My Shit Life So Far Read Free Page B

up in a wind so fierce that I lifted right up into the air. I hovered briefly, about four feet up, like a tiny superhero who had foolishly attempted to strike fear into criminals with a duffel-coat costume. The wind stopped suddenly and I landed right on my face. I was really proud of my torn trousers and gashed leg—a proper injury!
    There was a bit behind one of the high flats that got so windy that nobody could hear you if you shouted into the wind. Well, you couldn’t hear yourself; I don’t know if anybody else could hear. Maybe everybody round there dreaded blustery days because random children would turn up and scream obscenities outside their windows. To be honest, we did that on sunny days too.
    I got a telescope when I was a bit older. Actually my brother got a telescope that he never used. I’d train it on the windows of the upper storeys and look at folk—there were a couple of buildings that you could see right into. I think I was partly hoping to see women’s tits, inspired by a scene in Gregory’s Girl , but it was largely just curiosity. There was a couple who’d always dance together, drunk. It was sweet and a little bit sordid.
    One of my favourites was this woman (although I thought of her as an old woman, she was probably mid-30s) who’d do really high-powered Eighties aerobics and then put on a coat and go outside onto the balcony and smoke fags for ages, just looking down into the street. Once a guy had jumped out of that high flat and hit one of the concrete posts at the bottom where we used to play leapfrog. It never really got cleaned up properly and hebecame an impressively large stain that lasted for years. As a kid, I wondered if this woman was thinking about jumping. I wondered why this guy had jumped and distrusted my dad’s explanation (‘He was drunk’). As a teenager I grew really disgusted with the area. I’d look up at the flimsy little net curtains in the windows as I walked home from the library every night, wondering why we didn’t all jump.
    My favourite window was right at the top of a block on Shawbridge Street. A guy did martial arts in his living room wearing a sort of ninja outfit. It’s hard to be precise, but it looked like an all-black bodysuit and maybe a balaclava. He had nunchakus and a wooden sword and he’d be there every night—occasionally you could even see him leaping about with the lights off. I was visiting my parents years later when I was at uni and thought that I must just have dreamt this guy. I got out the same old telescope and pointed it up at his window. Ten years later and he was still there. Looked like he’d gotten really good at it too.
    The high rise nearest us had a bunch of shops set into the basement. The main one was an Asian newsagent that constantly changed hands as shopkeepers weighed up the cost of cleaning graffiti against the profit margin on a chocolate tool. When I was little there was a Sixties-style soda bar which had somehow survived into a completely different era. It was run by two old ladies with big beehive hairdos and they sold ice-cream floats and milkshakes, very, very slowly. It closed when one of them died. I remember one of the local mums telling me about it whenwe were coming home from school one day. I asked what had happened to her and the woman grunted, ‘Her liver went.’
    We always got our hair cut at this barber called ‘Old Hughie’s’. Old Hughie was from the Islands somewhere, was always completely pished and had a wooden leg. My mum would sit balefully behind us as we sat in the chair, encouraging him to take more hair off. She always left bitterly disappointed that we still had a little hair. Pretty much the only cut that would have satisfied her would have exposed a sizeable section of our brains.
    The place had a history of housing immigrants from way back. There was an old song about the time it had consisted of a whole load of Flemish people in the nineteenth century called‘The Queer Folk