Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 Read Free

to the fucking railway – mind I don’t hit you!’
    I had absolutely no idea at that point what Tom the tortoise could possibly have done. Usually Spud – the name by which my dad, Fred, was universally known – doted on the creature. He fed him by hand most days, and when he found out that Tom was partial to Bourbon biscuits – I don’t recall how – he laid in packets of the things so he wouldn’t run short. On more than one occasion I heard him say proudly that Tom was ‘the best thing I ever got out of the dock’ – meaning that his little shelled pal had been smuggled out of the port gates one day when the dockers were unloading them as cargo bound for the pet stores of Britain. When I think about the endless booty that my old man had liberated from his place of work over the years this really was some claim. And now he was threatening to launch the rugged little reptile on to the electrified tracks.
    Eventually he located Tom in, of all places, the wooden fruit box that was Tom’s actual house, stowed on the back porch. Pulling the sleepy pet from his lair, he carted him up the path and stood above the five or so tomato plants from which each year we harvested an impressive amount of fruit. This year, it seemed, we were going to be below the usual quota.
    ‘I’ve fucking told you and told you – THAT’S your one there. Leave. These. Alone.’ My dad was still holding our bemused tortoise by the shell and up at face level. ‘You’ve taken fucking great lumps off all them! I’m not having it. That one. That’s yours.’
    Satisfied it was no major crisis, I slid back into bed.
    ‘What’s Dad shouting about?’ mumbled my brother, Mike, from his single bed two feet away.
    ‘Oh, he’s got the hump with Tom,’ I answered, not entirely unaware that this line probably wouldn’t play outside our immediate family. In our house, actually in the entire world, every living thing was fair play for one of the old man’s notoriously explosive ‘volleys’ if the provocation warranted it. He often spoke to our dog Blackie as though he was a particularly irritating cellmate and they were doing twenty years together. If, for example, the dog broke wind whilereposing in front of the fire, Dad would say, ‘Are you gonna do that all night, you dirty bastard? One more and I’ll stick an air freshener right up your arse.’
    Following outbursts like this, my mum wouldn’t even look up from her book but just say calmly, ‘He don’t know what you’re saying, Fred. It’s all noise to him.’
    Should Blackie lazily turn round to see what the outburst was about, Spud would follow up with:
    ‘He knows all right. Don’t keep looking at me like that, Black – I’m too old at the game and you’re too close to that fire. Drop another one and you’re going on it.’
    Any time a rogue bluebottle arrived in the living room and buzzed by his bald head he would allow it a few laps and then say, completely normally, ‘Go on. Land on my fucking leg. See what you get.’ If our budgerigar Joey was in a particularly good mood and was chirping to express just how well the world stood with her at that moment, Dad might say directly to her, ‘I’m trying to watch the fucking telly here,’ and then turning to the rest of us say, ‘Ain’t it all right, eh? A poxy bird in charge.’ However, it was he who brought all our many and varied pets into the house and he who dutifully took care of each and every one. If anything, he respected them as equals and as such expected them to take some no-nonsense advice when required. This even extended to a lizard he’d chanced across on the quay and brought home in a paper bag. For a few days it lived in my sister’s small, wooden, pink-satin-lined sewing box that, because we figured the reptile must have come from a hot climate, we put on the top shelf of the airing cupboard by the immersion heater. The lizard remained disappointingly inert at first, completely ignoring the pieces