Trivial Tales Of Everyday Madness: Two Very Different Worlds 3

Trivial Tales of Everyday Madness: Two Very Different Worlds 3 Robert K. Hogg Jimmy Byres, a ginger-haired kid and Batman enthusiast – I suspect my own enthusiasm had its contagious aspects – would go down to the wallpaper factory where his mother worked. It was part of the building that was the old coffin mill. Another target for exploration. While she was on the main factory floor, we would wait in the front area and selling point where rolls of wallpaper were stacked on shelves. He knew where she kept her purse and would steal some silver, or sometimes a pound note at a time. A furious amount of cash for me/us at that age, I was amazed; not that he’d stolen it, but at his assumption she wouldn’t notice. And I never did hear of him getting into trouble over it. The money was for more cards of course, to feed our addiction. Later he invited me back after school and his mother offered me pudding along with his. I could get on alright with other people’s mothers it seemed. I liked the unfamiliarity of other kids houses. A tenement flat in their case. Like us, they had nothing. I had no reason to dislike her. Quite the opposite. Friendly and easygoing, she never raised her voice. I lost interest in him stealing from her. We bought the Batman cards at Joe’s, the shop next to the school, on the far side of the main playground and on the main road – Lochee Road, which stretched from one end of the town to the other. Sometimes I would climb and jump the railings to get to the shop, rather go all then way around by the main entrance. Once on my way back and as I was jumping from the fence back into the school grounds, my duffel coat snagged on the railings, leaving me dangling for some moments, my feet still short of the ground. A quite painfully abrupt and jarring experience, my discomfort immediately replaced my an acute embarrassment at the thought of passing traffic observing, or worse, that any hostile kid or cute girl might see me in such a ludicrous state. I lifted up my arms to let myself slide out. This sort of thing never happened to Batman. Or Superman or any other cloaked hero, such as (The Mighty) Thor. Trust me. A quite hilarious analogy, I was incapable of recognising it at the time in order to see the humour of the situation. It did happen to Daffy Duck though, in Superhero mode, as I saw only quite recently on a cartoon channel. But I still can’t recall ever seeing it before. And I did get caught and left dangling on the railings. The perfect comedown for grandiose fantasies. The world would always find a way to put you in its place. Chop you down to size. Some years later my mother would tell me – as I was tying my laces on the stairs outside the flat that I was “getting too big for my boots,” with all the intentionally deflating sarcasm she could effortlessly muster. She had a knack for distorting anything I might seem to be taking pride in or caring about, as it was dirt along with myself; one would be safety and common sense as, not doing my lace would be idiotic, and the other and simultaneously absurdity was that she had bought them for me. Would she prefer I walked around with laces undone? No doubt I'd committed some misdemeanour I've forgotten about; some unforgivable transgression she kept alive by a process of

internal accumulation, real or imagined. She did also get maintenance from my 'father', as she would call him. To me he was my dad. I did call her mum. Admittedly, she was getting at me for something else then conflated it with my passing concern over the lace. But she was as likely to criticise if I wasn’t taking any care of my shoes or emphasize my stupidity if I hadn’t seen to my laces, as I say. Any interaction with her on almost any level was useless and disturbing. Everything became an excuse, an opportunity for, ah, wrong footing me. She had no interest in comics needless to say, but her predilection to violence, or at least verbal abuse at the least provocation surpassed anything in the comics I enjoyed so much. If comics were such a waste of money – my granddad when giving me sixpence had once complained after I had went immediately down to the newsagent near the Astoria cinema, scoured the rack just inside the door, and brought back a DC Comic. As well as a bad influence (I would instinctively hide away cards at school and the odd comic like they were a bad habit; and I suppose they were), it was painfully ironic that adults only echoed and reinforced the underlying premise of almost every comic I read; that violence is the most effective solution to all problems and all obstacles. Violence saved the trouble of having to figure things out. It brought results. I was already becoming aware that some things were not quite as they seemed. That adults' capacity for simplistic solutions was only a matter of degree as with Mrs MacDonald and Paton. I knew on some level my mother was a basket case, but it was so convincingly conflated with worldliness' and authority, each would blend into the other as each also shared aspects of the other. It never occurred to me to complain to anyone about my mother's behaviour because if I voiced anything about any aspect of school I was feeling pissed off with, she would automatically take the side of the school, as she saw it, and never did see my view as she wasn’t the least interested. Authority was the answer to everything in my case it seemed, along with violence and sarcasm to keep me in my place. If I wasn’t happy with either, there was always the threat of getting me “put in a home.” A threat that conjured up all manner of fearful possibilities. What if she really could do it, and I never saw my bother again, or school and local friends and buddies and Lynne? It would be the end of 'everything'. The wording was important. It left no doubt that if she did ever want to go through with it the authorities would take her side as automatically as she took theirs. This was the confidence trick, a psychological sleight of hand I never thought to question. She would pull my hair and punch me and when she hurt her fist, bang my head on the skirting board by her bedroom door when she got out of bed in exasperation and retaliation over some petty query or other I’d be set up with to fail, shortly before leaving for school. My very existence seemed to arouse her to a kind of frenzy. I would be late partly because of this insanity and she would self-righteously say I could tell my teacher I was late because I “was so useless - and if she asks about the lumps on you head you can tell her it’s because you’re driving me up the fucking wall.” This did the trick. She was an

