit of a hard cunt, actually, which makes the artist thing seem so unusual. He wasn’t aggressive, but he could handle himself. I saw him in this fight once.
I was coming home from primary school, which was just across the road from my house. As I started walking to my street, I could hear shouting and screaming, and there was my dad outside my house with blood on his face. And there was this hardman cunt, a big angry guy that lived a couple of doors down. He was a debt collector for the local moneylenders, an evil bastard. I stood far away, watching. I don’t remember seeing any punches, but I remember this other guy’s wife screaming something like ‘Hit him with your shoe!’ But then the fight was over. The guy had battered my dad.
My dad didn’t want to leave it, so he started training. He hung a punchbag up in this lock-up garage that he’d rented, and he’d punch fuck out of it. Then, when the time was right, he squared up to this cunt, and punched fuck out of him. I didn’t see it, so I had to ask my dad the other day for the story. He said he was kicking into the guy’s face and everything.
When my dad finished telling the story, he said it brought back a lot of happy memories. I was happy to hear it. We hated the cunt.
Barry
Right, things have got a bit dark, with me talking about all these bad things. So let me lighten things up. Here’s a cheery one for you.
There was this boy in my class, called Barry. He was one of these pupils that just appeared in your class one day, a few years into primary school. And then, not long after that, he was gone. And I don’t know if it was something to do with me.
He appears, this new boy, and right away I didn’t like him. I think it was because of his face. He looked hard. There were a few boys in school like that, ones that would punch your jaw for next to nothing. I remember there was a boy called James White, who also appeared in my school for a short while before leaving. When he told me his name, I remembered a song to use for people with names that rhymed with white. I sang this:
James White
Did a shite
In the middle of the night
Saw a ghost
Eating toast
Halfway up the lamppost.
But I got as far as ‘James White, did a shite, in the middle …’, before he hooked my jaw. We were only seven or eight. He punched me in the fucking jaw. My face felt numb, like I’d been to the dentist.
Well, this Barry looked like one of them. He had a big square jaw, he was pale with freckles, and this straight-as-fuck fringe. My hair’s like that when I haven’t put any stuff in it to stick it up. When I see myself in the mirror like that, I’m reminded of this cunt.
Anyway, what happened was this.
One day, the class had come in from playtime or lunch, and it was a rainy day. A couple of lassies put their hands up to get the attention of the teacher. The teacher asked what it was, and they said, ‘Miss, Barry splashed us.’ They were talking about a puddle.
Right away, Barry was like that, ‘Miss, Miss, I didn’t. They’re lying, I didn’t!’
It was fucking obvious who was telling the truth.
The teacher went like that, ‘Barry, why would they lie?’ Then she got out some paper from her desk and gave him lines.
A day or so passed, and we had spare time in the class. Barry was sitting on his desk, near me, reading a magazine. It was a music magazine, like Look In. And he asked me, ‘What music do you like?’
That was difficult for me. A difficult question to answer.
You see, I wasn’t really into music, in a way. It’s hard to explain why. I liked music in general, I’d watch Top of the Pops and I’d like all that, but I don’t think I liked any bands or songs in particular. I’d like novelty songs, like ‘Shaddap You Face’, or singers with a strange look, like Toyah or Adam Ant, but I was more into how they looked than the songs. I didn’t know what most songs meant. A lot of songs were about love, and I didn’t really know what that was. Everybody else seemed to know. It was a bit like that feeling I had with the Bollywig. I felt a bit left out, I felt a bit embarrassed about love.
So when Barry asked me what music I liked, I felt exposed. I felt that if I just picked a song, I’d be caught out. If I picked a song with the word ‘love’ in it, I’d be laughed at, or asked to explain what love is, and who I loved. I didn’t actually go through that thought process, but you know what I mean, it was more of a gut feeling.
So I just said, ‘I don’t really like music.’
He said, ‘You don’t like music? How can you not like music? That’s stupid.’
Then he went back to his magazine.
I felt my cheeks go red. I felt humiliated, even though nobody else heard. I can’t remember what I did next, but I can imagine I looked down at my jotter, I looked down at my drawing or whatever, and just sat there, with my pencil on the paper, not moving. My pencil making a hole in the paper.
I hated him. I hated him and his pale skin and freckly face and big stupid jaw. Who did he think he was? Who was he? Who was he to come to my school, my class, this stranger, coming to my school and splashing lassies with puddles, and sit next to me and make me feel stupid? I hated him for saying that.
A day or so later, it was raining again. And we all came back in from lunch.
When the teacher arrived, I put my hand up.
The teacher said, ‘What is it, Brian?’
I said, ‘Miss, Barry splashed me.’
And then Barry, right on cue, said, ‘Miss, Miss, he’s lying, he’s lying.’
The teacher just went straight for her drawer to pull out some lined A4, and said what I hoped she would say. ‘Barry … why would he lie?’
Stitched up like a kipper.
A risky move, considering he looked like he could batter me, but that’s how angry I was.
And not long after that, he was gone.
Lassies
As you’ve maybe been able to tell so far, I wasn’t very good with my feelings when I was wee. Well, that was especially true when it came to lassies.
I was down in Millport once, when I was nine, wandering about by myself, and I bumped into a lassie from my class, called Helen. We played about for a bit, even though I never really spoke to her in my class, and she never spoke to me.
Then, one night, when we were in the arcade, she asked me to get off with her. I don’t know if you yourself are familiar with the term ‘to get off with’, but it means to kiss. To snog.
Anyway, I shat it.
It wasn’t just because I was shy. There was more to it than that. When I was in primary school, I got mixed up about one or two things. I overheard things and saw things, and I think it fucked with my head.
First of all, I’d see older boys talking about shagging. I must have just been in primary two or three. There would be older boys either in my school or on the street that I stayed, talking about lassies, fannies, poking, shagging, licking out, sluts, cows, whores. I can imagine that most of the boys were virgins, really, but I think it made them feel more grown up if they talked about lassies like that.
Any time I heard about shagging or anything sexual, it was from a boy’s perspective, and the sexual thing was something that was done to the lassie. You didnae do it with the lassie, you did it to the lassie. And then you slagged her off for it.
These boys would do shagging motions, they’d have these scowling faces, they’d make it seem nasty and minging. One of them talked about some lassie’s fanny bleeding, either through shagging or poking. They’d say all this minging stuff, right in front of me. Nobody said, ‘Here, we better talk about this somewhere else, wee Brian’s here.’
All this stuff was going into my head, all this sexual stuff. It sounded abusive. It sounded aggressive. It sounded like you had to be a bad person to do it, you had to not care about the lassie, and then later you’d slag the lassie off, you’d laugh about her. And in some way, the lassies liked it.
It was a horrible way to be confused.
But what’s that got to do with Helen asking me to get off with her? Well, I’d somehow got it into my head that ‘to get off with’ meant to shag.
I didn’t even really know what shagging was. It was something to do with putting your willy in their fanny and moving about. And that’s what I thought she was wanting me to do, or something like that. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary, because I’d heard other boys and lassies my age talk about getting off with each other, so I thought they were all at it. And it fucking horrified me. It was fucking nightmarish.
So I said to her, ‘No.’
I remember that I was playing a game in the arcade at the time, and I was trying to ignore her. But she kept asking me. ‘Please, Brian. Pleeeease!’
I went from one game to another to get away from her, but she kept following me. I started playing another game, hoping she’d go away. I was petrified. Petrified with a beetroot face. I remember ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy’ by Deniece Williams was playing, and it made me feel even more petrified. In the song, she was singing about some boy she liked, and here was this Helen following me about.
She put her hands on my waist, and I booted her.
I kicked behind me without looking back. I kicked her leg.
And she went away.
I was fucking shitting it to go back to school. I thought that when I went back she’d be harassing me there as well, or telling everybody that I didn’t get off with her, and they’d all laugh at me. Why would I not want to get off with a lassie? What was wrong with me? Did I not know how to do it?
But when I went back, fuck all happened. I saw her about, but she didn’t even seem to notice me, like it was no big deal because she did it all the time and she couldn’t even remember my face amongst the many. Thank fuck.
As I got older, I realised that to get off with somebody meant to just kiss them. But that feeling still stayed, somehow. That fear. And the feeling that to do something sexual with a lassie, you had to be a cunt. It manifested itself in my teenage years as the phenomenon known as ‘fanny fright’. But I’ll get round to that later.
My First Computer Program
As a bit of a loner type that was scared of lassies, it goes without saying that I was into computers.
My first computer was the Commodore VIC-20. Before that, we had the Atari 2600, then the Spectrum, but the Atari was more of a console, and the Spectrum was considered to be my brother’s. Whereas I thought of the VIC-20 as mine.