adult; in charge. If there were any sneaking doubts on my part that all was not right here, that as good as dispelled any notion of even remotely ever being able to do anything about it. I didn’t even want to bother Mrs Palmer with it. She was friendly and good-looking and clever, And seemed to look upon me as even a responsible person. It flattered me. I had as much of a pretence to keep up with her as I did any of my friends and girls. I was 'in control'. I was 'cool'. Everything was 'right' in my little world so I wanted it to be right in hers. In a way I wanted her to look upon me as older than I was; an adult even. She would call me “love,” in answer to some casual if necessary question. This was a year or two later. We had her twice for a year (Or vice-versa). Once, I had been standing talking to her, just after class after the rest had left, and had experienced an almost overwhelming impulse to kiss her. I may have even held back for that purpose. That I was going to do it. This was in primary seven. She was very attractive and I loved her red lipstick and the way it accentuated her oddly spacious and slightly flattish lips. A moment of swooning indecision as I almost gave in to the impulse and the moment past… An odd development in my mind, as I was still as 'terrified' as ever of Lynne as far as any overt romantic or even 'sexual' overtures went. I knew of course, that Mrs Palmer wouldn’t be going running to her teacher or mother. And neither would I have pictured Lynne doing as such. But I knew if I had attempted to kiss my teacher, things would never be the same. And what if she told my mother? I would never hear the end of it, or worse she would try and overwhelm me with guilt over it in one fell swoop never to mention it again. None of it bore thinking about. That Mrs Palmer herself might respond positively, as I might see it, was also an impossibility. I couldn’t imagine what her reaction might be. That was a part of the impulse. That 'imp of the perverse'. To explore an area however briefly, that few others would have the nerve to. I knew she liked me. I had found the same with student teachers and had allowed myself to romantically fantasize about them, with a vague sexual undercurrent. One would wear a tight t-shirt showing off her shapely figure. Girls in my class up until then didn’t really have a shape, though a plump girl I liked, but wasn't attracted to had once asked as we sat beside one another at a table in the dinner hall if I “wanted to see her tit”. Yes, I said, and she lifted up her cardigan to reveal this slightly plump little mound. I was flattered and slightly amused – and bemused by this, but felt nothing. She was friendly and intelligent, and wore glasses, which made her slightly 'geeky'. I needed glasses myself but was too self-conscious and vain probably, to wear them by then. And as for letting Mrs Palmer or any other teacher ever know the other life I led at home, it didn’t come into it. There was no need to bring the two into focus. Or I didn’t want to; At least in imagination I could play at being or becoming the adult. Emotionally I believed I didn’t have a leg to stand on. To complain, to ask for help would put me back in the position of a kid – which I was of course – a 'victim' – which I no doubt secretly felt myself to be, but only in one area of my life. In this other, I could make my way, if passably. When need be I could myself be violent to 'resolve' any conflicts, and if I thought I couldn’t, as with

older and bigger kids, then I could avoid them as best I could, ignoring any attempted insult. And anyway, as I had been hoodwinked, the emotional part would remind me that telling my teacher could be even more problematic than the impulse to kiss her, if only on a subconscious level. Worse, that I might bring about the very outcome my mother often threatened. Subconscious also. As for the impulse to kiss Mrs Palmer (The significance of the 'Mrs' part, lost in the unsettling thrall of it) was this a reflection of a precocious sexuality or some overdeveloped romantic impulse, a wish to grow up too soon, or was it my own non-verbalised way of seeing it as a means of escape from the sense of desperation I felt, if only I could be treated as an equal – literally? That I might be somehow catapulted from my sense of inadequacy in a way that I imagined I could never be in a friendship with any girl? It needed an adult solution in an adult world. A relationship with any girl my age only compounded it; made it doubly complex and unmanageable. Expressing 'romantic love' and friendship on the one hand didn’t go well with being the recipient of an undisguised adult and 'mature' hatred on the other. Only an unequivocal adult admiration would suffice. And better still, someone whose intelligence I respected as well as being more than passably attractive in a way that fit this internal criteria. An impossibility, as not only was she an adult, but someone else’s mother. She had mentioned her son or sons. And I must have known that, remembered it on some level. My mother’s combination of clever and instinctive deviousness was bending me out of shape; splitting me in two. There seemed to be no and or solution to the craziness on any level. The sense of guilt was further compounded if possible by the awareness I hated her – or I did as I made my way to school on that day, and there were more than a few; it had begun from as long as I could remember almost. I wished she was dead, I thought to myself as I walked down Rankine Street. That life would be so much better, or a whole lot easier – the same thing to me – if she just wasn’t around. Thoughts that came almost unbidden to me. I was coolly angry, furious; as only the browbeaten and powerless can be. And it had an object. My mother. And therein lay the guilt, and the circularity of it. I was somehow in the position of wishing my mother dead, and she had put me there. I could hate her for that also, which only made it worse... It was infinite regress. This guilt would never end because neither would her torment. Walking down that road on the way to school, I wondered what it must be to be like a cat or a dog, but especially a cat, probably because of their aura of independence. Than felt as frustrated that their consciousness would remain forever a mystery to me no matter how much I tried to imagine it as a reality, and paradoxically all the more mysterious knowing it was a reality;for them). The impulse to kiss my teacher was an offer of love and my way of asking for it as well as expressing it, however wildly inappropriate. Through it and her I could perhaps step right out of this nightmare existence into another that also combined not being a child, but an adult with adult expression and impulses. Because I had no way of communicating any of this either to her or articulating to myself. Yet was old enough or intelligent enough to see that it was a drift into a fantasy solution; as impossible as the very situation that seemed

to inspire it. A leap into further chaos, impossibility and illogicality. What I didn’t know, or hadn’t realised was my mother had already made efforts to disassociate me from her only shortly before, now long forgotten or never acknowledged or understood by those in a position to.